YouBama

Crowd sourcing has reached the elections. After the groundbreaking youtube debates, meticulously maintained candidate websites and wikipedia pages and facebook banner ads, internet users are accustomed to seeing their candidate online. Two standford grad students have created a website, YouBama, to allow supporters to upload video and audio about why they are planning to go Obama. The tactic is supposed to help Obama drum up grassroots publicity.

 http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/01/30/youbama-the-citizen-generated-campaign/

“Keeping an Eye on China’s Security”

The NY Times article, “Keeping an Eye on China’s Security”, profiles the new influx of American companies like Honeywell and GE capitalizing on the Chinese government’s obsession with monitoring their citizens. Congress is currently outlining rules to limit American companies transfer of equipment.  Amid constant uncertainty and outrage over our privacy (I’m thinking mainly of the Patriot Act and the google/ government showdown) one has to wonder how China is planning on uping their citizen monitoring.

Yahoo to Become OpenID Provider

I think this story is relevant to our class because it discusses and links to an explanation of a new trend in web 2.0- openIDs. The idea is that instead of setting up a million web IDs and passwords (like we did in class last week), you would have one master ID and password. As the comments below the article state, this raises a lot of questions about identity theft, Internet safety, and dangerous large corporation monopolies controlling all your personal information.

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