You too can be part of the Web 2.0 (if you’re willing to invest time and money on technology).

I was born in 1956, when ordinary people had far fewer opportunities to communicate their ideas to mass markets. For most of my adult life, there were only a few choices to get the word out. You could send out mass mailings or you could hit the telephones, dialing number after number. You could hang paper flyers on telephone poles and fences. You could knock on doors and talk to the folks house by house. Or you could stand on a soapbox and shout your ideas. These traditional “techniques” are still available and they are still sometimes quite effective, at least to those with hordes of volunteers at their service. The Internet, however, has opened up many additional possibilities for spreading your ideas far and wide. With that great power, however, comes serious responsibility to spend the time to obtain a working knowledge of the underlying technology. How many bloggers are out there now? At least 100 million. Being a proficient user of a word processor is only the first step. Putting your written work on your own website also requires you to understand at least the basic tools of blogging software. With those two steps, you might already be on a big slippery slope. Many people are perfectly happy blogging on a free site such as LiveJournal MSN's Spaces or Google's Blogger, or one of the many sites with low fees as long as your traffic is modest (e.g., Typepad). Choosing to place your blog with one of these simple on-line sites keeps things really easy. You needn't ever load any software or maintain the "backend" of your blog. In 2006, I suspected that I would want to take advantage of many modern day multi-media tools. That's why I chose to base my blog on WordPress. Going with WordPress allowed me to take advantage of numerous constantly evolving add-ons. I chose it because it kept my site flexible for using multimedia technology that, in return for its flexibility, can require a substantial investment in time. If you’re like me, you will thus develop a love/hate relationship to the flexible do-it-yourself blogging software and the many multi-media tools that allow you to feed your blog in sophisticated ways. You’ll become enthralled with the power these things give you to package your ideas. But you might also become frustrated when you see how much time it takes to learn to make proficient use of these tools. Here's an ironic twist: Since 2006, the free online sites now allow you to easily incorporate many kinds of images, sounds and video on blogs. Therefore, if you aren't exceedingly greedy for technology or traffic, you can now have it all. Yet you'll still need to decide how much multi-media to incorporate into your blog, even if it's free and simple. Therefore, much of this post applies to all of us who have decided to jump into the world of blogging.

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Youtube and copyright

Word is getting around the Internet that Youtube is no longer the wild west. Youtube is pulling down numerous video due to copyright violations. What is a copyright violation? Youtube has published this succinct set of guidelines, including various links for further understanding. It's a good starting place for anyone tempted to make use of the creative works of others without their explicit permission. Here's a hint: "Fair use" doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want.

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The real problem with the economy

I'm not an economist, yet I know that the most vocal economists these days are not shooting straight with us. You can see it in their faces and you can hear it in their voices. Niall Ferguson is a professor of history and a professor at the business school at Harvard. His analysis of our economic problems rings true to me. He starts with the premise that we are in hock up to our eyeballs and we are in massive denial that this is the real problem:

The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Average household sector debt has reached 141 per cent of disposable income in the United States and 177 per cent in the United Kingdom. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets forty, sixty or even a hundred times the size of their capital. Average U.S. investment bank leverage was above 25 to 1 at the end of 2008. Eurozone bank leverage was more than 30 to 1. British bank balance sheets are equal to a staggering 440 per cent of gross domestic product

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Religion in the White House: a history

Richard Balmer is a historian of religion. On Jon Stewart's show, he surveyed the relationship between religion and the Presidency since John F. Kennedy:

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The age of agnotology: culturally constructed ignorance

Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford who has pointed out a bizarre modern phenomenon: the coexistence of easily available factual information and ignorance. That is the subject of Clive Thompson's article in Wired:

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."

As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he's a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution.

Thompson suggests that we need to develop more tools like Wikipedia to allow society as a whole to "build real knowledge through consensus," thereby allowing us to expose systematic lies for what they are.

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