digitext.net
---------

Goodsearch.com donates to the Electronic Frontier Foundation if you set up an account and link it to EFF, a member of the anti-SOPA americancensorship.org. EFF also has an Amazon Affiliate account, and other ways you can help the cause. Goodsearch is particularly interesting to me, in light of Google’s blacklisting of pirate websites from automatic search. Goodsearch happens to run on Yahoo, so you can even send your search traffic away from Google, if that’s something that matters to you. You can set up Goodsearch as your default engine in Firefox, and send a little bread to EFF with each ctrl+k.

I started blogging in 2006 after reading Biz Stone’s wonderful book, Who Let the Blogs Out? Biz was the head blogger at Google when he wrote the book, and from what he wrote, and what I noticed, Blogger.com seemed to be the best platform out there. It was free to use, and simple to edit with my basic html knowledge. But Blogger’s code kept getting more complicated as they picked up xhtml and then css, which I never got around to learning. It was annoying, but I stayed with Blogger because switching seemed to be more of a pain than it was worth. I still liked Blogger for its being both free as in beer and free as in freedom.

But Google kept changing Blogger’s interface, then just recently announced their intention to incorporate it into Google Plus. That really bugged me, because I didn’t want by blog to be incorporated into anything, especially the nose dive network that is G+. And then today I read that Google has blacklisted websites connected to internet piracy. The Pirate Bay, BitTorrent, and numerous other sites now won’t turn up in automatic search sggestions for songs and other content—even if these sites are commonly searched for. Google’s not doing this because they necessarily agree with online censorship—they argued against it just last week in Congress when legislators tried to convince them that pirated content should be delisted from web search results. Google stood their ground and said they did not support the Stop Online Piracy Act, joining ranks—at least opinion-wise—with an alliance that began the website AmericanCensorship.org (Mozilla, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and Tumblr). As soon as I knew Mozilla was campaigning against SOPA, I switched my default browser from Chromium to Firefox. Chromium is the open source basis for Google’s mainstream (and semi-closed) Chrome browser. Google hasn’t joined the alliance of tech foundations and companies actively campaigning against SOPA, so I wasn’t entirely sure how invested Google was in the fight against internet censorship (especially given Google’s backing down against the Chinese government). Now I know: not much.

It’s not that Google is supportive of SOPA in the same way that proprietary giants Apple and Microsoft, along with DRM-maker Adobe, and a slew of other tech companies are. It’s that Google is blacklisting pirate sites just after releasing their own music streaming service, putting them nearly in the same boat as these pro-SOPA companies—in spirit, if not in letter. I’m not ready to entirely migrate from Google, but as far as new blog content goes, I’m moving toward those groups explicitly against SOPA (like Tumblr), and marking everything with a Creative Commons license. I’m also considering Word Press, but for the time being, I’ll be playing around with Tumblr, and keeping my personal Blogger site up as an archive at http://blog.travispoling.com/.

The US Congress is debating a bill that would end up censoring the internet in broad, even draconian ways. The bill is known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). A number of organizations have banded together to stop it, including groups that I’ve supported for a while, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, and Creative Commons. I’m particularly interested in stopping the bill as a writer and user of free and open source software. Creative Commons explains on their blog how SOPA will impact these two groups. Here’s the pertinent parts of that post (it was written before the Congressional hearings, but the bill is still active):

Read More