The battle lines have been drawn.  The weapons readied.  The battlefield, full of the milling throngs of social network users, stills briefly as the combatants take the field.  This is the new front in Google’s attempt to force themselves into every facet of the web.  Google has entered in to the fray of social networking. Since the news broke at the Virtual Worlds Forum about Google working with partners around the globe on a new virtual world, the pieces have begun falling in to place and more leaks have sprung.  It seems Google is no longer simply helping us find what we need and selling ad space, it also wants a piece of the Yahoo! action by actively courting the [...]

If you’ll recall, the internet used to be somewhat free of censorship, back before anyone realized how powerful it would become. It’s all relative of course, but it was harder to control online information than it was to control print media and television reporting. Things seem to be really changing now, unfortunately. Online censorship has been all over the news over the past year. With the latest reports of Myanmar/Burma cutting off internet access to help quash a rebellion, we’re seeing how critical the internet has become. Censorship seems to be a governmental response to something that, otherwise, they really have absolutely no idea how to handle. I have never been a fan of censorship. It’s incredibly dangerous to mask [...]