DISQUS

I, for one, am glad to see the era of willful ignorance and outright contempt for the truth is over for the time being. From abstinence-only sex education to the "personhood" of zygotes; from dismissing the science of the greenhouse effect to silencing NASA, the CDC, and any other government agency that didn't toe the party line - Bush has seriously jeopardized America's ability to compete in science and industry. We're in big trouble, and I for one am grateful Americans had the good sense to pick a president who *is* an intellectual elitist (hey - we all can't be editor of the Harvard Law Review, now can we?) instead of a beer-and-pretzels aficionado.

Yes, the Democrats have an agenda. Yes, they're partisans. Welcome to the real-life world of politics. But this time around, the numbers will shape the policy and not vice-versa!

Welcome back, America!

I recently had a nasty situation occur on Facebook where I was sent harassing, racist email by another user out-of-the-blue.

I've never gotten spam on Facebook or that sort of abuse, which I see daily on MySpace, Vox, and other popular social networking sites, and it really bothered me. I decided to repost the material with the originator's profile link on a number of relevant Facebook community pages to see if the community would mobilize to quash this sort of thing.

If you click the Website link above, you can read about what happened next - I lost my account, I got my account back, and assuming the profile information on this person is not a complete fabrication, I'd like to pursue criminal and/or civil action against her.

However, what's most relevant out of the entire situation to this post is what happened afterwards: my experience got blogged about by a young lady who really picked-up on the political context of my being harassed (the person sending the hate mail was a self-identified Clinton supporter; I am a self-identified Obama supporter, but to my knowledge we've never met or interacted online or offline).

In her summation of my experience, it was all about my pointing the finger at the Clinton campaign and making broad accusations about it and its members engaging in dirty politics; in my mind, the political context was more of a footnote and being a Clinton supporter was just one means of identifying the person who had harassed me.

Because of all this, I have to agree with Baratunde: motivation isn't always easy to discern online - at least not in the current, primarily text paradigm of blogs and conversation threads.

In my situation, I tried to make a point of applying offline social norms to online interaction, along with all the privileges and penalties that naturally follow. Yet the first person to "pick up and run" with my story missed that point completely.

I don't think that makes me "good" and her "bad;" I think it means that all the things that color our perceptions offline are amplified online (because even collaborate Web experiences usually involve people sitting by themselves in front of a keyboard), and most of the context cues that reign these assumptions in so that two people can "be on the same page" rarely get to come into play.

Why is that when Google gives away software like Picasa and Google Earth they're hailed as heroes, but when Microsoft gives away similar fare - bundled with an operating system that's largely invisible in terms of price to end users - they're demonized?

I remember when Netscape.net *was* the Internet (unless you were an AOL subscriber), and I remember watching Netscape sit by and do nothing to capitalize on that fact. But they sure knew how to scare the beejeezus out of non-academics into paying for the privilege of surfing the Web with their browser.

Then came IE, for free, and laid the foundation of the current Web. Seriously. I challenge anyone to compare Netscape Navigator 4.0 to IE 4.0 and honestly say that 1) Netscape was the better product, and 2) IE didn't lay the foundation for AJAX, RSS, and many of the other slick "Web 2.0" technologies that Google gets so much undeserved credit for.

And the list goes on and on - WinAmp, Eudora, and other programs for just about every software niche that's out there; the bulk of which Microsoft's detractors probably weren't even aware of until Redmond gave away their own equivalent product, bundled in the Windows OS.

I'm not naive - Microsoft has crossed the line into seriously unethical behavior on more than one occasion to *maintain* its market dominance, but the way they got to the top of their respective market strongholds is almost identical to the way that Google has taken: build a better mouse trap and "give it away." Microsoft did it with their ubiquitous OS, and Google does it through their ubiquitous search product. If this makes Microsoft the "evil empire," shouldn't we all be hating Google just a little bit, too?

Re: #3 by Sathya - with all the gloom and doom surrounding Yahoo! these days and things like the co-branded Yahoo!/IE browser and joint messneger projects still coming down the pipeline, am I the only one who thinks that the possibility of a Microsoft-Yahoo! alliance and/or takeover is still being discussed at some level?

A strategic partnership between the two keeps making more and more sense to me, not less.