The Rhetoric of Reputation

The presentation on Austin going green made me think about the new ways the country has gone green. Here's an article on America's Debate on how Time magazine proposes new ways.

Global Warming

I found an interesting article on Slashdot that mentions a recent net neutrality debate at Stanford.

Net Neutrality

My paper is going to be in the form of a proposal argument. My outline goes as follows:
Claim- Celebrities need to stop publicly backing political candidates.
Grounds- People need to decide on their own who they want to vote for.
Warrant- Uninformed people listen to celebrities over the actual candidates.
Backing- Research shows that 25% of Americans listen to celebrities in political elections.
Rebuttal- Freedom of Speech
Response- If you are in the public eye, you have a responsibility to the American people to let them have their own freedom of speech--your freedom would decide their

Since we have spent so much time discussing online social networks, I thought this article on blending social networking with traditional Web search might spark some interest.

How Social Networks May Kill Search as we Know it

There is an article on Slashdot that I found very interesting. Apparently, a person's actual identity costs less than fifteen dollars, while your bank account number can fetch anywhere up to $1000.

Your Identity Is Worth Less Than $15

What with many of our discussions on the powerful website YouTube, I thought this article was pretty interesting. Apparently, Pakistan isn't as avid a fan of the site as Americans are...

Slashdot

This blog entry is about the Wikipedia talk page on “Hybrid Vehicle,” whose link is

Talk:Hybrid

All of the commentators on this talk page do a very good job at maintaining a neutral point of view, or NPOV, on the topic of hybrid cars. The main topics on the wikipedia page are about fixing the page on Hybrid vehicles so it can make more sense to the reader, not arguing over whether or not a commentator is being neutral. For example, many people believed that the “Gas-electric hybrid engine” article, originally separate from the “hybrid car” article, should merge with the latter. They thought the first article was “badly named” with duplicated content that was basically just taking up space. So, after many people agreed that it was pointless to have two separate articles with very similar content, one participant went into the page and put the link “Gas-electric hybrid engine” into the “hybrid car” article.

So apparently Tim O'Reiley thinks there should be a "Blogger's Code of Conduct" enforced on the internet for online civility. Cory Doctorow is one of the "celebrity bloggers" that is interviewed about this new development.

America's Debate

I will be writing my paper on stem cell research using the website "America's Debate." Granted, Mr. Brown used this as an example today in class, but I knew when he handed out the assignment that I wanted to write about that. So I'm not just copying what he said, I promise!