shawn rider dot com

These are the bookmarks I created on May 21st, 2008:

• Budget Hero | Marketplace from American Public Media - Budget Hero is a political Flash game produced by American Public Media.

These are the bookmarks I created on February 20th, 2008:

• Change Congress - The Change Congress site is not up yet, but I back Lessig’s movement to fundamentally change the way Congress works for the better. Keep an eye on this page.
• Lessig ‘08 - Change Congress. - I would happily vote for Lawrence Lessig for Congress. Twice!
• Scribd - It’s like YouTube, but for documents. Scribd converts docs into a Flash-based format which you can then embed on any site. The iPaper format isn’t bad… The site is definitely unique…
• Techcrunch - Another maintenance link — I’ve been looking at TechCrunch for a long time, and just realized I had no bookmark to it.
• Danger! - Several interesting write-ups of dangerous places. There are dangerous mountain roads, that Russian highway with all the mud, and some insane tourist hike in China. Definitely worth a browse, and loads of awesome images.

As Congress returns tomorrow to start a new session, OpenCongress is excited to announce a major update that will put all the bills and votes at your fingertips. It’s never been easier to track what’s happening with your government.

Now you can build a personal profile on OpenCongress of the bills and people you’re tracking, network with other users, comment and vote on bills, and much more. To get started, create your own "My OpenCongress" profile, it’s free and only takes a minute.

OpenCongress.org

This seems like a very unique time for Open Congress. I have wanted this site to add social features for a long time. It still amazes me that something like OpenCongress doesn’t already exist. I see it as a great experiment that will (hopefully) lead to significant social reform. Although I still doubt the kind of reforms I want will happen within my lifetime (eliminate the electoral college, parliamentary representation in the House of Reps, etc.). Nonetheless, it is a great thing to add so much functionality to an already robust database.

Funny enough, the first thing I notice when exploring OpenCongress now is just how little activity there has been so far. I see "hot" bills that have no user-votes on them. I was the first person to vote for the Internet Radio Equality Act? Seriously? I can’t believe that…

As it is, OpenCongress brings to bear two things: 1) Government is HUGE. The list of bills is pretty staggering and in spite of all the helpful organization and flexibility of the website it is going to take awhile to parse through the stuff I’m interested in. 2) Government is complicated. When confronted with the text of a bill, it’s impossible for me to solely rely on the blog and news articles also listed on the page. I feel obligated to read through the text, which is arduous to say the least. So it takes awhile for me to get up to speed. On a new movie review site I can review 300 films in a couple hours of absent-minded browsing. On OpenCongress I spent two hours reading and got through, I think, three bills.

Although the pages of OpenCongress seem a bit empty at the moment, I am holding out hope that this thing takes off in a big way. I could envision additional tools to help citizens track and comment on legislation relevant to them. I have even seen a few suggestions for how users could actually contribute to government by drafting model legislation, which causes a bit of a forehead-smacking moment. Of course! Why should it just be giant corporations who influence lawmaking? Power to the people! (crowd? mob?)

It remains to be seen what effect OpenCongress can have on the world at large. The site has a lot of hard work ahead of it, but so far the direction and execution is good. I’m pulling for it, and I suggest others check it out. It’s free! 

A quick look through some of the stories listed in any current Google News search for “tiered internet” reveals that there is plenty of interest in recent legislative activities surrounding the issue of multi-tiered internet services.

What’s going on? Earlier this month, the US House of Reps rejected an ammendment that would have prevented lobbying actions by AT&T, Verizon and Qwest. A group of internet providers, led by AT&T, are pushing to introduce tiered internet services for internet content providers. According to the companies, nothing would change for consumers (as long as your favorite websites cough up the extra cash to fund high-speed transfers). That means that if Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft maintain their positions and refuses to pay extra fees to these internet service providers, they could find their sites being maliciously throttled back, likely driving users to other (paid up) outlets.

The argument from AT&T and friends is that it costs money to maintain the network lines that connect node to node. They do not intend to charge customers different prices for access to individual sites; rather, they will charge the sites themselves for faster access to browsers.

One major flaw in this argument, of course, is that there is precedent in the phone system for companies NOT charging to access lines. After all, it takes a lot to keep traditional telephone systems online, and that is all, presumably, factored into our montly phone bills. Why internet access charges would only apply to the “last-mile” of the network (that is, the part that goes from the Internet Service Provider to your house) rather than some fraction of the entire network is a complete mystery to me.

The much larger issue is the significant decline in quality, quantity and variety of online content that would no-doubt follow this change in billing practice. I think of this in relation to GamesFirst!, which we’ve had online for ten years now. It predates me, even, and it has always been a small, independent website. It might not always offer the latest or greatest material, but I think it’s unarguably contributed in some quality way to the growth of the Web. We’ve published short films, comics, podcasts, and thousands of articles.

If we were forced to pay extra (beyond the hosting fees we already pay) to run GF!, it could realistically put us out of the biz. If users found that our site loaded slower than another game site, they would not come back. And in the world of gaming websittes, there is plenty of competition. In the face of monoliths like Ziff-Davis, Imagine Media, and IGN, we would be simply buried in a pile of marginalized sites.

The infinite shelf space of the Internet is one of the qualities of the network that make it so worthwhile to engage in online production. If tiered internet service billing for online content providers became the norm, the Web would be forever altered in a negative way. It would probably feel a lot more like cable television…