Notes from the Electronic Cottage 1/26/12

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Now that the SOPA and PROTECT-IP bills seem on temporary hold, it’s a good time to take a look at some webs sites that use today’s technologies to make our world more understandable. Here are several:

www.forvo.com – learn to pronounce words in over 280 lanuguages

www.loc.gov/jukebox – the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox site

oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-oec-facts-about-the-language – a look at the most commonly used words in the English language.

Notes from the Electronic Cottage 1/19/12

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

It seems that discussion over the PROTECT-IP act in the Senate and SOPA in the house is heating up. The mainstream press is now all over this story and important Internet services like Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, Reddit and others staged a day of protest over these proposed acts on January 18, 2012. Let’s catch up on where things stand at present and on some of the larger issues that aren’t getting a lot of attention in the regular press.

Notes from the Electronic Cottage 12/14/11

In this edition, we update a couple of topics we’ve looked at recently – the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an alternative to SOPA which troubles many in this country and aboard; and a reminder that our privacy laws are reducing the competitiveness of U.S. companies trying to do business in countries worried about ubiquitous U.S. surveillance of personal information.

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell