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Senator Ted Stevens has already achieved a certain kind of blogosphere and Internet infamy for his comments about teh Internets being “a series of tubes” (click the image for a dance remix of his address to the Senate). Now, he seems to want to compound that infamy by passing legislation that would block most social networking sites — including not just MySpace, but virtually any site that allows user contributions, including Wikipedia — from any school that receives federal education funding.

Some are calling this proposed Bill 49 DOPA Jr., since it is very much like the Deleting Against Online Predators Act, which was proposed last year by Republican Mike Fitzpatrick. Wikipedia has an overview of the issue here. The bill would have made it an offence for schools to provide access to sites that offered chat forums, user accounts, public profiles, and other social networking tools. The FCC would have had to determine which sites were offensive and which were not. The new bill proposed by Sen. Stevens — which he first proposed last month and is called The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act— would be even broader than DOPA.

Now the Senator has company: Matt Murphy wants to ban social networking sites from schools and libraries in Illinois. As Marianne Richmond notes at BlogHer, this would prevent people in Senator — and presidental candidate — Barack Obama’s home state from going to his new social networking site. As James Robertson so eloquently puts it, it’s the blind leading the stupid. More discussion over at Slashdot.

Boy, that team over at Yahoo is something, aren’t they? Everyone keeps saying how Yahoo is falling behind Google, and they just don’t have the mojo any more, and how their peanut butter is spread too thin or whatever (don’t ask), but someone over there must have been burning the midnight programming oil, because somehow they managed to sneak into Digg’s secret compound and steal the code for their voting system.

As described over on Yahoo’s “Yodel Anecdotal” blog (come on — could any organization whose blog has a dumb name like that really be evil?), the company has added Digg-style voting for what amount to online suggestion boxes on many of their sites, including their auto hub, real estate hub, etc. They’ve even enabled it for the new Yahoo Pipes, so I can head over there and suggest that they change the name to Yahoo Tubes, in honour of Senator Whatshisname and his metaphor for the Internet.

As Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal and Frantic Industries and L.M. Orchard at DecafBad point out, the frenzy of Yahoo-bashing that this caused over at Digg is ridiculous — while at the same time not totally surprising, given the nature of the site and the mob mentality it often produces. Digg no more invented the idea of voting things up or down than I invented faster-than-light travel (oops, that was supposed to be a secret too). The inimitable Jason Calacanis has more on that here.

I’m with Mike Arrington: Digg fans need to chillax. (screenshot comes from Cory at Lost Remote).

Update:

Frantic Industries notes that Microsoft seems to be getting into this game too, but so far only on foreign MSN sites. It doesn’t look much like Digg, either, so maybe the fan boys will leave it alone.

There have been a number of stories recently in which Canada is accused of being a haven for copyright pirates, a scofflaw, a den of iniquity, etc. etc. — including the most recent story out of Washington, which describes how the International Intellectual Property Alliance wants the U.S. government to add Canada to a list of intellectual property villains.

A previous story talked about how movie studios are thinking about delaying the release of movies in Canada because of all the rampant “camcordering” or illicit copying of movies in theatres, with Canada described as the source of “nearly 50 per cent” of the world’s camcorded movies. Sounds pretty bad, right? But as copyright expert and University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist described on his blog recently, there are some holes in that portrayal. One of the first is the 50 per cent number. Not only is there no way of verifying that figure, but the International Intellectual Property Alliance says Canada is only responsible for about 23 per cent of camcorder copies. That still sounds like a lot, right? Except that only about 179 out of the 1,400 movies released in 2006 was camcorded, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

One of the most recent studies of movie piracy, Dr. Geist notes, found that the vast majority of illegally copied movies — more than 75 per cent — come from review copies or early releases that are sent to movie industry insiders. And an analysis of the way that movie copying tends to work shows that illegal camcorder copies have an extremely short shelf life, and are only popular until the DVD version of a movie is released (which is happening more and more quickly after the theatrical release), at which point pirates copy those instead. No one seems to be saying that Canada is a haven for that, although obviously we have our own share of illegal DVD sellers.

So the bottom line is that Canada appears to be one of the sources for a form of movie piracy that accounts for a relatively small proportion of the overall problem in the industry. But the stories all say that Canada doesn’t even care about that, don’t they? Industry sources say that our copyright laws aren’t strong enough and so criminals see our country as the perfect place to engage in that business. But as the Justice Minister and others have pointed out, copying movies is already a crime in Canada, under existing copyright legislation. It’s true that in order to make such a case stick, the authorities have to prove that it was copied for illegal distribution, but that seems like a reasonable requirement, and such cases are prosecuted frequently.

So what Canada is accused of doing, essentially, is not passing specific laws that the U.S. motion picture industry wants it to, to make any form of copying illegal and easier to prosecute. They’d probably like it if we didn’t have friends over to watch our DVDs too, but luckily that is still legal.

I confess that I still don’t get the whole Belgium vs. Google thing. I keep reading about it and reading about it, and thinking about it — hoping that I have somehow missed a crucial point or argument in the newspapers’ position that makes this whole thing sensible in any way. But by now I am totally convinced: It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It is just dumb, with a capital D.

As Danny Sullivan notes in his overview of the case, this complaint from the Belgian group known as Copiepresse dates back almost a year. After the first complaint — as is customary in these types of cases, when sites don’t want to be included in Google’s index — the search engine advised the agency (as Google notes here) to use the well-known “robots.txt” file to exclude parts of its websites from Google’s spider-bots. Copiepress apparently said that this process, which takes about 10 minutes, was unacceptable.

So after a year of legal wrangling, and millions of dollars in legal costs, the Belgian group has “won” and has forced Google to remove its newspaper content. In other words, it has prevented the world’s largest and most respected search engine from showing links to that content to people who want that content — and doing so for free. And the claim that Google makes money from this content, which others have argued in the past, is just as stupid, since Google News doesn’t carry advertisements on its content pages.

Carlo at Techdirt shares my feelings on this matter, and I know many other journalists who do as well. Some companies would kill for the kind of profile and access that being linked in Google News provides to potential readers. Someone at Copiepresse clearly sees this as some kind of noble battle against a U.S. tech giant, but all they are really doing is harming themselves. Oh yes, and looking stupid. Did I mention that part?

It’s not really about technology, or business, but it’s still an amazing story: Michael Holmes, a veteran skydiver with more than 7,000 jumps to his credit, had had his chute fail before — but never like this.

After failing to deploy, he couldn’t cut it loose, and then his reserve chute got tangled as well. Unable to control his descent, he plummeted 12,000 feet into the ground at about 80 miles per hour. Somehow, he avoided both the ocean (where he would likely have drowned) and a nearby parking lot, and crashed into a small clump of blackberry bushes. He came away from the impact with just a broken ankle and a collapsed lung.

There’s more info at the Mail on Sunday website, including comments from Michael about the jump. Incredible story.

The Mail on Sunday appears to have gotten YouTube to pull down the video, since it says it has been removed as a result of a copyright complaint from Associated Newspapers (which owns the Mail on Sunday). The newspaper has embedded the video here.

Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has taken another run at Powerset, which has been hitting the headlines in the blogosphere because the company continues to raise giant sums of money and get all sorts of attention with very little to show for it. Mike figures that the “natural language” search startup could be a “house of cards” and that CEO Barney Pell seems to be staffing the thing with Yahoo engineers, in the hope that the company will eventually be acquired by Yahoo in its eternal quest to beat Google.

That’s all fascinating and everything, but I have to say the most interesting part of his post is the video clip, which features platinum-haired Valley girl Sarah Myers of d7tv.com doing a feature called “PartyCrashers” (Matt Marshall has the video at Venture Beat too). She gets giggly with several staffers and has a brief interview with Barney Pell — in which he says he will probably raise more money this year — but the video really gets good near the end, when she interviews some poor schmuck who has either been hit on the head with a large object, is mesmerized by Sarah’s platinum bob and party dress, or has had way too much to drink (or possibly all three).

His explanation of what Powerset does is so incredibly obtuse that it is hard to believe. At one point, he says: “We have a demo where you can, like, search web pages and, like, get results.” It’s incredible. I don’t know who this guy is, but he is just about the worst advertisement for the company it is possible to imagine. One investor who says he put $100,000 into the company posted a comment on TechCrunch that said he was “very worried about this company.”

Admittedly, an offhand comment at a party by some faceless staffer who has consumed too many free beverages isn’t a fair judgment on an entire company, but still. It’s hilarious and painful at the same time. And a warning for startups: everyone who works for you is part of your sales team.

Lots of chatter about Barack Obama’s new MySpace-style social network, which he just launched in conjunction with the start of his official bid to become the next POTUS. It’s at my.barackobama.com, and it has all the requisite tools of a supposedly Web 2.0 campaign — profiles, blogs, friend requests, and (of course) built-in campaign financing tools so you can help Barack make it to the White House. But does everyone get Barack as a friend, the way all MySpacers get founder Tom Anderson? Inquiring minds want to know.

Fred Wilson has some problems with Barack’s attempts to get all Web 2.0, including the use of Brightcove’s video player, but my problem with the whole thing is a little more philosophical. In part, I’m unconvinced that politicians and political parties — which are inherently even more artificial, controlled and paranoid than companies (and we all know how blogging and social networking gets treated at many of the latter, thanks to Wal-Mart and Edelman) — are really going to walk the walk, as opposed to just talking the talk. John Edwards has passed one test when it comes to defending bloggers associated with his campaign, but there are sure to be others.

And I also wonder whether it makes any sense to try and convince everyone to come and create a blog and invest time in all those other social-networking aspects of their lives exclusively at my.barackobama.com. Why not have a site that acts more like SuperGlu or Squidoo or something like that, one that pulls in blog posts and photos from Flickr and aggregates it all in one place, instead of making people go to Obama’s site to write or post? Of course, that would only increase the risks to the campaign, but that comes with the territory. And presumably Obama’s legion of volunteers could monitor the content.

I think there’s a risk that the social networks Barack and others are trying to build will become little more than Potemkin villages. My friend Rob Hyndman thinks that Obama could have what it takes, and that his site goes a long way towards following through on the promise of Politics 2.0.

It’s more than a little ironic that Craig “Craigslist.org” Newmark — the guy whose classified service is making $50-million or so a year more or less by accident, and eating the lunch of various metropolian newspapers in the process — is a big fan of journalism and of newspapers. I’ve come across many comments by him that express his respect for the craft, and the latest is an account of his talk at the WeMedia conference in Miami that Jemima Kiss (god, I love that name) posted on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog.

The way Jemima describes it, Craig talked about how political philosophers and thinkers Thomas Paine and John Locke were very much like bloggers (except their blogs were written on parchment), and that they caused their own “paradigm shift” in the media. Craig said there is also a place for traditional media skills such as editing and information filtering — something that doesn’t get talked about a lot in these days of “open source” journalism and participatory media. Craig says:

“Everyday I see what some call the wisdom of crowds, but the down side to that is that there can be mob rule, or panic, or low-quality information so what you need on top of that is another layer – the editors.”

Craig went on to say that the blogging model is exciting but it “generally means speaking the truth and checking later,” Jemima says, while professional journalists do the fact-checking first. In many ways, Newmark said, newspapers may have been the precursor to the Internet. Interesting idea, that. The rest of Jemima’s roundup is also worth reading.