Last week, Iran joined the ranks of awful countries that block YouTube. It makes me kind of mad. Iran isn't a very good country, it turns out. I don't mind that they're trying to build a nuke that could kill me and everyone I hold dear, but YouTube is serious business, and I can't respect any nation that prevents her citizens from using it. They also block tons of blogs and basically any website that speaks ill of the current regime. How awful.
The thing is, Iran is a vibrant, youthful country that would benefit from a little more open dialog. I mean, last week Chad imposed some hard-core censorship, but they only did it to stem the massive bloodshed that's spilling into their country from Sudan. But Iran doesn't have those concerns. It's really a pretty stable place. Go figure.

source:Think Progress url: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/12/13/mccain-war-on-blogs/

"John McCain’s War On Blogs
John McCain has made clear that he doesn’t like the blogosphere.

Now he has introduced legislation that would treat blogs like Internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles. Some highlights of the legislation:

– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”

– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.

In keeping with drawing my inspiration from the Internet, I have finally discovered why blogging is important:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16157182/

If anyone has heard John Mayer's new album "Continuum" (which if you don't want admit, that's alright), you may have noticed that it is maybe a little bit, well maybe, sort of errrr... okay. And by okay, I mean okay in that same way that some Gwen Stefani songs are okay: though you feel like you should know better, somehow these songwriters are able to engage that small “audio crack” receptor in the brain, and you can’t stop listening to them no matter how hard you try to go back to your usual playlists.

So yesterday, because I was so surprised at suddenly liking John Mayer again, I decided to go in search of more information—and where better to turn than www.johnmayer.com! The site, as most artist sites now are, was a jumble of text, video, images and audio clips, and interestingly enough, a blog. Obviously, I had explore.