YouTube: Broadcast Terrorism Yourself, Mashable.

According to the YouTube blog today, Senator Joe Lieberman sent a letter explaining his misgivings with the platform for free speech that YouTube has given the public. His primary concerns weren’t the usual suspects when you think of the things that American politicians find objectionable (rap music, graphic portrayals of violence, Grand Theft Auto and Janet Jackson’s nipple).

Instead he brought up a topic that YouTube is actually fairly guilty as charged on - allowing themselves to be a willing participant in the dessimenation of Islamic terrorist organizations’s propaganda videos:

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In Lieberman’s letter, we learn that he and his staff identified numerous videos that should, in theory, be a violation of YouTube’s Community Guidelines (promoting hate-speech and violence against others, or even depicting ‘gratuitous violence’). The videos were not in fact cited by YouTube, but YouTube claims that they were not in violation of the terms of service, and did not contain any violent or hate speech content.

A Living-Room Crusade via Blogging, New York Times.

Jane Novak, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mother of two in New Jersey, has never been to Yemen. She speaks no Arabic, and freely admits that until a few years ago, she knew nothing about that strife-torn south Arabian country.

And yet Ms. Novak has become so well known in Yemen that newspaper editors say they sell more copies if her photograph — blond and smiling — is on the cover. Her blog, an outspoken news bulletin on Yemeni affairs, is banned there. The government’s allies routinely vilify her in print as an American agent, a Shiite monarchist, a member of Al Qaeda, or “the Zionist Novak.”

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Ms. Novak, working from a laptop in her Monmouth County living room “while the kids are at school,” has started an Internet petition to free Mr. Khaiwani. She has enlisted Yemeni politicians, journalists, human rights activists and others around the globe. Her blog goes well beyond the Khaiwani case and has become a crucial outlet for opposition journalists and political figures, who feed her tips on Yemeni political intrigue by e-mail or text message.

Democrats Launch McCainpedia, An Attack Site Masquerading As A Wiki, Wired.

The DNC hopes that its new tool will operate as a centralized source of opposition research that its gigantic cadre of online party faithful will virally market both on and off-line.

But technologists criticized the effort because it violates the ethos and spirit that drives wikis.

Wikis are by their nature collaborative projects that enable a large group of people to contribute their efforts, to peer-review, finesse and openly dispute the information that's presented.

McCainpedia, however, is closed to the public. Only the DNC research department gets to enter information about the senator from Arizona, his policy positions and his presidential campaign.

Democracy and the Web, NY Times Editorial.

The Internet, at least in this country, is a remarkably unfettered medium. If you type in the domain name of a large corporation or a small blog, a government Web site or a radical political party, the pages are sent to your computer with equal speed. Like a telephone line, an Internet connection does not play favorites — it simply transmits the words and images.

I.S.P.’s, the companies that connect users to the Internet, want to change this. They have realized that they could make a lot of money by charging some Web sites a premium to have their content delivered faster than that of other sites. Web sites relegated to Internet “slow lanes” would have trouble competing.

This sort of discrimination would interfere with innovation. Many major Web sites, like eBay or YouTube, might never have gotten past the start-up stage if their creators had been forced to pay to get their content through. Content discrimination would also allow I.S.P.’s to censor speech they do not like — something that has already begun. Last year, Verizon Wireless refused to allow Naral Pro-Choice America to send text messages over its network, reversing itself only after bad publicity.