Free Speech in a Flat World

In the wake of international scrutiny China has lowered the firewall for its citizens to access the English version of Wikipedia - with some sensitive pages blocked. Sounds like a step in the right direction. I would expect the "olympics" page is one that may be blocked or unblocked on a daily basis.

How's freedom of speech doing in the U.S.? Are there questions you can't ask? Positions you shouldn't hold? If you look very far on the web, it would appear there aren't many things you can't say.

In American academia though, challenging Darwinian dogma is the new taboo. And Ben Stein is being decried as a "willful ignoramus" who "must have lost his mind" and now risks being Expelled on or about April 18 when his controversial movie is released.

Stein apparently implies that scientific bias can be a result of, and a justification for, a preferred worldview. Is he allowed to say that? We'll find out in a couple weeks.

Web 2.0 and Problem Resolution

If your IT department is still using a traditional knowledge base to speed problem resolution, you'll want to consider stepping up the pace by automating the process.

Wiki-based automated runbooks take advantage of collaboration and clickable fixes with advantages similar to those of Wikipedia over a hardback Brittanica. I wrote a short article describing the new breed of RBA that the good people at TechRepublic were kind enough to publish this week - you can link to it here.