While I was debating what to blog about this week, I started thinking about how I usually think of topics. The first place I typically start out at is Google. I start at google for a number of things. For my senior thesis paper I first started googling different ideas until i realized my topic. When I hear about a job or a company that I might be interested in working for the first thing I do is google the company. I use google every day, multiple times a day. It is a starting point for almost everything that I need to get done on the internet, and offline. I google people, and random things when I am bored, procrastinating, busy, at any time of day, etc. I even googled the google image that you see above. And now that I have an iphone, I can google anything I want, whenever I want, wherever I am. . Within a short span of time I recently googled:

- How to get a stain out of a winter coat

- Gift ideas for moms

- Chili's locations

- Elizabeth Edwards

- Baked chicken recipes

- 10 day forecast

Needless to say I am a major information seeker, but I don't think I am alone. It is amazing how many times a day one person visits google. Wikipedia (another huge conglomerate that people use to seek all kinds of facts, but we'll stick to just google for today) asserts that google gets over 400 million searches a day, and while that number is extremely high, it still seems kind of low to me. In my paper, I talked about Collectivism and how the major sites like Google and Wikipedia are taking up all of the web traffic. When I look at my own Internet usage, this seems to be true. The moral of this post is, as google is a starting point for many internet searches, Where would we be without it?

Saving the internet

While talking about net neutrality today in class, I started thinking about whether there were any current court cases regarding ISPs trying to slow down connection to some websites. Freedom on the internet is such a broad and debated issue and whether or not ISPs have the authority to regulate what services they offer and at what price is an arguable topic. In April of 2010, there was a federal court case involving Comcast and high traffic video sites such as Youtube in which the court decided ultimatley that Comcast (and all other internet service providers) had limited power to over web traffic under current law. This ruling caused an uproar from the F.C.C. which strives to have explicit control over Internet service, and whose ultimate goal is to remove all rights of ISPs to control web traffic. As I was reading about this case, I came across this website, called savetheinternet.com. The goal of this website is to campaign for Congress to make a law that upholds net neutrality across the internet, and no longer allows internet service providers to take part in allowing one website slower connection than another. The website has a blog, and donations section which could help contribute to the campaign. The whole premise is based on the future of the internet and is a common ground where "two million everyday people who have banded together with thousands of nonprofit organizations, buisnesses and bloggers to protect internet freedom." I think the video on the website did an awesome job at explaining net neutrality, and why it is important that it be upheld. That video can be seen here on youtube --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L11kLmWha6o&feature=player_embedded