A group of bloggers has submitted 20 pages of proposals on Internet freedom to the Government, which says it will consider their ideas.

The group of 13 wants, among others, a guarantee of freedom to use the Internet to discuss political issues and promote political views, The Straits Times reported.

Also, any regulation of online content should not be at the administrative discretion of officials, who have legal powers in this area, but through a court of law or preferably moderation by a consultative body of citizens, they said.

In its reply, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (Mica) said their views plus feedback from others will be taken into account in its ongoing review of new media.

“To keep up with the fast-evolving new media landscape, we have been reviewing our light-touch approach and are considering how we could take a lighter touch approach,” said Ms K. Bhavani, press secretary to Mica minister Lee Boon Yang.

Her reply on Monday was e-mailed to a leader of the group, Mr Alex Au of the Yawning Bread site, who made it available to The Straits Times. (link)

Top bloggers have long heralded WordPress® as the superior blog platform for its ease of management and for the vast selection of open source social and SEO plugins designed for integration.

Now, a growing number of website developers and Internet marketers are leveraging WordPress as a platform for e-commerce websites - and for a whole new set of reasons.

According to online entrepreneur and Internet marketer Tim McGuiness, the WordPress platform offers search engine optimization components that are not present in traditional website platforms. By effectively utilizing these powerful components, e-commerce websites built upon the WordPress platform achieve high visibility in search engines in a very short span of time.

“I set up an entire WordPress based website in less than 5 hours and made a $115.96 sale from a Google search within 24 hours of launch. In 5 days, the site was already ranking on page one, two, and three in Google’s natural results for several of my primary keywords,” said Tim McGuiness, Internet entrepreneur and founder of OrovoWeightLoss.com (link)

Check out this spam I got today. Well last week actually. I get so much on a regular basis I don’t bother to check the spam folder everyday. However sometimes I get gems like this and I laugh. Hmm, wow, millions of dollars huh? Even links a BBC article, certainly sounds “legit” to me. LOL!

An announcement of a flaw in WordPress 2.x rated “highly critical” was posted on the Secunia blog today. The vulnerability allows a security bypass that enables malicious hackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks from remote access, which could compromise operating systems.

According to Secunia, “A vulnerability is caused due to improper access restriction of the administration section. This can be exploited to bypass the authentication mechanism and gain administrative access by setting a specially crafted cookie. This can further be exploited to execute arbitrary PHP code.”

The site also reports that “input passed to an unspecified parameter is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user’s browser session in context of an affected site.” (link)

But alas, the best-read blogs are filled with personal musings, sex, and the more dirty laundry the better.

So what’s a small business owner to do if they want a blog that’s well read? Should they start writing about their escapades in the bedroom?

“Unless your sex life is so interesting that you think it will gain you customers, I would strongly discourage getting too personal in your business blogging,” says Rich Sloan of StartupNation.com. “It’s important to draw a clear line between the ‘who you are’ as an entrepreneur and as a person beyond your business.” (link)

Sharon Sarmiento knew it was time to unplug when she realized she was blogging in her dreams and hearing imaginary instant messages.

For Ariel Meadow Stallings, it was the hours lost while surfing the Internet that left her feeling like she had been in a drunken blackout.

Both women are part of a new grass-roots movement in which tech geeks, Internet addicts, BlackBerry thumbers and compulsive IMers are deciding to wrest back control of their lives by daring to switch off — if only for a day. (link)

Bell Canada has formally announced that its commercial customers — other ISPs — will henceforth have all their traffic throttled and filtered by Bell, who will be degrading some connections based on the protocol they use.

Bell’s bizarre argument for this? We’re screwing our retail customers with throttling. If we let our wholesale customers offer a better connection to their retail customers, our customers will be upset that they’re not getting as good a deal. (link)

The co-founder of MySpace said he believes the popular online hangout is poised to succeed in South Korea after closely scrutinizing U.S. Internet services that have faced challenges making inroads here.

Speaking after the launch of MySpace’s Korean-language version in Seoul, Chris DeWolfe said he was confident about its prospects in a country that has proved difficult for foreign online services such as Google.

He noted the Korean-language site included the exclusive function “Minilog,” a way for Korean youths to jot down everyday thoughts and feelings in a few hundred characters. (CNN)

Heard about this today. Did you know that Darren Rowse is bankrupt since the most he ever earned on ProBlogger was $1,000/month?

It’s not true, of course. It’s a pretty tacky April Fools gag, clumsily made since the post date isn’t even April 1st. Darren wasn’t happy, and I can imagine he got even more pissed when his Wikipedia entry got updated accordingly. That shows how unreliable Wikipedia can be, if anything. Come on, is There’s a Blog in my Soup reliable enough for such an edit? And who does that kind of edit to a person’s entry without looking up on facts?

Patrick Curl, author of the post, have updated with an apology. The post is still up. (link)

The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs.

The idea borrowed from HCI studies was a simple one: perform observations of actual users as they are interfacing with their computers. The observations took the forms of usage surveys, overseen reading sessions, individual discussions, and a single group discussion. Unfortunately, given the time-intensive nature of the work, the study population was small (20 subjects), and several of them did not participate in all aspects of the study. Attempts to log browsing habits didn’t work out; the survey population was either savvy enough about privacy concerns to not install the logging software, or not savvy enough to manage a functional installation. (link)