Good comments and some attention from yesterday's blog on women joggers becoming women bloggers. The comments led to a blog that I will be checking closely as the blogging world evolves. At Seth Finkelstein's INFO THOUGHT BLOG, I was treated to the following eye-popping news: (taken verbatim from Seth's site-- my thanks to him for posting it)

Researchers Join Forces to Expose Net Censorship

April 26, 2004 -- For Immediate Release

An international team of academics from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Toronto has begun monitoring worldwide Internet censorship and surveillance.

"The Open Net Initiative represents a new approach to university-based research," says Cambridge University's Rafal Rohozinski. "We fuse cutting-edge intelligence-derived techniques with a networked model of analysis that includes some of the brightest minds in this field - we are striving to become the eyes and ears on digital censorship worldwide."

The Open Net Initiative (ONI) was formed in 2004 with support from the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute and represents a partnership among groups at three leading global universities: Cambridge, Harvard, and Toronto. As Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain explains, "The aim of the ONI is to excavate, analyze, and report censorship and surveillance practices in a rigorous, ongoing fashion. In order to fully understand the Internet's evolution, we must be able to map it empirically."

The continued disagreement over Homeland Security and what it should be able to monitor--especially on the net, made me sit up and read this post, and the press release, carefully. Is Big Brother hovering in the cables and connections of our Internet? Somehow we must accept that he is. We must remember that little the public does is secret when it's recorded in a post online, whether a blog or an email.

While this may inhibit some, I am not cowed by government attempts to watch what I say. Nor do I 'watch what I say' very often. I try to be informative while being factual. Yet, in my reviews of everything I write-- and I do review everything I write --- nothing goes out unchecked, despite errors that creep in (one should never be one's own proofreader). I often delete or reword something if it borders on trouble. Luckily, I make that call...not my readers, not President Bush, not Dick Cheney, not even Tom Ridge. I censor myself, and that is the only censorship that I will accept.

Can there be any doubt of my williness to flout the censors? After all, I did write a book called "Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online." A book continually censored for its provocative title. Women in certain networking groups have shook their knobby fingers in my face and said, "How dare you!" Men in professional groups, not so many men as women, laugh uneasily, then look me over carefully to see if I'm straight. And, certain small minds won't even verbalize their distaste of my title. They saunter away from me as if meandering off to refill an already fresh coffee cup.

What I find interesting is that we live in a world where the "Vagina Monologues" can become a fabulous success, but a title that refers (not really, Dickless refers to shopping in today's digital world as a Jane experience more than a Dick experience) to a certain male body part, or lack thereof, is being censored as too provocative or offensive. In a report from Writer's Digest, the reviewer of my book said it was well-developed and written, if one could only get by the "offensive title." I'm not sure what's offensive about Dick and Jane, but clearly this reviewer did not read the entire book. If so, how was the reference to those two 20th century characters missed? Mention of them appears in every chapter!

Seth Finkelstein's blog is worth adding to your list. Give it a look-see and decide for yourself. To set the record straight, I got to his blog by visiting Evelyn Rodriguez's blog, Crossroads Dispatches, another place to keep an eye on. Her "on-the-road coverage from a world journey to the emerging creative class centers of the world" is something I will be checking out on a regular basis. All of which proves that blogging is communication at its best. People to people, on a digital road that has no stop signs, just a lot of twists, turns, and forks. Leaving us with the question, if the road less travelled is beckoning, are we brave enough to take it? Choices.

What's not to like about that?