The Open Internet Coalition, an alliance of online businesses and advocacy groups, yesterday sent a letter to several influential members of Congress calling for legislation that would “guarantee freedom of speech in the digital world.”

The coalition — whose members include Educause, the higher-education technology group — also asked senior members of the House Committees on Energy and Commerce and on the Judiciary and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to convene hearings examining whether telecommunications companies are blocking protected speech online.

The letter cites several recent incidents in which telephone and cable providers have been accused of censorship. Last week Verizon briefly refused to let NARAL Pro-Choice America send text messages about its abortion-rights campaigns. (The company quickly reversed its decision.) A short while before, AT&T...

One Laptop Per Child’s recently announced “Give 1 Get 1” program is a bit of a gambit: By encouraging American and Canadian consumers to buy their own XO laptops, the project runs the risk of drawing unfavorable comparisons to more powerful home PC’s.

“Sure enough, the bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop,” writes David Pogue of The New York Times. “Clearly, the XO’s mission has sailed over these people’s heads like a 747.”

In a glowing review, Mr. Pogue calls the low-cost laptop “a kid magnet” and hails the computer’s battery life, its built-in programs, and a number of other innovations. Mr. Pogue makes a good point: Compared with commercial laptops, the XO will seem a bit puny. But the project’s goal of keeping production costs down has actually forced developers to come up with a really nifty machine. —Brock Read

The University of California at Berkeley has never been shy about giving away course lectures online: Its pioneering Webcasting site has been up and running for several years, and its newer iTunes page includes recordings from almost 80 courses, all available for free.

Now the university has gone a step further, posting more than 200 course videos on a new, slick-looking YouTube channel. Among the lectures already airing on the channel are discourses on human anatomy, electrical engineering, and an “introduction to the science of nonviolence.”

The site seems to be a hit. More than 2,000 YouTube users have already “subscribed” to the Berkeley channel, and that number is certain to rise considerably in the coming days. For colleges that have joined iTunes U. or started separate podcasting projects, there’s a lesson to be had here: If you’re really serious about using the Web to disseminate...

If you want to keep sensitive information on your Facebook profile private, it only takes a few mouse clicks. But analysts at Sophos, a computer-security company, say even those few clicks are too many.

It’s already been well-documented that most of Facebook’s college clientele — and, indeed, many of the site’s off-campus users — don’t bother changing their privacy settings. According to a recent Sophos survey, three out of four people on Facebook’s London network have left their profiles open to all comers.

A researcher with the company tells InformationWeek that Facebook ought to make profiles private by default and let people open their pages up to the world if they see fit. That seems like a reasonable idea that’s very unlikely to happen, but it does raise an interesting question: If Facebook profiles started off private, how many students would decide to make them publicly...

When Wikipedia was just a wee Web site with lofty goals, contributors worked feverishly to create articles on just about everything under the sun. But now that the encyclopedia’s English-language version boasts over two million entries, its administrators can stop wondering if the site is comprehensive enough. Quality, not quantity, has become Priority No. 1.

Editors are now fanning out across Wikipedia, deleting uncited claims, rewriting knotty passages, and identifying articles that seem trivial or otherwise unworthy. Their efforts may well enhance Wikipedia’s status in academe. But the encyclopedia’s shift in priorities has also led it into an “awkward adolescence,” writes K.G. Schneider, a librarian, in CIO. According to Ms. Schneider, Wikipedia’s “inclusionists” (who argue that the site should continue to encourage new entries) and its “deletionists” (who advocate cutting articles...

There was a time, not too long ago, when it seemed as if everyone in academe was building a personal Web page. A typical site might not have been much to look at, but it contained a wealth of professionally useful information — a CV, a catalog of published research, maybe some syllabi or course notes.

Now, in the era of blogs and Facebook profiles, the personal Web page appears to be a dying breed. But scholars shouldn’t rush to declare static Web sites obsolete, writes Steven Bell at ACRLog. Library and information-science students, he says, should seriously consider building their own Web pages — so they can hone their Web-design skills and post their academic resumes.

Mr. Bell concedes, however, that blogs seem to give academic librarians “more bang for the buck” than simple Web sites, and Steve Lawson of the blog See Also … agrees. “Build up a blog by writing interesting stuff with so...

Western Oregon University responded today to news reports of disciplinary actions against a student who discovered that the institution had not secured private data about some applicants. The actions, taken last week, have attracted attention as a dispute over freedom of the press because the student was affiliated with a student-run newspaper and helped that newspaper expose the security lapse.

But today Mark Weiss, Western Oregon’s vice president for finance and administration, told The Chronicle that “this was not about press freedom — it was about violating clear policies designed to safeguard confidential information.”

The student, a senior named Blair W. Loving, told campus officials in June that he had accidentally stumbled on a computer file with 100 names of applicants to the university’s College of Education, along with their Social Security numbers. He copied the file,...

When a Web site boasts more than 42 million registered users, discussions about “growth potential” might seem to be a thing of the past. Not so for Facebook: The social network is now planning its next big expansion, according to the Financial Times.

So far, Facebook has focused on attracting users in English-speaking nations, but the company hopes to unveil foreign-language versions of its site soon. According to CNET News, Facebook is rumored to be recruiting Stanford University students to help with the translations. —Brock Read

It’s taken only a few years for Wikipedia to become one of the world’s most translated documents: Sections of the site now appear in about 250 languages, including regional dialects like Quechua, Xhosa, Nauruan, and Kalaallisut.

The translation projects, fledgling though they may be, serve real communities across the world. But what to make of Vicipaedia, a bustling site whose contributors have translated more than 15,000 Wikipedia entries into Latin? The Wall Street Journal offers an entertaining profile of Vicipaedia’s editors, who are remarkably devoted to a project that is “a slightly odd thing to do in this century,” as one translator admits.

Most readers and contributors use Vicipaedia to test their language skills, not to conduct real research. So the site’s content is, well, eclectic: Entries about Roman history and mythology rub up against those on beer pong and Paris Hilton....

The Open Content Alliance, Brewster Kahle’s alternative to Google’s much-discussed book-scanning project, announced this week that it would digitize public-domain material from the 19 institutions in the Boston Library Consortium.

The alliance was created in 2005 by Mr. Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who has criticized Google’s digitizing project for scanning snippets of copyrighted texts and for tying material to its own search engine. Books scanned by the Open Content Alliance are public-domain texts that can be scanned in full and indexed by every search engine.

Mr. Kahle and his corporate sponsors, including Adobe, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard, haven’t grabbed as many headlines as Google, but they appear to be making steady progress. About 40 institutions have signed on, and pages are being digitized at six scanning centers across the country.

The newest location, at the Boston...