Best Lead of the Month

'Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an endless geyser of free floppy disks and CDs, the kind of place where the clueless management were willing and able to -- for example -- alienate every Vietnamese speaker on Earth by banning the use of the word "Phuc" (a Vietnamese name) because naughty people might use it to evade the chatroom censors' blocks on the f-bomb.'
--from an article in Information Week by Cory Doctorow, co-author of the popular Boing Boing blog, which bills itself as "a directory of wonderful things." We think his writing here is pretty wonderful, too. To review past Best Leads of the Month, go here and here.