It seems like everyone is on Facebook. Almost everyone. I'm one of the dwindling holdouts, a child of the web who builds computers and designs websites but who doesn't see the attraction of jumping on the social networking bandwagon. I'm not the only holdout. The media has been quick to pounce on Facebook and similar sites over issues like lost privacy and cyber-stalking, and while I think these issues are little more than network ratings fodder, others have taken them to heart. My grievance with Facebook is more fundamental, not at heart a problem with what Facebook does, but a problem with what Facebook is—a monolithic private company that millions of people have chosen to facilitate the most important thing in their lives: their relationships.

"We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent," proclaims the Facebook Principles page. "Facebook," it continues, "promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect." The page continues to set forth ten principles, which are in truth nothing but marketing buzzwords struck into idealistic sentences that reveal almost nothing about what commitments or services Facebook actually provides. What does Facebook provide? Contradictions, certainly. Click over to the Privacy Policy, also titled Facebook Principles, and you'll see that instead of ten principles, "Facebook follows two core principles" introduced with the sentence, "We built Facebook to make it easy to share information with your friends and people around you." This is a little less idealistic than the last page, but more immediately helpful. Facebook is a service that allows people to share information with the people around them.

People, or so I recall, have mouths for just this purpose.

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One of the greatest things about the Internet, in addition to its convenience, speed, and interactivity, is its open nature. Wheras the "little guy" is often barred from traditional media like printing and broadcasting because of the high costs and deeply-entrenched competition, the Internet offers an inexpensive way for all kinds of people to easily publish their ideas around the globe. While this lack of barriers has allowed for a lot of amateur and low-quality material on the web, it has also provided for the creation of many first-rate publications, some of which might never have existed otherwise. Some of the neatest sites have come from small towns and local neighborhoods where residents have made use of the Internet to strengthen their communities and offer immediate perspectives that can't be rivaled by the bigger, corporate media. Lately I've been finding a lot of websites dedicated to the news, culture, and history of small towns in the region around my home in southwest Wisconsin. I thought I'd share three of my favorites here today:

• The Kickapoo Free Press is an independent monthly magazine from Viroqua, Wisconsin, with a print and online edition. It features in-depth news and thoughtful opinions from the Kickapoo Valley region, and I love its emphasis on cultural and humanistic reporting. The writers for the Kickapoo Free Press do a marvelous job of depicting rural and small-town life in western Wisconsin, and the issues they discuss make this magazine a must-read for anyone with a stake in the region.
• PDC Today is a relatively new website dedicated to covering the latest news from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and its neighboring communities. The website features daily updates, along with streaming audio and video of recent news stories in the area. There are also Twitter updates for breaking news and a "Life" section about area events and culture. Overall, PDC Today makes for a great way to stay up to date on what's happening in that part of the state.
• Focus on PDC is another blog from Prairie du Chien, but this one puts more emphasis on yesterday—it's author has been hard at work digging up information on some of the city's lesser known historic sites. Prairie du Chien is well known for its long and eventful history, but some stories tend to crowd out the others. The Focus on PDC blog brings many of these forgotten curiosities into the spotlight with new research on historic people and places.

Be sure to check out these sites if you're a fellow Western-Wisconsinite, and as always, check the Links Page for a complete list of my favorite websites. Also, if you know of any other sites dedicated to the news and culture of small towns in Southwest Wisconsin, leave a comment and let me know.

Whilst traipsing about the Internet, I occasionally discover websites that impress my sensibilities but that fail to impress themselves upon my memory. This is always unfortunate. When I try to relocate these sites, my searches often fall hopelessly short. It makes me feel like the prince who had nothing but a glass slipper by which to find the girl who stole his heart at the ball. Weeks, months, or years pass with no success, and often I completely forget these sites that had so enthralled me. Sometimes, however, I happen upon a lost website again in a chance encounter. Such a reunification, while it doesn't quite permit me to live happily ever after, is still usually rather satisfying. It was by just this kind of chance encounter that I recently rediscovered the site I want to share with you today.

LibriVox.org is a website that offers free audio recordings of classical literature and public domain texts. The project was founded in 2005, it's non-profit and advertising-free, and the audiobooks it offers are recorded by volunteers from around the world. The large and growing catalog of recordings includes works by such fashionable authors as Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, John Milton, Mark Twain and William Shakespeare—among many others. You can download the audio books as mp3s, or as patent-free and technologically superior Ogg Vorbis files.

Since LibriVox relies on disparate volunteers to produce its recordings, the narration quality varies a lot from book to book and chapter to chapter. Nonetheless, the few speakers I've heard so far had clear diction and easily read with enough dramatic flair to keep my interest. If you think you could do a better job of reading, don't forget that you can volunteer to record books for the site too! I would happily contribute to this project myself if I only had a quiet place to read uninterrupted.

Anyway, I'm very happy to have found this site again. I love to read, but I find that while school is on I am too busy reading for class to ever read for pleasure—I'd have time, I suppose, but not the energy. LibriVox is the perfect solution: it's free, it's online, and audiobooks let me delve into literature for pleasure while giving my eyes a rest after a long session of reading for school. If your situation is similar, I hope you'll give this site a try. Alternatively, old favorite Project Gutenberg is still there for those who prefer just the text. Either way, there's no longer any excuse to keep from experiencing those great old books you've always been meaning to read!

Free audiobooks: LibriVox
Free e-texts: Project Gutenberg

It's been several days since my last post, so I thought I'd better put something up tonight if I mean to keep my two-posts-a-week promise through January. Remember the post where I made that promise? If you let your mind meander back, you'll recall that in the midst of promising, I expressed my disdain for blogs that update so constantly as to be no more than a stream of unthinking mush. It was mainly the unthinking mush component that chafes me, by the way, as I've no qualms with constant excellence.

Anyway, I fear that in saying what I did, I may have come across as implying that Acceity here is somehow snobbishly better than all the rest of the web. And Acceity is snobbish, there's no doubt—this has always been the kind of blog that, if blogs had nostrils, would turn its own up slightly but markedly, trying to fit with polite society by rudely dismissing the sordid masses. Acceity is not, however, the sort of blog with a Napoleonic urge to prove its supremacy by conquering Europe and beyond, and in that way, this blog is really less lofty than most Risk players.

What I mean to say by this is that, while I hope you enjoy Acceity, there are many websites out there with fabulous quality offerings far in excess of those here. Looking to acknowledge these fine sites, I've been compiling a list of my personal favorites on the aptly (and I daresay ingeniously) named links page. I recommend you go there to check some out for yourself. Naturally, the only websites listed are those hand-selected from the Internet's greenest pastures, and they're sites I've actually been visiting frequently myself. You'll find them original, informative, entertaining, and slightly quirky—best yet, many of them are rather local. Below are some highlights:

Wisconsinology

What makes Wisconsin Wisconsin? Apart, that is, from our peculiarly mitten-like geographical shape, a feature that'd be suitable for our climate but for the fact that, depending on lake detail on your map, it's rather riddled with holes? The answers are at Wisconsinology, a blog that delves into the state's history, heritage, and lore to isolate the distinctiveness of Wisconsin culture.

Letters from Here

This blog by "Madison Guy" features great photos from the state capital coupled with interesting and often quite amusing writing on all manner of subjects.

Eating La Crosse

I'm not sure why anyone would want to eat La Crosse, the town where I go to school. It's often rather grimy there. Apparently, though, this blogger is going to try to do just...wait, no, no, it's a blog about Eating in La Crosse! Restaurants and such. That's far more useful, really.