Editor and Publisher reports that Digg.com, a Web site that ranks and displays news items based on recommendations from its users, is expanding to include video and topics beyond technology. Currently, users are limited to posting and reading items on security, digital music, robots and other tech-related categories.

Beginning Monday, they will be able to post and have access to world, business and entertainment news, along with non-news video. Games and science also will break out of the general technology section.

A posting at Inside Higher Ed has noted that:

In recent years, as federal agencies have shifted the grant application process online, Mac users have complained about being treated as second class citizens. This year, as the National Institutes of Health shifted its process to the Grants.gov online submission system, glitches have further frustrated Mac-wielding scientists. Grants.gov is an outgrowth of the President’s Management Agenda that seeks to have all federal grants exclusively online.

Many academic scientists [have] said that the government didn’t know its audience when it began with a Windows-only system — and changes have not gone as well as many have hoped. While Mac users may be in a minority nationally, there are parts of academe where their numbers are far from small.

The Chronical of Education posted a note today about Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales. According to The Chronicle's note, Wales has stated that he wants to get a message out to college students, letting them know that they shouldn’t use Wiki either for class projects or for serious research. Speaking at a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday called “The Hyperlinked Society,” Mr. Wales said that he gets a number of e-mails each week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic trouble. However, he said that he has no sympathy for their misfortune, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

Although news of these two blogging events have appeared separately, it is quite useful to make note of them again, together, as an important signal of the power of the internet, specifically of bloggers and writing in the cyberworld. There was wonderful news last week about Glenn Greenwald, which also represented yet another sign of the growing, persuasive influence of writers on the internet. On the same day of the announcement that Andrew Sullivan's daily social/political commentaries on his blog, The Daily Dish, had reached over 2,000,000 readers during May, it also was reported that Greenwald's book, How Would a Patriot Act, had just made the New York Times' Best-Seller List. In addition, his book had climbed into the Top-100 of all books then being sold by Amazon.com. Greenwald is a writer who has reached a readership mainly through his blog, Unclaimed Territory.

I've noticed that my web site has recently had a number of visitors living in South Carolina. As a small thank-you to them, I'm posting eight pictures, many of which are of one of my favorite things in South Carolina, the "Old Main" building on the campus of Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. (For pictures, go to actual website listed at the end of this commentary).

The first two are logo-type images. The third picture is of an oil painting of "Old Main." The fourth image is an etching of The Main Building (Old Main) on Wofford College's campus in Spartanburg, SC. The fifth is from a rare postcard (I think from the early 1900s), and the following two are recherche, campus landscape daguerotypes, again from the early 1900s or before. The last is an image of the very first diploma awarded by the college.

Some writers and bloggers presently claim that "the internet" rules as a world-wide mode of interpersonal expression and communication. Even if this were so, the explorers in this field during its opening stages certainly didn't think or sound that way. For many (if not most) of the early pioneers involved in the internet, the issue of power and control was never part of their early internet instincts and/or experiences and experiences and/or instincts. Yes, it is possible to have it in either or both ways.