Media Mouse has endorsed a new campaign launched by FreeSpeech TV to challenge the corporate dominance of the Internet. The campaign features a video (see below) and a website promoting truly independent websites and open source software. The campaign coincides with recent announcements of new profiling and data-mining initiatives from Facebook and MySpace as well ongoing debate over net neutrality.

The video and campaign announcement:

This is a truly crucial time for the Internet, the most powerful and interactive medium humans have ever seen. New commercial incursions by big online media conglomerates including the widely distained "Facebook Beacon" make explicit what new media giants have been doing quietly for some time; searching for new and evermore invasive ways to sell our attention, our clicks and our private information to advertisers and marketers.

The message is clear; new media giants cannot be trusted.

Just how consolidated is the Internet becoming? An article titled "Our Web, Not Theirs" has the following startling facts:

"One recent study showed that only 20 domains (websites) capture 39% of all time spent online by US users. Considering that the Internet is technically an open medium, this is an amazingly high level of user concentration. Myspace.com, which is owned by News Corporation, commands an astounding 11.9% of US users time online. Bearing in mind the USA has well over two hundred million Internet users this kind of concentration of online website usage creates huge vectors of power.

Chief among the online brands are the ever popular social networking website.
In the period between September 2006 to February 2007 the number of visitors to the social networking website Facebook.com jumped 75 percent to 24.8 million worldwide and the number of visitors to MySpace.com grew 26 percent to 98.5 million visitors in the same period. "More than half of all Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 use some online social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook.

Many of the most powerful online media websites are owned by some of the largest media corporations. Fox Interactive Media (NewsCorp) spent $580 million to acquire MySpace.com. Google, a large and evermore powerful media corporation, owns one of the most popular blog platforms: BlogSpot.com. Google also purchased Youtube, the most popular online video site on the Internet, for U.S.$1.65 billion. Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL Time Warner own other popular platforms. Google's chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, recently estimated that Google buys start-up web companies every few days, and is quoted saying, "I think the pace [of Google buyouts] will accelerate"."

We strongly encourage folks to seek out independent websites in general, but especially those maintaining a local connection to Grand Rapids and Michigan. While not necessarily endorsing everything about them, we encourage folks to check out the following websites:

* G-Rad - A Grand Rapids blogging community.

* Grand Rapids Community Media Center - The online presence of the Community Media Center. It offers information on independent radio and television as well as media literacy resources.

* Grand Rapids History - An online archive of local history that accepts visitor submissions.

* The Atrium - The blog of the Grand Rapids Public Library. They also have an interesting wiki.

* Viget.org - A Wikipedia-style encyclopedia covering Grand Rapids and West Michigan that anyone can edit.

Feel free to add other local and statewide websites in the comments.