“The Internet represents freedom, but not everywhere.”

So begins the annual “Internet Enemies” report by Reporters Without Borders–and that’s probably the cheeriest line in the entire 39-page document. It goes down from there.

For the uninitiated, Reporters Without Borders is an anti-censorship watchdog organization. As blogs and news Web sites have grown in popularity, the group’s focus has similarly migrated to the Internet. Unfortunately, the report again paints a grim picture of Internet freedoms in parts of the world where it says the authorities regularly chuck bloggers in jail for online posts that displease the regime.

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Michael Dell gets a lot of the credit for pioneering the direct sale of PCs to the public. The reality is that there is a legion of now long-forgotten mail order entrepreneurs who came along earlier. He just did it better than all the rest. So it was with more than usual interest that I read a piece published by InternetNews.com earlier this week in which Dell’s (DELL) eponymous company claimed that sales alerts on Twitter had resulted in about $1 million in sales.

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Just as many of you settled into your seats to watch Thursday evening’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks was attracting his own crowd on Twitter after raising a question that strikes at heart of the blogosphere.

“It’s clear the link economy is broken,” he wrote, pointing to a write-up CNET News published on Friendster’s support for Facebook applications. The piece contained nine links, six of which pointed to previous CNET posts.

Not long after, Matthew Ingram piled on with a post dinging us for attempting “to prove how authoritative” we are “by making it look as though the only stories worth linking to are their own.

To say that their internal links are better than anything else they could possibly link to is just ridiculous.”

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If Jerry Yang has been saving up a “band of brothers” moment with his troops, this is it. The departure of Flickr’s co-founders, the husband-and-wife team of Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, follows the earlier resignation of Jeff Weiner, who was executive vice president of Yahoo’s network division.

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Jerry Yang was able to rope-a-dope Steve Ballmer. But he’s never had to square off against a royal pain in the ass like Carl Icahn. Wednesday afternoon, Icahn, a billionaire with a God complex — or is that repetitive? — wrote a new chapter in this deliciously goofy Microhoo saga when he launched plans for a proxy contest to challenge Yahoo’s famously feckless board of directors with his own handpicked nominees.

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Barring a come-to-Jesus moment by both sides, “MicroHoo” is dead and buried. So who won and who lost? Months from now, we’ll have a clear idea. In the meantime, here are my back-of-the-envelope picks.

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One more Microhoo observation before:
A) They announce the tech deal of the century.
B) They go to the mattresses.
C) They continue to screw around just to keep us sleep-deprived.

So let’s assume that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wakes up tomorrow and Yahoo’s a done deal. First order of business is to find the right person for the job. But that’s where Ballmer’s going to have to summon the wisdom of Solomon.

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When Twitter suffered a brownout last weekend, the “twitterati” had a collective conniption. I suppose the good news for co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone is that the bad news kicked up such a storm.

Lots of people are so addicted to Twitter that the intermittent problems wreaked havoc with their daily routine.

Lead architect Blaine Cook and VP of engineering and operations Lee Mighdoll are now gone. And it’s up to management to come up with a plan. But this isn’t the first time a popular online communication service found itself a target of criticism. In August 1996, America Online got in even bigger trouble after going dark for 19 hours.

How big a deal was it? Consider this: AOL’s outage was the lead news item on the evening news programs for ABC, NBC and CBS. If you thought the grumbling about Twitter was bad, remember that AOL back then had more than 5 million subscribers and they were not a happy lot.

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In the mid-1990s, America Online was enjoying exponential growth when it almost came a cropper. AOL’s infrastructure wasn’t able to support the increasing crush of new customers, and the online company soon developed an annoying habit of being offline too often. I remember a senior company exec at the time describing how the top brass was caught off guard by the seemingly sudden avalanche of complaints and negative coverage in the press. It was as if someone flipped a switch, and AOL went from darlings to dolts.

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If you’re still wondering why the media world is getting turned on its head, consider the following anecdote. A few years back, representatives from the Industry Standard, Wired and Upside were invited to a public-relations gathering to talk about how they decide what to cover. After they finished their prepared remarks, a young woman in the audience stood up to ask a question. “You talk a lot about tricks and tips on what we should do,” she said. “But I’ve done all that and I still can’t get you to cover my clients.” The reporter from Upside recognized the opening and rammed a Mack Truck right through it. “Ma’am,” he replied, “you need better clients.”

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What if someone started an auction and we all ignored it? I was hoping that might be the reaction in the “Twitosphere” after finding out that Andrew Baron put his Twitter account up for auction on eBay. Silly me.

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After the derision that greeted the New York Times’s blogging-will-kill-you story on Sunday, I’m probably not going to do much for the reputation of the mainstream media with hard-core bloggers. So it goes.

Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene. I included names of some online reporters–including colleagues from CNET as well as TechCrunch–but in the main, the list is comprised of people employed by A-list newspapers and periodicals.

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Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a $267 million loan to a Denver, Colorado-based company called Open Range. The idea: build out broadband service for 518 rural communities in 17 states. The loan represents one of the federal government’s biggest ever public-private investments in broadband service. Considering Uncle Sam’s miserly approach to date, that’s not saying much. But here’s what caught my eye: Those without service will have access to broadband and other technologies for the first time in their lives. Give me a break!

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The decision to expand YouTube’s application programming interfaces is the smartest move by management since it agreed to lighten Eric Schmidt’s wallet to the tune of $1.6 billion in 2006. With the announcement, developers get more direct access to the service, while it also facilitates the proliferation of so-called “chromeless” players without the traditional YouTube interface and branding. I don’t want to get all giddy on you but this is a big deal. Instead of promoting YouTube as a destination site, this lays the groundwork for YouTube’s transformation into a video service.

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