U.S. communications regulators voted unanimously Thursday to support an open Internet rule that would prevent telecom network operators from barring or blocking content based on the revenue it generates.
» Reuters [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
The executives who run big, ailing news organizations—in particular Tom Curley of AP and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch—complain every chance they get that search engines—in particular Google—are stealing from them, because Google links to their stories but doesn't pay the AP or News Corp. to do so. The way the news bosses see it, that is theft, plain and simple. They say Google is making tons of money by shamelessly lifting their content, and it's driving newspapers out of business.
"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley told the audience.
Google doesn't force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google's results with a few keystrokes. All they have to do is go to the Web site's robot.txt file and type this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
» Newsweek [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Advertisers, celebrity endorsers and even some internet bloggers will be held liable for false statements they make about products as part of a crackdown by US regulators on deceptive advertising practices.
The new rules on the use of testimonials in advertising, released by the Federal Trade Commission on Monday, also say that anyone who endorses a product, including celebrities and bloggers, must make explicit the compensation received from companies. In an effort to hold companies and endorsers accountable, the FTC guidelines state that businesses and reviewers will be liable for any false statements made about a product. If a blogger receives a free sample of skin cream and untruthfully claims it cures eczema, for example, the company and the blogger could be held liable for false advertising.
» FTC GOV - FT [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Despite some tentative optimism from Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, people who monitor the newspaper business for a living say it has not yet hit bottom. But in what passes for good news these days, the free fall in newspaper advertising may be slowing, and specialists predict it will ease through 2009 and into 2010.
With 10 days left in the third quarter, analysts, publishers and ad buyers say that ad revenue will be down about 25 percent industrywide from the third quarter last year, possibly a little less. They predict that the decline will be smaller in the fourth quarter. Several of them say the usual back-to-school uptick in newspaper advertising seems to have been a little better than in most years, if only because July and August were so weak.
» NY Times [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
The U.S. government plans to propose broad new rules Monday that would force Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, seeking to give consumers greater freedom to use their computers or cellphones to enjoy videos, music and other legal services that hog bandwidth.
The move would make good on a campaign promise to Silicon Valley supporters like Google Inc. from President Barack Obama, but will trigger a battle with phone and cable companies like AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp., which don't want the government telling them how to run their networks.
Treating Web traffic equally means carriers couldn't block or slow access to legal services or sites that are a drain on their networks or offered by rivals.
» Reuters [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
» Wall Street Journal
» Washington Post
“You wouldn’t publish a newspaper without liability insurance, so you should take the same precautions with blogging, if you have any kind of audience or readership,” said Granju, 41, a Knoxville, Tennessee, resident.
The cost of defending against legal action can range from $5,000 to at least $100,000 if the case goes to trial, said Ron Coleman, a trademark lawyer at Goetz Fitzpatrick in New York. Of the 256 lawsuits dating as early as 1994 through April tracked by the New York-based Media Law Resource Center, damages were awarded in 17 cases, totaling $43.9 million.
» Bloomberg [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing articulates a point made so often about the Web that it's nearly catechismal. Blogs, he says, have torn down the power structure of old media. "Decentralization and democratization" are the law of the land, offering “a podium to Americans of all ages and backgrounds to contribute.” This is a notion that bloggers and web gurus have been touting for years. In his 2006 book, An Army of Davids, for example, “Instapundit” blogger Glenn Reynolds argued that “markets and technology” empowered “ordinary people to beat big media.” And this June, internet sage Clay Shirky assured an audience at a TED event that the old model, where “professionals broadcast messages to amateurs,” is “slipping away.”
» The Atlantic [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
The Web, however, is a big place. And the many thousands of troops who use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to communicate with the outside world are not always in tune with the Pentagon’s official voice. Policing their daily flood of posts, videos and photographs is virtually impossible — but that has not stopped some in the military from trying.
The Department of Defense, citing growing concerns about cybersecurity, plans to issue a new policy in the coming weeks that is widely expected to set departmentwide restrictions on access to social networking sites from military computers. People involved with the department’s review say the new policy may limit access to social media sites to those who can demonstrate a clear work need, like public information officers or family counselors.
» NY Times [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.
» NY Times [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Just about everyone, from the general public to news executives, has an opinion about the future of journalism. Now, the Federal Trade Commission is stepping into the debate.
The commission is planning two days of workshops in December — titled “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” — to examine the state of the news industry.
More often, the F.T.C. tends to organize workshops related to consumer protection issues like mortgage fraud. But Jon Leibowitz, the F.T.C. chairman, says the agency has taken a look at other industries, through workshops on hospital competition, food marketing and the patent system. Journalism’s future falls in the agency’s purview, he said.
» NY Times - FTC [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
The reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program is specifically oriented towards launching tech dependent youth and adults back into the real world. Our individually tailored program is designed to assist participants with an internet and/or computer based behavioral addiction to break the cycle of dependency. Our 45-day abstinence based recovery program exposes participants to a variety of activities and everyday life skills which are often avoided or underdeveloped as a result of ongoing computer, video game play and internet abuse.
» reSTART [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
The U.S. government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet.
The "feed over email" (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system.
» Reuters [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Computing and communicating through the Web makes it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview; a lost or stolen laptop can expose personal photos or messages; or a legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating or just embarrassing details from the past.
Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.
For example, using the Firefox Vanish plugin, a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment — specifying that the document or message should "vanish" in 8 hours. Before that 8-hour timeout expires, anyone who has access to the data can read it; however after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content — not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data — regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout — simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.
» Vanish / Washington edu [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, so we'd welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.
Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system. We're also interested in higher-level feedback ("These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system") in addition to "This specific site should or shouldn't rank for this query." Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won't have the cycles to send replies.
Here's how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!
» Google [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Blogging has gone beyond the snip-it-and-comment approach that riffs on the journalism of others while doing no conventional reporting of their own in the sense of gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. The commentary has broadened into a concern with subjects that newspapers are no longer interested in.
» Public Opinion [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
The FTC Considers Raising the Bar for Online Product Reviews by Parents, for Parents.
» ABC News [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
“Did you see what Nikki just wrote?” That would be Nikki Finke, a well-traveled newspaper reporter who has found her moment as a digital-age Walter Winchell.
In the three years since she started Deadline Hollywood Daily, a daily blog about the entertainment business, her combination of old-school skills — she is a relentless reporter — and new-media immediacy has made her a must-click look into the ragingly insecure id of Hollywood.
“I really don’t see covering Hollywood as all that different from covering the Kremlin or the federal government,” she said. “I’m always fascinated by closed societies that don’t want prying eyes.”
» New York Times [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Google Books engineering director Dan Clancy spelled out the vision at a talk at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Clancy stressed the importance of making it possible to buy the digital books in traditional bricks-and-mortar bookstores, as well as online.
"Right now the physical bookstores are a critical part of our book ecosystem," he said. "A huge amount of books are bought because people go into a physical bookstore and say, hey I want this, I want that. It's a mistake if we think of our future digital world as digital means online and physical means offline. Because if that happens and 10 percent of the world goes digital, that's going to be really hard for all the bookstores to sustain their business model."
Dan Clancy comments:
People look at the settlement [with the Authors Guild and the AAP] and think that that is Google's vision for what the future looks like for books. And in fact the settlement is what we figured out for these predominantly out-of-print books, so it's more about the past. And in fact we've done a lot of thinking about what is the role we want to play going forward in a digital book world, for new books.
There are [three] things we put as requirements.
One is I believe people want their books stored in the cloud.... For most people, your library is something that you don't pull books off all that often, but when you need it, you want it to be there. That's where a cloud really works. You're not going to actively manage it, but you want to make sure that five years from now, [it's there].
Number two, I think it's critical that there's diversity of choices in terms of retailers that you work with.
Now one of the things with the cloud is that the consumer needs to trust that the person who's providing the cloud will be there. So you don't trust the cloud to some new startup that you've never heard of, or some small local bookstore, that you love to go to.
But right now the physical bookstores are a critical part of our book ecosystem. And in fact a huge amount of books are bought because people go into a physical bookstore and say, hey I want this, I want that. And I think it's a mistake if we think of our future digital world as digital means online and physical means offline. Because if that happens and 10 percent of the world goes digital, that's going to be really hard for all the bookstores to sustain their business model.
So part of our model is to figure out we're going to syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in bricks and mortar stores as well.
And then finally, our model is you should be able to read on any device.... Our model is some people will read [our books] on a laptop, some will read them on the phone, some people will read on their netbook, and some people will read on their e-reader. And we'll work with any reader provider that wants to make it so they can get their books from the Google cloud....
So the principles of our future world is trying to build this world where there's lots of retail players, read on any device, but it's still stored in the cloud. And as we talk with publishers and booksellers, I think this is the right model, because we're trying to make what would be an open model that encourages competition
» Blog2 [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Focus is on how technology companies, content creators and other institutions can thrive in the recession, and help lead the way to a new era of global prosperity.
The agenda is based on 4 content pillars:
Renewal and Recovery
Technology must strengthen the global economy, renew confidence and speed a recovery that establishes new business traditions.
Technology and Social Transformation
We believe that the transformational power of software, the Internet and technology is often underplayed in thinking about social issues.
The 21st Century Consumer
It’s a mobile, downloaded, Twitter world, and the way people are using technology in their every day lives has huge implications for the biggest media and technology companies on the planet.
Business Innovation
Great innovations and business practice always have emerged from chaotic times, and the smartest companies are already thinking about what they will look like when order is restored.
» Time Inc./Fortune July 22-24, 2009 [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
He helped break the old equation of PR + Journalists = Consensus Of Wisdom and that, in the final analysis, has probably been a good thing.
On the importance of corporate blogging. "I feel stronger about it now than ever. If you look at the Net, many, many companies use blogs. Even Apple Computer has soemthing similar. The best blogging is done when you're under pressure. You win customers over when you have to bite your lip [and admit to failings].
On the next web era. "Web 2.0 is almost eight years ago and the 2010 Web, New Web or Now Web will be about the real-time web."
» CIO UK [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
The idea for Revenue Bootcamp held on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, Calif., developed earlier this year after some people realized that upcoming conferences focused only on "social media . . . basically gathering eyeballs, but nobody was talking about monetizing people . . .," Guy Kawasaki explained in his opening remarks.
» Revenue Bootcamp
» Building43 [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Companies are increasingly sponsoring blogging events, paying for bloggers to attend tech conventions and even paying bloggers hundreds of dollars for postings or viral marketing campaigns. “Word of mouth is a very powerful tool,” said Mr. Mercurio, who added that the company uses things ranging from Amazon.com consumer ratings to market research like focus groups as part of its product research. “Consumers are increasingly investigating products online.”
» New York Times [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you've had a great--or disappointing--experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.
» Twitter 101 [ Contribute: submit link / submit article ]
A physician blogs about his malpractice suit during the trial, using an alias, and is unmasked in court. He settles the next day.
The case is a startling illustration of how blogging, already implicated in destroying friendships and ruining job prospects, could interfere in other important arenas. Lawyers in Massachusetts and elsewhere, some of whom downloaded Flea's observations and posted them on their websites, said the case has also prompted them to warn clients that blogs can come back to haunt them. A well known Boston personal injury lawyer who followed the case, said he had never heard of a defendant blogging during a trial.
» boston.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]
Young people make better entrepreneurs because they're too inexperienced to know that their ideas are silly:
The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, they regard it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that’s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge.
» corante.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]
Once upon a time, a writer would have to try to attract the interest of an agent in the hope they would submit their proposals to publishers and beg them a book deal. Now, however, it would appear to just be a simple matter of a writer posting their work online and then sitting back waiting for the offers to roll in.
Yesterday's announcement of this year's winners of the award for blogs turned into books, the Lulu Blooker prize, would have us believe that many publishers are perusing blogs with the aim of adapting them into books. The website eagerly claims, "Traditional publishing houses, ever in search of the next big name author, have begun to mine blogs and websites for new talent."
» guardian.co.uk [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]
Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online. The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation. "We found it a much freer, less constricting, far more believable way of letting prospective students glimpse what was going on on campus," said Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
» washingtonpost.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]
Mayer-Schönberger lays out his idea in a faculty research working paper called "Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing," where he describes his plan as reinstating "the default of forgetting our societies have experienced for millennia."
Why would we want our machines to "forget"? Mayer-Schönberger suggests that we are creating a Benthamist panopticon by archiving so many bits of knowledge for so long. The accumulated weight of stored Google searches, thousands of family photographs, millions of books, credit bureau information, air travel reservations, massive government databases, archived e-mail, etc., can actually be a detriment to speech and action, he argues.
"If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves," he writes in the paper. "Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly."
[ PDF ] Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing
While most newspapers are trying to stake bigger claims online, one new publication is pulling material off the Internet to be printed in ink.
John Wilpers, editor in chief of BostonNow, a free weekday daily introduced last month, said he wanted to fill the paper with items that local bloggers submitted to the BostonNow Web site.
Last week, editors began culling posts and running excerpts next to articles from reporters and newswires. The blog items, which appear in gray boxes, are still relatively few, but Wilpers said he thought the feature would grow.
Wilpers, who previously edited two other free commuter newspapers, Metro Boston and The Washington Examiner, said he wanted to address what he believed was the news industry's biggest problem: an inability to connect with the communities it covers.
As a few star bloggers have made six-figure salaries or million-dollar deals, more and more people have been tantalized by the prospect of making money online -- even though the vast majority of blogs are little more than online diaries.
"A lot of the blogosphere does not make sense if viewed from the point of view of a business model," said David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Blogs remain, I believe, primarily conversational."
