Justice Department urged a federal court judge to reject a proposed settlement which would allow Google to digitally scan massive libraries of books and place them online.

"The current settlement proposal would stifle innovation and competition in favor of a monopoly over the access, distribution and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world, and would reinforce an already dominant position in search and search advertising," said the Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. All three are Google's biggest rivals.


Business, Social Web
UserpicAd infinitum
Posted by Sasha

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg advises businesses to post quickly. (Think Twitter.)

“This isn’t about perfect messaging,” she said. “Do it often and quickly and imperfectly and just keep changing it.”

Both she and Zuckerberg said the company became profitable last quarter, beating its goal of getting out of the red by the end of 2010. I wish there were some details on where the money coming from.


The Boston Globe has published an interesting editorial piece on the balance theory both in social networks and in the movies.

Balance Theory:

Examples of unstable social network include Mexican standoff in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and “Reservoir Dogs” with all three pointing guns at each other.


On the other hand, if you and someone else hate the same third person, but like each other, balance theory says you’re golden - all three can persist without changing their opinions.

Six Degrees of Separation:

Back in the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram attempted to measure the number of connections separating people in Nebraska and Kansas from those around Boston, and found a typical distance of about six steps. Since then, this concept of a tightly connected world has captured the public imagination, and in math and science has spawned a large field known as social network theory.


UserpicFree: Not a New Concept
Posted by Vondah Elizabeth

Thinking about the ubiquitous confusion surrounding the concept of 'free'; yes, Linux is 'free' and yet it is a 38 million dollar industry, so somebody is paying for something. I think the proper analogy is this: Linux is to programming as ...the English alphabet is to anybody who writes in English. To use it properly and effectively you still have to know the basics of grammar and not just anybody can write Moby Dick.


If you stretch the analogy further, programming code, whether Linux or php is like all alphabets, meaning that code is as old as Cuneiform tablets, and so is the concept of free. This brings me to two other commonly confused points regarding the concept of 'free': free as in free speech and free, as in free beer. They are not the same, i.e. your right to free beer is not guaranteed in the Constitution.

1 comment 1 comment ( 1548 views )

Mobile Internet
UserpicFacebook Lightens Up for Mobile
Posted by Moxietype

Facebook launched it's Lite version which is supposed to be "a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates," according to the statement.

Facebook relies heavily on the applications which are slow in the Mobile environment. Optimized for Mobile will be a more correct definition.


"The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution. But it has not made content free. Accordingly, we intend to charge for all our news websites," said Mr Murdoch.

The firm has suffered from plunging advertising revenues. New Corp's $3.4bn loss was due to $8.9bn in write-downs already announced, compared with a $5.4bn profit a year earlier. Revenues at the media giant, which owns BSkyB and 20th Century Fox, fell 7.8%. In the fourth quarter, News Corp lost $203m compared with a net profit of $1.1bn in the same period a year ago.


Hackers at the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences have revealed a serious flaw in the way Web browsers weed out untrustworthy sites and block anybody from seeing them. If a criminal infiltrates a network, he can set up a secret eavesdropping post and capture credit card numbers, passwords and other sensitive data flowing between computers on that network and sites their browsers have deemed safe.

Read full article on MSNBC


Offbeat
UserpicSkype's Future is in Jeopardy
Posted by Moxietype

If Skype loses the right to use a key part of its software and can't create an adequate replacement, "Skype's business as currently conducted would likely not be possible," eBay said in its quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The battle with Joltid, the company that created the piece of technology at issue, shows no sign of being resolved anytime soon. A trial is scheduled for June 2010, eBay said in the SEC filing.


Online social networks have allowed people to easily stay in touch with large groups of friends, but the flip side has been well publicized. Some users have struggled over what to do when certain people--such as a boss or an ex-boyfriend--ask to be listed as a friend on their profile. Adding someone as a friend gives him access to the user's profile, photos, and daily musings. Worries about privacy were renewed recently when Facebook's Beacon advertising initiative began broadcasting information about users' purchasing habits throughout its networks. (See "Evolving Privacy Concerns.") Now Moli, a recently launched social-networking site, aims to win over concerned users. President and COO Judy Balint says that the site is intended for a more mature audience than the teenagers targeted by many social-networking websites. Directed at users who are trying to balance personal and professional networks, Moli offers multiple profiles--with different privacy settings--within one account.

Read full article at Technology Review


Business, E-Commerce
UserpicA grim outlook for traditional media
Posted by Sasha

A new Forrester Research study on U.S. interactive marketing portrais a rather grim picture for the traditional media.

Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing.


The cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies and a publisher awakening.

Interactive Marketing Spending Forecast


A new study published by mobile research company CCS Insight came to conclusion that access to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter were driving the tak-up of mobile internet services. Majority of users accessed Facebook, which is more popular than Bebo, MySpace and Twitter combined.


DRM, Tech Buzz
UserpicThe Pirate Bay Announced Video Streaming
Posted by Sasha

The Pirate Bay, the world's most high profile file-sharing website launched another video sharing website, The Video Bay. The service will offer unrestricted video content in violation of copyright law.

Peter Sunde, TBP founder, announced The Video Bay to the Open Video Conference in New York.

In a statement on the site, Mr Sunde said the service would use the latest HTML 5 features.

"More specifically the audio and video tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats.

"This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk encoding, so please don't bug us too much if the site isn't working properly," he said.

The statement from TBP is viewed as provocative as its founders were found guilty of breaking copyright law  and sentenced to one year in jail each, though still are free man.


I am only surprised that it took them so long to announce it. Perhaps mobile phones were not capable in the past, but broadband was.

With a service called TV Everywhere, Comcast and Time Warner will give cable subscribers access to "premium" television content via broadband, and later cellphone connections.

To begin with, 5,000 Comcast subscribers will begin testing the system next month, giving them access to Time Warner's TBS and TNT channels on their computers, and the same channels' video-on-demand catalogs on their cable boxes.

Read the article


An outstanding BBC production called "The Dream" (1990) was adapted by Murray Watts from "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man". "The Dream" is a monologue of an utopian vision of heaven of earth. Director: Norman Stone - Staring: Jeremy Irons. (In 5 parts Total time 40 minutes)



Hottest Girls has is the first application approved for sale in the iTunes App Store that contains nudity. Photos of topless women join the application’s “2200+ sexy bikini babes and lingerie models.”

Of course, porn has long been accessible on the iPhone through its Internet browser, but this marks the first time Apple has sanctioned images of naked women for the popular device.

The change in Apple’s porn policy is likely a result of expanded parental controls in the new iPhone 3.0 OS software.  Age restrictions can now be set to prevent mature downloads from the App Store.

Read more


Apple
UserpicJavascript and Quick Time
Posted by Moxietype

Important: Starting with QuickTime 7.1.5, you can no longer issue javascript:// URLs or call JavaScript functions directly from within a QuickTime movie. This feature was removed from QuickTime for security reasons. This document includes techniques for working around this change.

Introduction to JavaScript Scripting Guide for QuickTime

Full Guide (next page) includes Movie Commands Reference, Quick Time properties, etc.

Important: If QTSRC is set to a relative URL, it must be relative to the movie specified in the SRC parameter, not the web page in which it is embedded.

Note: URLs cannot cross local/remote zone boundaries. In other words, a local movie (file:// protocol) can invoke only local URLs, such as another local movie, and remote movies (http://, https://, or rtsp:// protocol) can invoke only remote URLs, such as another remote movie or a web page. Furthermore, remote URLs are restricted to http://, https://, and rtsp:// protocols. Other protocols, such as javascript://, are prohibited.

More here

HTML Scripting Guide for Quick Time

If you do have QuickTime Pro, there might be a workaround:

  1. Open the movie in QuickTime Pro;
  2. Display its properties (by pressing Command-J or Control-J);
  3. Select the master track;
  4. Click the Presentation tab;
  5. Enable the checkbox beside "Enter fullscreen mode when opened."
  6. Set the webpage to launch the movie in the QuickTime Player by assigning the target parameter to quicktimeplayer.

Needs to be tested.


Mr. Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, who gives 50 speeches a year for an estimated $35,000 to $50,000 apiece (up to 2 and a half million dollars just for speeches) promoting big ideas, writes best-selling books such as “The Long Tail” has yet to come up with one big enough to save Wired's business. According to today's NYT article:

The magazine has lost 50 percent of its ad pages so far this year, ranking among the worst off of the more than 150 monthly magazines measured by Media Industry Newsletter.

Mr. Anderson seems to believe that by redesigning the Wired magazine three times and winning National Magazine Award design category two years running he would reinvegorate the struggling print business model.

But it is still one of the least popular magazines at Condé Nast, with a circulation of only 704,000. Its Web site, meanwhile, is the most popular of Condé Nast’s magazine sites, with about 11 million unique visitors a month, according to the company’s internal figures. That suggests that technology-forward readers prefer to read articles in a technology-forward way.

And yet, when publication had to downsize it eliminated a quarter of its Web employees and only four print employees.

Mr. Anderson belives in Free. He even wrote a book about it “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which comes out in July and is guaranteed to be another best-seller. Another thing Mr. Anderson belives is the buzz. It takes a lot of it to be a tech guru and get paid for it.

“The problems are obvious, the range of solutions are obvious,” he said.


Social Web
UserpicPrimates of Social Web
Posted by Sasha

Will social networks increase in size is not an obvious hypothesis. There could be more networks and more groups but cognitive power of the brain is limited to the number of friends one can develop. "Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148," quoting the related article by The Economist. Even more worrisome is the fact that with the rise of social networks, the number of "core" friends is on downward trend.

 


DRM, E-Commerce
UserpicVideo on Demand is Not Digital Property
Posted by Moxietype

By statutory definition, the term “digital property” does not include:

  1. video programming services, including video on demand television services; and
  2. broadcasting services, including content to provide such services

Read more on what qualifies as Digital Property and is taxable in the State of New Jersey.