The competition to save newspapers online heats up, with Google being the front runner.

It is hard to tell what payoff would go to the winning technology provider, says Gordon, nor is it even known who would own the content. There is also the question of whether the various pay-for-content ideas would fly with consumers. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told British broadcasting executives that charging for online content won't work except for niche and specialist markets. Consumer surveys tend to support those doubts. A Belden Interactive survey released in mid-September found that computer users who said they'd pay for news online would shell out an average of only $4.64 a month, while 47% of the group surveyed said they wouldn't pay anything.

"The Hydrozoan species Turritopsis nutricula is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again. This means that there may be no natural limit to its life span."

Related: Google map of oldest things in the world.

The research was based on 24 million speed tests done in 66 countries via speedtest.net. The test focused on download speeds, upload speeds and latency - the delay that happens as information is routed around the net. Using this measure alone, the UK was ranked 31st. Only nine countries, including Japan, Sweden and Latvia, were ready for future demands, such as watching high-definition video. The study was conducted jointly by Oxford University's Said Business School and Spain's University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics.

While this research addressed an attitude towards DRM in the independent music sector, it could be applied equally as well to the independent film distribution. Most widely used DRM systems currently are not user friendly in the terms of usability and carry very serious drawbacks such as a prohibitive cost of implementation and sub-optimal speed of viewing the encrypted content. To make matters even worst, there was not developed up to this date a system which could prevent the content to be captured by a knowledgeable hacker. It could always just be shot on a DV cam as it is done during the releases of new movies in the theaters by unsavory patrons.

It is interesting to note three major differences for the Indies in comparison to the majors’ perceived strategy of active and extensive DRM-protection. First, the smaller and more independent the label, the more sympathetic it is to consumers’ convenience and perceived rights. Second, Indies try to avoid active DRM whenever possible. But they acknowledge that this decision is up to the distributor. Third, Independent labels’ preferred DRM strategy is a passive one: watermarking. They feel that this does not limit their customers’ convenience and at the same time identifies users in case of infringement.

Again, among the labels using the portal for online distribution, there is not a single one insisting on DRM-protection, Mr. Krieger affirms. The company feels that legitimate buyers of digital music should not have less usage rights than those downloading pirated material.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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