To support electric vehicles like the Leaf, which will be available in Houston toward year's end, the city and Reliant are working to create an infrastructure that places charging stations in convenient locations. Reliant will also be developing a system of support, including home assessments, for people installing home charging stations. The stations will be compatible with other plug-in vehicles as well.

When the folks at Netbook Navigator first asked me to write about the company's new 9 inch tablet PC I had a hard time getting past the high price tag of nearly $1200. But that price was for an early model that packed 3G capabilities and was intended for early adopters. Now Netbook Navigator has updated the pricing for the Nav 9 tablet and the base model costs just $799. Yeah, that's still enough money to pick up 2-3 netbooks, but here's what you get for the money:

• Display: 8.9 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel multitouch display
• CPU: 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU
• Graphics: Intel GMA 950
• Storage: 16GB SSD
• RAM: 2GB
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
• Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, LAN, optional 3G HSDPA or CDMA
• I/O: 3 USB ports, MiniSD card slot, SIM card slot, port replicator w/VGA/LAN adapter, 1.3MP webcam
• Battery: 3 cell, 1700mAh (2.5 hours max)
• Dimensions: 10 x 6.6 x 0.8
• Weight: 2 pounds
• Other: car charger

The 3G module will cost you extra, as will a higher capacity battery which is good for up to 4 hours of run time. You can also get the Nav 9 with a 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB SSD. The most expensive unit will run you $1399, but the $799 starting price is certainly much more appealing than the $1200 the company was charging earlier.

Netbook Navigator has also put together a handy chart comparing the Nav 9 tablet to the upcoming Apple iPad and the already-on-the-market Archos 9 tablet. The long and short of it is that the Nav 9 supports multitasking, supports USB peripherals and SD card expansion, and comes in more varieties. Oh yeah, it can also run most Windows applications. On the other hand, it's thicker and heavier than the other tablets.

Post from: Liliputing

Netbook Navigator's Nav 9 slate PC gets affordable, guns for the iPad

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

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Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

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The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

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Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

At the end of a failed 15-year experiment in giving away its product, the press (newspapers and magazines) has begun to renounce free. It's slow in starting, because of the inertia of this decade and a half, but the New York Times announced recently that it would begin charging for its Website, and others are sure to follow.... But payment for Websites alone won't be enough to change newspapers' and magazines' bottom lines from red to black. Apple's tablet, however, will.

It's time for free to end. Newspapers and magazines made the mistake, in the early days of the Web, of giving away their content for free, in exchange for revenue from Web advertising.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and newspapers and magazines are cutting back and folding all across the U.S.... Yet we need the press: the fourth estate is a necessary check for our government and business. As long as free thrives, the press can't do its job correctly. Free may be good for freeloaders, but it's bad for society. Those who want things to be free forget that there are still people doing the work they get for nothing, and those people need to be paid. As the old saw goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What news agencies can't do is the added-value reporting, the analysis, opinion and in-depth reporting that we want to read to better understand, and that we need for society to thrive. It may be a coincidence, but in recent years, investigative journalism was severely lacking at a time when it was needed the most. Only when people pay for news can we have quality reporting.

To those who protest that "no one will pay for a newspaper on the Web", consider some very successful experiments in paid online content. The Wall Street Journal charges around $100 a year for full access to its Website, and plenty of businesspeople pay for this. This is because the Journal provides the kind of news that is not plentiful; people pay for the quality of the business news and analysis that they can't find elsewhere, as well as its timeliness.

I'm betting that Apple will get it right, as far as features, interface and usability are concerned. It will also be an excellent tool for reading the news. Newspapers and magazines will be able to package their content in multimedia bundles (either as apps or something similar to the iTunes LP) that will be designed for reading on a portable screen; this won't simply be web pages viewed on a smaller screen.

The key to hardware being successful is the software that supports it. One of the main advantages to Apple's tablet, as far as the press is concerned, is the iTunes Store. Since Apple already has this platform to sell and deliver that content, even on a subscription basis, readers will be able to easily buy their favorite newspapers and magazines and get them delivered instantly. They'll be cheaper than the print versions, and they'll be a lot greener too. And the iTunes Store will be able to provide a better selection than readers can find by going to individual Websites. Whether by subscription or by single issue, it'll be extremely simple to buy newspapers and magazines to read on the Apple tablet.

A federal lawsuit alleging collusion among the major music labels over digital download pricing can proceed, a three judge Appeals Court panel ruled today.

As lawsuits go, this one's a humdinger, charging that the labels engaged in a price-fixing conspiracy to ensure that they each made about 70 cents per track sold online, and that no one received a better deal than anyone else. The case had earlier been tossed for a "failure to state a claim," but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has reinstated it and ordered the trial judge to proceed with the case.

Beyond joining the cool kids at the table again, Facebook is ready to begin stepping on the toes of its biggest competitors, Google and Twitter. And they are positioning themselves to put more nails in the MySpace coffin.

Facebook has been rejuvenated by the release of new products, interface improvements and acquisition of FriendFeed. A service much loved by brand name nerds that were able to grok the arcane interface and discussion method.

Facebook is now positioned (with some tweaks) to stunt Twitter's growth, enter real time search as the dominate player and extend its platform much further than Google or Twitter through its API.

Stunting Twitter's Growth

Facebook and its audience are maturing. And this maturation makes it more tolerable for the cool kids to come back to the service. Cool kids in this case being those that were first to jump on board and when the unwashed digital masses began showing up they jumped ship to avoid those newbies getting Dooced for moronic updates.

The audience maturation shouldn't overshadow the growth of Facebook as a more robust platform for messaging. With changes in chat, fan pages, the release of Facebook Lite and snatching up FriendFeed they are acting on a strategy to better control ads that provide a higher ROI for advertisers, removing excess interface components to run a lean set of products like Lite and integrating the core of an API that can power a massive real time search engine.

All of these capitalize on growing an audience by word of mouth and new services build on top of the Facebook platform. With both this combined maturation it will be harder for Twitter to justify the lack of features that it offers as a core service. No payloads of video or audio, chat or multiple user pages for the same account. Today's users expect these features and more like social search.

Real time Social Search

Facebook has done a great job of making recommendations of people to friend and groups to join. They track every bit of activity that you perform on the site, analyze it and then offer up customized recommendations. Add the FriendFeed engine to this and you have an extremely powerful real time social search utility.

Users on Facebook are heading to the front lines, where the cool kids have been for years, to fight the battle against an ever expanding delta of information. The best weapon to use in this battle is created by harnessing the power of each users friend base to narrow incoming river of information . . . to begin with. By using this select group of trusted confidants the delta begins to shallow and offer more valuable focused results.

When users are selecting who they are friends with, they have assigned trust of some varying level in the individual and the type information that they will be sharing. Many times friends or colleagues or members of other hobby groups will share information accordingly to their interests in updates and on their account pages. Real time social search depends on this trust to deliver the most relevant items to a searcher. Facebook has this built in as a core feature.

The I/O of Data, Ads and Opportunity

It is hard to know where to begin. Facebook recently updated their Connect feature which simplified their API somewhat but it still relies on Facebook Markup Language (FBML) a proprietry list of namespaces and commands that interact with Facebook's platform.

I fully expect that Facebook will be releasing a version of their API that conform with the ease of use that existed with FriendFeed's. The FriendFeed API was more akin to that of Twitter than their own. The Twitter API is simple to use, open very powerful.

The release of a simpler API that delivers data in JSON or XML to satisfy developers on different platforms would strengthen all third party tools. It could open Facebook's platform to a greater influx of user generated data to power robust social search and ad inventory. Which is what will keep the ship afloat.

There has been some discussion recently about charging for API usage versus paying developers for using your API. Evidence suggests that the latter is the winning choice to build a strong developer network. Facebook is in a position to drive this type of revenue stream and turn it into the AdSense of the developer world.

Conclusion

Facebook is in a position like no other company to capitalize on paying developers a slice of the advertising pie for including targeted ads in their applications. And if they can be delivered with the content that Facebook is sending developers in a way that allows devs to enhance or choose better, more targeted ads for their applications audience, Facebook would be walking into El Dorado with a smelter the size of the Rhode Island on their back.

For now they have the ability to step on some toes, be it pretty hard. In the coming months and long-term, look for them to begin breaking backs by acquiring properties to freeze out competitors and adding new features for social search.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Facebook Ready To Step On Toes is a post from: TechStartups.com

Are you a VIP? Did you pay for access?

These are the questions that will drive the next web, the version beyond 2.0. A trend towards exclusivity is one that appears to be gaining momentum as business models are coming apart at the seams.

The most prominent of these business models, revenue by CPM from advertising dollars, was the first to begin unraveling over last few years. As the economy tanked many sites relying on this revenue stream couldn't afford to keep the lights on.

Those that have survived are looking to premium content to supplement their income or even stay afloat. Premium meaning exclusive pay for content. And as the great Janis Joplin sang, Exclusive's just another word for nothing left to lose.

That's close right?

Don't take my tone the wrong way. I am bullish about the next web and view exclusivity as a viable method to generate revenue that can sustain a business. Many publishers, for years, played the hunch that simply building audience would lead to revenue. Much in the form of advertising dollars and we can see where that has put them. They're ready to earn.

I recently spoke with Tim Bourquin, the founder of New Media Expo. Tim was a leader in creating a community from the diaspora of global podcasters. But as Tim found out, along with others, there was no sustainable revenue stream to produce your own content. If someone wanted to make money in the medium they would need to produce shows for other people.

This is the category that I fall into. For the last 5 years I have been podcasting a free show at the rate on average of 2 episodes a week. We've done over 500 episodes and are the proud owners of an artist page in iTunes. Over that time, all but one month, I paid $200 for the server to host the show. Simple math will put my costs of production over $10,000. And that doesn't include the time to produce the shows, gear or facility (though it was my home).

We were never able to monetize our show with an audience of over 2,500 regular listeners. We looked at advertising, sponsorships and pitching our show for television. None of them were viable as our audience was too small. It was filled with the right people, just not enough of them. The only money that I have made from podcasting came from performing contract work for advertising agencies.

Bourquin is now charging for his content and building a community from and exclusive set listeners that are paying him with their attentions as well. It does change the dynamic as a publisher to have a financial obligation to an audience. In this model, every player has a vested interest in the content having value.

Exclusive purple ropes are a coming necessity for online businesses to grow from the passions of artists, publishers and regular folks. The next web will be filled with independent publishers mixing their content with that of today's mainstream media.

The difference will be that it will be paid for. Think exclusivity through micropayments and the bundling of content like a cable television provider under the umbrella of larger publishers. Both of these models rely on the new web's ability to syndicate and track content effectively.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Post from: TechStartups.com

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The question of what effect an employee's disloyalty has on authorization to access an employer's computer has arisen in numerous cases in which employers have added civil claims under the CFAA in actions brought against employees alleged to have misappropriated of trade secrets. A typical scenario in which such a claim would be made is where, before departing for a new job, the employee is alleged to have copied or transmitted an employer's computer files for the benefit of a new employer.

Often, what is at stake in such cases is the employer's ability to maintain an action in federal court. A dispute over misappropriation of trade secrets is likely to involve only state law issues, and unless there is diversity of the parties, there is no basis for jurisdiction in a federal court. But, of course, federal courts have jurisdiction over a CFAA claim, and the trade secret misappropriation claims are then swept into federal court along with the CFAA claim as pendent state law claims.

The Seventh Circuit opinion in International Airport Centers v. Citrin is the ruling that is cited by employers seeking to press CFAA claims in such cases. In that case the circuit, in an opinion written by Judge Posner, ruled that under common law agency principles, an employee who breaches the duty of loyalty to an employer thereby becomes unauthorized to access the employer's computer, at least for the purpose of furthering an act of disloyalty to the employer. In LVRC Holdings, LLC v Brekka, the Ninth Circuit ruled to the contrary, finding that under the plain meaning of the language of the CFAA, acts of disloyalty on the part of an employee do not render the employee's access to the employer's computer unauthorized within the meaning of the statute.

In LVRC, the Ninth Circuit panel concluded that under the ordinary, contemporary, common meaning of the statutory terms, an employer gives an employee 'authorization' to access a computer when the employer gives the employee permission to use it. The court found that there is no statutory language to support the contention that authorization terminates when an employee determines to act contrary to the interest of an employer. The court looked to the term "exceeds authorized access," and concluded that the definition of that term made it clear that Congress had no intent to include in the statute any implicit, rather than explicit, limitation on the term authorization. It is an employer's act of allowing or terminating an employer's authorization to access a computer that determines whether the employee's access is authorized within the meaning of the statute, not the employee's disloyal act. The court reasoned:

Section 1030(e)(6) provides: the term exceeds authorized access' means to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter. 18 U.S.C. 1030(e)(6). As this definition makes clear, an individual who is authorized to use a computer for certain purposes but goes beyond those limitations is considered by the CFAA as someone who has exceed[ed] authorized access. On the other hand, a person who uses a computer without authorization has no rights, limited or otherwise, to access the computer in question. In other words, for purposes of the CFAA, when an employer authorizes an employee to use a company computer subject to certain limitations, the employee remains authorized to use the computer even if the employee violates those limitations. It is the employer's decision to allow or to terminate an employee's authorization to access a computer that determines whether the employee is with or without authorization.

The Ninth Circuit rejected the Seventh Circuit's reasoning in International Airport Centers, LLC v. Citrin, concluding that relying on whether an employee's mental state changed from loyal employee to disloyal competitor to determine whether the statute had been violated would be problematic in the criminal law context. The statute should be interpreted consistently in civil and criminal contexts, the court reasoned. Relying on the employee's mental state with respect to disloyalty to determine whether the statute had been violated would run afoul of the proscription against interpreting criminal statutes in surprising and novel ways that impose unexpected burdens on defendants.

In this respect, the ruling echoes (but does not cite) the recent district court opinion in United States v. Drew, No. CR 08-0582-GW (C.D. Cal. Aug. 28, 2009) (the MySpace "cyberbullying" criminal prosecution). There, the court dismissed a misdemeanor charge of violating the CFAA that was predicated on a user's alleged violation of the MySpace Terms of Service, finding that it would run afoul of the void for vagueness doctrine because individuals of 'common intelligence' arguably would not be on notice that a breach of the terms of a service contract could become a crime under the CFAA.

And conversely, the Ninth Circuit ruling appears to contradict the recent opinion in United States v. Nosal, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 31423 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 13, 2009), in which the district court declined to dismiss an indictment charging a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4). The indictment alleged that the statute was violated when a former employee accessed an employer''s computer network to copy proprietary information for use in a competitive enterprise. The court found that the statutory element of intent to defraud in subsection 1030(a)(4) could be found in the employee''s knowing access of electronic records for uses outside their intended purpose. The court in Nosal also rejected the defendant''s argument that because subsection 1030(a)(4) had never been addressed in the criminal context the indictment should be dismissed under the rule of lenity. Citing International Airport Centers, LLC v. Citrin and a number of opinions following it, the court found that there was ample authority in civil cases construing this section to conclude that the CFAA was violated by the 'access to the employer's confidential and proprietary information to advance his own competitive enterprise.

No doubt more will be heard on this issue in the Ninth Circuit, and other courts as well. And eventually, perhaps, the U.S. Supreme Court.

Manhattan-based Art Capital Group says Leibovitz borrowed the money last year because she was in dire financial straits due to unpaid bills, mortgage payments and tax liens.

The breach of contract lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Manhattan state Supreme Court, says that in return Leibovitz granted Art Capital the right to sell all of her photographs, plus her homes in Manhattan and upstate New York.

The lawsuit says Leibovitz and her associates are now trying to ignore their obligations.

A spokesman for Leibovitz denies the allegations.

Matthew Hiltzik says the suit is part of Art Capital's "continued harassment."

Spinvox announced they've signed up 600 developers in five months. The API (our Spinvox API profile) brings the power of voice transcription to an application.

And developers are apparently willing to pay for that power. Spinvox charges 35 cents to create text from a half-minute message.

Using a computer to convert speech to text has been long promised, but poorly executed over the years. Spinvox uses a combination of methods, including sometimes falling back on humans to do the work.

There is a real cost to the company to provide the service, but there's also an undeniable value to its output. Yet there are worries that Spinvox has grown too fast after a deal to serve Telefonica's 125 million customers in Latin America. The company may be paying staff with stock, which leaves questions for developers building a business on top of Spinvox.

This is all fuel to an argument for Spinvox charging for its service. If enough developers payand they seem to be open to itthe service should remain reliable. The same cannot always be said for those APIs without a clear revenue stream, as we've seen recently with Google's Mashup Editor and Microsoft's PopFly mashup tool.

Sponsored by

Content owners are looking beyond straight-up advertisements and product placements. One opportunity lies in the ability to immediately sell products seen in video content. To that end, startup Clikthrough has just raised $1 million for its interactive clickable video efforts.

Clikthrough is an interactive video platform that allows content owners to associate video with specific products and places and then push that content out. Clikthrough is not a destination site, does not have its own player, and says it can work with any third-party video publisher.

The company is starting off with music videos because they are short-form and drive a lot of traffic. Clikthrough has 39 music videos up on its site to showcase, for example, how it highlights the shirt Kelly Clarkson wears (or the hotel she's in) so the viewer can learn more about it or purchase it.

Clikthrough can do this because when the record labels provide a music video, they also hand over a list of every item featured in that video. Clikthrough then pulls pictures and information from those product sites and associates them with the objects in the video on the back end before the videos are pushed out for distribution.

The company earns money by charging a set-up fee as well as a rev split for clicks generated for products featured, as well an affiliate fee for any purchases made. Additionally, because it knows what's in a video down to the exact frame, Clikthrough will be able to serve up better targeted ads.

Music videos are a starting point for Clikthrough, which has relationships with Phonogenic/Sony Music, Universal Music and Slip N Slide Records. The company has some nice musical backers as well with this latest round of funding coming from investors like Swedish music producer/hit maker Max Martin and Nick Byrne, who was a member of the Irish band Westlife. Clikthrough does not have an official partnership with Vevo, the forthcoming video site from UMG and YouTube, yet. The company is looking to expand its technology to TV shows and movies.

Clikthrough is certainly getting into a crowded space. Other companies doing interactive, clickable video include Overlay.tv and PLY Media, Zunavision and Innovid.

Based in San Francisco, the 2-year old Clikthrough has four employees and has raised $2.1 million in funding to date.

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Some fans objected to Reznor's claim that Topspin Media (video interview) got it right with its re-release of the Beastie Boys album Ill Communication, which offers a wide array of merchandise in just about every conceivable format at a wide variety of prices. It's become a well-worn criticism of the independent distribution model that fledgling bands need a helping hand in order to make it in the music business. Not so, says Reznor. According to him, giving away digital music while charging for scarce, premium edition is the best way forward for artists of all stripes not just Radiohead and his own band, Nine Inch Nails.

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales, wrote Reznor on his message board. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY [as DRM-free MP3s] Collect people's e-mail info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods.

It's a play straight out of Anderson's playbook (and, in fact, Anderson cites Nine Inch Nails as an example of a business that understands Free).

To put it into practice, Reznor advises that bands distribute through Amazon, TopSpin or Tunecore; set up a simple, Flash-free site outside of MySpace (which he says is dying and reads as cheap / generic); never abuse their mailing list; use free tools from Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube and SoundCloud; and give people a reason to keep coming back to their site (Reznor's own forums are an example of this strategy).

However, Reznor says the strategy of giving away music in return for e-mail addresses, then marketing pricey box sets and other premium goods to those e-mail addresses only makes sense if a band wants to keep all its money and stay in control of its image.

If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake), your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days, you'll need old-school marketing muscle, and that only comes from major labels.

Good luck with that one.

See Also:

• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
• TopSpin Lets Bands Ape Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails
• Video Interview: Ian Rogers, Topspin Media
• SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era
• Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson on the Future of Free
• Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead Dominate Amazon MP3 Chart
• It Just Got Cheaper To Sell a Song on iTunes
• MySpace Music: What Went Wrong, and What's Being Done About It

Photo: Andrea Veraart

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Apparently all print subscribers haven't been asked (this by way of a full disclosure), but the New York Times is asking its dead tree readers whether they'd be willing to pay to access the paper's content online.

The numbers being floated are $2.50 a month for subscribers, and $5 a month for everyone else, according to Bloomberg.com.

Nytimes.com is currently free, and a previous attempt to put some their columnists behind a paywall, Times Select, ended with great fanfare nearly two years ago with the slogan: Now, everyone is entitled to our opinions.

But that was then: Way before the global recession, when the New York Times Co was worth four times what it is today, wasn't selling assets and cutting its payroll, the advertising market hadn't gone into freefall (the industry has lost more than $11 billion in ad sales since 2005) and Google wasn't the enemy.

The notion of beginning to charge for content that has always been free is extremely controversial. Some media observers simply think it cannot work and some industry professionals think it must absolutely happen.

Nobody can say it will work, and the risk of trying and failing could do serious permanent damage to a news brand to say nothing of being utterly demoralizing to everyone else who might have thought it was the last, best hope.

There have been some newspaper attempts to start asking readers to pay for what had been free content (like Times Select) but no major player has ever tried charging customers directly with any gusto the digital equivalent of giving no part of the print paper away for free. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have always charged online, so there was no need to re-condition their readers to go from paying zero to something. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had to shut down its newspaper to try to survive purely in digital form, and the Christian Science Monitor curtailed print editions.

But those publications, with all due respect, are not the likes of the New York Times. Were the Gray Lady to draw a line in the sand, a lot of theory would be put to the test right quick.

It might be time for some paper to stop the threats and just do it, and an iconic brand like the Times may be the best one to try.

New York Times Considers $5 Monthly Web-Access Fee Update1 - Bloomberg.com.

An Ohio appellate court has upheld the felony hacking conviction of a man who was found guilty of unauthorized access for misusing his computer at work.

Richard Wolf acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate when he used his work computer to upload nude photos of himself to an adult web site and view other photos on porn sites, but he didn't think he should be convicted of hacking for doing so.

A jury disagreed and felt he exceeded his authorization on the computer, which the appellate court recently upheld (.pdf).

Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor of computer crimes, called the conviction a misuse of the computer hacking law.

This goes to the whole concept . . . that violation of an internal policy on the use of a computer can be piggybacked to make a crime, said Rasch, who now works as a consultant for Secure IT Experts. His uploading of nude pictures is certainly inappropriate and something he could be terminated for, but it was perfectly legal. When you use the heavy hand of the criminal law to prosecute inappropriate behavior, it's just an abuse of the criminal statutes.

Wolf was also convicted of soliciting a dominatrix online for sexual services, a misdemeanor. Rasch says using the computer evidence for proof of this crime is appropriate, but charging him separately for felony hacking goes too far.

Rasch said the problem stems from an amendment that was made to the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the federal anti-hacking law that states have added to their own statutes.

The early statute only talked about unauthorized access which is breaking into computer, he said. But then they amended it to say or exceeding the scope of authorization to access a computer'.

The amendment was intended to target employees who have access to a computer but abuse that access to obtain data they shouldn't have or go into parts of their employer's network they shouldn't enter.

The amendment arose from the case of an IRS employee who was caught looking up tax returns on an assistant district attorney who was prosecuting his father, among others. Authorities tried to prosecute him on hacking charges but ran into difficulty since he was authorized to use the computer system.

Unfortunately, Rasch says, the amendment created an opportunity for prosecutors to interpret the law too broadly.

That term exceeding authorization' is very loose and ambiguous, he says.

The case began when Larry Wise, the Superintendent of the Shelby City Wastewater Treatment Plant, where Wolf was employed, was deleting old files from a work computer and found a nude photograph of Wolf.

When police interviewed him, Wolf admitted that in January 2006 he joined a web site called Adult Friend Finder to meet women and that, in violation of established work practices, he uploaded nude photos of himself from his work computer after women he met online requested pictures. He also admitted accessing various porn sites and spending more than 100 hours doing personal business on his work computer.

Forensic analysis of the computer's temporary internet files uncovered 703 pornographic photos as well as several sexually explicit e-mails Wolf exchanged with a dominatrix named Mistress Patrice, soliciting her services.

Wolf was convicted on state charges for three counts: unauthorized access to a computer, a felony; theft of services in office (essentially for depriving the city of his paid services while he conducted the unauthorized activities on a city computer on city time), which is also a felony; and solicitation of prostitution, a misdemeanor.

He was sentenced to 15 months and a $5,000 fine for the two felony convictions and ordered to pay the city about $2,400 in restitution for personal business on city time. On the misdemeanor solicitation charge, he was sentenced to 60 days (to run concurrently with his other sentence) and a fine of $500. His sentence was later reduced to two and a half years in community control.

Wolf argued for appeal on grounds that there was insufficient evidence for any of the convictions and that the convictions for unauthorized use of computer and theft of service in particular are contrary to public policy and create such a manifest miscarriage of justice that such convictions must be reversed.

The Ohio hacking statute reads in part that No person, in any manner and by any means, including, but not limited to, computer hacking, shall knowingly gain access to, attempt to gain access to, or cause access to be gained to any computer, . . . without the consent of, or beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of, the owner of the computer, . . . or other person authorized to give consent.

The appellate court wrote that Wolf's conduct was beyond the scope of the express or implied consent and the charge of unauthorized use of a computer was based upon sufficient evidence.

The appellate court vacated the theft-of-service conviction, however.

Judge John Wise wrote that while the State presented evidence Appellant spent approximately 100 hours over a five month-period utilizing internet websites that were not related to his job, there was no evidence presented that his job performance suffered or that he failed to perform his job duties.

Furthermore, even if it could be shown that Appellant failed to perform
such job duties, while it could certainly serve as a basis for termination from his
employment, such could not be the basis of a criminal theft in office charge.

One of the judges wrote a dissenting opinion on this point, saying the state had proven that the city experienced a measurable loss for the time Wolf wasted on the computer.

The county assistant prosecutor said her office will appeal the ruling to the state supreme court.

UPDATE: David Carto, the attorney who handled Wolf's appeal, told Threat Level that Wolf was prosecuted because authorities disapproved of the material he viewed online.

The reason he was prosecuted was clearly because of the content of what he was looking at, he said. If somebody else had been on an internet site studying horticulture, I don't think he would have been prosecuted. It was not obscene. It was just something that was not approved of by certain elements of the city government and by the court in which he was tried. The prosecutor and the judge both treated this basically as a sex offense.

Carto said the photos Wolf viewed were profile pictures from the adult dating site he visited. Some of the profile photos of women on the site showed nudity but not sexual acts.

He said his client was a good worker and had even been promoted after his supervisors found the pictures. Initially he was suspended while police investigated the case, but was promoted after he returned to work. He lost his job, however, when he was convicted of the charges.

He added that the city had never actually disseminated a policy regarding internet usage to tell workers what was inappropriate.

They had crafted one but they hadn't published it, he said. So there was in effect no policy and no protections on the computer no password protection or filtering of any kind so basically anybody could access anything on the internet through the city's computer.

Photo showing a random computer: chunter01/Flickr

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), who helms the Senate's government affairs committee, is annoyed enough that he bypassed the administrators of the system and sent a letter Friday straight to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

He's asking Judge Lee H. Rosenthal to explain why in the age of Google the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, system isn't free for citizens. He'd also like to know why federal courts still aren't blacking out sensitive information in court documents as required in the 2002 E-Government Act (a piece of legislation dear to Lieberman).

He writes:

Seven years after the passage of the E-Government Act, it appears that little has been done to make these records freely available with PACER charging a higher rate than 2002. Furthermore, the funds generated by these fees are still well higher than the cost of dissemination ...

If the complaints sound familiar, perhaps you know of public.resource.org's Carl Malamud who's been running a virtual one-man campaign against the clunky and costly PACER system. It's just part of his campaign to "open-source the nation's operating system."

He's also been vigilantly searching through court documents and using automated tools and has found that some judicial districts routinely fail to redact information that would be very handy for identity thieves to have. He's also found just plainly embarrassing and invasive information like medical records of patients not even involved in litigation.

Malamud is running a campaign to become the nation's public printer, and from the looks of this letter, he's already got one senator's attention.

See Also:

• Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records ...
• Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama's Printer
• Contrarian Libertarian
• Death to Sleepy Stock Data

Notebook Magazine have just done a full set of battery life tests on the NC10 Netbook and it looks like Samsung have once again worked their magic. The tests included continuous Wifi-on web browsing in battery saving mode which is a very reasonable test to be doing. Far better than the misleading 2001 Jeita test and much more real-life' than the Battery Eater Pro turn everything and and run it at full-steam' approach. The NC10 returned

• 12% screen brightness: 7hrs 34mins representing an average drain of about 7.6w which is just a little bit more than what I saw on the Q1 Ultra.
• 50% screen brightness, the duration dropped to 6hrs 30mins which is an average 8.7W.
• 100% screen brightness, the test result reduced to 4hrs 38 minutes which is 12.3 watts drain.

More after the break

What it highlights is something I've been saying for years. The CPU power drain is not the most important element in determining a devices overall efficiency. In these 10" screens, even the latest LED technology backlight can take a lot of drain. In this case, nearly 5W at full power which is nearly 50% of the total power drain of the whole PC! Obviously, as screens get smaller, the LED power required drops and when you get to a 4.8" screen, you'll see 1-1.5W average drain. If you were to attache that Samsung battery to the Aigo MID, you would see close to 20 hours battery life under similar conditions as the Wifi-on drain is about 3W.

As we move to lower and lower power processors, screens and other components need to follow and the OEM that has access to the best components and the best engineers is always going to have an advantage. Samsung keep proving that.

So how's the rest of the NC10? I was watching a live session at EeePCnews.de a few evenings ago and it was clear that people are really interested in this one. 3000 people watched Sascha, the lead guy there, do live testing and as the session went on you could almost sense people hitting the buy button as Sascha reported positive comment after positive comment! LaptopMag calls it their netbook of choice' right now. From what I've seen, I have no reason to doubt it.

Samsung NC10 links and info in the product database.

But a lot of what Thomson said didn't quite add up, and I still reckon that wsj.com is going to go free eventually -- although not nearly as quickly as I anticipated when Murdoch first bought it.

For instance: Thomson tried to paint a picture of non-subscribing visitors to the WSJ's website being so attracted by the headlines on premium stories that they end up subscribing. He said that the website is up to 30 million uniques -- "a doubling of the audience from last year, and a great free funnel of the readers to premium content". (If you think that number is high, so do I, and so does Thomson: he admitted that web metrics are "problematic".)

Thomson admitted that the website's ad revenue is growing much more slowly than its visitor count, and he didn't even mention what the growth rates are in paid subscriptions on the website.

And later on, Thomson talked about "how promiscuous web readers are" -- implicitly admitting that just because someone is reading a free story about the yen, to use his example, they're not going to jump through all the hoops needed to pay money to read a premium story on the recapitalization of Japanese banks.

Thomson also talked about how his decision to allow Dow Jones's newswire content to appear for free on his Chinese-language website has sparked 400% growth rates there.

Thomson's most interesting datapoint, for me, was when he was asked about the impact of consolidation in the financial-services industry on subcription revenues. He replied that there's no doubt that if you're a Dow Jones sales person phoning up banks and trying to get them to subscribe to products, you're not in a great place right now. At the same time, he said, people who got fired from a place like Dow Jones haven't disappeared, and are likely to strike out on their own in one form or another. They won't necessarily be reached by a human salesperson, but if and when they find their own way to Dow Jones, they will still subscribe to content.

But aren't individual subscription rates much lower than corporate rates? No, said Thomson, not on a per-person basis. If you can get a company's worth of people to subscribe at individual rates, you'll make more money than if you just sell a single corporate subscription. The question, of course, is how many individuals, after being fired from a big bank, will still do that.

My feeling is that Thomson was entirely right when he said that commentary had become commoditized, and that therefore you couldn't charge for it; he also said the same thing about most news. But what he calls "specialized content" is to a large degree just taking commoditized news, and adding the kind of value that comes from informed commentators. Yes, there are things which Dow Jones the WSJ can do and no one else can do in quite the same way -- Thomson was interesting when he started talking about selling content on the subject of India to Japan, for instance. And in a world where Dow Jones is looking to individual subscriptions to make up the losses from corporate subscriptions, it's going to be very difficult for them to start slashing those individual subscription rates to zero.

But I suspect that eventually the WSJ will do the math and work out that the best way to monetize and grow its large number of unique visitors is to maximize the time they spend on the site. And the best way to do that is to go free.

A company called Celiocorp has launched a completely different take on the netbook phenomenon. Instead of offering a lightweight computer running either Linux or XP like today's netbooks do, this notebook PC is entirely powered by a device you already own: your smartphone. Dubbed a mobile companion, the Redfly device has an 8-inch screen, a full-sized keyboard and touch pad, and is connected to your smartphone via a USB cable or Bluetooth.

To use the Redfly notebook, all you need to do is install the Redfly driver on your phone (see supported phones here). You can then use the netbook like any computer. Its bigger screen makes it easier to read documents, write emails, or surf the web. Redfly supports remote desktop, virtualization and other cloud-based environments like Citrix, GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, Microsoft's Remote Desktop protocol, stoneware, inc., and others. The netbook also features a VGA connector so you can connect your Redfly netbook to a projector for presentations.

As you use the Redfly device, you can be charging your smartphone too, assuming it's plugged in via the USB cable. The Redfly battery works for up to 8 hours, according to the company.

Because Redfly has no OS, no CPU, no hard drive, and requires no software licenses, its cost is lower than a laptop PC (an Amazon search shows that price to be around $199). That's also slightly more affordable than today's crop of OS-powered netbooks, but not by much.

The benefit to using a mobile companion instead of a PC is that the device can get lost or stolen without any threat of losing important data. Of course, a lot of companies have already started doing this now via the use of virtualized business apps running on top of the OS installed on regular company laptops all the important data is in the cloud so laptop loss or theft isn't as big a concern as before. However, given the price ($199) of Redfly vs. that of a laptop, the replacement cost would be minimal.

in reply to Redfly: A Netbook Entirely Powered By Your Windows Mobile Phone

A company called Celiocorp has launched a completely different take on the netbook phenomenon. Instead of offering a lightweight computer running either Linux or XP like today's netbooks do, this notebook PC is entirely powered by a device you already own: your smartphone. Dubbed a mobile companion, the Redfly device has an 8-inch screen, a full-sized keyboard and touch pad, and is connected to your smartphone via a USB cable or Bluetooth.

To use the Redfly notebook, all you need to do is install the Redfly driver on your phone (see supported phones here). You can then use the netbook like any computer. Its bigger screen makes it easier to read documents, write emails, or surf the web. Redfly supports remote desktop, virtualization and other cloud-based environments like Citrix, GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, Microsoft's Remote Desktop protocol, stoneware, inc., and others. The netbook also features a VGA connector so you can connect your Redfly netbook to a projector for presentations.

As you use the Redfly device, you can be charging your smartphone too, assuming it's plugged in via the USB cable. The Redfly battery works for up to 8 hours, according to the company.

Because Redfly has no OS, no CPU, no hard drive, and requires no software licenses, its cost is lower than a laptop PC (an Amazon search shows that price to be around $199). That's also slightly more affordable than today's crop of OS-powered netbooks, but not by much.

The benefit to using a mobile companion instead of a PC is that the device can get lost or stolen without any threat of losing important data. Of course, a lot of companies have already started doing this now via the use of virtualized business apps running on top of the OS installed on regular company laptops all the important data is in the cloud so laptop loss or theft isn't as big a concern as before. However, given the price ($199) of Redfly vs. that of a laptop, the replacement cost would be minimal.

Let me tell you a story

Lid does a number of things around the Web, and sometimes I even find it hard to keep up. So I have a Google alert on her, so I can see what she is doing and what people are saying about her. That's my excuse anyways.

Last Friday I got an alert from Google with 3 references:

The references are:

1. Lid's ReadWriteWeb post about Social Media and who is doing it well from the Social Media Marketing Summit in San Francisco.
2. A post by Laurena about delicious and tagging which discusses and references Lid's article -just what the Web is intended for.
3. A post by Oggi' which looks remarkable like Lid's - it starts with the same 20 words - and even references her by name.

So who or what is Oggi's blog? Here is a screen shot.

Here is a breakdown of Oggi's blog:

1. 3 separate groups of Google advertising - two text based, and the third image based.
2. The title of the post which is the same as Lid's.
3. The content of the post is the same initial 20 words of Lid's post, then followed by Original post by Lidija Davis with Lid's name linked to her post on ReadWriteWeb.

Now the link on Lid's post is interesting in that it is not a direct link to the post on ReadWriteWeb, but rather an indirect link via Google's FeedBurner service. Here is the link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/nS1e6RgCjbw/social_media_for_business_who_is_doing_it.php

So what about the other posts on this blog? Surprise, surprise, they all reference other people's posts in exactly the same way. The same title is used, same first 20 words, and a link to the original post via FeedBurner.

Just to prove to myself that Google is still in fact indexing Oggi's blog, I did a site search for Lidija, and found two previous ReadWriteWeb posts.

So what is the point of Oggi's blog?

To hi-hack anyone who is searching for the title of noteworthy posts, so that if they click on the links, they will invoke 3 separate Google blocks of ads, with the user clicking through to the original article.

Now, who wins out of this?

1. Oggi - for the princely sum of a few fractions of a cent.
2. Google - for recording and charging the lucky advertisers for appearing on Oggi's blog - this too would be minimal; however, it is still money on the bottom line.

The individual amount of money changing hands is minimal; however, multiply this by the number of hapless visitors and it could get into the hundreds for Oggi, and multiply this by the number of Oggi clones out there and now you are getting into the thousands for Google. I must state that I have absolutely no clue as to the actual numbers, but I think I have underestimated both sets of numbers here.

So who loses?

1. The users of the Web for being distracted by useless profiteering
2. The advertiser.
3. The Web in general for being littered with content which has absolutely zero value.

So to recap:

1. I was sent an e-mail by Google alerting me to the existence of Oggi's blog, of which I was blissfully ignorant until then.
2. I visit Oggi's blog and find that I am reading a post of zero value to me, has zero content, well actually 29 words copied from elsewhere, and which is surrounded by 3 block's of Google advertisements.
3. The link to the original post is via Google's FeedBurner service.

The only thing which is not Google's is the blogging software, which is WordPress in this case. Otherwise, we would have had a clean sweep. Digressing a bit, we had a bit of fun last April fool's with this post on Google acquiring WordPress (remember this is not serious).

Now what Oggi is doing is cookie cutter stuff, so I can't see how Google cannot detect that the intent is none other than injecting a post in between the user and what they actually want to view and benefiting courtesy of Google ads.

But then the conspiracy person within me has a theory, and we all have one, just the degree varies (checkout ReadWriteWeb's very own post on Chrome)

Why aren't Google proactively purging such sites from their index, and thus alerts?

If they did then they loose money since ads are not being triggered.

I certainly hope this is not the case. I would expect that purging 100% of such sites from the index is actually impossible, but I think that low hanging fruit such as Oggi are simple enough for a group of 2-3 Googlers to solve - a few, ok, many, 20% days perhaps.

It maybe a long bow, but the theoretical dilemma is interesting, and no doubt finer minds than mine have discussed this to death.

I googled Google to see if you can report such blogs so this site is removed from the index, but the only thing I could find on the first page of the results, I am not a patient searcher, was a reference to reporting copyright infringements which requires me to mail in a letter (I kid you not).

I was expecting to find a report abuse' link one click away from the Google's home page, in About Google specifically.

With search being an integral part of everyone's online life now, and that given that googled' is now a verb, it plays a critical component of the Web, in that it potentially can control the pages which are viewed by users, thereby controlling the ads which are displayed, thereby controlling the potential revenue received by Google.

Google currently receives a lot of freedom in what they do, which they have rightly earned, but how can we be sure that this is not abused in the future?

How can we, the citizens of the Web, be assured that there is no conflict of interest between the search/index side of the business and the advertising side within Google?

Is there a common theme here? Checkout Michael Gray's view on Google's book search.

</rant>

• First, also from OneBag, comes the bundled-wrapping method of packing. Folding your clothes with this method will not only keep your gear more compact than rolling, but it also means less wrinkles.
• If you simply can't fit everything you need into one bag (this better be a long trip!), you might prefer shipping your luggage ahead rather than paying for the extra bag just so you can lug it around the airport.
• On the other side of the coin, if you're looking to save time at the terminal and avoid the huge lines at baggage check, you may also benefit from these tips for traveling with one carry-on.
• With a ruthless checklist of acceptable items, you can even pack your vacation into one backpack.
• Finally, if you're really into packing light and you're not afraid of spending a little cash and buying specifically for the purpose, check out how author Tim Ferriss travels the world packing less than 10 pounds.

If you've got your own favorite tips for stuffing all your gear in one bag as summer vacation approaches, let's hear them in the comments.

Content as infrastructure

I say the notion of persistent ubiquitous content. And when I say content - I mean all sorts of content - movies, TV shows, music and books - blog posts, links, RSS feeds, wikis - ideas, statistics, directories, memes, stories, articles, lists of links, concepts and most importantly personal expression byproduct.

What I mean by being persistent is that this content gets stored up on the web and is always there. And by ubiquitous - I mean its everywhere. So always there and everywhere.

What's important to keep in mind when building the mesh is that everything starts and ends with the user, the customer, the human being who's using the stuff. That's why every one of these blog series' posts will have the user's ID (profile page) at the center of the drawing. Then by overlaying any or all of these domain' drawings on top of each other, we'll be able to get an idea of what the mesh will actually look like - which I'm betting will be a hodge-podge and distributed mesh' of inter-connecting pieces - loosely coupled together.

No one vendor will be able to dictate exactly how the mesh will evolve. It'll be a hybrid combination of open and proprietary standards, all driven by market factors, latest trends and a gradual education of the mainstream populace as to the benefits of all this stuff.

You'll also notice that I'll put an RSS icon and the words - DataPortability and Interoperability on each chart - as well. Think of these things are portals or rabbit holes between each of the domains' I'm writing about.

Some of the connections between the components and domains of the mesh - will be based upon open standards, like RSS, OpenSocial or OpenID while others connectors' will be proprietary APIs, like Microsoft Windows Live Contacts APIs or MySpace APIs. And just so we're clear - the purpose of these blog post series is to map out how these various kinds of domains will all exist unto themselves as their own unique dimensions connecting to humans and providing unique functionality for us all - moving forward.

If we (software developers) can all agree upon standardized constructs, such as an RSS feeds, shared public servers, user profile pages or groups - then we can have disparate implementations, techniques and solutions - while at the same time - provide a comprehensive, loosely coupled meshed architecture which anyone can contribute to and benefit from - just like the web.

This mesh doesn't have to get LED by Microsoft or Google, but they can contribute to it - for sure. But I just wanna remind everyone that this all started with RSS and RSS readers - and the fact that no one (despite some efforts) owns or controls RSS. And even though HTML has it's own little governance and political world surrounding it - it also is not controlled' by any one entity or constituency.

Over the years I've given up thinking that there's one way to build the mesh, or that one set of altruistic standards and solutions will fit all.

As long as there is time - Microsoft will do it their own way. As the dusts of time accumulate we'll see that Google is also it's own world - unto itself. And there's no way in hell you're ever gonna tell Steve Jobs how to do soemthing, he's always gonna be his own man.

So now the questions are: will Facebook continue to innovate, extend and grow - or just become a puppet aligned with Microsoft? I'd also like to see if MySpace will continue on it's own path, or will it become subservient to Google? And thank god for the Evan Williams' of the world!

Politics aside - from a technology POV this is all possible, but it's gonna take cooperation, devoid of ageism, sexism or capitilism to make this all work. Yes we all need to make money, but NO you don't get to lock my balls up in YOUR vice. Ain't gonna happen.

The little guys needs to live off the crumbs left behind by the behemoths and this whole thing needs to work around the world - evenly.

So as user's behavior patterns shift and migrate and as vendors smarten up and start thinking of the user FIRST - in the center of all universes, I believe that the market trends and pressures from users will define the mesh. This series of blog posts simply lay out SOME of the domains, standard constructs and APIs - that will make up the mesh. it is by no means complete or exclusive.

Technology solutions today enable users to assume that we can buy music (and soon) movies through the web just as easy as going to Virgin Megastore or Wal-Mart. Customers are getting over Blockbuster and are choosing NetFlix instead. Because of separate regional rights and languages - we're seeing music and movie downloading and rental solutions pop up around the world.

End-uers are getting used to the notion of storing their files (text, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), their media libraries (images, music, videos, etc.) and their user generated content' (blog posts, reviews, etc.) in storage facilities or storage lockers (as they're sometimes referred to) - on the web. On-line storage is an entire market category, though it's gonna be hard for small guys like Box.net and Omnidrive to compete with the likes of Amazon's S3, AOL's XDrive or both Microsoft and Google's storage offerings (Live drive and GDrive.) But god bless them - they are alternatives to the bug guys.

But storing files you own and control is only part of what ubiquitous and persistent content is all about.

What I MOST excited about is when we can rely upon old news reels, stock photo libraries, statistics libraries, biographies and documentaries - from places like the BBC open project and the Internet Archive. Wikipedia is also morphing towards this sort of on-line knowledge dissemination and availability.

Pioneered by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive - the idea of backing up the web' was so outrageous that I just couldn't believe it when I first heard of it.

You mean they're going to backup - the entire web - how many times? Forever?

And then when I heard about the BBC Open project - my head did a similar thump you mean the entire library of everything the Beeb has ever done will be available -on-line forever? (Of course we've found out later that its not quite everything and that it's gonna take YEARS to get all the rights clearances - but at least they got the right idea!)

Soon after the Beeb announcement Pathe also made their catalog on-line BUT they were charging for it - and it was minuscule compared to what the Internet Archive and the Beeb have.

We tried to to do a storage play for bloggers, podcasters and vloggers called ourmedia.org (back then) - as a UGC front-end to the Internet Archive. But the same month we launched - YouTube launched. So we know what happened with that scenario.

Now persistent ubquitous content is available for everyone. Your great American rock video, novel, soap opera or viral video - can be stored up in YouTube (or blip.tv.meta-cafe, Revver, whatever [insert 40 brand names here.]

If you step back and think about content as infrastructure you can take a different attitude towards stock photos, soundtracks and beats, 3D models, 3D city models and all sorts of reusable digital content assets. You can bake historical references, sports statistics, background on diseases and weather trends into your blog posts and software. You can make collaborative hypermedia a dream come true.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - as a key construct - is a mesh that can provide health information, small business knowledge and courseware for all ages - free and built into word processors, email, spreadsheets or browsers.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - can enable entirely new kinds of record labels, movie studios and book publishers - which have a fighting chance of surviving. By lowering distribution, development and www costs - we can enable the Long Tail to at least cover their costs and pay the rent and feed themselves.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it can seamlessly tie into other domains like the Live Web or Tools- and seamlessly mesh' with other constructs like micro-content, aggregators or collections.

Persistent ubiquitous content is an idea who's day has come.

I'm hoping that in all the billions of dollars of revenues, greed and exploitation of users, we can make sure to get enough content on-line and available for free - that new kinds of educational tools, knowledge bases and learning environments can evolve - to make our kids even smarter than we are.

Persistent ubiquitous content is a domain which can mesh into any other domain, construct and API. Here's a chart outlining some of the ways I think of this:

all sorts of opinions - threadsML, message boards, stored conversations, IM transcripts,

Action Items in this domain include:

- MORE free content - we'll never be done, they'll never be enough!

- APIs for content infrastructure - not sure what two-way APIs would be here - but they'r eimportant!

- standards for content infrastructure - hmm - I wonder what that would look like?

- educational objects' - that's an idea that's been bantered around for a while!

- persistent conversations - which are re-entrant and annotatable. That's what ThreadsML was all about.- and (of course) we need to continue to educate end-users onwhat the hell it is we MEAN by persistent ubiquitous content!

Action Items in general include:

- make sure that ALL the open standards continue to rise in popularity, that all implementations are compatible with each other and that more open standards get created

- testing and compatibility labs - a place where we can guarantee that everything works together. Building a COMPATIBLE mesh will be a challenge - and it won't ever happen if things break or don't work.

- two-way APIs - until we can write back into systems and services as easily as we can get data from those services we won't have a symmetrical architecture and a successful mesh environment

- establish OutputThis as a standard for content producers to list all of the destinations they'd like to route their content - to. SEE Dataportability.

Summary of persistent data repositories discussed here:

Box.net, Omnidrive, S3, GDrive, Live Drive, XDrive, Wikipedia, Revolution Health, Stats Inc., Freebase, Twine, DMOZ, Technorati, Hulu, iTunes, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, all sorts of wikis I didn't even bother to put down. All the micro-content places - I'll cover in the next post!

Major players and people to watch and listen to:

Brewster Kahle, J.D. Lasica, Ross Mayfield, Brad de Graf, Jon Lebkowsky, Harold Gilchrist, Susan A. Kitchens, Mike Linksvayer, Mary Hodder, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, Stephen Downes, B.K. DeLong, Brian Dear, Marc Eisenstadt, Christopher Allen, Aaron Swartz, Paolo Valdemarin, Jamie Faye Fenton, Bernard Goldbach, Jeremy Zawodny, Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Jimmy Wales

Major organizations and advocacy groups:

BBC, Internet Archive, ourmedia, mediaventure, Creative Commons,

Final NOTE: This is my second post in this series - I ain't done yet! Next up - #3 - micro-content.

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever? By choosing Wordpress.com (or Yahoo.com, or anyone.com) as my OpenID host/provider/whatever you call it, what happens to my ID should I choose to move it?

What do you know/think?

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HBO has announced that it is finally going to start offering its content online (in a somewhat meaningful way) through its new HBO on Broadband service. But the initiative seems so unnecessarily complicated that one has to one wonder if HBO gets a sick thrill out of frustrating its customers.

Here are the basics:

• The service is in the testing phase, and will only be available in Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisc.
• To subscribe, you must already have HBO and you must be a Time Warner Cable subscriber (Time Warner Cable, don't forget, is considering charging for broadband based on usage).
• HBO on Broadband requires a separate (PC only) download.
• You can download movies or HBO TV shows to your hard drive, but they expire after four weeks.
• About six episodes of a TV show will be available at a time. Additionally, each month, all of the episodes of one series will be shown.
• The service won't feature HD content.

HBO is in a tough position. Its entire business is based on aging media models, such as offering exclusive content and making people pay for its programming. But as Liz pointed out in an earlier essay, we are approaching the end of exclusivity. And at a recent CES panel, entertainment execs said they're looking to dump paid downloads in favor of ad-supported streaming because people online want to watch for free.

Additionally, the parsing out of content works a lot like HBO's On Demand service, which is simultaneously kinda cool and kinda sucky. It's obviously nice because you could watch the entire series of Rome without ever leaving your couch. But the method by which they parse out content is aggravating. To ensure that you keep your subscription, HBO dribbles out content slowly and somewhat randomly. Shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Real Time with Bill Maher are in constant rotation, but I've never seen a single season of Deadwood be offered.

Rather than muddle matters with an assortment of constantly changing schedules, HBO should just focus on its original content (after all, the movies are old and will be available through numerous other outlets, like iTunes and Unbox). Meanwhile, offer every HBO TV series and every episode for online rental. Or syndicate it to Hulu. HBO shows are already sanitized and shown elsewhere on old teevee with ad support, so why not do the same thing online?

Finally, HBO should turn its site into something more meaningful than just a boring rundown of what's available, with the occasional cast and crew interview. HBO fans are passionate. Tap into that and empower them to create content.

HBO says this broadband plan is just laying the groundwork for the future, but I'm not sure it realizes that the future is already here.

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Bad news for big downloaders who use Time Warner Cable as their ISP: you may soon face a higher bill. The nation's #2 cable ISP is set to begin charging customers more based on the amount they download.

A spokesman for the company says that the top 5 percent of downloaders can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity, which is why they are considering the new pricing structure. According to a report from the Associated Press, Time Warner Cable would offer various tiers of pricing, versus what could become painfully expensive pay-as-you-go charges for bandwidth. However, there is no need to freak out yet if you're currently a TWC customer for now, the new pricing structure is only being offered as a trial in Beaumont, Texas, and will only impact new customers.

While I imagine the immediate reaction to TWC's plan will be decidedly negative, it at least seems more reasonable than AT&T and Comcast's filtering of traffic for users that frequent p2p download services like BitTorrent.

On the other hand, if TWC's interest is truly to be fair, prices won't only go up for big downloaders, but they'll go down for those that consume little bandwidth (yea, right).

Is it fair for ISPs to charge heavy downloaders higher fees?
• Yes
• No
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DAVID ECKOFF: How do you evaluate and screen new ideas and products?

MARISSA MAYER: There's a vibe that comes from winning ideas. When I break it down:

First, I think of it as a new company within Google, to understand how we should invest. Is there a core piece of technology that would be interesting and repurposeful in any number of ways? For example, with 1-800-GOOG-411, it's expensive to process the calls and it might not pan out; but we're building a database that will make it possible to build a more robust speech to text model, which could be used in any number of ways... iPhone based search... it could help us deploy car based computers... it could help us do things like take videos and generate closed caption transcripts off of them rather than having them generated by humans.

Second, is this the kind of product that is easily articulatable and that will grow through word of mouth? Meaning, is it a very simple concept that people can express to each other on the street? Very basic concepts that are easily understood and used, instantly intuitive.

The third thing I look for: the overall vibe from the team. When you look at start ups, and founding teams, a lot of times it comes down to the verve and tenacity of the team. Eric Schmidt, our CEO, and I were talking once and I asked him "When you're looking across the entire company, what are you looking for? My area has become so broad, and it's really hard for me to be an expert in everything that I'm hearing about. I can't even imagine looking over the entire company. What do you look for?" And he said, "Sometimes, it really comes down to the vibe in the room. I'll just sit there and when a really good team comes in, I just get this visual image in my head of someone trying to take the mountain. I literally will see the presenters there, and I feel like they're just so fired up that in my head I unconsciously get this image of that team really charging the mountain and no one is going to be able to knock them back."

So that's really what you want: a piece of repurposeful technology; and a very simple and easy to understand idea; and you want a great founding team that's really fired up. So fired up that they won't take no for an answer and they won't fail.

I have a lot of friends who are entrepreneurs. I asked, "How do you decide when to start a company? When does that actual moment happen, when you start a company? I think that same thing is true when you start a product or a team." And he said, "The moment that you start a company is the moment you won't take no for an answer."

The new upgrades from web based RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines are tempting but none of them still match the desktop based FeedDemon. Let's see 10 features in FeedDemon that sets this software apart from most of the competition coming from online news readers.

1. Personal Techmeme - FeedDemon has an in-built meme-tracker that shows all the popular news stories within the RSS feeds that you have subscribed. It's something like Techmeme or Megite but only for the feeds that you have chosen.

2. Visual Themes - If you have subscribed to a Flickr RSS feed, you would want that to look more like a Photo Album than plain text. With FeedDemon, you can define different visual styles for your subscriptions so that doubles your joy of reading RSS feeds.

You can also read feeds formatted in the style of a Newspaper.

3. Real Time Watches - CES 2008 is happening a tons of blogs are live-blogging the event. I am not much interested in gadgets so I have created a new watch for CES in FeedDemon.

If there's a news story in my subscription that contain keywords like CES, it automatically appears in the Watch bin and I easily skip it. At the same time, I like to read every story that mentions Matt Cutts so there's a watch for Mr Cutts and so on.

3. Delete Dinosaurs (Inactive Feeds) - FeedDemon shows a list of RSS feeds in your subscriptions that are not updated in the last 2-3 months so you can safely unsubscribe from them. You also get to know about feeds that are in your reading list but you rarely read them - probably that can be deleted as well.

4. Desktop Alerts - Like Particls, FeedDemon can show desktop alerts as new stories arrive in your favorite feeds. The software itself can stay minimized in your system tray and can check for new content in the background.

5. Windows Live Writer - If you are a blogger and use Windows Live Writer for posting stories to your blog, FeedDemon can make you more productive. You can right click an item in FeedDemon and send it directly to Windows Live Writer for publishing or copy the entire story to the clipboard.

6. FeedDemon Download Manager - If the RSS feed has enclosures (say you are subscribed to audio or video podcasts), use the inbuilt download manager in FeedDemon to download episodes to your desktop. No need of iTunes.

7. Reduce RSS Stress - RSS is not like email - so you don't have to read everything. If there are too many unread stories in your reader, this new Panic Button will allow you to mark all those items as read which were published say more than 48 hours ago.

8. Offline Reading - If you plan to read your RSS feeds on an airplane (or any place that has no Internet connection), FeedDemon can prefetch all images and links for you so the feeds remain accessible while you are offline.

May also prove useful when the hotel is charging exorbitant rates for Wi-fi access.

9. Shared Items - Like the shared items in Google Reader, Newsgator has a similar feature called Web Clippings where you can share your favorite news stories. Each clipping folder has a separate RSS feed syndicated through Newsgator Online. Great for creating Tumblr style blogs.

10. Discover Your Favorite Feeds - You don't have to tell FeedBurner about your favorite feeds - it automatically detects and sorts feeds in your subscriptions that get your maximum attention. Similar to Trends in Google Reader.

Resources: FeedDemon Home, Nick Bradbury

What's missing ? FeedDemon is tightly integrated with Newsgator Online which is good but not so popular as Google Reader or Bloglines. If there was a way to make FeedDemon work with Google Reader, nothing could beat that combination.

Related: FeedDemon Review [v2.0]

Why FeedDemon is Better Than Google Reader and Bloglines - Digital Inspiration

• The total "book of business" held by Fannie and Freddie between them is now $4.7 trillion, mostly in the form of mortgage-backed securities as opposed to outright mortgages. That means their $65 billion in capital is just 1.4% of their book of business. That's worrying.
• Fannie and Freddie have been reasonably good at avoiding subprime: their $170 billion of subprime MBS is just 3.6% of their total book of business. But it's still $170 billion, which is 2.6 times their total capital.

In the comments, Anarchus has an even more sobering datapoint:

The majority of [Freddie's] book of biz is sound - 86% fixed rate, 91% owner-occupied and overall the garbage ratio is relatively small: 8% Alt-A, 9% IO and 1% option arm (note: due to the overlap of categories percentages are not additive). The problem FRE has is that the 38% of its book concentrated in '06 and '07 vintages has very different characteristics from the overall book: 39% Alt-A, 44% IO and 14% option arm. (WHAT were they thinking, these past 21 months, enquiring minds want to know?)

It's a very good question: Freddie Mac was not founded with the idea that it would buy a pool of mortgages 44% of which were interest-only.

Hamilton concludes that Freddie (and Fannie, too) should cut its dividend in order to increase and preserve capital: that's a no-brainer. But he remains agnostic on the question of whether OFHEO, Freddie's regulator, should relax Freddie's capital-adequacy restrictions and give it a bit more room for maneuver. Should the government use Freddie's balance sheet to try to restore liquidity to the mortgage market? Or should it first ensure that Freddie remains solvent? Anarchus is clear that "when we're probably no further along than the 2nd inning of a 9 inning game," the most important thing is to ensure Freddie's survival.

I have a lot of sympathy for this view, especially in light of what's happening to Countrywide right now. It doesn't seem to matter how big you are: if you're a mortgage company, you're at risk of failure.

So the next step, I think, is to take a very serious and realistic look at the downside of Freddie becoming insolvent. I really haven't looked into this, but I suspect that the implicit government guarantee would kick in, that Fannie and Freddie would continue to buy conforming mortgages, that their creditors would suffer no losses, and that taxpayers would be stuck with a bill for probably some 11-figure sum (over $10 billion, but below $100 billion). Not optimal, to be sure, but I don't see nasty systemic repercussions beyond the moral-hazard problems which have been a known issue for many years in any case. On the other hand, if OFHEO forces Fannie and Freddie to continue to dump performing mortgages into a downwardly-spiralling market along with everybody else, the damage to the multi-trillion-dollar housing market could be much worse.

So I'm still in favor of charging Fannie and Freddie with doing their job, and, in the process, of running the risk of insolvency if the mortgage market continues to deteriorate further. But I do appreciate that reasonable people can differ on this one.

CNET
The 80GB Zune cuts a much slimmer figure than its bricklike older brother. Measuring 4.3 inches high by 2.4 inches wide by 0.5 inch deep, Microsoft shaved some considerable bulk off the Zune's thickness, while nearly tripling its capacity...we believe the latest crop of Zunes should finally take hold as a true iPod alternative. (83/100)

PCWorld
All of the new Zunes are built around a rounded touch-sensitive control that also doubles as a clickable d-pad-style controler, much like the Click Wheel on Apple's iPods. Flick your thumb up or down the pad repeatedly, and you begin to build up momentum while scrolling through long lists. At any time, you can tap to stop the scrolling, though it will eventually come to stop naturally. In my experience, it's a very fun way to navigate through a music collection, even in a long view of artists on the 80GB player...All in all, the 80GB Zune is a decent choice as an 80GB MP3 player. (no score at this time)

Wired
Video performance is very good, with the screen size really helping...Battery life didn't meet the published specs of 20 hours for music and 4 hours for video with the Wi-Fi turned off. My rundown test on music was 18 hours, and video was 3.5 hours, which is, you know, fine.... Would I recommend the Zune? Yeah, I think I would. If you're not invested in the iPod/iTunes ecosystem, it's the most polished competitor I've used to date. Especially if you're looking for a subscription service, the integration of player and service just crushes everyone else. (6/10)

YahooTech
...the most innovative new feature on the Zune: wireless syncing. Setup was a piece of cake: you just connect the Zune to your PC via USB, fire up the Zune software, and enable wireless syncing under the Settings menu. If your system is already connected to a wireless network, those settings are transferred to the Zune automaticallyno need to key in the access point name or password...automatic syncing only works when the Zune is plugged into its charging dock. Overall, I thought wireless syncing worked pretty seamlessly, and I loved being able to sync new songs and playlists over the air (why can't the iPhone or the iPod Touch do this?)

Dean Takahashi
The Zune Marketplace website looks better than iTunes because it feels less like a spreadsheet. It still uses the MTV Urge back-end but is completely redesigned.... All of these things represent improvements that allow Microsoft to claim that it is going its own way. Clearly, they aren't copying Apple...At this rate of improvement, Microsoft will be a contender. But it has a long way to go before it keeps Steve Jobs up at night.

- Zune fans should be happy with the improvements, but even more, that the big new features are software based and free for everyone.

Take banks' losses on CDOs. What happened there? Banks such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch would bundle up lots of bonds, many of them backed by subprime mortgages. They would then take the income from those bonds, and split it into tranches, much like the income from mortgages is aggregated and tranched in mortgage-backed securities. They would then sell the tranches to investors attracted by the high yields on offer, and they would make healthy profits by charging a fee for their services structuring the CDO in the first place.

But there was a problem. It turned out to be quite easy to sell the lower-rated tranches of the CDOs, and even the weakest of the AAA-rated tranches. But at the very top of the waterfall, there was a large chunk of so-called "super-senior" notes, which yielded so little that no one seemed particularly interested in buying them. As a result, the banks structuring the CDOs tended to keep those super-senior tranches on their own books an activity which they thought carried negligible risk, since the debt was, as we used to say in England, as safe as houses.

When houses turned out to be not very safe, those super-senior tranches went from being safe to being unsellable at pretty much any price. You could try to look to something like the ABX index to get an idea of what the market considered them to be worth, but for many reasons the ABX is an atrocious guide to the value of super-senior CDO tranches. All the same, those CDO tranches are now clearly not valued at par, and so the banks concerned, responsibly enough, have written down the value of those tranches by many billions of dollars.

Now, here's Stein:

Why didn't the directors ask the chiefs, Gee, how can you continue to earn a far higher rate of return on debt than the market rate? How are you defying gravity this way? Can it last?
Why were the questions not asked?

Well, Ben, the questions were not asked precisely because the super-senior CDO tranches weren't earning more than the market rate: that's why no one was particularly interested in buying them. They were considered ultrasafe, ultraboring, low-yielding assets. The banks were happy to hold on to them because they were safe and because they came with hefty fee income attached. But if no one structuring these things foresaw that they might plunge in value, it's a bit much to ask directors to be so prescient.

What the directors should certainly have been doing is keeping an eye on total CDO exposure that's where the Merrill directors fell asleep at the wheel. But the number they should have been looking at was the rate of increase of total CDO assets, not the spread between market interest rates and the yields on CDOs. Looking at that spread would have told them nothing.

Stein doesn't stop there, of course. He accuses Merrill of being "P.C." in its choice of directors, stopping just short of making the same accusation about the chairman of the board in particular, who of course was African-American. And he is also unimpressed by Bob Rubin:

When I saw that Citi had taken a bath in collateralized debt obligations and subprime, and saw that Robert E. Rubin had been on the board in a major position and had failed to stop the train wreck, I was staggered. And now he has been named chairman. He couldn't protect Citi's stockholders, and now he's in charge? And let's remember, he was Treasury secretary when we had the first part of one of the worst bubbles in stock market history. What on earth are the Citi directors thinking?

Clearly, everybody on Citi's board "failed to stop the train wreck" should they all have been defenestrated along with Chuck Prince? And I really don't see what Rubin, as Treasury secretary, can or should have done to prevent a stock-market bubble. It may or may not be fair to blame Alan Greenspan, who was in charge of monetary policy and margin requirements, for that bubble. Rubin, by contrast, was in charge of fiscal policy, which has precious little effect on stock prices.

Stein finishes off with an appeal to patriotism, implicitly accusing Rubin and the other board members of immorality:

It certainly hurts to spend day after day, as I did this fall, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center where the incredibly brave wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan learn about walking and eating without their natural legs and arms and to realize that the America for which they're fighting is led in so many arenas, especially the money one, by such weak, disappointing specimens.
It's high time that the America for which soldiers sacrifice so much is run on a moral standard more like theirs.

Do you hear that, Mr Rubin? You should behave, at Citigroup, much as US soldiers behave in Iraq and Afghanistan. Your thank-you letter for this advice should be sent to Ben Stein, c/o the New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, NY 10018. Hop to it, before more "fresh tears keep the ground damp" at Arlington National Cemetery.