As of a month ago Trader's title had been downgraded to VP of Partnerships and Studio Services, although no top sales or business development replacement executive has yet been named.

Why is he gone? No one is saying. CEO Mark Pincus says only AT [Andrew Trader] and zynga have parted ways. He made an awesome contribution. We need to continue scaling the company. Trader hasn't yet returned a phone call asking for his comment.

Zynga's revenue growth has been nothing short of astronomical over the last 18 months, so it would be hard to blame him for not bringing in the dollars. Perhaps he took the fall for the Scamville saga although that has largely blown over now.

Trader was with Zynga nearly three years, so he's vested on a lot of his stock. Given how much money is at stake, the whole story about why the first cofounder of Zynga has left the building may never come out. Zynga raised $180 million in December 2009, at a rumored valuation of above $2 billion.

And no, I have no idea why he's holding a banana in the picture.

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

My Thoughts On Techcrunch And Daniel Brusilovsky

One of the side effects of being bipolar is that many of your senses are heightened. For example, there are times when I will smell gas on fire, when there is none, or a knock at the door when no one is there. As a kid, seeing flashes of people out of the corner of my eye made me believe my house was haunted (and kept me scared of the dark for most of my life). Even feeling hands on my leg or as if someone was in the bed with me freaked me out.

Of course, being me, I swore I had super powers. I knew I could see, hear, smell and feel better than anyone. (Taste was one I never spent much time with, dunno why) I remember things in images. When I used to take tests, I could see the specific page the answer was on, and I would imagine myself reading that page. Even now, I can remember weird facts and places, even as I forget the most mundane things (I have no idea where my keys are).

I know I had super powers.

I spent time looking in the mirror at each millimeter of my face and body. When I see people in photos I will absorb the photo, memorizing the crease under the right eye, or the slight dimple that only appears when the person is half-smiling. I note the curve of the forehead and the shape of the nose. The nape of the neck. The slope of the shoulder.

Its not just people.

I will notice the smallest spot on my dogs snout, where hair doesnt seem to grow, or the change in her skin tone depending on her level of activity. When I go to movies I spend time looking at the entire screen, trying to understand where the characters were coming from, why the set was built in the way it was. Where the story was going. Could I see the monster before it jumped out of the tree?

Over the years its has become not just visual. I try to observe emotion and body language where I can. Sighed just a little too long? IM responses are really short? Perhaps you are talking excitedly, but your eyes are tired.

Often I mis cues (especially in terms of relationships and romantic interest. Man, do I miss that stuff), but many times I am right. Which in many ways, is awesome.

But there is the opposite side. I see all my negatives. I see all the negatives of people around me. Friends will tell me how a particular woman that I am hanging out with is super hot, and I will see the white hairs and the standoffishness. People will show me what they are working on, and I can see the holes, and why something cant work before I spend time worrying about if it can.

Growing up, I used to joke that if I brought home a report card full of A's with a single A minus, the conversation at home would be about the A minus. My parents spent more time discussing the things I could improve on, than the things I doing well.

In my first couple of positions, and certainly at my company, that was the standard. You are expected to do a great job. Not a good job. Because you are expected to excel, lets spend our time on correcting the errors. Ive never much believed in bonuses or commission plans, after all your motivation should be perfection, not hitting some (semi)arbitrary numbers or goals.

In the past year or so, I have started to change how I look at things. I still see everything. I try to use that to understand the holes and the positive directions we are moving in. I have stopped spending time in the mirror looking at me (although, on occasion, I still do it), and when I do, I try and force myself to look at the positives. At work, I have started to do the same. In all situations, there are positive elements and negative elements and spending time on any specific element is not holistic. It is not a complete approach. It is a failure waiting to happen.

Now as a bit of a tangent (I promise to come back to center), each year, it seems that I am inspired in a large way by a single individual. In 2008 it was Jeffrey Kalmikoff, and in this past year (as a whole), as I think about, it kinda surprised me, but it was Michael Galpert. Neither of these guys said or did anything specific TO me, it was more how they conducted their lives, the struggles they dealt with, etc. In fact, I have a pretty good idea who might be my inspiration/muse for 2010, but I will wait a year to see if I am right.

Last year, one of the things that MSG did that I really liked is that he recorded his interactions with the world. Either a quick video or a photo.

I dont do that. I see nothing but negative in photos of me. There is a reason that about 15 pictures of me exist in the world. (BTW, I used to say that one day I would be rich and famous, so less pictures meant they would be more valuable. Always squeezing a dollar out of 15 cents)

So, as I start to try and see myself holistically, I am going to start recording my interactions (and allowing others to record my interactions) with the world. I am going to try this coming year to take a photo of myself every day. I have started to play with DailyBooth, which is wonderful (except I want an RSS feed of my own photos *AHEM*).

I might spend a bit more time in front of the video camera. After all, I do have a lot of things to talk about with the launch of a new company, and other cool stuff that I will talk about later (that, my friends, is an admission that I have nothing else interesting to talk about. Yet.)

Its all about absorbing life holistically. Let the absorption begin.

If you are looking for a meetup with more brainpower than horsepower you need to be in New York next week. Don't come for Web 2.0 East, come for the Augmented Reality Lounge being hosted by and at Portner Novelli on November 17th at 7:00 p.m..

In this room will be some of the brightest stars from the Augmented Reality and Semantic worlds. You heard that right, AR and Semantic nerds in one room. Two of the most powerful forces that are shaping how the next web will be architected and delivered both on pc's and mobile. The work of both groups will be the defining factors in how you experience the world around you.

If you would take part in shaping the future of the internet, these are the folks you should meet and talk to. Many of them are going to be in town for a panel on AR at the Web 2Open, an unconference event at the Web 2.0 Conference. The others are based in New York and take part in the Semantic Web Meetup Group. That group is organized by one of the AR panelists and semantic technologist, Marco Neumann (@neumarcx).

Other members of this panel include:

• Robert Rice: CEO of Neogence, Chairman of the Augmented Reality Consortium
• Ori Inbar: Co-founder and CEO of Ogmento
• Jack Mason: Global Business Services, Strategic Programs and Social Media at IBM
• Lynne d Johnson: SVP Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation and host of the NYC Android Developer's Meetup
• Erik Manley: Manager, Digital Media at GE
• Michael Eisenreich: Technology Leader for GE's company-wide Internet presence
• Matt Szymczyk: CEO of Zugara
• Marco Neumann: CEO and Founder of KONA, Lead Organizer for New York Semantic Web Meetup Group

This meetup before the event is the brainchild of John C. Havens (@johnchavens), the author of the book and blog Tactical Transparency and lead organizer for the first PodCamp NYC that helped to define all that followed. John has a strong interest in Augmented Reality and saw the obvious ties between the AR world and the Semantic side that I was talking to him non-stop about.

The Augmented Reality Lounge is an event that Marco described as:

The Semantic Web is an ideal candidate to become the fabric for Augmented Reality applications in the near future. The global availability of HTTP and the flexibility of RDF, the foundational framework for the Semantic Web, make it a perfect match for distributed, heterogeneous and networked applications that can help to enable emergent Augmented Reality services.

Believe me, if there is an iteration of the web that you should be a part of it is this one. The foundation that is being built from semantic data and the interaction with the real world that augmented reality presents is one that your ideas should be a part of.

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

Shape the Next Web Next Week with Augmented Reality and the Semantic Web is a post from: TechStartups.com

Video using VideoPress and filmed/edited by Michael Pick.

Going to set up a new form for these.

Dogster has never been a Web 2.0 darling. At first glance a social network for pets isn't the most innovative idea, and its audience is limited to the kinds of wackos who make name tags for their dogs at conferences or create elaborate fictional personalities for their cats.

But with the benefit of hindsight, Dogster has done two things very, very right: It never raised venture funding and never relied on an ad network for revenues. The result is its network of sites Dogster, Catster and Snuzzy that focused on maximizing revenues early on instead of aiming for user growth for the sake of user growth. While many other Web 2.0 names are struggling to raise more money to stay in business, Dogster has been profitable since the second quarter of 2007 and is solidly in control of its own destiny. (Full disclosure: Michael Arrington was a very early angel investor. His statement about his investments is here.)

Not only thatpremium ad sales for the sites are up 20% this year. Why? Because while hot sites like Digg and Facebook outsourced ads to big players like Microsoft and smaller sites outsourced them to Google, Dogster has invested five years in building direct relationships with big pet food, supply and other consumer packaged good brands. We figured each $50,000 ad deal was like getting another angel investor, says Ted Rheingold, Dogster CEO.

These aren't lame banners. These are coupons, contests and other things that incent users to interact with the brand. A recent example was a coupon from Royal Canin Cat Food. The company was hoping for 500 takers and it got 5,000. As a result Dogster and Catster charge $10-$12 CPMs and as high as $40 CPMs for their newsletter. (I interviewed Rheingold about this strategy back when I was co-hosting TechTicker. The clip is below.)

But there's a problem. Dogster is still a small site and even happy advertisers will only continue to pay so much to reach the same users. So Dogster has solved that by deciding to become in essence the thing that it always argued startups shouldn't work with: Ad resellers.

Dogster will now sell ads for the much larger Cheezburger Network of Lolanimal-related sites that include IHasaHotdog and ICanHazCheezburgera never-ending meme that will hit one billion page views later this week. That's 10 billion cat pictures served, says founder Ben Huh. At 72 pixels per inch, if you laid them out end-to-end it would reach the moon and back four times. (I'm guessing that moon part is actually true. Huh also told me that under the new deal every time they sold an ad, Dogster would ship them a free dog.)

The two have just closed their first sale to Clorox for Fresh Step Kitty Litter. Sexy? Maybe not. But it's lucrative. But Dogster is no longer in the one million-unique category, it's selling for six million uniques and until the CPM dies, this is still a volume industry. Neither company would comment much on the economics, but Dogster is taking a smaller cut than a traditional ad network would. In exchange, Cheezburger Networks has to do more work to make sure the ads are effective, whether it's creating a contest or just tracking the metrics the way Dogster already does in house.

It's an interesting announcement, since ICanHazCheezburger is so much larger and better known. Typically it's the smaller site that outsources inventory to the giant. But the founders Huh and Rheingold were long time friends who'd frequently ask each other's advice: Rheingold would ask how Huh got those gaudy user numbers and Huh would ask how on earth Rheingold was so good at monetization. Looks like the two will now be able to actually share those areas of expertise: Dogster now gets a network of six million uniques and Huh gets much higher revenues.

Neither of the deals is exclusive. Dogster plans to add more complementary sites to its ad inventory and Cheezburger Networks plans to ink similar partnerships for properties with non-pet user profiles like the FailBlog and newly launched ItMadeMyDay.comwhich has already hit one million page views.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Harvard has rolled out Week 2 of Michael Sandel's course on Justice. Courtesy of the course web site, here's a synopsis of what you can expect from Episode 2. New lectures are getting rolled out weekly. Check the Harvard web site for new additions.

Part 1 -- PUTTING A PRICE TAG ON LIFE: Sandel presents some contemporary cases in which cost-benefit analysis was used to put a dollar value on human life. The cases give rise to several objections to the utilitarian logic of seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. Is it possible to sum up and compare all values using a common measure like money?

Part 2 -- HOW TO MEASURE PLEASURE: Sandel introduces J. S. Mill, a utilitarian philosopher who argues that seeking the greatest good for the greatest number is compatible with protecting individual rights, and that utilitarianism can make room for a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Sandel tests this theory by playing video clips from three very different forms of entertainment: Shakespeare's Hamlet, the reality show Fear Factor, and The Simpsons.

We've been following the persistent rumors of an Apple Tablet for some time now and have written on why we think it's most certainly coming at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Today there's a small nugget of fuel to add to the Tablet fire, with Apple rehiring former Newton developer Michael Tchao as VP of Product Marketing according to The New York Times.

For those unfamiliar, the Apple Newton was the progenitor of the personal digital assistant (PDA) class of devices that outlived the Newton project itself, which was eventually canceled. Still, it was a groundbreaking platform for its time and presaged the age of handheld mobile devices. A truly amazing tablet device from Apple would in some ways finally do the original Newton vision justice.

Now, one of the original ideators behind the Newton platform is back after a 15-year absence. He'll be reporting to SVP Phil Schiller and carrying out unspecified duties, but it seems highly logical that Tchao might be involved in the marketing strategy for the still-mythical tablet that everybody is convinced is in the works. What do you think: is the new-but-old hire related to the Apple Tablet?

Header image courtesy of Pickupjojo on DeviantArt.

Tags: apple, Apple Tablet, hires, Newton, pda

Take subscription services for example. Sure, I'd love a service that would allow me to download unlimited content in high bitrate MP3 format for a reasonable fee every month. Except economics and greed will never let that happen.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Much of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's legal arguments following this summer's $1.92 million Recording Industry Association of America file sharing jury verdict against her don't have much weight or precedent.

Clearly, that a jury in June ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 music tracks she infringed on Kazaa is outrageous and shocks the conscience and there's no rational relationship between the amount of harm suffered by the recording industry and the award granted.

Thomas-Rasset wass the nation's first sharing defendant to go before a jury. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting individuals, and most have settled out of court.

That said, in their latest court papers, (.pdf) Thomas-Rasset's legal team again is sticking to the argument that the whopping jury award is a due process violation all in a bid perhaps to secure a third trial. (The first ended in a $222,000 judgment against the Minnesota woman, but a mistrial was declared after the judge conceded he gave faulty jury instructions)

Still, it is true that the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly reduced lofty jury awards based on so-called due process breached. But those were punitive damages awards, not statutory damages awards.

Those punitive damage reductions, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, do not apply to Thomas-Rasset's case although Thomas-Rasset's defense team suggests there's always a first.

Punitive damages are the amount a jury awards to punish conduct of an offender. Up until recently, there generally has been no limit. But the Supreme Court has suggested that punitive damages should be limited to about no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages a jury awards.

Higher ratios, the courts have said, are due process breaches because defendants have no notice ahead of time about the lofty financial consequences of their actions.

But the law is crystal clear when it comes to the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Thomas-Rasset. Juries can award up to $150,000 per violation. Punitive damages do not fall under the Copyright Act.

One of the only points in Thomas-Rasset's brief that makes a compelling argument is that the Copyright Act, when amended in 1999, didn't conceive of non-commercial cases the RIAA has been bringing the past six years.

The notion that Congress decided that the award of statutory damages in this case was somehow appropriate or tailored to ensure deterrence is a fiction that the plaintiffs would have this court adopt. The Congress that enacted the statutory-damages provision of the Copyright Act could not have had the kinds of illegal but non-commercial music downloading here at issue in mind, defense attorney K.A.D. Camara argues in recent briefs.

It's true: There's no doubt that a $1.92 judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000.

That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.

Still, the RIAA is crying foul.

After Thomas-Rasset refused to settle out of court, the industry is now demanding that Thomas-Rasset pay up. The RIAA is also seeking U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to issue an injunction barring her from future file sharing.

Plaintiffs' evidence showed that defendant knew what she was doing was wrong, that she did it anyway, and then lied about it for years. Through two trials, defendant still shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions and has made it clear that she has no intention of ever satisfying any portion of the judgment against her, Timothy Reynolds, the RIAA's attorney, wrote (.pdf) Davis.

Judge Davis of Minnesota could rule on the retrial and injunction issue any time.

See Also:

• Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
• Feds Support $1.92 Million RIAA File Sharing Verdict
• Will File-Sharing Case Spawn a Copyright Reform Movement?
• Thomas Seeks New RIAA Trial; Says $1.92 Million Verdict Monstrous
• File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA
• Jury Dings File Sharer $675000, RIAA Prevails Update

If you haven't heard the story yet, a Chicago real estate company called Horizon Realty Group filed a lawsuit against one of its tenants on Monday. She apparently made a snarky remark on Twitter, claiming that the company didn't care about mold in her apartment.

Horizon is suing her for libel, looking for $50,000 in damages to their reputation.

She only had about 20 followers, so this looked like a pretty harsh David and Goliath story. Unfortunately, Horizon's legal and PR teams forgot what happened to Goliath.

By Tuesday afternoon, the story of Horizon's lawsuit had hit trending topics on Twitter. Which means that a peevish remark made in front of 20 people has now found its way to hundreds of thousands.

That megaphone is a lot more powerful than you think it is

Think you just have 20 followers? Think again. Your tweets are findable both on Twitter search and Google. And it's a routine practice for any smart company to look for its name regularly using both services.

Think the customer who just infuriated you has just 20 followers? Think again. Angry tenant Amanda Bonnen's megaphone was tiny, but the social web can't resist a juicy story. And the social web really can't resist a juicy Twitter story.

It's not about what you think is fair

Horizon Realty might be the most loveable, fair, decent and true company in the world. Right now, their name recognition has about as much appeal as Saddam Hussein. With mold.

Whether fair or not, Horizon has made a worldwide name for itself virtually instantly, connecting its brand with callous disregard for its tenants, or worse.

(Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. This is what it looks like.)

Do social media users read all the facts carefully before flaming? Of course they don't. Are there dozens of inaccurate accusations about Horizon flying around Twitter at the moment?

Absolutely.

Is that fair? No. Then again, filing a $50,000 lawsuit against a customer for a snarky remark made to a friend isn't going to strike many as entirely reasonable either.

The Meatball Sundae has no mercy

Horizon's Jeffrey Michael, trying to explain his position to the Sun-Times, said that Horizon has a good reputation to protect. His company says they can prove there wasn't any mold in Bonnen's apartment, and they couldn't let Bonnen bad-mouth them. So they took a traditional route. (Although it would have been somewhat more traditional to ask her to remove the remark before filing the lawsuit.)

A year and a half ago, in a post about Seth Godin's book Meatball Sundae, I wrote about my take on a nice little company called Kryptonite Locks.

Kryptonite got knocked down hard when they tried to play by old communication rules in a new communication environment. They hadn't actually done anything wrong, but they looked clueless, unfeeling, and arrogant.

You don't get to play by the old rules any more, and it doesn't matter what business you're in. You don't get the old privilege of anonymity. You don't get to bury your story on page 47.

There is no more page 47. Every story is somebody's page 1.

As a matter of fact, it isn't your story any more. It belongs to everyone, and they'll do what they please with it.

If you want to influence the conversation, you've actually got to get into the conversation. Respectfully. Meaningfully. Just because that's a social media clich doesn't mean you get to ignore it and hope it goes away.

The one-to-a-jillion aspect of social media means that any of us can hit the equivalent of the front page of the New York Times at any time. All that has to happen is that we find ourselves in the middle of a really interesting story.

So what's the story about you going to be?

(And if you work for a company, be sure and warn your legal team about Twitter users. You don't want to mess with those people we're crazy.)

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication. She also offers a pretty darned good free class on email marketing.

Horizon argues that Bonnen libeled the company with her May 12th tweet, which read in part Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty thinks it's okay.

Bonnen's alleged twitter account, abonnen, is no longer active. But, based on information in Google's cache, it appears that Bonnen had 22 followers.

The statements are obviously false, and it's our intention to prove that, said Horizon's Jeffrey Michael. We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization. Michael added that the company has a good reputation it wants to preserve.

Sue First, Ask Questions Later

Horizon may be breaking new ground in public relations with its response.

By suing Bonnen for $50,000 over a tweet that was probably seen by a fraction of abonnen's 22 followers, the company is bringing Bonnen's complaint to tens of thousands of readers on Twitter, in blogs and in news stories that the situation will generate.

Instead of preserving the company's good reputation, Horizon Realty is establishing itself as a sue first, ask questions later kind of company.

The kind of company that will sue you for $50,000 if you have something bad to say about one of their apartments.

If Horizon's lawsuit goes forward, fixing the damage it will do to the company's reputation will take a lot more than $50,000.

Horizon's response looks like a textbook case of what not to do when faced with a new media PR problem. What do you think the right response would have been?

Note: If you want to share this on Twitter or other social network, hit the Share/Save button below!

Horizon argues that Bonnen libeled the company with her May 12th tweet, which read in part Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty thinks it's okay.

Bonnen's alleged twitter account, abonnen, is no longer active. But, based on information in Google's cache, it appears that Bonnen had 22 followers.

The statements are obviously false, and it's our intention to prove that, said Horizon's Jeffrey Michael. We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization. Michael added that the company has a good reputation it wants to preserve.

Sue First, Ask Questions Later

Horizon may be breaking new ground in public relations with its response.

By suing Bonnen for $50,000 over a tweet that was probably seen by a fraction of abonnen's 22 followers, the company is bringing Bonnen's complaint to tens of thousands of readers on Twitter, in blogs and in news stories that the situation will generate.

Instead of preserving the company's good reputation, Horizon Realty is establishing itself as a sue first, ask questions later kind of company.

The kind of company that will sue you for $50,000 if you have something bad to say about one of their apartments.

If Horizon's lawsuit goes forward, fixing the damage it will do to the company's reputation will take a lot more than $50,000.

Horizon's response looks like a textbook case of what not to do when faced with a new media PR problem. What do you think the right response would have been?

Names added to that list yesterday included one local writer: the ludicrously prolific Michael Nagrant of Hungry Mag, Serious Eats, New City and just about any paper or website that publishes a byline. Owning to all sorts of biases here as both a colleague and friend, if the Times really wanted to make a splash in naming Bruni's heir apparent few food critics have the resume of Nagrant; one that includes collaborating on a Beard Award-winning cookbook; a critic whose voice is constantly evolving; a entertaining and engaging writer equally comfortable in traditional and new media; one whose personal code of food journalism ethics is downright Orthodox Catholic in the age of the Yelp! Elite Squad.

I contacted Nagrant about his name popping up. He responded by saying that he's sent Times "Dining In/Dining Out" Editor Trish Hall samples of his work in the past two months for her consideration. Nagrant replied, "The New York Times food critic position is one of the most important jobs in American food writing. Whether it's (Ruth) Reichl or Bruni or (William) Grimes et al, as a writer I've looked to those who've held that chair and always tried to write to that standard. The NYT critic spot is very much a goal of mine." As to wanting to take the job in these uncertain times for print journalism, Nagrant said, "In these tough times for print journalism where some would rather be the next food TV star or own a restaurant, I want to write. I don't want to be rich or famous. I only want to sustain myself, practice the craft and get better everyday. I want nothing more as a writer and I'm willing to give everything I am if the honor came my way."

Nagrant acknowledged Eater's speculation yesterday with (natch) twitter updates, paraphrasing Groucho Marx and even providing a headshot so the Times doesn't have to.

This is part of our success story series where users share their tips and tricks on using LinkedIn more effectively. Today's user experience story comes from Divya Gugnani, a venture capitalist and principal at First Mark Capital who provides companies with strategic and operational guidance to achieve their visions. Read more on one of her more recent sponsorship deals she closed, with the help of a LinkedIn connection.

I'm a LinkedIn evangelist, and as a startup CEO, I've become an even bigger fan. I love all things social media and happily ride the Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo! Buzz wave. What makes LinkedIn different and incredibly helpful is the instant access to my professional network with an easy to use interface. As a former venture capitalist I used LinkedIn to source deals, check references for management, and connect with entrepreneurs. Today I run a media company in the culinary space, Behind the Burner, where we leverage a network of over 250 culinary experts to package their best tips, tricks and techniques in the form of short videos, articles and blogs. We also offer tools and ingredients the experts recommend at a discount. We actively virally market our food and beverage tips learned Behind the Burner and I take this same sharing approach on LinkedIn.

I've networked and participated in various entrepreneur, startup, food and wine enthusiast groups on the site, from ONEKO Internet Entrepreneurs to Slow Food to Food Service Professionals Network. People regularly send me inMail for culinary how-tos, restaurant insights, small business questions and entrepreneurial advice. Sometimes these interactions result in new business relationships.

Last month, Michael Gross (CEO of AJ Madison) one of the country's largest e-commerce appliance retailers, reached out to partner with us on one Behind the Burner's video segments through LinkedIn. He wanted to further market his appliance brand and we were considering doing a piece on summer grilling, and so we made a deal. They sponsored the segment and offered a e-commerce deal so our members can enjoy free shipping on appliances through Labor Day and as a result, they got a great professional, widely syndicated video segment highlighting their high end outdoor grills and how to use them.

I also use LinkedIn to generate buzz about my new business and keep my personal and professional network up-to-speed on my culinary happenings. Adding my profile link in outgoing emails adds credibility and the extra qualification nudge with certain requests. Your LinkedIn profile is like a mini resume, that snapshots your skills, experience and offerings and I like being able to subtly sell my expertise, as well as investigate other people's potential by reviewing their profiles. This has been great resource for recruiting new talent, including writers, videographers, graphic designers and interns.

I am genuinely baffled by the journalistic ethics debate over TechCrunch's decision to publish Twitter corporate documents that were apparently obtained through "hacking" and then forwarded to the Silicon Valley business blog.

TechCrunch appears to have played no role whatsoever in the alleged hacking. According to TechCrunch, it was simply sent 310 documents, unsolicited. It then decided to print "financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings," as well as "the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May." Why? "[M]ostly because it's awesome." TechCrunch voluntarily refrained from publishing other information contained in the documents, including "floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices." According to the NY Times, TechCrunch's founder Michael Arrington (a fellow OMM alum) "is working closely with Twitter as it determines which pieces of information to publish," though "[h]e is protecting the identity of his source."

Here's what I don't get: why the ethical hand-wringing here? Why was TechCrunch's decision to publish some of the hacked documents any different from what mainstream publications like the Times and Wall Street Journal do countless times every day: print information and documents leaked from employees to reporters, without company permission? Every company I've ever heard of prefers to keep its business information confidential. Often, they have formal confidentiality policies, or even require employees (and contractors) to enter into strict nondisclosure agreements. Of course business reporters know this. And yet, without giving it a second thought, they ask employees to violate their duties to their employers, and leak confidential documents and spill the beans on company secrets. And their editors don't wring their hands; they praise their reporters for their scoops.

In some ways, what typical reporters do in soliciting confidential documents is ethically worse than what TechCrunch did. Reporters typically ask sources to give them confidential documents knowing full well that the employee is breaking company policy, and possibly civil or even criminal laws (e.g., conversion or theft of trade secrets). But TechCrunch did no such thing; by its account, the hacked documents just showed up unsolicited in its inbox. And assuming that's accurate, I think TechCrunch faces no significant legal risk from publishing the material. See Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001) (radio host not liable under wiretapping statutes for broadcasting illegally intercepted conversations, where he played no role in illegal interception).

The hand-wringers can't have it both ways. Either TechCrunch's decision to print was perfectly legitimate journalism or what business reporters do every single day is even more unethical. Am I missing some distinction?

We're not only losing journalists, we may be losing journalism, according to Copps.

Some blame the Internet and bloggers, and that's certainly a part of the story. All that consolidation and mindless deregulation, rather than reviving the news business, condemned us to less real news, less serious political coverage, less diversity of opinion, less minority and female ownership, less investigative journalism and fewer jobs for journalists.

The decline of traditional print and broadcast outlets is the primary focus of the report. The report also loks at possible ideas for addressing these issues.

How about journalism? asked Copps. Will anyone figure out a business model to support in-depth, investigative journalism or must we develop something completely new, perhaps based on philanthropy, non-profit models or public media?

Kara Swisher has a great interview of Harvey Levin of TMZ talking about breaking the Michael Jackson story.

But at the end Harvey said something that just rings with me we're a platform.

So what do I think about platforms?:

- my company Broadband Mechanics' is in the white labeled platform business. The combination of our PeopleAggregator platform and Paolo Valdemarin's publishing system - Pages+ means we can build platforms for anybody cheaper, faster and license it at reasonable rate - around the world.

That means platforms need to have their own CMS/aggregation engine/direct manipulation page layout system as well as a full-featured social networking system (blogging, profile pages, groups, messages, widgets, media gallery, commenting, activity streams, OpenAPIs, Open Stack support, etc.)

- the BBC, NYTimes, Plain Dealer and NPR need to think of themselves as a platform. And American Greetings.

This means that whatever the core assets, features and brand awareness that already exists in your on-line offering, you need to SUPPLEMENT it and in the case of the 4th estate brands - move beyond just news and journalism and figure out new ways to MAKE money. Along the way you build up your own platform of members, giving them all the classic things they get from Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and Flickr. And THEN you wrap your own unique joie de vivre around it, insert some editorial, provide Open APIs to your most valuable data, figure out ways for OTHERS to make money off of that data and step back and build your OWN unique on-line cred!

- and since we're in an open web world - you don't have to worry about competing with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Seesmic or Flickr - you're gonna work WITH them, suck in and spit out their data and join hands and sing kum-bah-yah' with all of us - right?

Which means you're going to not only support the Open Stack and issue OpenIDs, you're going to respect and support all your brethren's OpenIDs (formerly known as competitors) and do the same for them - as well. And you'll bring in your biggest advertisers and sponsors and get them to throw contests and promos where your users and developers can all make a few shekels. And fame. Remember that tune you're humming

- finally - having a platform means having your own underlying ID strata - so all you're disparate web sites, web services and on-line anything is glued together and you can offer cross-site promotions, accounts, friends, sharing, commenting, rating and even a points system (formerly known as frequent flyer credits) so even YOU can get into the SWAG and schmattie market.

Remember those former competitors who you now support and who ALSO enable small add-on, widget, gadget developers who support your Open APIs? Well you're ALL gonna keep helping out those small guys - cause in the end - we all win!

Max Ray Butler, 36, faces up to 60 years in prison for the two felonies under law, but his actual sentence will be influenced by a number of factors, not least a plea agreement with federal prosecutors that was filed under seal Monday.

Wearing an ill-fitting orange jail uniform and round glasses, his hair cut short and neat, the six-foot-plus Butler towered over the burly deputy marshals that brought him into the court room. Once he settled into his seat, he spoke softly and evenly as he answered questions from the judge, frequently drawing admonishments to speak up for the benefit of the court reporter.

I actually did the actions that are relevant in the indictment, and I am guilty, Butler said, at one point.

Butler identified himself in court as Max Vision, the name he gave himself in the 1990s when he became a superstar in the computer security community. At that time Butler was billing himself out as a $100-an-hour computer security consultant, and he earned the respect of his peers for creating and curating an open source library of attack signatures used to detect computer intrusions.

But it turned out Butler was staging recreational hacks on the side, and in 2001 he was sent to federal prison for 18 months for launching a scripted attack that closed security holes on thousands on Pentagon systems, and left backdoors behind for his own use.

While in prison, Butler met more serious criminals, and he was befriended by a professional swindler named Jeffrey Norminton. After his release, Norminton introduced him to an Orange County, California entrepreneur and former bank robber named Chris Aragon.

Butler admitted Monday that he began hacking banks, merchants and other hackers to steal credit card numbers, then sold them to Aragon. Aragon, who's pending trial on related state charges in southern California, turned that stolen data into near-perfect counterfeit cards, complete with holograms, and recruited a crew of shoppers who used the cards to snap up designer merchandise for resale on eBay. Aragon earned at least $1 million in the business, police say.

Butler became a priority to federal law enforcement officials in 2006, when, under the handle Iceman, he staged a brazen takeover of the online carder forums where hackers and fraudsters buy and sell stolen data, fake IDs and specialized underground services.

He hacked into the forums, wiped out their databases, and absorbed their content and membership into his own site, called CardersMarket.

On one of the sites he hacked, called DarkMarket, Butler later discovered that an administrator named Master Splyntr was logging in from an FBI office in Pittsburgh. Butler partnered with a Canadian hacker to try and expose Master Splyntr as a fed, but his claim was largely dismissed in the underground as inter-forum rivalry. DarkMarket went on to become a full-blown undercover FBI operation, and the FBI and Secret Service began an investigation into Iceman.

(I wrote about Butler in the January issue of Wired. I'm now working on a book about him and the carder forums for Crown publishing).

Using informants and some genuine electronic gumshoe work, the feds identified Iceman as Butler about a year later, and arrested him in September 2007 at a corporate apartment he used as a hacking safe house.

When the feds seized Butler's hard drive, they found five terabytes of encrypted data on his harddrive, the government said Monday. They later cracked Butler's crypto, and discovered 1.8 million stolen credit card numbers belonging to 1,000 different banks. The banks tallied the fraudulent charges on the cards at $86.4 million.

But Butler's defense attorney told U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill Jr. Monday that Butler and his associates weren't' responsible for all of the fraudulent charges.

Butler, noted federal public defender, Michael Novara, frequently cracked the computers of other members of the underground, and stole their stuff. Some of the credit card numbers found on Butler's hard drive had been in the hands of cyber thieves before Butler began his hacking spree.

Max is kind of a hacker's hacker, said Novara. There was a lot of stuff on his computer that he was not responsible for, and did not intend to use.

I don't think I ever heard the expression, a hacker's hacker' before, said Judge Cohill, with a smile.

Sources say Butler's plea deal will also wrap up a separate federal case in Virginia, in which Butler is charged with staging the first documented spear phishing attack against employees of a financial institution, gaining access to the corporate network of Capitol One bank.

Butler was calm and attentive at Monday's proceeding, which opened with federal prosecutor Luke Dembosky crossing to the defense table to shake hands with the hacker, who smiled and nodded.

Through his attorney, Butler released a two-paragraph statement following his plea.

Max Vision, known in this case as Max Butler, pled guilty today as a first step toward getting this sad chapter of his life behind him. It is unfortunate that his life circumstances in 2005 led him to participate in this criminal conduct, and he very much regrets doing so, he wrote.

Max has always preferred using his extraordinary computer skills his computer vision for the good of society and the cyber world, and he hopes that he will be given the opportunity in the future to once again don the white hat.

Asked afterward what kind of sentence the government expects for Butler, Dembosky was vague with reporters. Suffice to say, it won't be probation.

See Also:

• Notorious Crime Forum DarkMarket Goes Dark
• Cybercrime Supersite DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm
• 56 Arrested in DarkMarket Sting, Says FBI
• One Hacker's Audacious Plan to Rule the Black Market in Stolen Credit Cards
• A White Hat' Goes to Jail

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Michael Bay understands that summer movies are about two things: male anxiety, and pure id. That's why he casts Shia LaBoeuf, that supreme avatar of pure male inadequacy, in the lead role. LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he's not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen's prostate that somehow achieved sentience. I imagine the DVD of ROTF will include a whole disk of outtakes where they had to stop filming because LaBoeuf was drooling on camera. As it is, the film includes several extreme closeups of LaBoeuf's dazed stare.

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

And then there's the "id" part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height. It's the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or "ghetto" robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their "schmear" and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let's go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement.

And yet and here's the part where I really think ROTF approaches "art movie" status the movie's id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

The closest thing I can think of to this movie is the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, which had a similar kind of CG image overload, although it was only five hours long as opposed to ROTF's nine.

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components male enhancement and pure id start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

So yes, ROTF approaches the sublime, and then just keeps rocketing. Next stop: total anarchy. In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.

But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot. There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.

Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.

Oh, but that's the other thing about ROTF. It's actually quite funny, a lot of the time. Some of the jokes fall flat, like the "twin" robots with the ghetto speak, and a lot of the stuff with John Turturro. But the movie's relentless silliness is mostly pretty hilarious, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, and almost nothing in the movie seems intended to be taken seriously.

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

Along those lines, a great documentary to check out is Spike Lee's Kobe Doin' Work (Netflix). Bryant gave the filmmaker unprecedented access to his life for one game. He's mic'd up, 30 cameras follow him, and coach Phil Jackson lets the crew into the locker room before the game, at halftime, and after the game too. Here's a preview:

It's fascinating to watch even though the game was a blowout. Also, there's a great storytelling lesson here too: Tell a story about less. See, the impulse is to go for a grand tale. In this case, it'd be to prove how great Kobe is by profiling his entire career or trailing him for an entire season. Along the way, you'd interview teammates, experts, etc. And you'd come up with a pretty generic piece.

By focusing on just a single game, Lee put a magnifying glass on how Kobe plays. Cameras trail his every move so during every timeout and every play, you get to see and hear how Kobe guides his teammates. It completely changes the way you view both the player and the game. There's no filler or outside input. It's just a laser focus on this one subject during this one day.

Sometimes it's easier to get a big message across if you narrow your scope. It's what we tried to do with our Behind the scenes at 37signals series which presented a look at one week of 37signals' Campfire usage. Not as exciting, perhaps, but the idea was similar: To tell the big story of how integral Campfire is to us, it was best to focus on a short period of time. Sometimes the perfect way to explain a universal truth is through an individual example.

Also, if you watch the documentary, Lee is incredibly loose with how he asks his questions. It means that Kobe is really relaxed and open with his answers too. If you're ever doing interviews, it's something to note: Go in with stiff questions and you'll probably get stiff answers. Go in loose and you're more likely to get your subject to open up and admit things to you they probably wouldn't otherwise.

Tonight I managed to get out for my first decent run since racing in the Cabot Trail Relay a few weeks ago. While out pounding the trails for what felt like forever, I was able to catch up on some of my podcast listening. I highly recommend you check out two of the episodes I listened to, from two of my favourite podcasters.

TVO Search Engine

If you're not a regular listener, you may not know that Jesse Brown's excellent podcast recently moved homes - from CBC (their loss) to TVO (their gain). Michael Geist has done a wonderful job recently of drawing attention to plagiarism and bias in a report by the Conference Board of Canada claiming that Canada is a hot-spot for internet piracy (the report has now been recalled by the organization). In his second Search Engine episode in his new TVO home, Jesse interviews Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference Board. It's awkward, it's uncomfortable, and it's fantastic journalism from someone that doesn't let people get away with a template messaged response to questions. Make sure you check it out.

CBC Spark

Nora Young's Spark podcast has long been a favourite of mine. While it has a similar tech focus to other podcasts to which I subscribe, Spark tends to cover stories I might otherwise overlook. In Spark episode 80, Nora interviews Andrea Reimer from Vancouver City Council about Vancouver's plan to open up municipal data (in the same manner also announced by David Miller for the City of Toronto at this year's Mesh Conference). I found the interview immensely refreshing. Coming from a government background, I know that there's often a fear within government of what people will do with information. This often leads to the minimum information necessary being shared with the public. Reimer's take, in contrast to that:

we shouldn't, as policy makers, fear the public knowing what we know when we're making decisions, and in fact by knowing it perhaps we could inform ourselves better maybe they'll think of new creative or throw in more information that we didn't have

I found myself nodding and smiling throughout the interview. Well worth a listen, for a refreshing take on how governments can go about sharing information with the people who are funding its collection. What other podcast episodes have caught your eye (or ear) recently?

People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that's not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. He's the only player we give it to, Morey says. We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don't want them swinging while they're thinking.

If [Kobe] has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that, Battier says. My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible. The court doesn't have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn't merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers' offense is worse than if the N.B.A.'s best player had taken the night off. [emphasis mine]

Click the play button below to listen, or click here to subscribe to us on iTunes!

Here are the show notes for this week's episode:

Shownotes for The Singularity Law Podcast: Episode 8 for December 8, 2008

Our Panel for Today:

• Prof. Michael Scott of The Singularity Law Blog
• Josh Kagan of The Josh Kagan Blog

Video Game Law as a Hot New Practice Area: Hype or Reality?

• Wall Street Journal: Video-Game Law: The Niche Legal Practice Du Jour
• LA Times: These Lawyers Got (Video) Game
• Michael Scott's blog: Videogame Law: New Legal Specialty or Marketing Hype?

The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 1: Malware

• 47 U.S.C. 230
• Venkat Balasubramani's SPAM NOTES blog: Could Facebook Be Liable for Spreading the Koobface Virus?
• Green v. AOL

The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 2: Trademarks

• Alleyinsider: Amazon, Google: eBay Shouldn't Have To Hunt For Trademark Infringers
• EFF: Jewelry Company Quest to Expand Trademark Law Could Quash Internet Commerce

Practice Pointer: The Continued Importance of Forum Selection Clauses

• Internet Cases blog: Court enforces forum selection clause in web hosting agreement
• Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute, 499 U.S. 585 (1991)

Turning Piracy Into Profit: The Myspace Experiment and Other DMCA Issues

• Reuters: MySpace, MTV Test Piracy-Profit Plan
• Michael Scott's blog: Priming the Pump - Copyright Style

Final Thoughts: Entrapment by Emoticon

• Wall Street Journal: Emoticons on Trial at the Nebraska Supreme Court

This recording is an informational resource only. It is not designed to offer legal advice.

Update: The Progress and Freedom Foundation is funded by the record labels, including EMI, Sony and a host of content providers.

A conservative think tank lashed out at U.S. District Judge Michael Davis on Monday, calling his mistrial decision (.pdf) in the Jammie Thomas music sharing lawsuit "unreasoned," "unreasonable" and "injudicious."

The new position paper (.pdf) from the Progress and Freedom Foundation says the judge's September ruling is riddled with "profound flaws" that "must be exposed before they mislead other jurists."

Davis' decision overturned a $222,000 Minnesota jury verdict against Thomas, setting the stage for a new trial.

The Washington-based PFF's staff and board are filled with former Reagan administration and other government officials. Monday's publication, "Thomas on the Making-Available Right: An Unreasoned and Unreasonable Decision," comes as the Recording Industry Association of America is demanding Judge Davis allow the record labels to appeal the decision to a higher court before a retrial commences. The trial is currently set for March.

Davis, a President Clinton appointee, tossed the jury's October 2007 verdict after concluding his jury instructions made it too easy for panelists to find Thomas liable for infringing 24 music tracks on the Kazaa file sharing program. Davis had instructed jurors Thomas was liable for infringement solely for having music in an open share folder on a peer-to-peer network, even without evidence that anyone had downloaded the music illegally.

It was an important decision, resting at the heart of what proof is required to ding a file sharer for copyright infringement, with fines totaling up to $150,000 per music track.

The RIAA has issued about 30,000 lawsuits. Most have settled out of court. Rulings on the so-called "making available" argument have been all over the map. The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled in a file sharing case.

Only one federal judge has sided with Davis. But the RIAA eventually won a $40,000 judgment from the judge, before trial, after the court said the defendant had tampered with evidence. But a Texas judge last month sided with the RIAA in a case against a teenager accused of "making available" music on a file sharing network.

In declaring a mistrial in the Thomas case, Davis wrote that "actual" distribution of music files was required. The RIAA countered that infringement was implied (.pdf), and that it was next to impossible to demonstrate somebody else downloaded files that Thomas publicly made available.

Still, the decision, even if ultimately accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court, does not kill RIAA lawsuits. In every case, the RIAA downloads music files from the open share folder. Judge Davis said the 24 downloads allegedly made from Thomas' share folder could be used as evidence of infringement. (A looming issue, however, is that the RIAA's investigators are not licensed, which could become an evidentiary issue but so far has not.)

Thomas Sydnor II, a Progress and Freedom Foundation senior fellow, blasted Davis for failing to follow case law that found pedophiles were guilty of distributing child pornography for solely having kid smut in an open Kazaa share folder. Snydor wrote that Davis "found these on-point analyses of the ordinary meaning of 'distribute' irrelevant."

Sydnor, a former copyright adviser to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Thomas decision misread or disobeyed precedents, federal treaties, scholarly reviews and the three branches of government.

In his mistrial decision, Davis concluded the RIAA's position "is simply not reasonable."

Sydnor seized on that language.

"And with that, Thomas collapsed its rickety tower of clashing results, unreasoned decisions, and distinguished precedents," Snydor wrote. "This extreme claim was itself unreasonable, and it triggered cascading absurdities."

Illustration: Modernhumorist

See Also:

• Thomas Demands Retrial in RIAA $222000 Verdict
• RIAA Decries Attorney-Blogger as 'Vexatious' Litigator
• Beckerman: RIAA's 'Vexatious' Charge Reeks With 'Falsehood and ...
• Retrial Date Set in RIAA v. Thomas
• RIAA Decries Texas Woman as 'Vexatious' for Demanding File Sharing ...
• Judge Declares Mistrial in RIAA-Jammie Thomas Trial
• MPAA Waffling on Piracy Costs; RIAA Says Illicit CDs Worth $13.74 Each
• File Sharer Settles with RIAA for a Whopping $756 a Song

On October 28, 2008, Google and the AAP announced a settlement of the litigation. The agreement, stretching to 141 pages, provides that Google pay $125 million, plus establish a new licensing system with publishers. The system will allow any copyright owner to opt-out of the project, will require Google to pay 63% of all revenues generated by users' access to the database to a collection society (the Book Rights Registry) for distribution to copyright owners, and will result in the implementation of a DRM/subscription model for full-text access, but not for search which will be limited to short snippets for in-copyright works.

Who won?

While the copyright owners will receive compensation for the use of their works, the settlement (if approved by the court) will definitely work in Google's favor going forward. First, the high settlement amount will discourage others from entering the field giving Google a virtual monopoly on every book, periodical and other copyrighted work coming within the settlement. Second, it will be more difficult for others to claim fair use if they decided to compete with Google. While there was no determination of whether Google's conduct was or is fair use, a judge in a subsequent case may look at this settlement as evidence that massive digitizing of copyrighted works is not a fair use otherwise, why would Google, which claimed fair use all along, have settled for such a large amount? A decision in this case that Google's use of copyrighted material was a fair use would have opened the door for many competitors who could have piggybacked on the court's decision and built competitive databases protected by fair use. So a lack of a ruling on this pivotal issue plays into Google's hands.

The settlement allows Google to charge for access to these millions of digitized works something that previously would have been difficult for Google to do and still claim fair use. So the settlement establishes a legal business model for Google to monetize this huge and growing database of copyrighted materials with the copyright owners' blessing. Google get 37% of all revenues generated, where previously it was getting nothing. (Much more than iTunes gets for their music downloads.)

The settlement agreement is, in essence, a compulsory license for Google to copy virtually any copyrighted work without having to negotiate individually with copyright owners. And it sets the market rate for any negotiations Google will have in the future with copyright owners who are not part of the settlement. While copyright owners are free to opt-out of the system, it would be foolish for most copyright owners to do so. They essentially have three choices go along with the system, opt-out and forego the revenues they would get under the system, or try to set up their own system to monetized digitized version of their works (which hasn't worked in the music industry and is unlikely to work here). A fourth choice do a deal with another database developer is unlikely, since this settlement sets up huge barriers to entry for any competitive service.

So, despite the price tag, I would say that Google is the big winner in this battle, and that the publishing industry may (no, I predict, WILL) live to regret the day they gave Google exclusive control over the online, worldwide distribution of their works.

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>