Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It's crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything's been programmed to use Yahoo.

It is not unusual for carriers to work deals for specific software on its handsets. They take money wherever they can get it. But this deal is sure to confuse the customer, as Android phones are commonly called Google phones by many. Let's face it, Google makes Android, and one of its strengths is the tight integration with the company's online services. And search is certainly one of Google's big services, but not on the AT&T Backflip.

This is the equivalent of a Windows PC hitting the market that has Internet Explorer removed and Safari as the only browser. Some customers might be happy by that but most would be confused. Then to make matter worse, imagine that Internet Explorer couldn't be installed by the user to get around this major change. That seems to be the case with the AT&T Backflip, as early testers are reporting the inability to get Google search working in any of the Android programs.

There has been enough complaining about fragmentation in the Android space, so I won't rehash that topic. But there is something so fundamentally wrong when an Android phone has Google search removed. And replaced by Yahoo search? I guess this makes the Backflip the Yahoo Phone.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

As Windows Mobile Stumbles, Which Smartphone OS Will Seize the Lead?

Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It's crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything's been programmed to use Yahoo.

It is not unusual for carriers to work deals for specific software on its handsets. They take money wherever they can get it. But this deal is sure to confuse the customer, as Android phones are commonly called Google phones by many. Let's face it, Google makes Android, and one of its strengths is the tight integration with the company's online services. And search is certainly one of Google's big services, but not on the AT&T Backflip.

This is the equivalent of a Windows PC hitting the market that has Internet Explorer removed and Safari as the only browser. Some customers might be happy by that but most would be confused. Then to make matter worse, imagine that Internet Explorer couldn't be installed by the user to get around this major change. That seems to be the case with the AT&T Backflip, as early testers are reporting the inability to get Google search working in any of the Android programs.

There has been enough complaining about fragmentation in the Android space, so I won't rehash that topic. But there is something so fundamentally wrong when an Android phone has Google search removed. And replaced by Yahoo search? I guess this makes the Backflip the Yahoo Phone.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

As Windows Mobile Stumbles, Which Smartphone OS Will Seize the Lead?

Although Open Home is an $3.99 app, I'd really call it a platform. With it, you can skin or customize your Android interface, add Live Folders, shortcuts and such. And there's tons of custom skins, fonts, icon packs for sale in the Android Market to enhance it. There's even an experimental 3D cube interface in the latest version as you swipe to other home screens, the screen rotates like a cube. I haven't dropped the $3.99 just yet, but I did install Open Home Lite, which is free. It wasn't until after installation that I realized the software adds two extra home screens to the Nexus One. I don't have enough apps and shortcuts to fill up seven screens just yet, but I'm heading in that direction, so the extra space will come in handy. Each of the screens can hold a custom descriptive title as well check this old but relevant video to see how one user categorized the screens on his HTC Magic.

Aside from the extra home screens, Open Home adds dedicated search on the left and an interesting little slideout drawer on the right side of the screen. Simply tap and swipe the star to pull out the drawer. I'm thinking of placing the most used apps in the little drawer so that they're available from any of the seven screens. And I don't even have to give up my Live Wallpapers since Open Home supports them on my handset. Perhaps one of the best features of all Open Home allows for home screen rotation to landscape mode, something I wish Android would support natively.

I'll be playing some more with the free, lite version of Open Home, but I'm already inclined to drop the $3.99 it's a small price to pay for two extra home screens and customization features.

Images courtesy of Better Android Apps

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Google's Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

Earlier, I posted a video asking which format you prefer our YouTube videos to be recorded in. Going a step further, I can't help but wonder what it is that will make the community one big happy bundle of joy. What do you want to see? What directions do envision our community taking?

For instance, if I post an article or video related to Apple, the Windows fans go ballistic. Likewise, whenever I posted something Windows-related, the Mac fanboys blow a gasket. It's like there's no happy medium these days. I cannot possibly make everyone happy all at once. I'm not even going to try!

However, I DO strongly believe that what we're doing is about the community, not just for the community. So I want to know what YOU think. What do you want to see more of in the coming months? What things can you live without? Leave a follow-up comment here, or drop me an email with your thoughts.

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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.

The big project fails, the company begins to struggle and before you know it, the board of directors replaces the management team. Sound familiar? But crisis doesn't have to spell the end of the company itself.

Most companies and teams in turnaround situations focus on the obvious and important factors of balance sheet, cash flow and net income health. Teams also usually get to work quickly on market analysis that ultimately results in new product and business strategies. These actions are almost always necessary, just not always sufficient. Here are four often overlooked tactics that, if successfully employed, are critical to rapidly and successfully turning around a struggling enterprise:

1. Facilitate Closure - When a team has been through an extended period of hardship, it needs a sense of closure before it can start moving forward again, and closure is often best facilitated through a cathartic event that symbolizes the end of the perilous and painful journey. But while closure commonly necessitates letting a person or team go, don't rush to find a fall guy. Be very precise about identifying what was holding the company back it could just as easily have come in the form of an ineffective process or out-of-date strategy. Approach its removal the way you would a tumor: Excise carefully, and be wary of damaging any healthy surrounding tissue.

2. Set a Vision - According to intentional change theory, there are five steps to achieving sustained desired change. The first is to identify the ideal self, which for an organization is usually embodied in a collective vision consisting of its members' dreams (to be recognized as the best in the industry? world domination?), their desired future (market penetration? profitability?), and their strengths or values (high quality? extraordinary customer care?) Identify these in order to establish a shared vision that resonates with each team member on a deep, even emotional, level.

3. Find an Enemy - The easiest way to solidify an us is to identify a them. As Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory makes clear, people need to be part of a group, but in a company the result is often conflict between groups. The conflict that most often occurs in a crisis is affective and role-based and therefore often negative and value-destroying. There is no better way to rally the troops than to embody the fight with an external nemesis. Identify for your team an enemy outside the company and focus on beating or staying ahead of it, using everything from its press releases to its product launches to spur the team into action.

4. Tend the Garden - In our recently published book, The Art of Scalability, we talk at length about how leadership is like gardening. Leaders must hire or seed the team with the right people and mentor its members just as gardeners feed their plants. And when team members aren't working out, they need to be weeded out.

The time period between Microsoft's release of its XP desktop operating system and Vista marked the longest in the company's history between product launches. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's co-president, admitted in a Wall Street Journal interview to telling Bill Gates at one point that It's not going to work, describing the development as crashing to the ground due to haphazard methods of feature integration.

To recover from this, Microsoft enlisted the help of senior executive Amitabh Srivastava, who rooted out the process that was holding the project back. He then had a team of architects establish a development process that enforced high levels of code quality and reduced interdependencies. Once the new process was in place, the vision was set for what was ultimately a successful product launch, at least in terms of getting the product out the door and meeting the expected sales volumes.

There are entire books and domains of research dedicated to turning around failed projects and distressed teams. This list is in no way all-encompassing but if you are ever faced with the daunting task of turning around a team, these four tasks will be critical to its success.

Less than 100 tickets remain for Mashable's Social Media Week event, NextUp NYC The Future Journalist on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 92YTribeca.

Join us for networking and a conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan (Professor and Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor of DNAinfo.com) and Vadim Lavrusik (new media journalist and digital media graduate student at Columbia University Journalism School).

Details

Location: 92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013

Socialize: Facebook Event Page

Pricing: $20 in advance, $25 at door. Tickets on Sale Now.

Food and drink: Full cash bar and food menu available

Schedule

• 6:00 7:15 = Open Networking
• 7:15 8:45 = Conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrusik
• 8:45 Bar Close = Open Networking

A Conversation and Q&A with:

Sree Sreenivasan Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor, DNAinfo.com.

Sree Sreenivasan is a tech evangelist and skeptic specializing in explaining technology to non-techies. He is a professor and dean of students affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital media program. Sreenivasan is contributing editor at DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan-news startup he helped launch in 2009 with Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade and whose family just bought the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field. He also has been a fixture on NYC-area television. For more than eight years, he served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV and now occasionally appears on various TV shows (on CNN, NBC's Today Show, CNBC and elsewhere) to talk tech. He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Popular Science. You can find him on Twitter at twitter.com/sreenet and on the Web at sree.net.

Vadim Lavrusik Online journalist and M.S. candidate in Digital Media at Columbia Journalism School

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media journalist and social media consultant studying digital media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he is launching NYC 3.0, a tech start-up news site as part of his Master's project. He's reported for publications like the Star Tribune, The Minnesota Daily, the Mpls./St. Paul Business Journal and most recently was a guest feature writer for Mashable.com, where he covered trends in news media, and contributed to Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/lavrusik and the Web lavrusik.com.

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Tags: Events, nextup-nyc, social media week

Yesterday, Apple got all of the geeks glued to their screens waiting for the "Jesus Tablet," iPad. An hour later, they were twittering that it did not come. Or maybe it just wasn't their Jesus?

It turns out it was his Mom's.

It's been a long time since most of us have used our computers to do anything approaching "computing," but the iPad explicitly leaves the baggage behind, leaps the conceptual gulf, and becomes something else entirely. Something consumery, media'ish, and not in the least bit intimidating.

The automobile went through a similar evolution. From eminently hackable to hood essentially sealed shut. When the automobile was new, you HAD to be a mechanic to own one. Later, being a mechanic gave you the option of tinkering and adapting it to your specific interests. In fact, that's how most people up until about 1985 learned to be mechanics. The big changes came with the catalytic converter and electronic ignition (and warranty language to match). Now the automobile has reached the point in its development where you don't even have to know whether it has a motor or an engine to use it, but to tinker at all requires highly specialized skills.

So, in some ways this evolution of the computer to the iPrius seems completely natural. I don't care all that much if the iPad is hermetically sealed, but I wonder uncomfortably if in a few years the MacBook and the PC will be too. Or, more likely, we'll just wake up one day to a world without MacBooks or PC's. As we continue our shift en mass to the mobile device ecosystem and the laptop as we know it goes the way of the desktop, banished to special purpose niches.

In mobile land, closed carrier heritage combined with Apple's product vectors may leave us with only closed options. A confluence of interests - commercial (get your pure non-pirated content only from me!), governmental (cyber defense!), and user (I want to be safe!) - will find that outcome attractive. Our generative and hacker-friendly world will be replaced by a sterile world of sealed aluminum.

No doubt the iPad will be hacked by someone to prove it is still possible. They'll run linux on it within a week of launch, but that's not where they will have learned those skills. They learned them on the highly generative PC they probably bought for something else. Slight differences in approachability and "ease of mastery" (as Zittrain puts it) make a big difference. The curves are steep. And tomorrow the people that buy iPad's descendants will be less likely to develop those skills. Who's going to buy a developer's license just to screw around?

For your phone Apple could make a strong argument that this kind of control was necessary. They needed to make sure it was a reliable first and foremost as a phone (rather than reliable as a snooping device or wouldn't just crash every time you really needed to make a call). The argument is being extended to the iPad more because of Apple's culture than real need, and if I was Steve Jobs looking at iTunes receipts I would do the same thing. But... directionally this is a vector toward compuserve, not away from it. The iPad is Steve's Minitel terminal.

Just for the heck of it, imagine for a minute that the MacBookPro was locked up like the iPad. The apps that run on the iPhone have been mostly trivial. One person for a few weeks is probably the average effort. Eugene Lin may be willing to build apps on spec and hope for the best after they are submitted, but will Adobe? Imagine when Adobe invests $X millions building Lightroom for a year only to have it rejected because Apple launches Aperture the same week.

With that in mind, I decided to filter the barrage of iPad coverage through a publishing lens. What follows are intriguing ideas culled from all sorts of sources. Most revolve around content applications the iPad may provide.

There's no way I'll catch all the good stuff -- there's just too much out there -- so please use the comments area to post links and commentary that grab your attention, publishing-related and otherwise.

Ebook pricing could get interesting

The iPad's release portends a price-point battle between Apple and Amazon. That's ebook pricing, not hardware.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is pushing book publishers to set two ebook price points, $12.99 and $14.99, with Apple taking its customary 30 percent cut from any sales. They key word in all this is "set." The big kahuna of ebooks, Amazon, controls its pricing. Most bestsellers are parked at $9.99, which is below what Amazon pays a publisher for a title. Amazon is subsidizing its low price point.

But that's the present. The future is a different matter. The thought is that Amazon is taking a short-term loss on ebooks so it can solidify its position as the dominant channel. Once it owns the ebook market, Amazon can ditch the subsidy and force publishers to renegotiate pricing.

That's the fear, and Apple appears to be playing to it by giving publishers an option: get a measure of pricing control through Apple, or make more with Amazon but pray they don't rewrite the rules later. (Apple could always rewrite rules, too ...)

What's really interesting about this -- and kind of bizarre -- is that the binary Apple-or-Amazon thinking obscures an important point: mobile devices already offer publishers plenty of pricing options.

What about e-reader applications?

Steve Jobs famously quipped a couple of years ago that "people don't read anymore." Well, I guess Apple changed its stance on that one. The new iBooks app -- and accompanying store -- is a big ol' cannonball in the ebook pool.

Early discussion on a back-channel publishing list I follow has focused on how Apple will treat its new ebook competitors. Will established applications, like Stanza and the Kindle app, be removed? Kirk Biglione, co-founder of Medialoper, thinks competitors will remain in Apple's universe. Just don't count on sharing titles across apps:

Look for books to be added as a new media type in the device media library. The other reading apps may be able to co-exist as long as they don't access books stored in that library. So, for example, you probably won't be able to use Stanza to read iBooks. [Note: Kirk gave me permission to post his comments.]

One thing to consider here: Past inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission may soften Apple's competitive instincts. At least for a while.

Of course, FCC heat doesn't preclude Apple from a little friendly rivalry. Digital Trends picked up on the backhanded compliment Jobs gave Amazon during the iPad presentation:

... [Jobs] basically told the online retailer that we'll take it from here.

The reading/viewing experience

Apple has already shown what it's capable of on the music and video front, so I'm curious to see how it handles the book experience. Early word is positive from folks who've had a chance to demo the iPad. Here's Gizmodo's take:

It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyesbut time will tell on that.

The iPad is backwards compatible with existing iPhone applications. That seems useful on first blush, but Joshua Topolsky of Engadget called out a big issue with "old" apps:

It's kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen.

More to come

I'll be adding to this post in the coming days as more analysis bubbles up. Again, please use the comments to point out interesting or informative links you come across as well.

You need a pile-o-data fast and you got nowhere to get it other than surf, bookmark and beg for interns to copy and paste for you. Where do you turn? Your IT department? Your hackery skills and your shared GoDaddy hosting account for bandwidth? Nah.

80Legs is ready to run a couple miles with your pile of data on their shoulders. You get to pick it up and work with it as you see fit.

Did I mention that they are now offering this as a free service? Well, up to a certain point it is free but for the many is plenty of room to get what they're looking for.

80Legs offers a unique service that will crawl the internet on your behalf and gather data from the links that you provide. They then take this unstructured data and make it available for further refinement to the customer.

Their value proposition lies in the ability to deliver this service efficiently and affordably. Like I said earlier, it would be difficult if not impossible for an individual run a service to crawl 100,000 pages quickly. 80Legs is offering this as a free service now and it's all powered by a 50,000 computer network.

The ability to put the data collection into another companies hands allows developers to think about what to do with the data. By freeing up developers more can be done with the data that is returned to them as they have time to think about new algorithms to run across the dataset.

An example of this would be simple search. Developers with more time could work on creating new layers to search that make it more valuable to the end user. Whether it is integrating advanced search functionality or returning results contextually depending on the page that a user is currently searching from.

If you're interested, the free Basic specs are below. Plus and Premium are listed on their blog.

80Legs Basic Plan:

• Free to use
• Normal crawling speed (up to 1 request/second/domain)
• Access to 80legs Web Portal
• 1 job running at a time
• Up to 100K crawled pages per job
• Low priority in 80legs job queue
• No recurring jobs allowed

[Via VentureBeat]

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• Got Data? How Changing My Social Sharing Workflow Is Making Me Smarter (I Hope). (techstartups.com)

80Legs, 50k Computers and a Web Crawler is a post from: TechStartups.com

The week before Thanksgiving, I attended an unusual symposium sponsored by the University of Denver Law Review entitled Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age. The symposium covered standard Cyberlaw topics, but the raison d'tre was University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron's two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review). It is unusual for a law school to celebrate another school's professor and her research, especially when the professor is fairly junior. Nevertheless, Danielle's participation brought together academics from both the Cyberlaw and civil rights communities, which provided a rare and interesting mix of folks..

First Panel

Danielle Citron started off by recapping her two papers. Online participation, such as blogging, is essential to professional standing, and employers are reviewing online profiles of prospective employees as part of their hiring considerations. However, women are being targeted for abuse online. These attacks are harming women by changing their online and offline activities, reducing their job opportunities, and causing women to change their gender representations online. Further, folks are trivializing these problems. Women are underreporting the attacks, and law enforcement only intervenes when there are offline harms. New laws can serve an expressive function to communicate that online attacks against women are socially unacceptable. The new laws can validate women's feelings that they have been harmed and encourage law enforcement to pursue more cases.

Commenting on the papers, Robert Kaczorowski of Fordham Law (and Danielle's stepdad) made an extended analogy between the Ku Klux Klan and cybermobs.

Wendy Seltzer asked if we could deemphasize the effect of words rather than prohibit them. Danielle responded that we don't know how seriously to take any particular threat.

An audience member asked if is there a difference between mobs and individual actors who are just taking advantage of being anonymous. Danielle answered that groups can become more extreme online. I think this point deserves more exploration: a series of uncoordinated individual decisions to pile on to an attack can look like a coordinated attack to the victim. This is part of why I thought the KKK references were puzzlingKKK activities are clearly coordinated, while online attacks against women can succeed without any coordination or ongoing connection between the attackers.

Paul Ohm argued that that legal solutions are better for cyber civil rights problems than technological solutions. Paul discussed what he labeled Felten's Third Law. (He doesn't know of two earlier laws named for Ed Felten; he just assumes they exist given Ed's impressive and influential oeuvre). As articulated by Paul, Felten's Third Law is that in Cyberlaw conflicts, lawyers love technical solutions and technologists love legal solutions. In other words, we love the solution we don't know because we assume it has to be better than the one we do. As both a law professor and technologist, Paul picks law over technology for these problems.

Paul categorically rejects any technical solution that would create a fully identified Internet. For example, we should not mandate server log retention because we know the logs will be co-opted to regulate other forms of unwanted content, not just online harassment.

Wendy Seltzer discussed the unintended consequences of legal intervention. For example, mandatory Internet filtering in school libraries hasn't stopped kids from bypassing the filters, but it has facilitated a marketplace for improving filtering technologies that has benefited repressive regimes. Another example: anti-circumvention technology fails to restrict copying but has reduced innovation around DRMed content. Wendy also noted how norms can help curb abuses. For example, while there are online cesspools, she praised Wikipedia's evolving guidelines for living people's biographies.

In response, Danielle admitted that her solutions need to be more surgical. She said she might consider moving from a notice-and-takedown model to a notice-and-preserve model for intermediaries.

Second Panel

This panel was composed of three women academics from the civil rights community, so it was a noticeable shift from the typical Cyberlaw academic discussion.

Mary Anne Franks is a University of Chicago Bigelow Fellow and soon-to-be full-time law professor. She expresses our collective disappointment that cyberspace isn't a utopia that allows people to escape offline discrimination and harassment. She laments that women can lose control of their identities online, such as when someone creates a fake online profile in their names.

She then addressed how cyberspace is unique/special/different with respect to gender harassment. Many commentators try to duck cyberspace exceptionalism, so it was refreshing to see her tackle the issue squarely. Existing offline discrimination/harassment laws assume interactions between repeat players at work and school; online harassment can be divorced totally from any existing social networks. However, because the online activities still harm targeted individuals at work and school, we should treat the harms the same. Offline, there are switching costs to changing jobs or school; online, search engines' consolidation of results for search on a person's name creates a different type of switching cost. In terms of supervisory power, she thinks web operators have analogous control to employers or school administrators. Thus, when web operators receive notice of online harassment, they should have a duty to do something about it. Offline, employers can develop a variety of responses and policies to combat workplace harassment. Web operators should have similar latitude; for example, they can delete offending posts or suspend/ban accounts.

Helen Norton, a University of Colorado law professor, did not share Danielle's optimism (expressed in her first article) that existing discrimination laws can curb online harassment. Instead, Helen thinks a new civil rights statute is needed, but she might limit its remedies to exclude money damages. Helen is pessimistic that there will be regulation any time soon, noting that it can take years to enact civil rights legislation. Helen would also like to see more precise definitions of the exact harms that women are experiencing only online.

Nancy Ehrenreich, a Denver University law professor, began her talk by saying that we should not overstate the Internet's benefits. She then clarified that we should not assume that disadvantaged folks can overcome barriers online. For example, we impose cultural categories on people in every interaction, so even if people try to mask their identity online, they can't really escape. She wondered why we aren't talking about an anti-discrimination law for the web. Her concern is that discrimination denies individuals access to the Internet.

In Q&A, Paul Ohm observed that civil rights scholars often invoke free speech as the countervailing concern to their desired regulations, but Cyberlaw scholars are often more interested in other generative effects of the Internet, such as new business models, new labor models and new modes of production.

Panel 3

James Grimmelmann (see his slides) started with the Skanks in NYC case. In that case, the defendant criticized someone else in her social network on a blog, calling the plaintiff (among other unflattering things) a skank. The plaintiff sued to obtain the blogger's identity. After a successful unmasking, the plaintiff dropped the lawsuit, having successfully publicly shamed the blogger.

James hypothesized that this unmasking and shaming was an appropriate remedythe blogger got shamed (like an eye for an eye), and unmasking is a better outcome than other legal remedies like damage suits. James then posited a thought exercise that provided plaintiffs with an expedited unmasking procedure if they drop any damages claim. This would have a number of benefits. Unmasking curbs online harassment is especially effective at busting online mobs. Also, an unmasking remedy avoids messy debates over the First Amendment's scope, and it may be more desirable than trying to hold online providers liable.

Having advanced his own strawman, James then cut it down. In some cases, defamation remedies may be more desirable, and plaintiffs may not know that until they learn the putative wrongdoer's identity. In other cases, plaintiffs who just want unmasking would appreciate a lower legal hurdle. Also, we provide legal protection for anonymity for good reasons.

James' lessons from the thought exercise: we should consider ways to decouple an unmasking remedy from litigation. At the same time, we need to protect defendants from pretextual unmasking; in some cases, retaliation is a big concern, and we should incorporate this concern into the unmasking decision.

From Chris Wolf's talk (see his full remarks), the most interesting thing I learned is that 18 states have laws banning wearing masks in public, enacted to suppress KKK activities. This was the second speaker's KKK reference of the day, and it made me wonder if we were experiencing some variation of Godwin's Law.

Panel 4

Viva Moffat observed that secondary liability issues generate the most heat in online harassment discussions. She expressed concern that imposing legal duties on third parties may not help law's norm-shaping effect, and it's not appropriate to impose liability just because the provider has deeper pockets or the direct actor can't be found. She also suggested that imposing liability on third parties creates a greater risk of collateral damage than direct liability. [Note: I would like to know more about this last assertion. I suspect we cannot make a utilitarian calculation a priori]. As a result, she favors focusing more efforts on sharpening direct liability.

Ed Felten talked about identifying and anonymizing online activity. He explained the usual sequence of events in chasing bad online content:

log file => IP address => identity => justice

But the IP address => identity step breaks down when users use an anonymizing proxy or the user's network uses network address translation (used by home wireless routers or in coffee shops) and all connected devices' requests share a single IP address. He said that a majority of Internet connections use NAT.

Because IP address tracebacks can dead-end at the intermediary, an IP address can reveal too little information. However, even when users aren't investigatory targets, IP addresses can reveal too much information, such as geolocation. This paradoxIP addresses simultaneously reveal both too much and too little informationreflects that the IP address system was built for routing, not identification. So could we design a better authenticating technology?

He then conducted a semi-realistic thought experiment of a new technological tag that could be used instead of IP addresses. This tag could have the following attributes:

* can be placed by any intermediary
* conveys no information about the sender unless unwrapped by the intermediary (presumably for good legal cause)
* unwrapping the tag yields the best identity information the intermediary has
* the tag's use is voluntary as a technical matter
* the tag is removable as a technical matter

I then batted clean-up. A summary of my remarks:

Today's conversation has revisited long-standing Cyberlaw issues, such as:

* anonymity v. accountability, and who should be responsible for online content and actions
* cyberspace as a physical place. See, e.g., Noah v. AOL (an online discrimination case), National Federation of the Blind v. Target (also an online discrimination case) and Estavillo v. Sony
* cyberspace exceptionalism and cyberspace utopianism (on the latter point, see my article on search engine utopianism)
* when is the optimal time to regulate rapidly evolving technology? Early, when the technology is still in its infancy, or later, when market forces and new technological evolutions may have cured the early problems?

Danielle's articles convinced me that women are experiencing serious harms online that menincluding mecould easily trivialize. Danielle's articles also convinced me that online harassment has strong parallels to the 1970s legal evolution of workplace harassment doctrines, where a big part of the battle was to get people to take the harms seriously.

While I find a lot of descriptive value in Danielle's work, the normative implications are not as clear. As usual with attempts to regulate rapidly evolving technology, there are many important but overwhelmingly hard definitional challenges, such as who is an intermediary, what are online mobs and what constitutes online harassment. For example, I do not think the Skanks in NYC incident is an online harassment case or an attack, but James Grimmelmann's talk assumed those characterizations.

While we can debate what should be the right level of regulatory intervention, we should not overlook that Congress already enacted a law squarely governing intermediary liability for online harassment: 47 USC 230. The angst that prompted this conferencebad behavior onlineis the logical consequences of 230's broad immunity. The statute enables websites to adopt policies that they will not police user content or retain server logs of user activity. These choices aren't a surprise or a per se abuse of the immunity; instead, they are the unavoidable implications of Congress' action.

We might question Congress' wisdom in adopting 230, but we should not diminish its potential importance to the Internet as we know it. [In Q&A, Chris Wolf asked about the comparative experience in countries that don't have such broad immunity. In those countries, we know that websites take down user content much more freely, and I believe that the most interesting UGC innovations are all taking place here in the US, not countries with more restrictive UGC liability.] I can, at most, only prove correlation and not causation, but I believe 230 is one of the main causal reasons why the Internet has succeeded so well.

When I speak around the country about 230, I often encounter folks who generally accept 230's immunity scope but want just one new exception, i.e., their pet topic. If everyone got their just one exception, the law would be eviscerated. (I said it would be Swiss-cheesed to death; maybe I should have said it would be overcome by a thousand duck bites). I'm not rejecting new exceptions categorically (they should be each considered on their own merits), but in aggregate 230's immunization benefits are actually quite precarious. I believe 230 works precisely because of its strength and simplicity, so adding more exceptions could significantly reduce its efficacy.

I concluded my remarks by observing that online harassment is a subspecies of bullying and incivil behavior in our society. While we can and should work to curb online harassment, I am more interested in addressing bullying and incivility in all its forms, wherever it takes place.

In this regard, I have been impressed by how my son's school is proactively addressing bullying. See more about this effort, called Project Cornerstone. The school is teaching kids not to bully or to tolerate being bullied, and the project gives bullied kids tools to go on the offensive against bullies. There's no guarantee that anti-bullying programs will work in the short or long run, but I remain hopeful that online harassment today partially reflects that many current Internet users never got any anti-bullying education. Perhaps, then, online harassment issues will naturally abate (without any regulatory intervention) as new generation of Internet users, better educated about bullying, come onto the Internet.

Following my remarks, we had more Q&A.

Paul Ohm Q: Some cyber folks argue against secondary liability because they believe that a victim can pursue a direct action, but Ed's talk suggests that user anonymity will continue to be possible.

Mary Anne Franks: civil rights isn't about individual claims because victims have to bear too high a burden to pursue claims. Instead, civil rights are about changing large-scale social norms. The goal is to achieve anti-discrimination by any means necessary. Thus, civil rights scholars have already discussed and concluded that it's appropriate to impose liability on intermediaries like employers and schools.

Danielle: intermediaries are the lowest cost avoiders.

James Grimmelmann: no, the harassers are the lowest cost avoiders. Civil rights folks would get more support from the Cyberlaw crowd if they focused their regulatory desires towards intermediaries who are in active concert with the bad actors.

Danielle's Wrap-Up

We all agree that:

* education can make a big difference
* online communities need to self-police
* there are numerous limits to using the law as a solution, including that lawsuits don't make sense and 230's immunity.

We don't agree on what to do next. There are First Amendment limits, and technology doesn't offer any panaceas.

For those of you unaware, Engadget put on a new face this week and restructured the way stories are found on their site. As part of this new design they began sculpting links with a technique that I'm dubbing URL graffiti. Say what?

They are engaged in a brilliant new system of taggery that shows the maturity of blogs that have thousands of items of content and want to gain the value that they often represent. One method that they have chosen for this is filtering with user chosen tags (graffiti) attached to the end of a tag URL. Example: http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g,sony

Why is this brilliant?

It shows a step forward by Engadget and their designers to finding solutions to create value from the long tail. For the public and their own writers there is now an ability to treat all of this content as a reference system. You could also call it a knowledge base, library or archive. Whatever your chosen term, this simple approach to content filtering is hot.

What does it mean?

Access to an entire body of work via multiple tags can begin to yield better search results without forcing a user into a situation where they need to use an advanced search' feature. These are usually blocks of form elements that easily overwhelm a user's sense that they can find what they are looking for with ease and underwhelm them with your information architecture skills.

Take the full example URL above with graffiti as an example then click these three links with varying tag graffiti on the end of them in succession:

1. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att // All ATT tagged content
2. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g // All ATT and 3g tagged content
3. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g,sony // All ATT and 3g and Sony tagged content

As the results wane you are given a better picture of content within Engadget's archive that meets the tag requirements. In this purest form it is advanced search functionality without the mess.

How to use it?

I found this feature because Engadget was already using it in posts. Their writers can use it to create a better picture of previously written content for users that click through. It can also be used by them as a an internal search capability for research on a topic. When you have multiple authors the chances are high that at some point there is another post or a few within the corpus that is similar and a can be used for reference.

In this current iteration this feature for users is a bit limited. Users can tack on their own graffiti to the URL and get results for these topics, but it is more of a command line interaction. It is powerful but not very user-friendly.

How can URL Graffiti from Engadget be improved?

This is a powerful system for content filtering that needs just a few tweaks and can become a ridiculously valuable to the publisher and to users.

1. Autodiscovery feed added to page
2. Link to this feed in the top section
3. Ability to add a .rss or .xml' to query for feed access
4. Button to change tag search to OR' instead of And' to increase results pool
   1. Currently all searches are AND'
   2. Ex. ATT and 3g and Sony
   3. New would allow ATT or 3g or Sony
5. Text input box with URL graffiti loaded in it for editing to add new tags
6. Number of results displayed on page

Below is a comp of some of these changes added into the interface. By no means is it perfect but it is a good start to adding some additional value to users. Click the image to see full size.

For your next client or startup keep this URL graffiti approach in mind as an efficient way to solve content filtering. If it is built in from the beginning you can ensure that you are creating a continued value, even if diminishing, for your content. Let your users throw some graffiti on your work.

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

URL Graffiti From Engadget is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is your chance to be a Martian, and you don't even have to step away from your computer screen. NASA and Microsoft created the Be a Martian Web site to let anyone participate in research and help them sort through data.

I wanted to be a Martian Citizen, so I set up an account. The first question was quick and easy: How old are you? Then they asked me to create a Martian Identity. I entered the relevant information in green text. I claimed to be an Intrepid Explorer. And I chose a kangaroo avatar to represent me. And most importantly, I gave my Citizen Oath. I counted the number of craters on-screen by clicking my mouse on each one. The more I played, the more game points I earned. And the act of counting craters will help scientists figure out the age of certain regions on Mars. Was counting craters really as fun as the wildly, addicting game, Minesweeper?

There are multiple levels of engagement through virtual town hall discussions and videos that put Mars researchers in the limelight. But it's not all fun and games. You really do have a chance to help scientists improve the maps, which will help them see the surface changes better. Developers can win a prize if they can figure out how to distribute hundreds of thousands of Mars images online and in the classroom.

Is this my generation's virtual version of the moon landing? There are no strings attached with this visit. NASA gives you the option to just look around with their Anonymous Tourist Visa.

NASA and Microsoft Want You To Be a Martian! is a post from: TechStartups.com

There is hope. The Huffington Post calls this The Obama-Effect in Journalism, where small donations from a crowd is used to fund stories. If crowdfunding becomes the future of journalism, the editorial power will shift from an elite group of editors deciding on what is important to the community choosing which issues they care about most.

Several companies such as Kickstarter have figured out a way to fund the creative mind. Musicians and journalists can connect with fans to raise money for their projects. For example, Polyvinyl Records sold their overstock through Kickstarter and racked in $15,000. The donors received complementary DVD sets for their payments.

David Cohn founded Spot.us, a non-profit that recently had one of its community funded stories end up in The New York Times. Spot.us raised money for Lindsey Hoshaw's $10,000 trip to the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. Hoshaw spent a month aboard Captain Charles Moore's research vessel, the Alguita, to report on the plastic trash floating in our seas. Eventhough The Columbia Journalism Review was underwhelmed by the actual reporting of the story, it is an example of how community funded reporting can be done.

Hoshaw's garbage patch story might be a one-hit wonder. Crowdfunding isn't going to save traditional media. The real issue is figuring out the best payment model for online content. Sadly, 80 percent of us admit that we wouldn't pay to read anything online. But if you're in the minority, these companies will collect your spare change.

Image: flickr/ Donncha @ InPhotos.org

Fund Your Stories and Projects With Small Donations is a post from: TechStartups.com

User: Taminania
Location: Norway
Occupation: Psychologist

These sound like the character sketch for the lead in a science fiction piece about some dystopian future. Maybe a future ruled through a bot-mediated reality? Sorry, just had to touch on yesterday's post about that.

The information above is true in fact. She is a social psychologist in Oslo, Norway that goes by the user name Taminania on Google Reader. And she shares about 20 blog posts on average from her subscription list daily. I have never met or spoken with Taminania but she is a rock star in my world. A smart rock star.

She isn't the leader of a rogue group fighting for survival in the aforementioned dystopian world. She is a passionate psychologist that seeks out high quality content online in her field then shares it online. In this sharing process the door opens wide to accept her recommendations, nearly tacit, that allow those that come across her Google Reader shared feed enlightened.

In every example of the site that I have built to capture and continue filtering her shared feed, and that of about 59 others, I talk about her shares. By filtering the master feed that Taminania creates through daily user activity I am able to glean what I find most valuable and let the rest flow on by.

Example:

I have created a group called Taminania Science. Where I filter down the entire content database to shares from Tamihania, from any publisher and with the keywords augmented, brain, reality, science, research.

Which currently yields the following results:

1. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
2. Foreign subtitles improve speech perception
3. Why Do We Dream?
4. Are You Treating Your Computer Better Than You Treat Yourself?
5. New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children: Good Readers Learn From Repeating Auditory Signals, Poor Readers Do Not
6. Geoffrey Cohen on Identity, Belief, and Bias
7. Bacteria in Gut Linked to Obesity; Western Diet a Factor

Compare this list her current (as of this moment) full Google Reader shared feed:

1. Drop of water
2. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
3. Google *Chrome OS* To Launch Within A Week
4. Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.
5. How To Easily Automate Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog
6. A New TV Guide for Internet Television
7. The Introvert's Guide to People

Of all the links in the first list above I am not subscribed to a single of the publishers. I don't need to be to get the value of their content. However, I do need a guide like Taminania that has an understanding the topics and the drive to sort the quality content from these publishers. The other thing I need is the software to make it happen. In this case I built it for myself and would love to publicly release it. But in the current version it doesn't scale very well and has a tendency to crash my server. Who can make this happen for everyone?

The answer is simple Google. What I have created are features and an automated advanced search that pulls from a pool of data. My pool is currently 43k items. Google's slightly larger. By a factor of 10k or more I am sure.

What I am able to learn from Taminania's shares in what is clearly not a dystopian reality comes to me from as close to osmosis as a human can get when it comes to information. In this version of the story we are all learners and we are all teachers. The only problem is that we don't have the tools we need to teach.

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

Google Reader and The Osmotic Learner is a post from: TechStartups.com

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

Startups are often in a position of being bootstrapped or strapped for cash when it comes to what is considered outside the core product roadmap.

Often in that category is the marketing of the product site online. The crew at Sitening as an ever maturing offering with Raven SEO Tools that won't hurt a startup budget and could prove a big return on a $79 monthly investment.

Raven SEO Tools is an internet marketing tool set. Designed to be a powerful tool for those in the know and accessible to newbies to manage site marketing, research SEO, monitor linking campaigns, reporting and integration with the Google Analytics API.

If there is one thing that Raven could do to improve upon this application it would be spin off components of the functionality into separate interfaces or other product offerings. Raven doesn't suffer from bloat, but it does put a lot of options for monitoring and reporting in front of a user.

Raven's interface is like opening a tool box to find the shiniest most sophisticated wrenches when you would settle for a rusty vice grip. After some time you can get to the rusty vice grip but you have to know where to find it.

The team at Sitening has begun to address with the addition of a Wizard for entering in a new site for monitoring and some social components. The social monitoring is a must for today's market in monitoring tools and a welcome addition for a startup to gauge the pulse of concerned users.

Beyond the Wizard integration there is something very interesting that Raven has that no other monitoring application I've reviewed has a content manager. Raven has a built in mini-CMS consisting of the essentials, title, keywords and body with a TinyMCE WYSIWYG wrapper that currently will connect with a WordPress blog.

The ability to blog from within a robust set of tools when a users mind is full of ideas, keywords, strategy and tactics is a powerful addition. It turns Raven into a hybrid monitoring SaaS that has the ability to help make your startup budget go further.

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

Make Your Site Fly With Raven SEO Tools is a post from: TechStartups.com

The semantic web is well on its way and one of the startups that has taken an early lead is Zemanta. They have taken a unique approach to linked data and the science that powers their ability to create structured content from it. They aimed their service at publishers, not the IT crowd.

Typically, semantic technology companies rely heavily on their colleagues with computer science degrees not the actual publisher. They will deliver products as API's or server side solutions with a hefty price tag. Zemanta has created the right relationships with CMS and blogging platform owners to integrate their tools within administration sections.

They offer AJAX'ed out components in these platforms that reads from the main content box as a publisher types a post and updates linked content like photos, links and tags that are appropriate for the post. By doing this it allows the publisher to focus on their post and actual release content faster.

The core of their service is to intelligently eliminate the need for the publisher to start research from ground zero. They offer points of direction inside the administration interface to guide the publisher to resources quickly. I am most impressed with the way that Zemanta handles tags and the relationships between them.

Zemanta does offer an API, I have used it in the past. The API returns data quickly and an even more robust set than the plugin style for CMS's. A sample request returns maps, categories, links, excerpts and more. The only problem that I encountered was one that all semantic companies have right now, context and sentiment for breaking news.

Semantic services rely on hefty algorithms that need sample data to create the links between data and develop sentiment. As a result of this issue, it makes it very hard to implement solutions that work with real-time data and syndication of that content. Most times, once something has hit a feed or been released to a partner site it cannot be updated with linked data. I've been told it is something that the Zemanta team is working on.

Zemanta makes it easy to Zemify your content in WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type among others and possibly Blogger in the future.

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

Post from: TechStartups.com

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• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

I dance the Macarena whenever I come across an article that argues against healthy living. I cautioned you against too much positive thinking a few days ago. I laughed while reading research about dark chocolate firing up the happy brain. And I high fived the doctors who warn folks against too much sunscreen because it blocks the vitamin D that all of us need. I hate that stuff and was looking long and hard for an excuse not to look like a clown this summer. Thank you!

I've even performed the opposite of an intervention with one of my friends last week who was foolishly trying to give up alcohol and nicotine at the same time.

No, no, no, I told her. You can't do both of these together and expect to keep friends. Now I suggest you go pour yourself a glass of Merlot or light up the lung rocket pronto, and do us all a favor.

Alas, I bring you one more doctor you will like: Dr. Erika Schwartz, Medical Director of Cinergy Health. She's here to tell us not to get too carried away with our healthy habits. Thanks, Erika!

As a society, we are constantly striving to lead healthier, happier lives. But with these efforts, we sometimes run the risk of going too far. As a rule of thumb, any extreme is unhealthy, but rarely are we made aware of the cons of healthy habits, instead led to think any good thing is better if done as often as possible. Not so fast

Here are some examples of healthy habits that can backfire when done in excess:

1. Over-Exercising: Your body and mind do not need more than 3-4 days a week of 30-45 minutes of cardio activity. Cardio/aerobic exercises should be done every other day alternating with Yoga, Pilates, walking, and weight training on the off days. Hiking, swimming, tennis, golf, team sports and a simple variation in exercise over the course of the week, month and season is the best way to stay lean, toned and energized.

2. Staying Out of the Sun: Our bodies need Vitamin D to stay strong by making healthy bones and ward off illness by boosting our immune system. The only way to get Vitamin D into our system is via sun exposure. Don't make yourself overly neurotic about sunscreen. If you are going to the pool or beach or participating in outdoor sports that involve more than 20 minutes of sun exposure, slather on the SPF 30, but if you are simply doing your daily errands outdoors, enjoy the feeling the sun on your skin. The only part of your body that should always be protected is the face.

3. Antibacterial Soaps and Gels: Antibacterial soaps and gels are good to carry in your purse or car but becoming obsessed with the sanitization they promise could weaken your body's ability to fight off good bacteria. Using them is okay, but use regular soap as well.

4. Sleeping: The average person needs 8 full hours of undisturbed sleep at night. If you are regularly getting fewer or more than nine hours sleep, you are not doing yourself much good. Human beings are not built to think, process or function optimally on more or less than 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night. Not to mention too little or too much sleep is bad for our skin and causes bloating, overeating, confusion and depression.

5. Air Conditioning: While air conditioning feels great on a hot, humid summer day, don't sit and breathe in cold recycled air all day and night long. The air may contain bacteria and germs and certainly all kinds of particles of dust. Every few hours, turn the air off, open the windows, go for a walk outside and breathe in the fresh air don't forget to wash your air conditioning filters with warm water and soap and let them air-dry every month you're using them. And if you work in an office building where windows never open, bring a sweater to keep your core temperature warm and get out of the office at least for lunch and a mid-afternoon break

6. Organic Food: While organic foods - such as fruits, vegetables and packaged goods - tend to be expensive, the real problem is that unless you eat them directly from the farm, they to can contain pesticides or be processed. Make sure to read the labels of the food you are purchasing carefully even if you are buying them from the health food store. Foods don't need to be organic to be healthy. Stick with labels that have simple and few ingredients, and a low amount of natural sugars (like honey, turbinado sugar, cane sugar), sodium and processed carbohydrates.

Most of us are generally aware that television isn't the healthiest of activities. Yet, like cigarette smoking in the 1970s, it's one of those harms we continue to whitewash or worse exposing our children to it as though it were as innocent as playing with Tinkertoys.

Yet as today's Boston Globe reminds us, TV is not this passive device you sit your children in front of with no ill effects. Decades worth of research have shown the harmful effects of TV on your child's development. Most child psychologists and child development experts recommend no TV whatsoever for a child before the age of 2 or 3. None. Yet a whopping 43 percent of parents plop their toddler down in front of the television set, apparently blind to the consequence of their actions.

But don't take my word for it. Look at the research:

Countless studies have documented the inverse link between devotion to the boob tube and achievement in school. Researchers at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons concluded in 2007, for example, that 14-year-olds who watched one or more hours of television daily were at elevated risk for poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, poor grades, and long-term academic failure.'' Those who watched three or more hours a day were at even greater risk for subsequent attention and learning difficulties,'' and were the least likely to go to college.

In 2005, a study published in the American Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that the harm caused by TV watching shows up even after correcting the data to account for students' intelligence, family conditions, and prior behavioral problems. The bottom line: Increased time spent watching television during childhood and adolescence was associated with a lower level of educational attainment by early adulthood.''

The baleful effects of TV aren't limited to education. The University of Michigan Health System notes on its extensive website that kids who watch TV are more likely to smoke, to be overweight, to suffer from sleep difficulties, and to have high cholesterol.

There are also the studies that show that teens who watch more sexual content on TV are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the next three years than their peers. Imagine an illicit drug was resulting in twice the amount of teen pregnancies and how quickly parents would be an uproar to stop the peddling of that drug in their neighborhood.

Ah, but you argue, I grew up on TV and I came out okay! Sure, personal anecdotes and analogies are great, but not a great way to inform public policy or carry on a serious public health debate. What works for a single individual at a single point of time in a single household doesn't carry the same weight as a scientific study that examines data across families and neighborhoods, studies that were carried out over time and with attention to possible alternative explanations (such as the fact that maybe in your household, TV time was more strictly limited than you remember, or the content in the programs themselves was very different than today's content).

The upshot we Americans watch way too much TV and we raise our children on TV, somewhat oblivious to its negative effects on our children's development. While TV isn't evil, it is a powerful media that has a well-understood impact on a child's or teen's development. Like the Internet, it should be allowed with clear rules and conditions, and time doing it should be monitored and limited. What the right number for you and your family will vary, but it should not be whenever they want and as much as they want.

Read the full article: Silence that idiot box!

Beverly Stayart searched her own name and didn't like the results. She got links to pornographic websites, online pharmacies promoting sexual dysfunction drugs, and an adult-oriented online dating service. She sued Yahoo! and other defendants, including the operator of AdultFriendFinder, for false endorsement under the Lanham Act and state-law privacy violations. The court dismissed the Lanham Act claim and surrendered jurisdiction over the state law claims.

Stayart lives in Wisconsin and was previously employed by several major financial institutions in Chicago, attaining the position of Vice President. She's involved in animal protection and genealogy research throughout the world. This includes an internet presence; her periodic posts on one genealogical website have generated almost 17,000 hits during the past three years. (Okay, I'm sorry, but: on the internet as a whole, that's tiny. My stats look more impressive than thatif you've never seen any others.) And two of her poems appear on two Danish websites (they support the preservation of baby seals).

Stayart alleged that she was the only Beverly/Bev Stayart on the internet, and that she had never engaged in a promiscuous lifestyle, or other overt sexual activities, which are repugnant to her and her community. She alleged that her name had commercial value because of her humanitarian endeavors, positive and wholesome image, and the popularity of her scholarly posts on the Internet. The search engine defendants, she alleged, knowingly used her name on false snippets in results by (1) repeatedly linking Plaintiff to the advertising of Cialis by an online pharmacy; (2) repeatedly linking Plaintiff to six separate websites playing pornographic videos containing computer spy ware; and (3) repeatedly linking Plaintiff to a website captioned Free Streaming Porn--HOTTEST DAILY PORN' displaying 27 hardcore pornographic photos. She asked Yahoo! to stop linking her name to these search results. Yahoo! replied: We do not aim to judge web content for appropriateness or censor materials that we find offensive or inappropriate. Instead, we present information as it is reflected on the Web, allowing you to draw your own informed conclusions about what you see.

Stayart also alleged that Various (which operates AdultFriendFinder) used her name on a website advertising its service. She typed her name into altavista.com and got, among the results, jewellery-makin-doorway.orge.pl/bev-stayart.html. This went to an Under Construction site that stated Meet AdultFriendFinder members near Janesville [Wisconsin]-- Over 20 Million Members and displayed five graphic images of fully or partially nude women, accompanied by the age, nickname and city of residence of the women.

Under Iqbal, though a court must accept all well-pleaded facts as true, the claim must still have facial plausibility. And a plaintiff can plead herself out of court, which was what the court determined had occurred here.

False endorsement means that consumers are likely to be misled about a person's sponsorship or approval of a product or service.

In order to have prudential standing under the Lanham Act, Stayart needed to allege at least an existing intent to commercialize her identity. This she didn't do. Though she alleged that her name has commercial value, her complaint is really about distasteful associations. That emotional desire to prevent others from using her name doesn't create Lanham Act standing. Her correspondence with Yahoo!, attached to the complaint, further indicates that her concerns are with privacy and reputation, defamation and demeaning associations. But the Lanham Act does not create a false light tort claim, absent commercialization.

Stayart relied on Doe v. Friendfinder, which refused to dismiss a false endorsement claim against AdultFriendFinder. But Doe didn't address prudential standing in its decision.

The court went on to reach an independent ground for dismissal, lack of likely confusion as a matter of law. [A] commonsense reading of the complaint demonstrates that there could be no likelihood of confusion. The complaint explicitly disavows any association with pornographic materials, sexual dysfunction drugs, or sexually-oriented dating services. This contravenes likelihood of confusion, so Stayart pleaded herself out of court. (Query: before 1999, would Bob Dole have had a claim? He'd never previously been associated with sexual dysfunction drugs, so wouldn't it have been just as implausible that he'd be a pitchman for them?) No one who accessed these links could reasonably conclude that Bev Stayart endorsed the products at issue.

Stayart argued initial interest confusion against AdultFriendFinder. But on the internet, initial interest confusion depends on relatedness of goods and a consumer's level of care. Given that Stayart's identity is completely unrelated to AdultFriendFinder's services, initial confusion won't facilitate free riding on another mark's goodwill. Without a meaningful effect on the market, confusion is of little or no consequence under the Lanham Act. The type of person looking for information about Bev Stayart would not be fooled into using an online adult-oriented dating website. (I'd add in to find her at the end of that; the court might be surprised to find outjust as Stayart might bethe non-Stayart-related interests of the type of people looking for information about Stayart. I'd be willing to bet that even genealogists and animal rescuers sometimes like to meet adult friends!)

Next, a puzzling CDA discussion. The court commented that if Stayart successfully stated a false endorsement claim under the Lanham Act, it would probably fall under the CDA's intellectual property exclusion. But, it continued, one of the fatal flaws of that claim is that Yahoo! didn't use Stayart's name in connection with its own goods or services. It just included snippets from third-party websites and didn't create the content of which Stayart complained. So the proper analysis is vicarious liability/contributory infringement under the Lanham Act.

Under settled doctrine, Yahoo! can't be held liable for failing to remove the search results even after Stayart complained. It didn't control the third-party websites, which fact defeated both contributory and vicarious liability. (That's a shortcut on contributory liability analysis, but not particularly troubling under the circumstances.) The only way Yahoo! could control the results would be to change its algorithm, which goes to the heart of Yahoo!'s role as an interactive computer service. Because ordinary search engines play no part in developing any unlawful searches, Yahoo! should be entitled to immunity because it acted as an interactive computer service, even though Stayart's claims are nominal intellectual property claims. Immunizing Yahoo! doesn't contravene the CDA's IP exclusion because Stayart doesn't have a valid IP claim.

Comment: oh, my. Look, I like CDA immunity generally. But what's weird here is not the court's willingness to use CDA reasoning on an IP claim despite the IP exclusion; what's weird is the court's failure to notice that IP secondary liability doctrine itself incorporates the tech-promoting rationales underlying the CDA. Well, trademark does much more than copyright, these daysbut it's trademark doctrine that's at issue here! There's no need to bring in the CDA! And that last bitthis analysis only applies because Stayart doesn't have a valid IP claimmakes this whole excursion even more obviously useless.

The court then said that matters were less clear with respect to AdultFriendFinder. The site is in some ways interactive, but Stayart's complaint relates to the banner ad associated with the bev-stayart.html URL. AdultFriendFinder's role in the creation of the banner ad content was unclear, so the court couldn't grant it immunity at this stage.

The only claims that remained were state-law claims. Given that the dismissal was on the pleadings, ordinarily a federal court should relinquish jurisdiction, unless it is so obvious how the claims should be decided that the plaintiff should be put out of her misery rather than involving state-court resources. Defendants argued that Wisconsin requires a name to have commercial value in order to maintain a right of publicity claim. But some variations of the appropriation tort, which Wisconsin may recognize, require only commercial use plus bruised feelings. (Doesn't Yahoo! get out of this even if AdultFriendFinder has to proceed in state court? Under what theory is Yahoo!'s use commercial? If it's using snippets from other sites, how can it possibly be distinguished from the New York Times using Stayart's name in a story?)

The distinction between appropriation and the right to publicity (based on commercial damage) is also relevant to CDA immunity. The latter is an IP claim. (Implicit holding: to the extent Stayart is bringing an appropriation claim, Yahoo! is immune.) Plus there's the Perfect 10 versus Friendfinder split over whether state IP claims are preempted by the CDA. Since this is an unsettled issue of federal law, the court couldn't conclude that there was an obvious resolution of the state law claims. Even though the Court already held that Yahoo! was entitled to CDA immunity, the Court cannot say with certainty that a potential right to publicity claim under Wisconsin law is without merit, meaning that the intellectual property exception could save Stayart's claims. Also, AdultFriendFinder's CDA status is unclear, leaving it potentially vulnerable under either a misappropriation or right of publicity claim.

Does having too many friends in online social networks make radical, innovative thinking harder to develop and foster group-think instead? That's the conclusion of one scientist contributing to a recent issue of Science magazine, but we're not so sure.

Viktor Mayer-Schnberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, argues that "the over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold."

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Mayer-Schnberger is specifically interested in what it will take to see the next major stage of the internet come into being and believes that extensive social networking could favor slower iterative development instead of radical paradigm shifts. Smaller networks of developers are more likely to allow unusual ideas the time they need to grow and mature, before other thinkers shoot them down or rip them off. Big networks can also be very distracting.

Other factors to consider though, we would contend, include the positive impact of collaboration, serendipitous social discovery, rapid news dispersal, interdisciplinary cross-pollination and the increased scalability of support for ideas that living large on social networks enables.

A "good or bad" analysis may be too crude for evaluating the effect of extensive social connections online on innovation: it seems true that both extended periods of uninterrupted work time are essential to innovation and that online noise is good for you. Is participation in large social networks a net positive or a net negative? That probably depends on the person, but smaller networks are probably an important option as well.

We would post a poll asking for your opinion on the matter, but in writing about group-think online that would seem too ironic.

Science magazine subscribers can read Mayer-Schnberger's article here. MSNBC's science blog and New Scientist have additional coverage.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as "flash trading," where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders and can rapidly buy and sell in ways that are argued to influence the market unfairly - thus discouraging mere mortals from participating.

Many bleeding-edge trends in the consumer web play out writ large in financial markets; as all of us look at the growing prominence of real-time information on the web, the debate over flash stock trading raises issues worth considering outside the stock markets as well.

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If the real time web at large grows up open and democratic, then we're likely to see innovation, understanding and growth. If it's priced out of reach to all but marketing and state interests, then an experience analogous to that of small-time stock traders today could become what the web at large looks like.

It's easy for technologists to say that this is progress and rejecting the advantages technology brings would demand a return to time before the abacus. It's not so easy to explain why we have to take an all-or-nothing approach to judging technologies and their implications - why not look at them one at a time and evaluate them intelligently?

Here's how the introduction of real time information is being debated regarding financial markets, followed by some thoughts about the analogous transformation going on around the web.

This isn't just a story about robot stock traders and the SEC; it's also a story about Twitter, Facebook and the Pushbutton Web.

Robots in Financial Markets

Last month the New York Times' Charles Duhigg wrote a high-profile story about the practice of high frequency trading, including this juicy description of the practice:

Powerful algorithms -- "algos," in industry parlance -- execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits -- and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

Rich Miller, writing at Data Center Knowledge, a blog that tracks the powerful computers that high frequency traders (among many other industries) use, called the article one-sided and inconsiderate of the argument that "this activity provides liquidity to execute trades that would otherwise not be possible, making the market more efficient." He also said the press was widening the debate over the practice by bringing it into the mainstream.

Now U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) has sent a letter to the SEC this week, calling for action to be taken against the practice of flash trading in particular, the act of selling for a fee access to trading information milliseconds before it is otherwise available. He argues that the practice "creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions. If allowed to continue, these practices will undermine the confidence of ordinary investors, and drive them away from our capital markets."

Schumer focuses on the early access to information, but always in the context of the computer-driven trading that occurs based on it.

Trader John Hempton writes that critics over-estimate the financial impact of flash traded stock, needlessly complicating a situation that he describes with the following, fascinating, story:

We trade electronically at our fund. We were recently trading in a stock with a large spread. I have changed the numbers so as not to identify the stock - but the ratios are about right. The bid was about 129.50, offer was about 131.50. We did not want to cross the spread - so when we bid for the stock we bid $129.55. Within a second a computer (possibly at our own broker but it makes no difference which broker) bid $129.60 for a few hundred shares. We fiddled for a while changing our bid and watching the bot change theirs. We would have loved to think we were frustrating the computer - but alas it was just a machine - and we were people up late at night.

Actually obtaining the stock required that we paid up - and when we did so it was probably a computer that sold the stock to us.

...It is always there - even when buying defaulted debt that trades once per month. We simply ALWAYS find the bot.

What About Real-time Robots on the Web?

Could the real time web give some people such an unfair advantage over everyone else that non-early adopters of new technologies or people outside of marketing firms could be left out in the cold? Presuming we're talking about important, actionable information online and not just real-time chat and fun - it's possible. The question is: will the most important parts of the real time web be open and democratized, or proprietary and shared only with those who can pay a high price for access? That question hasn't been answered yet.

If you were among the people who purchased the new Breaking News Online (BNO) iPhone app (released an eternity ago, yesterday!) then today you probably found out about the two US journalists being freed from North Korea and the shooting in Pennsylvania at least 45 minutes before almost anyone else did. (CNN posted a link to local PA news 45 minutes after the BNO network published.) That notification system costs $1.99 to purchase and $1 per month to stay subscribed.

If you've visited Yahoo's social-bookmarking turned real-time news service Delicious since this morning, you've seen that hot news links are now found not just by vote counting, but with a new method augmented by tracking the open, rapid conversations on Twitter.

These are innovations built out of elbow grease and publicly available feeds of data. Yahoo might be, but the scrappy guys at Breaking News Online definitely aren't, using software something like IBM's new stream processing software, for which it will charge "at least" hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No, this real-time public web is very low cost and increasingly both open sourced and decentralized. It's akin to what Anil Dash calls the pushbutton web.

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

As long as it's open and low cost, real time information on the web should be as democratic and fair as computer use is. It's not perfect, but it's no longer the David and Goliath-on-steroids fight that critics of high frequency stock trading say that market has become because of real time stock data.

The Risk: Facebook

The real time web is a shimmering mass of conversation and data, but there's no guarantee that it's going to stay open, free and democratic forever. Already, in fact, there's no bigger river of the real time social web than Facebook. Facebook is simply huge, it holds huge sums of information and so far it allows aggregate access to no one. As far as we know.

If Facebook, or some other equally important site of the real time web, began offering access to its data but pricing mere mortals out of that market - then we could have a situation where individual software developers and social scientists were like grandpa reading the stock pages in the newspaper and huge marketing firms and government agencies had the kind of advantage that high frequency traders are alleged to have in financial markets.

Anil Dash puts it this way:

Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.

In addition to development concerns, there are also analysis concerns. If stock trading equals liquidity and knowledge is the new currency, then open access to aggregate data could be the equivalent of high-powered stock-trading tools for all instead of for just the already-richest few.

Some research has already been performed on the connection between communication on social networks and real-world events. The Information and Language Processing Systems Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, for example, correlated mood messages on LiveJournal closely with world events. ("Mass increase in the level of worriedness around major weather phenomena, such as hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 - Excitedness around global media and culture events, such as the release of a new Harry Potter book on July 15, 2005 - Mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks, as witnessed by the response to the London bombings on July 7, 2005.")

Analysis of real time mass communication could lead to a world of innovation and understanding - if that communication is an open fire hose of data and not shared only with deep pocketed commercial partners.

Everything is Complicated, Some Can Afford to Ponder It

Is high frequency, low latency, computer executed, "flash" trading unfair? It must feel that way to individual and small investors who can't afford killer number-crunching robots - but it's also pretty awesome technology and is said to provide liquidity that the markets depend on.

Could the real time consumer web be made undemocratic by being priced out of reach for edge-case developers and social scientists outside of government and the corporate world? That could happen.

As we speak, though, there's a lot of innovation going on in the real time web that's open, based on standards and available to all of us. Let's hope it stays that way