Talk to Me. Avoid language barriers by using a real-time speech-to-speech translator.

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Translate language speech to text and text to speech phrases with many different language options
• Email and SMS text message the translations
• Great for traveling
• More language options in text to speech mode

Cons

• Voice translation only works from English to other languages and not in reverse, however you can toggle text to speech mode to write for example Spanish to Italian
• Not 100% accurate but what automated translation service is?!?

Features:

Talk to Me Android App is a speech language translation app for many languages, which also supports text to speech. Send your translations to friends via SMS text message or email the audio file. The speech detection experience has been much better than Google's voice to text experience.

Voice Languages Supported (there are many more language options in text to speech mode):

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• English (United Kingdom)
• English (United States)

Usefulness:

Talk to Me Android App is very useful to those trying to learn another language or travel.

Ease of Use:

Simply tap the big green button and speak a short phrase into the phone, a few seconds later it will translate in the language and dialect of the translation language chosen.

Frequently Used:

User dependent, maybe sparingly or casual use.

Interface:

Nothing fancy but very intuitive.

To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you're talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company's other products have been hinting at. Here's a list of Google's major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.

Google Voice: This is a big one, and it'll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you're using it the way Google wants you to use it, you're already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google's tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you're talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.

Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone's email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that's not enough for Google, which is why they developed...

Google Wave: It's email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that "openness" loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google's biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google's maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn't you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?

Google Docs: For longer documents.

Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.

Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn't have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.

Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.

Everything else. There's Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren't quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.

But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don't think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they're going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.

• Aldiko: outstanding e-book reader (better than Kindle on the iPhone in terms of feature set; obviously the book store is not quite as good, but the integration with free eBook download sites is a plus). Currently reading Makers by Cory Doctorow.
• Amazon: search the full Amazon catalog (can use barcodes or photos in addition to typing or speaking your query), track orders in my account.
• APNDroid: useful if you want to disable your phone's cellular data connection (useful if you're often on WiFi and want to turn off your EDGE or 3G data connection)
• AppReferer: builds a QR code (a 2D barcode) that makes recommending an app to another Android user in person a one-click affair.
• Battery Graph: shows a nice chart (exportable, even) of battery usage, which is helpful if you're trying to isolate when the battery started to drain.
• Coin Flip: silly app that lets me flip a coin. Use it mostly to settle disputes between the kids. :)
• Congress: built by Sunlight Labs, a phenomenal "pocket Congressional directory" that includes contact info, committee memberships, news, and YouTube vids of every Senator and Representative.
• DroidLive Lite: Streaming radio (via Shoutcast) from 1300 radio stations around the world.
• Facebook: news feed, photos and profile info for friends
• Fandango: Order movie tickets from movie theaters so I can bypass lines at the ticket counter.
• Finance: Google Finance app
• Flashlight: turns screen bright white to use in dark rooms
• Foursquare: app for playing Foursquare, also has a nice widget for my home screen
• Gmote: turns my Nexus One into a touchpad remote (when paired with a computer running the Gmote server software). Handy for giving presentations, or just doing something nerdy and cool.
• Google Goggles: search Google by taking pictures.
• Google Sky Map: the one app that consistently blows people away. Load it up, turn your camera toward the night sky and you'll get a real-time view of which stars, constellations and planets are above you. An awesome accompaniment to a telescope.
• Jewels: Bejeweled-like game.
• Layar: Augmented reality app that displays info on screen in realtime through your phone's camera.
• Locale: very sophisticated app for scripting events to happen based on certain triggers. (When I'm at home, disable the data connection and connect to my home wifi access point. At 11pm, turn off the sound and put the phone to sleep; at 6am turn the sound back up; when I'm at work, put the phone in vibrate mode; etc.)
• Metal detector: actually works.
• Movies (aka Flixster): Lots of info/trailers/reviews about new and upcoming movies, also integrates with Netflix for DVDs
• My Tracks: built by some Googlers, great app for keeping track of runs/bikes/ski runs you've done; captures altitude, distance, etc., then uploads to Google Maps My Maps.
• OpenTable: make restaurant reservations from the phone.
• Owner: adds my contact info to the unlock screen ("If found, please contact Rick Klau...")
• Pandora: streaming music channels.
• PapiJump: great little game using the phone's accelerometer.
• Pintail: monitors your phone's SMS messages for a message that says "locate" (plus a PIN); once received, activates the GPS and replies with the phone's location. Helpful if you've got a lost phone.
• Robo Defense: addicitve game.
• Scoreboard: Tracks scores of your favorite teams, with realtime updates and notifications as score changes.
• Seesmic: Great Twitter app.
• Shop Savvy: grab a barcode, find out who sells it and for how much.
• TiVo Remote: works with any TiVo HD unit over WiFi.
• TripIt: phenomenal itinerary manager for all travel info.
• Voice Recorder: does exactly what it says it does.
• Yelp: Local reviews.

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.

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

Fifteen years ago I listened to James Burke at a symposium deliver a speech titled, Axe Makers of the 21st Century. It was the precursor to his writing of The Axemaker's Gift. A book that dealt with the problem that Burke was working through in his head before the internet exploded.

Axe Makers was a syllogistic study of mankind's ability to restructure society based on how the internet age would create a diaspora of talented workers. These workers in turn would be able to lead a nomadic lifestyle based on their connectivity to the internet as information workers. At this time, part of his hypothesis was that these workers would then raise the standard of living for local inhabitants.

Some components of Burke's look into the future have come true. A connected information worker can now perform their duties from anywhere they choose as long as their employer has signed off on it. Another was his correct assumption that the ubiquity of near real-time information would change global culture.

His book, The Axmaker's Gift, was an attempt to reconcile this new culture shift with cultures of the past. Burke was concerned that technology was and would strip away our humanity. That our future needed to have a moderated technological lust passion interest. In the book he advocates for the simplicity of life and a continued movement toward small communities but not through technology.

What really got me going down this path today thinking about James Burke was my experience at another small conference here in New York. As an information worker in one of America's largest cities, I find myself more connected to a community of like people than ever before.

For the last three years I was one of the diaspora working from remotely from home for businesses that at their closest proximity to me were 900 miles away. An opportunity that Burke described in detail. But in this space I was isolated. I had a few friends that could identify with my work life and worked in similar ways. However, most of the people that I was in contact with on a daily basis I couldn't connect with. We existed in two separate realities.

What Burke didn't account for was this loss of community due to the lack of commonality in the experience that nomadic workers have with the locals they take up residence with. In New York I am able to continually find common experiences with other people, workers that have similar experiences to mine.

The proximity of information workers even in this large city is due to the multitude of businesses that need our services. Many of them in media and others in financial or advertising benefit from the central location of talent. What makes this talent even more valuable is its ability to connect to one another and flow through these businesses to keep culture and ideas fresh.

The ability to capitalize on common experience, talent and proximity is what has made certain locations on our planet the centers for varying industries. Information workers, like Burke described, should be considered skilled tradespeople that for the better should be concentrated into spaces so that they can produce their best work.

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

Proximity: The Power of Space is a post from: TechStartups.com

The web is a wonderful place. It's got something for everyone. And it has become increasingly social due to new tools that connect our online and offline lives. Think Facebook and Twitter's abilities to move messages between the web and mobile phones.

With this connectivity there is a massive amount of information being created that allows us to find others interested in the same topics. Simply by using these services your own ideas, passions and causes spill out in the public eye.

The intersection of your media, by sharing, allows you connect to more people. That's a given, right? But it also allows you to be a teacher.

Yes, it's 99% Noise

We all know that most of what is shared online, especially via social networks is crap. It is a bunch of noise about going, doing and just did. Inside of this insidious sharing that we do, however, are some amazing insights, lessons and knowledge that wouldn't be captured without the services and electronic connectivity.

In a given day, our experiences lead us to create messages, content, that formerly would have been lost in the ether. Or, it would have been crammed away in some recess our minds and assimilated into our behavior, speech or thought processes.

Yes, 1% is Good

But that 1% that you didn't tuck away or forget to deliver ad nauseam can become the one message that helps those connected with you more than you expected or could have known the impact of.

This percentage claim I would also stake to academia. Name more than one time that you sat in a classroom and didn't have to filter out instructor bias, wheezing, indecipherable accent, bad hair, uncomfortable seat or delightfully appealing classmate. Distractions exist everywhere and online they are amplified, but no different than what one faces in a classroom.

By participating online, you are leading (up to you what direction that is) and by association you are teaching throughout the day. Professors and instructional designers call this associative learning.

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

Post from: TechStartups.com

Tweet This Post

Update: The CNN iPhone App is now in the app store. Download it here [iTunes link].
-
A little over a month ago, we reviewed the NPR News iPhone App. We raved about its radio integration and personalization options, so much that we definitively declared that NPR's iPhone app blows other news apps out of the water.

We may have spoken too soon, because that declaration was before the CNN iPhone App.

The CNN iPhone App, which is now live in the app store [iTunes link], is nothing short of impressive. It combines breaking news with customization, the ability to save stories, streaming video whenever breaking news is in progress, and most intriguing of all, citizen journalism.

CNN's iPhone App: It's Impressive

The CNN iPhone app is divided into four key (but very different) components, combining for one seamless app experience. Here's what you can expect if you download the $1.99 app:

Headlines: It's the core of any news app being able to read breaking news. You can sift through news by recency and by category (crime, politics, health, etc). And since it's CNN, you can also share stories via Facebook Connect, Twitter, SMS, and email.

Oh, one more cool thing about headlines: if you turn your iPhone on the side, you can view stories like you can your iPod album covers. Flick through images to find the story that interests you. It's a uniquely visual way to consume news.

My CNN: The app is chock-full of personalization options. Our favorite is the ability to save stories you want to read later. You don't even need a connection to read saved stories, so you pick out the news you want and read it on the plane without a problem.

Another nifty feature: you can follow topics or stories that interest you and get alerts when there are updates to that story.

Video: Yeah, this app gets even better. It is CNN we're talking about, so you'd hope there would be some video. You can watch on-demand clips related to breaking news. However, we're huge fans of the live streaming video integration. Anytime there's a breaking event (Obama gives a speech, a major natural disaster, election night, etc.), live coverage from CNN Live becomes available. Hell, this is a feature that I'd purchase as a standalone app itself.

iReport: Out of all of the CNN iPhone App's features, this one may be the most game-changing. iReport is CNN's user-generated citizen journalism initiative, where everyday citizens can upload photos, videos, and stories about events happening near them. Some of it is even used on CNN's news coverage.

Guess what? The app lets you submit photos and videos you take with your iPhone to iReport and to CNN. Can you imagine how much citizen journalism this app will encourage?

To say we're impressed with this app is an understatement. CNN went all-out with features and functionality, but did it in a way that's simple and easy to use and consume. The app sets a new standard in functionality and even has the potential to change the news game with its iReport integration. It's the complete package.

Tags: cnn, iphone, iphone app, News

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Early Android 2.0 "Donut" build available, up and running on G1 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored by

Multiplatform video company Current Media said today that Mark Rosenthal, the former president and COO of MTV Networks and CEO of Interpublic Media, will replace co-founder Joel Hyatt as CEO.

Rosenthal had been a Current board member since the inception of the company. Hyatt will now serve as vice chairman.

Rosenthal had most recently been vice chairman and president of media platforms at the troubled ad startup Spot Runner, which he joined a little over a year ago from Interpublic.

Current says its cable channel is available in more than 60 million households and its web site has more than 7 million unique visitors per month. Chairmain Al Gore said in a recent speech that the site now receives more than 10 million video views per month.

The most notable news out of Current in recent months is something it hasn't actually covered the imprisonment of two of its journalists. Laura Ling and Euna Lee are being held in North Korea after being convicted for trespassing there while they were on assignment from the network.

With no disrespect to that terrible situation, Current still has some really fantastic talent we love the folks at InfoMania (recent coverage) and some great opportunities to make the web and TV work together. But it hasn't always been smooth sailing, and the network scrapped IPO plans earlier this year, citing the bad economy. In the run-up to the IPO we had also challenged the company's claims that it was profitable.

Current's most recent management hire was Paul Levine, president of new media, who had previously been with AdBrite.

Sorry about the poor quality pic; Current hasn't updated its management files yet.

---

GigaOM Pro: Smart insights at the pace of the digital media market. Get the latest research on trends and tech shaping the future of entertainment. Learn more

Luckily, in the last second, I made the cut without time to spare. By this time, I had a whole plan worked out as to how I was going to approach a possibly difficult client situation. Instead of wasting my series of steps and never thinking about it again (hopefully), I decided I'd turn it into a post. Truth be told, the first thing I did was jump on the Internet and run a search on, how to handle missed deadlines. I didn't get much help and I kept thinking, Why are there no better resources for this kind of thing? What am I supposed to say?

Now, if you're in the position I was in last week (and hopefully you aren't), my prepared plan may serve as a resource for you.

1. Notify the Client

Probably the most difficult of all of these steps, but telling your client as soon as possible is a must. I probably should've told my client my worries early on. Luckily, it ended up working out, but I'm willing to bet this won't always be the case. By telling your client you won't make the deadline, they'll be able to create a plan B. Of course admitting to them that the deadline won't happen doesn't mean that procrastination can begin. Do everything in your power to come as close to the deadline as possible while the client handles things on their end.

2. Apologize

If the deadline was tight in the first place, or missed due to the client's actions or interference, this may not apply. But if you committed to a deadline and missed it based on no fault but your own, it's professional to admit your mistake and apologize sincerely. This is where good customer service comes into play. While there is little an apology can actually achieve, it does demonstrate good manners and an appreciation of the client's needs at least.

3. Identify What Went Wrong

Show your client that a missed deadline won't happen again. I was prepared to actually create a document containing a brief on what caused the missed deadline. By identifying these factors, we may be able to work around them and prevent them next time.

4. Create an Action Plan

Show your client how you intend to avoid these pitfalls next time around. Your dedication and take-charge approach to problem solving should prove to your client that you're serious about your working relationship and don't take missed deadlines lightly.

5. Don't Let it Happen Again

There will always be unforeseen circumstances and random occurrences that could get in the way of meeting a deadline. Do your very best to ensure it's met though. Don't procrastinate, keep on top of your timelines and document your communication with your client. Two missed deadlines with the same client is likely a cause for designer-client relationship termination.

This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003.¹

Sponsor

After shaking hands, I told Tim Berners-Lee that this blog's name was in part inspired by the first browser, which he developed, called "WorldWideWeb". That was a read/write browser; meaning you could not only browse and read content, but create and edit content too. It was a shame then when Mosaic, a read-only browser, became the first mainstream web browser in the mid-90s. It wasn't until the rise of Web 2.0 that the read/write philosophy gained widespread acceptance.² On that note, we launched into the interview...

Note: the interview will be published in two parts, with Part 1 today on the topic of Linked Data. Part 2 will explore other topics and will run tomorrow.

How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web

RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data. You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself - i.e. we've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it?

TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web.

We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing.

The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we've got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus

How Linked Data Has Evolved via Grassroots

RWW: Linked Data has had a lot of grassroots support, which you mentioned in your TED speech. This is something Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, have struggled to get over the years. Has the W3C been pushing the more bottom-up Linked Data world, because of the frustration over lack of take-up of top-down Semantic Web?

TBL: A lot of the initial RDF and OWL projects came out of the academic world; and some of them were projects to show what you could do in a closed world. And the files were zipped up and left on a disc. While they were interesting projects, and while the systems were useful systems, the semantic web community maybe missed the point of the 'web' bit and focused too much on the 'semantic'. However the work that's been done in the Semantic Web, the standards, was really valuable. It's relatively recently for example that SPARQL [an RDF query language] has been developed.

Somebody drew an analogy the other day: can you imagine trying to promote a world of databases without SQL? Even though it's not an interoperable protocol, it's just a query language. So similarly, all that's been put into RDF, rdfs and OWL is very valuable to the linked data community.

The Linked Data community tend to use a subset of that [Semantic Web technologies], of OWL for example. But they certainly use SPARQL. So you could argue that really it wasn't ready to be deployed widely.

Linked Data started as a very informal Design Issues note that I put in; it was a grassroots movement from very early on. So yes W3C has been emphasizing the importance of Linked Data. It's been the Semantic Web Interest Group of course, and various [other Semantic Web] activities, which has been pushing it. But also Linked Data has been seized on - a group of people for example put together DBpedia.³ That wasn't commissioned, that was that they just thought it would be a really cool idea.

Graph of Linked Data sets on the Web, as at March 2009

Linked Data and Governments

RWW: In a recent Design Issues note, you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you'd also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data - presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets?

TBL: One can't generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you'll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who's just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you'll find there's RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily.

There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it's available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They're exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It's remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It's not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.

Data.gov, a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government

The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say 'but actually I wanted to have XML.' A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file.

In fact, I don't see why SPARQL servers shouldn't provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn't in the standards. But I'd recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want.

So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane, it's the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it's out there as Linked Data.

Part 2 of ReadWriteWeb's interview with Tim Berners-Lee will be published tomorrow...

Footnotes:

1. The very first sentence written on this blog, on 20 April, 2003, was: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfill the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it."

2. For more on read/write browsers, you can read another early RWW post entitled What became of the Browser/Editor.

3. DBpedia is a community project to extract structured information from Wikipedia; see ReadWriteWeb's profile of this and similar resources.

Draw from this what you will. I've been reading coverage of the events through Memeorandum, a great source for political news, and the one thing that stands out to me in this visualization is that allegations Palin addressed the nation and not the state she was serving seem questionable given how much she talked about Alaska and Alaskans. It is also interesting to see how many times she used the word dollars. She used the word government far more than she did family, though when watching the video of her press conference it sounded like she was really talking about family a lot.

Do you think this kind of analysis can be truly useful? I think that it's most useful when comparing multiple speeches for content, but even then I'm not sure how to read the meaning of word frequency.

See also a comparison I did in January at ReadWriteWeb of President Obama's inaugural speech compared the Bushes' and other past presidents.

Data analysis is fascinating and of course much larger opportunities to engage in it are becoming available every day online. I believe we're going to see a whole lot of innovation making use of the text of conversations as a foundation for analysis in the near future. Not cute little stuff like this, but big, ongoing, ambitious projects. Hopefully for more than just marketing purposes. Here's a blog post and great audio interview on that topic, if you're interested.

1. The greatest gift you can give your audience is a passion for your material. If you don't care for it, they won't care for you.

2. Your audience's attention is a lot like your virginity. You only get to lose it once.

3. PowerPoint is always optional. A great speech doesn't improve when accompanied by slides in a dark room.

4. If PowerPoint makes it easy to do, you probably shouldn't do it. Avoid bullet points, clip art and cheesy animated transitions at all cost.

5. The number of words on a slide is inversely proportional to the attention your audience will give it.

6. Your slides are not your script. The purpose of PowerPoint is to help others understand your material, not to help you remember it.

7. Never read your slides. When you do, it suggests to your audience you think they're incapable of doing so themselves.

8. The average person remembers just three things from your presentation. Great speakers make certain everyone remembers the same three things.

9. Unless your presentation tells a story, the audience won't care about the ending -- they'll just pray for it.

10. Never underestimate the impact a great presentation can have on your audience or your career. Being prepared serves both of them well.

Check out what the High Court said as reported in the article:

"In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no reasonable expectation to anonymity because blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity.

Coming down in favour of freedom of expression, the judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds"

This case will send a shockwave through the legal community. What effect will it have on Internet Defamation Law in the United States?

So far, American legislators have done everything possible to protect freedom of speech; and really, to do the EXACT opposite of everything the UK has been doing in terms of online defamation law.

This is HUGE.

Thanks to @Vbalasubramani for giving me the heads-up on this!

Realizing that the phone is now a computer, or possibly that ubiquitous wireless networks mean that computers can go anywhere, IBM said today it would spend $100 million on research over the next five years to improve mobile communications for businesses and consumers worldwide. This is a piddling amount for IBM (it spent $1 billion on its green effort), but Big Blue does have the street cred among enterprise customers to push mobile platforms for corporate computing in a big way if it so chooses. Currently mobile innovation is primarily benefiting consumers, who can use mobile devices to read books, find out the name of songs, shop and even track their fitness goals. Enterprise adoption of novel applications and phones, meanwhile, is still lagging over concerns about corporate security. IBM could help change that.

IBM's four areas of focus will be analytics; security; privacy and user interface; and navigation. I think its areas of focus should be around virtualized desktops for mobile phones; authentication and security when it comes to using mobiles to access programs in the cloud; and device security, notably how to protect sensitive information kept on mobile devices. As for user interface research, IBM sold off many of its speech recognition patents to Nuance Communications, which is where I think IBM had the potential to make the biggest impact.

So IBM's research will add $100 million to wireless efforts over the next five years $4 million less than venture firms invested in the wireless industry for the entire month of May, according to research by Rutberg & Co. Such an investment is unlikely to change the industry, but it could lead to IBM buying up some startups if its research convinces it that there's a high-value software or services play that allows Big Blue to make money in mobile, that is.

The TOSBack.org site was, in part, an outgrowth of Facebook's change in its service agreement in February that seemingly allowed the company to use its members' content forever. Facebook changed its terms after an internet revolution of sorts.

The new tracker, chronicling 44 internet companies, shows terms of service agreements side by side with older and new versions, and highlights what is new.

The companies include Facebook, Google,Wordpress, Data.gov, YouTube, Apple, GoDaddy and, among others, eBay.

See Also:

• Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets Scary' Legal
• AT&T, Comcast Deny RIAA Three-Strikes' Participation
• Comcast Deflects User's Questions - Updated
• AT&T Revokes Right to Disconnect Based on Political Speech
• Does Your ISP Sell Your Internet History? Help 27B Investigate
• Adware Maker Says Facebook Security Warning False and

[Instructor's name] IS NO LONGER TEACHING ANY COURSES AT THE U OF C!!!!! Remember when she told us she was a long-term prof? Well actually she was only sessional and picked up our class at the last moment because another prof wasn't able to do it .. lucky us. Well anyways I think we should all congratulate ourselves for leaving a [instructor's name]-free legacy for future [law and society] students.

It's pretty hard to see how this isn't just an expression of opinion, but the university thinks it qualifies as non-academic misconduct. The problem is, it's not at all clear how. The only part of the definition that doesn't involve injury, damage or theft is "conduct which seriously disrupts the lawful educational and related activities of other students and/or University staff." It's hard to see how a Facebook post of this nature "seriously disrupts" much of anything (until someone gets put on probation and the Streisand Effect kicks in). But there's a nice little "includes but is not limited to" that makes the definition non-exhaustive, which is likely what university officials are relying on. You'd think that other instances of misconduct would be similar (hurting people, breaking stuff, stealing, "serious disruptions"), but apparently "expressions of opinion that we don't like" can qualify...

A computer science professor interviewed said the posts "can be compared to putting up notices all over the university campus" (quoting the article, not the prof). But this is more like putting up a notice off campus (albeit in public). It may not have been nice, but it's pretty troubling that a student's right to express an opinion (free speech much?) on a third-party site is overridden without a clear policy violation.

I've had direct experience with this sort of thing. A couple years ago, friends of mine at another university were sent ominous emails and hauled into their department head's office over some comments about a professor on Facebook (jokes, e.g. "crazy drunk [instructor A] is better than boring stoned [instructor B]!"). The department heads argued that the comments were "visible to the community" (similar to the "notices on campus" argument), but they clearly didn't understand the context (wall post or message? profile or group?) or privacy settings, and they couldn't even locate the comments on the site (someone had copied and pasted them into an email). They, too, failed to specify how any policies were actually violated (or even which ones), yet they'd gone ahead and notified the professor of the students' comments and identities (while there was still grading to be done). We convinced them to back down and apologize, but it took a solid week, mid-semester, to deal with the mess.

Universities should understand and develop policies about social networking sites before they take action against students. If they can't be clear about what qualifies as misconduct, how can students expect to know? What's the difference between a Facebook group and study group? An email and a Facebook message? What difference do privacy settings make (hopefully some...)? How was this post on a Facebook group different from a review on RateMyProfessors.com? What's the difference between off-campus speech and speech on non-school websites? Before policing student speech off-site (problematic in and of itself), universities should at least ask these questions and develop policies first. It doesn't seem like many of them have. It's pretty ridiculous to just throw social networking under the ambiguous "but not limited to" umbrella.

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

I'm sure you've all seen the 25 Things phenomenon sweeping across Facebook. Your SBA officers have thus far resisted the urge to follow suit, although we wait with bated breath for Corey Pollard's version to hit the web shortly.

In the meantime, it's worth noting that the craze has overtaken our 2009 Law School Commencement speaker, Rick Klau, who recently posted his own 25 Things list to his blog. I thought it might be an interesting glimpse at our speaker for those 3Ls graduating in May.

Of particular interest:

22. The two best speeches I've ever given were as best man - once at my brother's wedding, and once at Jim McNeal's wedding. Neither is recorded.
[...]
24. I founded the world's first student-edited law journal to publish exclusively online (1995). We beat Harvard by 3 months.

It's worth a read. And here's hoping that Commencement Speech 2009 ranks right up there with those best man speeches!

In 1980, a vacationing Rod Blagojevich camped in front of Richard Nixon's home, with a friend, until the pariah ex-president emerged and this picture was taken. What the hell is wrong with this guy?

As Time Out Chicago writes,

In 1980, most twentysomething men probably pined to bump into one of the Beatles or maybe Bo Derek; Blago wanted the autograph of our nation's most notorious politician.

Freak!

At least the disgraced, bribe-hungry Illinois governor was smart enough not to voluntarily tape his incriminating conversations, as far as anyone knows (unlike Nixon).

Just before he was arrested, Blago told reporters, "Those who feel like they want to sneakily and wear taping devices... I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate. He was pretending to be outraged but in reality was totally turned on, because of his massive boy crush, on Nixon.

Blago later fell in love with John McCain, because he wanted to be a Maverick Reformer too, and hilariously he turned out to be not much of a reformer at all, just like his imaginary boyfriend!

Blago has truly followed in his heroes' footsteps. Now he just needs to give this speech, in front of a crowd of jeering racists.

The case highlights the legal challenges facing courts and school administrators as they grapple with campus civil order and free expression in an online world.

"We're in the very first generation of this and there's nothing ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear," said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Virginia-based Student Press Law Center.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida federal court, concerns Katherine Evans, now 19, who was suspended as a senior last year after creating a Facebook group devoted to her English teacher. The group was called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!," and featured a photograph of the teacher, and an invitation for other students to "express your feelings of hatred."

After people's comments derided Evans for the online stunt, and expressed support for the teacher, she deleted the group. But Pembroke Pines Charter High School, which did not respond for comment, suspended Evans for three days for "disruptive behavior" and for "Bullying / Cyber Bullying Harassment towards a staff member," according to the lawsuit, which is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Evans was removed from her from advanced placement classes "and forced her into the lesser-weighted honors classes." The lawsuit alleges the black mark on Evans' permanent record is "unjustifiably straining her academic reputation and good standing."

The lawsuit(.pdf) is one of about a dozen across the United States that are part of the fallout as schools confront cyberbullying and the explosion of social networking sites. A Texas high school volleyball coach in September went so far as to declare a ban on student Facebook and MySpace profiles, a decision the Northside Independent School District reversed(.pdf). Last month, Tennessee State University blocked the online gossip site JuicyCampus at the school firewall. In June, Missouri enacted a law against "cyberbullying" in the wake of the Megan Meier suicide tragedy, which was triggered by a hoax MySpace account.

Before the internet, student speech cases usually concerned student newspapers and dress codes.

There's no bright-line rule on what constitutes free, student speech in the online world. And as schools start to regulate off-campus student speech on the internet, lawsuits are following.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never addressed the parameters of online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts are following a 1969 high court ruling saying student speech is protected unless it is "substantially disruptive," though the road map provided by that decision is leading different judges to varying destinations. In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

Generally, the courts have allowed the suppression of student speech, online or off, when it threatens bodily harm and advocates illegal activity, "none of which we have in Ms. Evans' case," said one of the teen's attorneys, Matthew D. Bavaro, of Plantation, Florida.

"She has the absolute First Amendment right to do this," Bavaro said. "The question is how far does the school's authority go to punish off-campus speech they don't like? If Katie had praised the teacher, would she have been punished? The school is judging what is appropriate speech."

But with the explosion of the internet and social networking sites, "The courts are figuring out where the boundaries end and start when it comes to off-campus speech," LoMonte said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, one court level below the Supreme Court, will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit similar to the Florida case filed Monday.

The appeal concerns Justin Layshock, who, as a senior and honors student at a Pennsylvania high school, was suspended for 10 days after creating a mock MySpace profile of his principal.

The profile said the principal took drugs and kept beer at his desk. A federal judge overturned the suspension, ruling last year that the fake profile was not created at school and did not create a "substantial disruption."

"Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited," U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry of Pennsylvania ruled last year.

Hickory High School appealed.

According to Monday's lawsuit, Evans used no profanities and stated no threats against the teacher. The suspension notice from the public school alleged only that Evans "had posted an inappropriate site regarding her teacher on Facebook." Evans is demanding that the suspension be removed from her record.

Vancouver businessmen Wayne Crookes, once an important federal Green Party of Canada official, sued Jon Newton, the operator of p2p.net, for linking to four articles that Crookes alleged were defamatory.

In Crookes v Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 2008 BCSC 1424, Justice Kelleher ruled that a simple link to a defamatory article this does not amount to republication. The defamation was contained in the article, not in the simple act of pointing to it.

Justice Kelleher's ruling drew a parellel between links and footnotes in printed articles.

Although a hyperlink provides immediate access to material published on another website, this does not amount to republication of the content on the originating site. This is especially so as a reader may or may not follow the hyperlinks provided.

Further, he recognized that link text could support defamation, but that simple linking does not.

It is not my decision that hyperlinking can never make a person liable for the contents of the remote site. For example, if Mr. Newton had written the truth about Wayne Crookes is found here and here is hyperlinked to the specific defamatory words, this might lead to a different conclusion.

Linking is a footnote; it is a signpost pointing to a viewable object. I'm glad to see it supported as part of Canadian free speech. I'm also glad to see that the few websites with policies asserting they can prevent other sites from referencing them through links receive ridicule for their attempts to govern references to them.

As Mr. Newton noted, They're links, the genius of the Net. Allowing the public to refer to publically posted materials with links affirms a rudimentary function of the web.

ShareThis

Internet defamation attorneys and bloggers listen up! A new law will take effect in California on January 1, 2009, which allows online speakers to obtain attorney's fees if they successfully oppose a subpoena to obtain their personally identifying information in California involving out-of-state litigation.

Witness his reaction to last night's VP debate, courtesy of his blog:

So she was understandably nervous, and you could tell that by her rapid speech, faster than what we've heard before from her. Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she'd survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two of three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in Fargo.

Palin is best in that persona. You want to smile with her and wink back. But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman's logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn't have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, M'am, I been cooperatin' with ya here. Palin was persuasive. But I felt a brightness that was not always convincing.

As part of this, Fred makes a plea to "bury the name Silicon Alley." He hates it in the same way I've always hated the names "Silicon Flatirons" and "Silicon (whatever)" to describe the tech communities in other geographies than Silicon Valley. Fred appropriately suggests that we should call "New York" simply "New York" - which I completely agree with.

In response to questions about the use of Associated Press content on the Drudge Retort web site, the AP was able to provide additional information to the operator of the site, Rogers Cadenhead, on Thursday. That information was aimed at enabling Mr. Cadenhead to bring the contributed content on his site into conformance with the policy he earlier set for his contributors. Both parties consider the matter closed.

In addition, the AP has had a constructive exchange of views this week with a number of interested parties in the blogging community about the relationship between news providers and bloggers and that dialogue will continue. The resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers.

I'm glad that my personal legal dispute with the AP is resolved, thanks to the help of the Media Bloggers Association, but it does nothing to resolve the larger conflict between how AP interprets fair use and how thousands of people are sharing news on the web. You could probably guess that by the lack of detail in AP's statement.

I spent around two hours yesterday talking to AP attorneys about their specific objections to the user blog entries in dispute, going line by line through the text to pinpoint exactly where they have intellectual property concerns in the short excerpts that were posted. I won't reveal the details of this discussion until AP releases the guidelines for bloggers that it promised on Monday.

On a social news site that's still manageable in size, like the 8,500-member Drudge Retort, it's possible to steer bloggers away from potential conflicts with media organizations by working directly with users. But 25 million people visited a social news site last month, and thousands of people are sharing news links in a way that's in direct conflict with AP's interpretation of fair use regarding the headlines and leads of its articles.

If AP's guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we're headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use.

When it appeared that I might end up in court on this issue, I got offers of help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and the Stanford Fair Use Project. My attorney Wade Duchene and I were already working up the victory speech to deliver on the steps of the Supreme Court in the landmark First Amendment decision AP v. Me (Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, Kennedy, Lessig, Tribe and Clinton concurring).

I think AP and other media organizations should focus on how to encourage bloggers to link their stories in the manner they like, rather than hoping their lawyers can rebottle the genie of social news. Given the publicity of this dispute, the first blogger sued for excerpting a news story will have the best pro bono legal representation that massive press attention can buy.

Although AP will be releasing guidelines, I don't think the news service will be able to concede any ground to the blogosphere. AP sells headline and lead-only services to customers. Asking the company to concede there's a way people can share this information for free is like asking the RIAA to pick its favorite file-sharing client.

If an expansive view of fair use is to remain in place, it's incumbent upon bloggers and our $500-an-hour friends in the legal community to define our own guidelines and fight for them. If we don't, big media companies will eventually define them for us, just as they've gotten the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and Copyright Term Extension Act passed in Congress.

I have learned that the Drudge Retort popped up on AP's radar through its use of Attributor technology to find potential cases of copyright infringement, as K.C. Jones reported in InformationWeek:

Attributor launched last year, with company representatives saying they would identify and "fingerprint" chunks of content from more than 10 billion pages on the Internet. The company provides a service to media outlets and other content creators to track how their content is reused online and whether the user has authorization to reproduce the material.

"Our agreement with Attributor will enable AP to safeguard its investment in creating and distributing news reports, while assuring licensees that unauthorized use will not diminish the value of their licenses," AP general counsel Srinandan Kasi explained in the announcement. "These services are part of the next-generation licensing and enforcement services we plan to provide to our global network of members and subscribers."

Earlier this year, Attributor told its customers that when a case might be fair use, it's better to ask for credit than to file a DMCA takedown:

No one wins when a DMCA notice is sent. First, unless you have an open and shut case, a DMCA notice can be a PR risk for the DMCA sender. Next, the site hosting the content has to deliver the bad news to its user putting them in an unfavorable spot. Finally, consumers lose overall because the result of content removal is one less place to find quality content. ...

You can't send a DMCA notice if it's Fair Use -- and Fair Use is usually not a black and white situation. The fairness of asking for a link is indisputable.

As a newspaper reader since age 8 and the spouse of an investigative reporter, I want the media to keep making enough money to afford the expensive and essential practice of journalism. I sure as hell don't want to do all that reporting myself.

If AP's core business is to report the news, blogs and social news sites send millions of people to its articles every day. Retort users have posted 109,000 links to news stories in the last four years, each link sending from 1,000 to 5,000 readers directly to a media site to read the article.

If its core business is to repackage the news, they're in as much trouble as every other middleman on the web.