Author: Mike Melanson

It’s been nearly a year since China first shutdown access to Twitter in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but today Google has opened up the doors again, in a way.

According to an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times, Google has added Twitter search results to its search engine there, “in effect, lifting a nine-month blackout of the microblogging service in China.”

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Earlier this week, Google announced that it would stop censoring search results and would redirect visitors from mainland China to Google.com.hk from Google.cn. Already, China has worked to censor search results provided on Google.com.hk.

This latest move by Google is sure to further aggravate an already tense situation, but we have to wonder, as we have before, if it really matters or if we’re looking at it from an ethnocentric point of view. Twitter may have been blocked, but China has several of its own Chinese Twitter clones. So now China can see tweets, which are predominantly not in Mandarin, in Google search results.

Then again, the Los Angeles Times points out that the search results are already bringing sensitive topics into view of Chinese citizens:

“The tweets do not show up for all searches, but only for terms that appear to be popular on Twitter. On Thursday morning, that included discussions on such taboo subjects as how to circumvent China’s Internet firewall, why Google decided to exit China and a vaccine scandal unfolding in central China.”

The move seems more like a principled slap in the face than anything else. But then again, so does much of this situation.

Discuss

Yesterday, the Telegraph ran an article about a study that seemed to have found a connection between the spread of syphilis and the popularity of Facebook. Today, the paper has run a follow-up story, wherein “Facebook has said that reports linking the site’s rise to an increased incidence of the bacterial infection syphilis are ‘ridiculous’”.

According to the article, a Facebook spokesman has said that the initial report ignores “the difference between correlation and causation”, but is the idea so unbelievable? Are we falling into the trap of technological determinism in thinking that Facebook could actually aid in and cause the spread of STDs?

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Right off the bat, we have to say that Facebook has a decent argument, at least on a semantic and statistical level. Further on in the Telegraph follow-up article, the spokesman for the social networking site “pointed out that the dramatic rise in social networking over the past two years meant that Facebook’s rise could be correlated with any other increased trend in the UK”. Is it really so hard to believe, though, that people are meeting and arranging casual sexual encounters through the social network? According to Facebook, it is:

“As Facebook’s more than 400 million users know, our website is not a place to meet people for casual sex – it’s a place for friends, family and co-workers to connect and share,” a Facebook spokesman is quoted as saying in the initial article.

It’s not like we’re comparing the rise in popularity of a site that sells used cars with sexually transmitted disease – Facebook deals in social interaction, which does, indeed, involve sex and therefor sexually transmitted diseases. Even the name “Facebook” comes from the book that some colleges put out at the beginning of every year with pictures and names of all of the incoming class (at least they used to) – the book that upper-classmen scan for the hot incoming freshman. The only thing that might be missing from the previous statement is that, at times, Facebook is a place for friends, family and co-workers to connect and share…sexually transmitted diseases. Okay, hopefully not family.

But is it really Facebook’s fault? Probably not. While the professor behind the study said that there was a “fourfold increase in the number of syphilis cases” in these areas, where residents were 25 percent more likely to log onto Facebook, the site is likely not at fault. Were Facebook not available, we’d likely be trying to put the blame on Myspace, Craigslist, Friendster or whatever other method that was most popular for social interaction there.

In the end, we run into one of those “chicken or the egg” dilemmas. Would these towns, absent entirely of the Internet, have these same rates of syphilis? Or are the new communication options offered by the Internet making this all possible?

We’re likely to stand behind the idea that the Internet, indeed, aids in interaction and Facebook’s popularity is likely a solid corollary, but that this is not an inherent fault with the network. Blame the Internet, if you will – it can take it.

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Returning to a lesson we recently learned from the dancing hippie, we have to wonder if today’s move by GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name provider, means there’s more trouble in store for China and western Internet companies. According to an article in today’s Washington Post, the company will follow Google’s lead and cease registering websites in China.

As we learned when studying the case of the dancing hippie, it’s the first follower that “transforms a lone nut into a leader.”

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin called for the U.S. to stand up against Internet censorship in China this morning, criticizing Microsoft for its stance on the issue. While Brin’s own stance has been called into question, it seems that the lone dancer has found a partner.

The Post quotes Rep. Christopher Smith, the man behind “a bill that would make it a crime for U.S. companies to share personal user information with ‘Internet-restricting’ countries”, as saying that “Google fired a shot heard ’round the world, and now a second American company has answered the call to defend the rights of the Chinese people.”

GoDaddy’s move, however, is not the purely altruistic act of solidarity it might first appear to be. A new Chinese policy enacted last December upped the ante, requiring registrants of .cn domain names to submit photos and business identification, which would then be forwarded to the government. The law would require GoDaddy to retroactively gather information from domain registrants.

While this certainly has extremely ominous implications in terms of human rights, we have to wonder how much the law implies in financial terms. GoDaddy is currently responsible for more than 40 million domain names, a number that is three times the nearest competitor. We don’t know what percent of that is in China, but it could be quite the endeavor to go back and acquire extra registrant information before sending it to the government.

On the other hand, we can hope that this is all being done for the good of humanity. And even if not, if it has that result in the end, does it matter what the reasons for the actions were? All skepticism aside, Google has found a friend, and the hardest part may be behind it.

As Derek Sivers, the man behind the dancing hippie video, told us last time, “When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.”

GoDaddy, it seems, has stood up, joined in and now we’re wondering what big player might be next.

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Google has come out with a new security feature today for Gmail that addresses some common email scams.

Many of these email scams involve a hijacked account being remotely accessed and Gmail’s new feature addresses specifically that – remote unauthorized access.

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The most common scam – one we’ve heard about more and more recently – involves someone hijacking an account and emailing someone’s friends and family saying that they’re traveling, can’t access their bank account for some reason, and needs to borrow some cash.

The thing is, unless you somehow ferret out the fact they they’re not who they seem – from contextual clues – there’s likely no way you would ever know it was fake. The email comes from the correct email address because it is, indeed, sent from that email address. And the person with the hacked account is likely to be completely unaware.

Google’s security feature should help with this, as long as your friend and the scammer don’t happen to live in the same area. According to Google, the feature uses logged IP addresses and compares them, over time, to determine whether or not suspicious activity might be occurring. So, if your friend’s account is accessed twice within a couple hours, from Colorado and then Mexico, it will alert them.

According to Google, IPs are logged according to the Gmail privacy policy and point only to a broad geographical location. When an alert pops up, you can choose to show the details, which will show how the email was accessed, from where and when.

Within the same window, you will be able to change the account’s password. Google Apps customers, the blog says, can look forward to this feature soon as well.

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We’ve seen the feature before on services like MapMyRide and surely many other maps, but as of yesterday, we will probably begin seeing it pop up all around the web – elevation on maps.

Google announced yesterday that it would be bringing elevation to its Maps API, ensuring a whole new slew of Google Maps mashups.

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The new service, available for use as either the ElevationService class or the Elevation Web Service (which doesn’t require an API key to use), provides “the elevation in meters for one or more sets of coordinates” or a select number of points, equally spaced along a path.

As Google points out in its blog, the most obvious use for elevation is in planning out something like a bicycle route. “In fact you’ll be happy to hear,” the company writes in its blog “that the Maps API bicycling directions already factor in elevation”.

Already, for bicycling junkies like myself, the ability to check out routes and elevations on sites like MapMyRide is extremely useful, if not just really interesting. The mashup on Google’s blog post about this new feature shows how the data can be used to give a side-view of any path, alerting you to any unforseen inclines or descents.

Aside from bicycling, there are any number of uses for this sort of data – avoiding hills in icy winter travel, figuring out sight lines or just choosing the best route to drive that moving van and not have everything slide to the back end.

While there are other services, as we’ve mentioned, that have already offered this feature, there’s something about it coming to Google Maps. We already use Google Maps to plot out our routes and get directions, so why go somewhere else to get elevation? Now, you might not have to. We’re hoping this gets added as a standard feature on Google Maps soon.

Take a minute to play with the embedded map below and see how the elevation data can be used with Google Maps.

Discuss

At the time of this writing, it’s been just over two hours, 21 minutes and 14 seconds since Opera submitted Opera Mini to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes App Store.

How do we know this? Opera is putting Apple’s notoriously slow response time and browser monopoly on center stage today as part of its announcement that it is coming to the iPhone.

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Opera first announced that it was planning to bring its mobile browser to the iPhone at the beginning of February. As we noted then, Apple’s response is uncertain, as it has yet to allow any browsers that use alternative rendering engines on the iPhone. While other apps work on top of Safari, there are no other independent browsers.

Opera Mini is already available for Symbian and Android and Mozilla has been working on apps for Android and Windows Mobile.

A primary difference between Opera and Safari is the browser’s server-side rendering, which downloads a web page to a server and compresses it before sending it to the client, in this case your phone, for viewing. This method can reduce page load-times dramatically and could be even more important for mobile browsing than it is for web viewing at home.

The following sneak-peek video shows a full-featured, tabbed browser that certainly looks a lot faster than Apple’s native Safari.

Even if we end up trying Opera Mini and decide to stick with Safari, in the end we feel it’s always better to have options when it comes to software and platforms. But then again, that’s not exactly what Apple is known for, is it?

Hopefully, Opera Mini will pass muster and it will be the beginning of the browser revolution for the iPhone – or, at very least, we’ll have two browsers to choose from.

Discuss

We trust services like Last.fm or Pandora to learn our musical tastes and serve up custom radio stations, so why not the same for the numerous streams that bombard us daily?

My6Sense, a recommendation engine for your social streams and news feeds, is releasing its functionality today in its “Attention API” at the DEMO conference.

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The company released an iPhone app last summer, which uses the company’s “digital intuition” to determine the particular stories and status updates that are most relevant to you according to what you’ve clicked on and spent time with in the past. The system learns from you, becoming more familiar with what you are interested in as time goes on.

According to the company, “the service is content/stream agnostic and can automatically rank information from all types of sources — including social streams like Twitter, news streams, RSS, vertical content providers, open whiteboards and more. The solution is optimized for mobile platforms, where digital clutter is the most prominent, and can be successfully used on non-mobile sites and applications as well.”

With services like Pandora, you need to let the program know when you like or dislike something. The “Attention API”, on the other hand, simply requires that the site making use of it report back user activity in order to learn the user’s habits and preferences.

While this sounds great, and we can see it filtering out some of the noise, we have the same concerns about it as we do about Google customizing our search – that we will end up in an echo chamber of like-minded thought. As our own Frederic Lardinois pointed out when reviewing the My6Sense iPhone app, you may want to step outside the recommendations once in a while for a breath of fresh air.

If you are a real news junkie, you will probably still sometimes want to switch to the regular timeline mode that organizes items chronologically. After all, the items you don’t usually think you would be interested in can sometimes really grab your attention (which is, to be honest, a problem that all recommendation systems have to grapple with).

On the company’s API page, it mentions that the API will provide “No fear of bombardment” as “Developers and publishers can broadcast any amount of information and content to a widespread audience, which reaching individual consumers with messages that are uniquely relevant to them.”

We would hope that, in reality, any service using the API would notify its users that it was doing so and even offer the ability to step outside of the service’s recommendations.

Discuss

For many people, Twitter offers a larger, more diverse stream of constantly flowing data than they’ve ever had to deal with before in their life. Depending on how many people you follow and how much they tweet, the information can become unmanageable. To that end, we have user lists, third-party clients, Twitter tools and search.

And today, it looks like Twitter has begun working on making this last option – search – more useful for its users by offering the ability to percolate popular search results to the top of the page.

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Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable noticed an update in the Twitter API Google Group this morning that alerts us of a soon-to-come search feature – popular tweets.

From the post on Google Groups:

Until the popular tweet feature all search results have been sorted
chronologically, most recent results at the top. If a search query has any
popular results, those will be returned at the top, even if they are older
than the other results.

Basically, the API will now offer a variable named “result_type” that can will return either “popular” or “recent”. Programs will be able to use the variable to either return search results with popular tweets at the top as default, show only popular results or show only recent results.

Also added to the Twitter API this week are two other variables for the retweet API.

The first will return up to the first 100 user representations of those who
have retweeted the tweet specified in the url by :status_id.

The second will return just the ids of those retweeters for the cases where
that’s all you care about.

Perhaps these have some sort of implication in how tweets will be deemed popular, but even if not, it could be useful in watching the trickle-down spread of a tweet.

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In continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news consumption, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing how Facebook users compare with others in return visits.

According to Hopkins’ article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

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Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users are also repeat offenders. That is, they don’t just visit once, they come back for more. From the Hitwise blog:

Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News.

Why do we care about this metric? Because “visitors aren’t as valuable if they don’t come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again.” Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?

Hopkins doesn’t get into the “why” behind the numbers, but we’d be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual’s world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more.

Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you’ve imagined. It doesn’t offer that one thing we can all trust – the valued opinion of a friend. It’s also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.

Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure – news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, “with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important.”

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Here’s an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.

That’s what Lokast, the self-described “disposable” social network lets you do – carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.

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The LoKast iPhone app was released earlier this week at the South By South West festival in Austin and is the perfect app for finding yourself among throbbing masses of the technologically inclined. But what is this disposable thing? From the email we received this week on the app’s release:

Disposable? Yes. That means unlike Facebook which is friends and family, this app is about finding random people in close range and being able to share and see parts of their public digital profile including downloading their public-share videos, music and pictures. The best part, is that after you’re in that close range, you may never see them again. IE: Disposable.

According to the press release, the name is short for “local casting”, as opposed to broadcasting, and “aims to eliminate the need for physical media sharing, thereby eradicating physical CDs, plastic cases, video DVDs or waiting to get back to a PC computer to share and experience content.”

We have to agree that SXSW seems like the perfect venue for this type of app and we’d say why not give it a shot? We haven’t made it all the way downtown yet to be close enough to give it a full whirl, but it looks more than capable from toying with it.

Now, the thing is, we can’t see a lot of people using this outside of big, hi-tech cities or conferences. Where does this fit into our day to day life? Are we really going to run around town staring at my screen trying to see if someone else with the same app is nearby? We don’t think so. For now, though, we’d say give it an install and run around collecting some demos and see what people are listening to.

Discuss

This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the “100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora” that is the standard for the site.

Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative?

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While we wonder about the collaborative nature of the site versus the more fixed nature of video, others have already been hard at work making collaborative video a (potential) reality.

We spoke today with Michael Dale, a self-professed “open-video evangelist” for Kaltura, who said that “we haven’t really seen yet the collaborative sequencing aspects of the software,” but that these tools are currently in development. Kaltura is the online video editing company that is working with Wikimedia to enable video on Wikipedia. Through meta data and other tools, the company is trying to make video a more collaborative media.

The “Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia” page offers a simple five-step how-to on how to add video to the site, but the only thing we’re thinking it’s missing is the “wash, rinse, repeat” aspect of adding any content to Wikipedia. While it is rather simple to go in and edit a sentence here and a paragraph there in a text format, editing a video is not nearly as simple.

Now videos can be easily uploaded, how will Wikipedia’s users contend with the medium? If a three-minute long video is added to an article, but 30 seconds of it contain somewhat disputed ideas, interspersed through out, will these parts simply be cut? Will the whole video be scrapped or will another user take the video, slice those parts out and insert their own? And in the end, if this is the case, what sort of mish-mash multimedia will we end up with in the end? This is the next step, it would seem.

“Once there are more tools available,” said Dale, “I think we’ll see more experimentation.”

It’s not as if these questions are new to the Wikipedia community, as you can read in its proposed guidelines, which suggest that videos will should likely be limited to “snapshot-type”, “performance-type” and “tour-type” videos. Even with these limitations, if you’ve ever looked through the history of changes on Wikipedia articles, then you know how even the finest points of an idea can be discussed and dissected.

According to a video interview with Kaltura co-founder Michal Tsur on Beet.TV, “users should be able to use video just the same way they’re using text”, but a word is a word is a word. A video, even a tiny bit of video, can differ in lighting, sound, angle and any number of other variables.

“The actual fact is that we’re just getting started,” Dale pointed out. “There’s not a clear idea of how video will work and be used.”

In the end, we think video sounds like a great idea, but wonder how widespread it can really become on a platform that holds collaboration in such high esteem. Whether or not video collaboration takes off on Wikipedia, we would love to see what could be created within other contexts (i.e. not encyclopedic) with the collaborative video tools that Dale says are currently in development.

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Facebook may be denying any wrongdoing, but a California judge is disagreeing with the social networks’ disagreement to the tune of a $9.5 million dollar settlement today.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the settlement comes in response to a class-action lawsuit over Facebook’s Beacon program that published what users were buying.

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The decision allocates $6 million of the settlement to a “digital trust fund” that will go to organizations that study online privacy, says the Times article. The Times explains the bit of controversy hovering around this final decision:

Over the objections of privacy advocates, Facebook will have a seat on the fund’s three-member board. It consists of Chris Jay Hoofnagle, who heads the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s public policy director; and writer Larry Magid.

While some people are saying that the settlement is unfair in a few ways, Justin Brookman, a senior resident fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, seemed to disagree. The general contention has been that Facebook will have one seat on the three-member board for the “digital trust fund” and that it was already required to pay money out to promote online privacy, as our own Sarah Perez discussed when the settlement was first announced last October.

Brookman said that today’s decision is “a really good settlement for consumers”, explaining that “there are really very few settlements that come up with that type of monetary figure.”

He also contended that, while Facebook will have a seat on the board, it will be a minority member, as a majority vote requires two out of the three parties to agree. He said that the other two members, Hoofnagle and Magid, were both good choices who will act in the public’s interest.

“We have a lot of confidence they’ll make wise awards of the money,” he said. “They both criticized Facebook when Beacon came out.”

According to the Times, however, this may not be the end of the appeal process.

One privacy advocate said he was exploring whether he could appeal the decision. “This sweetheart deal for Facebook is outrageous and another indication they don’t really want to ensure privacy online,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Brookman noted, however, that a settlement like this for privacy issues was relatively unprecedented.

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Everybody piled into the ballroom today at the Austin Convention Center to hear Spotify CEO Daniel Ek give the final keynote interview of SXSWI of 2010 fully expecting to be blown away with the release of the peer-to-peer music player.

Instead, we got somewhat evasive and allusive answers on when to expect a U.S. version and were left looking to yesterday’s announcement of MOG’s move to mobile, with full knowledge that Napster is nipping at its heels.

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At the same time, while we’re all awaiting the U.S. launch, it looks like many of the tech savvy already have gotten their hands on the Europe-only application. Interviewer Eliot Van Buskirk started out the session by asking who in the audience had used Spotify and more than most of the crowd raised a hand in the air. Ek said that he was very surprised by the number of people that had used the software.

Ek said that he thinks that the day that we allow music to be seamlessly transported between platforms and carried around on mobile devices would be when we saved the music industry.

“Music that I really love, I tend to want to buy and own still,” said Ek. “I don’t necessarily want to own it in the format it used to be, like in a dumb plastic disk, but I’m more than happy to pay $100 to get a box set with a t-shirt and notes.”

He explained that, while many seem to criticize Spotify for giving music away for free and adding to the problem, “it’s not free” and that “with all those listings on the Spotify platform, the artists get paid every time” their music is played.

Ek argued that he thought that the music industry would be “radically bigger” today if users could legally have music on any device, using the metaphor of music as flowing water.

We did, however, get to see a quick demonstration of Spotify for Android, but it was a bit quick to glean much in the way of usability. It did, indeed, play music.

In the end, though, we have to wonder why we’re all holding our breath for Spotify to land on U.S. shores. By the show of hands, it certainly doesn’t seem that hard to acquire and we have some valid alternatives, like MOG and the soon-to-be Napster platform, as well as their web counterparts.

If you’re that worried about getting Spotify, our suggestion would be to go get a proxy service set up and get to it already.

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ReadWriteWeb is pleased to be hosting a live-stream for tonight’s Ai Weiwei event at the Paley Center in New York City. You can watch it live on our site, where we will be discussing social media and digital activism. Ai Weiwei will be joined by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, our own Richard MacManus, and moderator Emily Parker. Make sure to tune in tonight at 6:30 pm Eastern.

Special thanks to Conjunctured Coworking in Austin for hosting the RWW team during the event. To take part in the conversation on Twitter use the hashtag #aiweiwei.

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Ai Weiwei and Digital Activism in China

ReadWriteWeb has been actively covering events in China this year, in particular Google’s struggle to effect change regarding censorship in China. So I’m personally thrilled to join the conversation with these three smart and influential people: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey and Orville Schell.

Ai Weiwei is undoubtedly the star attraction. He is China’s leading digital activist and a pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China. He’s also a renown international artist and architect. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron on the famous "Bird’s Nest" design of the National Stadium for the Beijing Olympics. Ai Weiwei later renounced that design as a “pretend smile” from the Chinese government.

Details About the Participants

This information comes from the Paley Center website:

Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, curator, architect, social commentator, and activist. He was born in 1957 into the domestic political exile of his father, the noted modernist poet Ai Qing. Ai Weiwei’s birthright was simultaneously one of a cultural insider and a political outsider, and he quickly perceived the contradictions of his condition.

Ai Weiwei’s art has been shown in museums and galleries internationally. As a curator, he is known for cutting-edge exhibitions. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with the acclaimed Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the winning design for the National Stadium project for the Beijing Olympics, popularly known as the “Bird’s Nest,” which he later renounced as a “pretend smile.”

Ai Weiwei has never sought foreign citizenship and maintains his credibility among a devoted Chinese following as a highly active blogger, with his finger on the pulse of modern China. Unafraid to spotlight injustices, he has documented the arbitrary conviction and swift execution of alleged cop-killer Yang Jia in Shanghai, investigated shoddy school construction in Sichuan, and led a movement to oppose the nationwide installation of Internet filtering software in new computers. He is critical of one-party rule and government corruption, as well as the nationalist tendencies of China’s citizenry, which allow state power to go unchecked. As a result his blogs are shut down, his home studio is under surveillance, and he’s had to have cranial surgery for injuries sustained during a recent altercation with local police in Sichuan.

Jack Dorsey is the creator, cofounder, and chairman of Twitter, Inc. Originally from St. Louis, Jack’s early fascination for mass-transit and how cities function led him to Manhattan and programming real-time messaging systems for couriers, taxis, and emergency vehicles. Throughout this work Jack witnessed thousands of workers in the field constantly updating where they were and what they were doing; Twitter is a constrained simplification designed for general usage and extended by the millions of people who make it their own every day. Jack is dedicated to creating public goods which foster approachability, immediacy, and transparency, and is starting a second company named Square focused on bringing these concepts to commerce.

Richard MacManus is the founder and editor in chief of ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular and influential technology blogs in the world. New Zealander MacManus founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and grew his blog about the evolving Internet into an international team of journalists. ReadWriteWeb is read by millions of thought leaders and consumers, and is syndicated daily by the New York Times.

From the early days of blogging, social networks and YouTube to the future of machine learning, aggregate data analysis and other meta-trends, MacManus is widely recognized as a leader in articulating what’s next in technology and what it means for society at large.

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Calling itself an “all you can eat, on demand, whenever you want it” music service, MOG gives its users access to “just about every artist, album and song ever made” for $5 a month – certainly not a deal to scoff at.

Today, at the South By South West festival in Austin, the company has announced the release of a mobile version of its application.

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The company first launched its $5, all-you-can-hear service last fall, announcing deals with Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI. MOG All Access is a browser-based service that will offer more than 5 million on-demand tracks that, unlike Pandora or other Internet-based radio stations, you can pick and choose from on demand. There is no limit on skipping around songs and if you want to hear a specific song, then you can hear that song.

“You can see the queue, you can jump to anywhere in the queue, when a song comes on the library, you can save it,” said David Hyman, CEO of MOG, at today’s unveiling. “When you listen to Bob Marley radio, it’s not Bob Marley inspired radio. You get Bob Marley 24/7.”

Today’s launch brings this sort of on-demand music delivery to your smartphone. MOG will be launching for Android and iPhone early in the second quarter of 2010. Users will get full access to 7 million tracks on demand, the ability to download music to the phone, MOG radio, 64 ACC+ audio quality with higher quality available by download, for $10 a month.

The demo of the mobile app for Android showed a responsive, full-featured application that allows users to browse through artist discographies, with the ability to add entire albums to the playlist and voice search functionality.

Looking at the iPhone app, we saw a search based app that gives users the ability to play by album, song, playlist or artist radio. An interesting service we’ve only seen with MOG was the slider, which allows the user to give a variable on how they would like MOG radio to work, whether focusing solely on the chosen artist, on similar artists, or somewhere in between. The user can also switch over to look at the album a particular track comes from, play that album and even chose other songs from that album.

The app is not yet available for download on the iPhone and Hyman said that similar services have not had a problem so far. He guaranteed that there would be no problem for the Android, but couldn’t say the same for iPhone.

There is a bit of buzz in the crowd here at SXSW that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek will be announcing the similar music service’s arrival on U.S. shores when he speaks tomorrow at the keynote speech. We also spoke with Michelle Fields, a marketer with Napster.com, who said that a Napster mobile application was also on the way. Napster offers nearly 9 million songs to its users.

“We have a very strong mobile strategy and a mobile application will be unveiled soon,” said Fields.

While we long ago swore off CDs and moved over to the likes of Last.fm and Pandora, this sort of music portability might actually bring us back into the land of the paid consumer. What do you say? Will you shell out 10 clams a month to carry around more music than you’ve probably ever owned in your pocket?

Discuss

Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can’t be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.

But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?

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Even Moka Pantages, the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation, said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled “Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right“. Here’s the thing – we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise.

Update: We got a chance to sit and chat with Moka Pantages today and she took a moment to clarify that she was specifically referring to students using and quoting Wikipedia in research papers. We apologize for any misrepresentation of her stance. Here is her clarification:

I absolutely believe Wikipedia is a good, trustworthy source for contextual news and information and should be used by everyone, including students, as a resource. When I was asked during the panel whether or not Wikipedia should be accepted as a source for college papers, it was my opinion that, just like any other encyclopedia, I don’t think it should be cited as a reference source. However, I do think it’s a great starting point for students to start their research and begin to understand the topic or issue they are writing about.

Tackling Real-Time Content

The panel featured journalists from the New York Times, SeattlePI.com, Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content – whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise – could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency.

Each panelist spoke about a specific case study – the New York Times’ coverage of last summer’s protests in Iran, for example – and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage.

“When you’re sitting in an office in New York and you’re trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you’re not going to be able to verify that,” he said. “The idea is that it’s a conversation on the web about this event.”

The Newsroom Moves Online

Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website’s breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter.

“The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter,” said Guzman. “We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff.”

While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? “Common sense,” she answered.

The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story.

Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks

Then came Pantages’ turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn’t be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper.

One particular user, Kensplanets, was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations.

“It’s not just U.S.-centric information,” Pantages explained, “You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India – they’re all there.”

According to Pantages, by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article’s life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is “really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom.” Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news.

Wikipedia As News Aggregator

Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection.

“There’s no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it’s real-time aggregation,” Pantages said.

So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia’s contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals.

In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors.

While Pantages argues that “Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point,” we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we’ve entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow.

With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content – whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else – as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own.

Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you’ll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it’s all laid bare for the world to see.

Discuss

We write this for you, the tired, the weak and the weary, the dogged attendees of the South By South West festival in Austin this weekend. We know that you’re exhausted, but it’s not from the booze, the parties or the product pitches – it’s the endless location based check-ins. If only someone had solved this in time, right?

From what we can tell, the folks over at Brightkite have the solution with Check.in, but have yet to release it to the achey-thumbed, smart-phoned masses.

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According to the splash page we found at Check.in, the app, which looks to be for both iPhone and Android, will be the “one checkin to rule them all”.

“Check.in takes the hassle out of checking in on multiple services,” the page reads. And at the bottom, we’re told that the service is “made by Martin May, Brady Becker, and Jordan Harband of Brightkite after severe check-in fatigue.”

When you take a closer look at the sole image on the page, which depicts a Check.in app on both iPhone and Android, we can see that the service appears to handle check-ins for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, and we would assume others are on the way. But we have to wonder how it would check in to Gowalla, as the company’s API is currently read-only.

Check.in would be the first of its kind in the market and would surely co-opt a large amount of traffic and make the “severe check-in fatigue” that much more manageable.

When we first wrote about this at the beginning of the month, the only response we received was “no comment”. We asked again today, but have yet to receive any comment. We’ve also asked the folks over at Gowalla and they had this to say:

“We currently do not allow write access to our API. For now we’re excited to see creative use of the read API while we continue to polish our own native clients.”

If this service is in the pipeline to be released soon, it looks like Gowalla would not be included in the check-in service and that would be a shame. It’s only Friday and there are a number of days left to SXSW Interactive, AKA “Nerdfest 2010”, but wouldn’t it be that much more enjoyable if you didn’t have to spend the first 10 minutes any time you arrived somewhere new checking in?

With that said, we have to wonder how much we would lose out on the features now offered by these services. Will Check.in also offer tips, photos, check-in commenting and all of that or will it just let us broadcast our location? For now, we’ll just have to wonder, but either way, fear not, a solution looks to be on the way.

Discuss