Category: News

Last fall, Mass Animation, which calls itself the largest global animation collaboration ever, posted an invitation on Facebook for artists around the world to collaborate on the making of an animated short film. This film is now getting a theatrical release this week with Columbia Pictures’ Planet 51 release. It’s called "Live Music."

"When artists arrived at Mass Animation’s virtual studio on Facebook, they were given the essential tools and animation software necessary to participate, including individual storyboards and 3D models bundled for download along with guidelines on animation," a representative for Facebook tells WebProNews. "Through the social networking features of the application, animated shots could then be viewed, voted on and shared with friends."

"’Live Music’ reflects the input of  58,000+ participants from 101 countries and 51 animators who collaborated in the making of this unique film, which introduces Mass Animation to the world," she adds.

Mass Animation has illustrated to a great extent what can truly be acheived with collaboration efforts on Facebook (or social media in general). It probably helps that Mass Animation puts so much focus on Facebook as a tool. They even use their Facebook page as their website. If you go to massanimation.com, it redirects to facebook.com/massanimation. That’s some dedication to a specific channel. 

Now Mass Animation is involved in another Facebook project with Sony Online Entertainment and DC Comics. This week the DC Universe Online Animation Contest was announced. This is being called version 2.0 of the Mass Animation FB app and will give DC fans, gamers, and animators a chance to animate characters from the DC Universe online game that Sony is developing. This is another example of Mass Animation allowing fans to collaborate on a big product. The contest will launch on December 7.

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Since September 21st, hundreds of students across the country responded to the President’s call to take greater responsibility for their education by creating videos explaining why education is important. In less than two months, students submitted more than 600 video entries.

In their entries, students talked about the goals they had for their future and the steps they would take to meet them. The submissions came from students from diverse economic, social and ethnic backgrounds, and the content ranged from music videos to short skits. The common theme in all of these videos was the understanding that education was the key to success. 

Secretary Arne Duncan recorded a message thanking all the students who submitted videos:

var params = { allowscriptaccess: “always”, allowfullscreen: “true”, wmode:”transparent”}; swfobject.embedSWF(“http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/oxjD9st3MM4&hl=en&fs=1&showinfo=0&showsearch=0”, “flashcontent2”, “480”, “295”, “8”, null, {}, params);

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Communications and Outreach has carefully reviewed each submission and narrowed the submissions down to 10 finalists based on creativity, strength and originality of content, and ability to inspire. These videos are now available for voting at www.youtube.com/Iamwhatilearn.

Voting for the videos runs from November 16th to December 4th. The three videos with the most votes at the end of this period will each win a $1,000 prize issued by the U.S. Department of Education.  

Eddie Lee is Director of New Media at the Department of Education
 

A study from a couple of NYU Stern professors has found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. Basically, if this research is any indication, if your business has both a paid result and an organic result appear at the same time, you have a better chance of your paid result getting clicked than if the organic result had not appeared.

Seen better CTRs when paid and organic listings are present? Tell us about it.

Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang have highlighted the following findings:

– On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.

– The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.

– Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.

– The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.

– The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.

– Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.

The professors used "a unique panel dataset of consumer responses to keyword ads on Google" to conduct their research. The complete findings from the study are evidently available in a paper entitled "Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence?" It’s 52 pages long.

"These findings have important implications for the incentives of search engines to strategically modify the rankings of their organic search listings in order to boost their revenues from paid search advertisements," says Professor Ghose.

Ghose’s point is an interesting one. Nobody’s making any accusations here, but would search engines tweak organic results specifically with the goal of increasing the performance of paid results, and bringing in more revenue?

Some think the idea is absurd. For example, one WebProNews reader commented:

No additional CPC is incurred when an organic listing is present, and the CPC certainly does not change depending on the organic listing’s position. The PPC auctioning process has nothing to do with the organic SERPs.

Lastly, manipulating the organic SERPs in order to charge more for PPC clicks is cutting your own throat, from an SE perspective. In effect, telling advertisers: "You got a better organic position, therefore you will be charged more for your PPC clicks." Under which business model does this make sense? Exactly none. (respond here.)

Even if a search engine did engage in such a practice, it is highly unlikely that anybody would know about it. I think the larger point is still just that it pays to optimize your site for organic listings, even if you are paying for listings. This may seem like common sense, but it is easy to dismiss the time and effort that go into an optimized site if you think you can just buy your way to clicks. What are your thoughts on the subject? Comment here.

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So this is interesting. The folks at The Pirate Bay have shut down its tracker for good, and switched entirely to a distributed, decentralized system, called DHT. As others are noting, this is quite a milestone, but I actually wonder if it will also have legal implications. Basically, using such a distributed system takes The Pirate Bay even further out of the equation in terms of its role in the sharing of content, and in theory could impact the ruling against The Pirate Bay. Of course, the entertainment industry will say it doesn’t matter, and the courts (who don’t seem to understand these things very well) might not realize the difference, but it is meaningful in terms of how involved The Pirate Bay actually is in the activity that’s happening.

But, of course, even if this makes no difference in how the courts view The Pirate Bay (as expected), it does show the inevitable trend of these things: making them ever more and more decentralized and harder to shut down. When the RIAA shut down Napster, what came out of it was even more decentralized and harder to stop. Now the same thing is happening with the attempted shut down of The Pirate Bay. Even if you don’t like what sites like The Pirate Bay do, at some point you have to wonder what good it does to keep shutting down these offerings when all it does is drive people to the “next” offering that’s even more difficult to stop? At some point, someone is going to get the message that you can’t stop this stuff. So why not figure out a way to use it to your advantage?

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How excited are you about the Dell Adamo XPS 13? Like (*stretches arms wide*) this excited? (*stretches arms wider*) Or this?

Well, it’s true. The XPS is available now for a mere $1,799 with a 128GB solid state drive, 13-inch WLED screen, 4GB memory, and an Intel Core SU9400 1.4GHZ processor. It will run Windows 7.

You can pick the old girl up right here

We’ve been pretty excited about Adamo generally and this is an interesting move towards the right size and shape for the line.

I point you in the direction of Business Insider, which has compiled a list of knock-off products that’s worth your time. It’s not just the typical, Chinese iPhone wannabe, either. Like, nalencia oranges? Never heard of those. Dolce & Banana? I might be able to afford that. And, hmm, that looks an awful like the Amazon Kindle, but it’s not quite it, now is it?

Sharing open source software just got a whole lot easier.  The Open Web Foundation has announced the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement, and some huge corporations – namely Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo – have given the arrangement their figurative seal of approval.

It’s important to note that this isn’t some superfluous, feel-good pact.  Eran Hammer-Lahav, Director of Standards Development at Yahoo and President of the Open Web Foundation explained in a post on Yodel Anecdotal, "While Open Source software enjoys a wide range of licenses for making software freely available, specifications and standards are usually licensed under a complex set of rules and conditions."

He then continued, "These licenses are hard to read and spread over many pages full of terms even many lawyers don’t fully understand.  There was also no suitable standalone agreement available for companies and communities to use when making their work available, forcing them into long and costly legal negotiation between the contributors."

The Open Web Foundation Agreement should address most of those problems.  It’s a relatively short, relatively simple, and easily tailored document that’s meant to be serve individual developers, large corporations, and everything in between.

The fact that so many important organizations support the Agreement should ensure that it actually gets some use, too, and perhaps becomes the standard it’s meant to be.  Without Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, the Open Web Foundation Agreement – interesting as it is – might be forgotten within days or weeks.

But as things stand, Hammer-Lahav concluded, "This is just the first step in what we hope will be a new path for open collaboration and innovation on the web."

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Update: Facebook officially announced the integration of Facebook and Xbox today:

We’re excited that beginning today the social game experience is coming to Xbox Live, so now you can play Xbox games with your Facebook friends…

The Xbox Facebook integration allows you to take part in some of the most popular activities on Facebook directly from your living room on your television. With Facebook for Xbox, you can update your status, browse updates from your friends and view photos on the big screen. You also can link your Facebook profile to your Xbox Gamertag to find your Facebook friends and connect with them on Xbox Live. It’s never been easier to discover friends you never even knew played Xbox.

According to Mashable, Twitter is also now available on Xbox via the latest Xbox 360 system update.

Original Article: At the E3 Expo today, it was announced that Facebook and Twitter integration would be coming to Xbox. I guess MySpace gets left behind here too. Liveblogging the event, Daniel Terdiman of CNET writes:

Finally, Xbox Live members will now be able to interact with both Facebook and Twitter through their consoles. They’ll be able to share photos with Facebook friends via Xbox Live, and be able to see their lists of Xbox Live and Facebook friends simultaneously.

As for Twitter functionality, Xbox Live users will be able to post tweets directly from their consoles, without a PC.

It only makes sense that social networks and the gaming consoles get together. Games (particularly a service like Xbox live) are already social by nature, and Facebook and Twitter just happen to be two of the hottest forms of communication at the moment.

"Ever since the Facebook Platform launched two years ago, Facebook has become an increasingly important platform for online game developers. Entirely new companies have been built on the back of the Facebook Platform, like Playfish, Zynga, and SGN, that are creating the next generation of social games," says Justin Smith at Inside Facebook. "However, today’s announcement shows Facebook’s potential as a content distribution channel that could actually lead to more viral growth for games on other platforms."

It will be interesting to see if other consoles and social media companies integrate with one another. Smith notes that Electronic Arts is taking advantage of Facebook Connect for its Xbox version of Tiger Woods 2010.

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I originally had a hot tip on a dark colored Sony mini stereo system that was quite impressive and headed for Europe, sporting a 3 disc DVD changer and a 7 inch LCD screen. I didn’t have a price, but I had a model name – the MHC-GZR33i. I then looked at SonyStyle USA and noticed that this product already existed, and is called the Muteki Shelf System LBT-LCD7Di. The US version has a tang orange color scheme on the speakers and light while the European version is more subdued and in tune with Sony Design. Oddly enough, I have seen little to zero coverage about its debut. However, what’s really crazy is that the product is available at a ton of stores. Let’s talk about the US version first:

Fusing a 7″ LCD screen, 3-disc DVD/CD player and an iPod (including iPod Touch and iPhone) dock, this Muteki shelf system is an extremely diverse offering from Sony that is sold at $499, but can be found for nearly $75 less already. In addition to 360 total watts (180W x 2) with GROOVE and Z-GROOVE (lol) bass boost, this Muteki system comes with a karaoke feature that allows you to sing along to your favorite tunes. Plus, you can play your iPod video, DVD or view a photo slide show. The tiny screen is nice, and if you want to show video on a bigger screen it has composite video output.

Other I/O include digital audio output, headphone, and analog in. You can play music (MP3) or video from CD’s, DVD’s, iPod, and USB. Put a single DVD disc with a bunch of MP3’s and your sitting pretty. Overall codec support includes MP3, WMA, AAC, and DivX. Did we mention it reads many Walkmans easily because they appear as mass storage devices? It also has the ability to listen to the radio or record and playback from the USB port. More specifications are available at SonyStyle.

So, the European version is essentially the same but looks much better in my eyes and is called the MHC-GZR33i – it hasn’t shown up anywhere yet but it will soon. I don’t have details on the price, but at $499 in the USA, I’m sure you can use your imagination. The only comparable system being sold in Europe right now by Sony (although that will change when this arrives soon) is the similarly named MHC-GTZ3i, which has less features.

This information is a Sony Insider exclusive, brought to you here first.

Looking for a DSLR this holiday season, but the budget is a bit tight? Let CrunchGear and Photojojo help you out. Photojojo is running a giveaway for a Nikon D3000, and they’ve invited you, our very special friends, to join in on the contest. Find out how to win after the jump.

The contest starts today, and the will end on the 23rd. To win, just leave a comment below telling us what your big plans are for the Thanksgiving holiday. You’ll enter here instead of at Photojojo, but we’ll collect the entries and send them over on the 25th. Only one entry per person please, and we will be watching.

It’s definitely worth your time to check out Photojojo as well. They have some pretty cool photography tips and some suggestions for projects you might not have ever seen before.

Here in the states, T-Mobile has been no stranger to screw-ups, but we’d always just figured that their UK counterparts were stand-up guys. After all, they’re British – as we all know, every one from that side of the pond is charming, affable, and rocks a bloody good accent. Unfortunately, it looks like not everyone employed there is as scrupulous as their customers would hope – a story by the BBC has confirmed that T-Mobile UK employees sold private subscriber data to a third-party broker.

We’ve seen a lot of “confirmations” for the much-rumored and believed-to-be-impending arrival of cross-game chat to the Sony PS3. Here’s another, this…

Pretty big news to share with y’all today: The Pirate Bay is no more. Well, “no more” in the sense that the site’s admins have decided to kill the tracker once and for all. The site will continue to serve the BitTorrent community, but will instead rely upon trackerless technology, such as DHT and PEX.

You’ll notice that, for today at least, the site’s well-known pirate ship logo has been replaced by a giant magnet. (No, Panic Software didn’t buy ad space on the front page!) That’s a clever reference to the new type of non-tracker links you’ll be clicking should you continue to use TPB. Called magnet links, these links don’t contain .torrent files, but rather the data needed for your client (Vuze, uTorrent, etc.) to connect to other peers to download the data.

It may take a little while to get used to non-torrents, yes.

Perhaps even more interesting, it seems like TPB’s higher-ups are trying to convince other BitTorrent sites to eliminate trackers, too. So says TorrentFreak, who’s usually right on the money when it comes to TPB news.

The idea is that the Internet’s big BitTorrent sites will do away with torrents so as to better evolve with the BitTorrent protocol. Presumably there are legal reasons for this, too.

How you can convince the world’s big “private” BitTorrent sites to hop aboard the DHT bandwagon, I don’t know. All the private sites I’ve been a party to have discouraged the use of DHT for the longest time.

All that said, you may want to star November 17, 2009 on your calendar, for that’s the day the tracker died. (How’s that for melodrama?)

crcb alerts us to the bizarre situation where the son (and heir to the copyrights) of poet Louis Zukofsky isn’t just brandishing the copyrights against those trying to republish his works, but he seems to be demanding fees from anyone quoting his father or writing about him — even academic dissertations. It doesn’t appear as if Paul is doing this to protect a legacy or anything (if anything, it sounds like he’s not a fan of his father), but he does want cold hard cash:

“I hardly give a damn what is said about my father (I am far more protective of my mother) as long as the name is spelled properly, and the fees are paid.”

The full copyright notice is quite a doozy, where the son basically seems to think copyright law means he alone gets to determine what is acceptable and what is not — and, for the most part, his view is that he doesn’t want you ever quoting or discussing his father, but if you must, then he wants money. He also seems to think that fair use is as he defines it, rather than what the law actually says.

All Louis and Celia Zukofsky is still copyright, and will remain so for many many years. I own all of these copyrights, and they are my property, and I insist upon deriving income from that property. For those of you convinced that LZ would find my stance abhorrent, the truth is that he kept all copyrights (initially in his name) as he had the rather absurd idea that said copyrights would be sufficient to allow for the economic survival of my mother, and their son. My stance is congruent with that hope.

Despite what you may have been told, you may not use LZ’s words as you see fit, as if you owned them, while you hide behind the rubric of “fair use”. “Fair use” is a very-broadly defined doctrine, of which I take a very narrow interpretation, and I expect my views to be respected. We can therefore either more or less amicably work out the fees that I demand; you can remove all quotation; or we can turn the matter over to lawyers, this last solution being the worst of the three, but one which I will use if I need to enforce my rights.

Except that, no, fair use is somewhat broadly defined under the law, and just because Paul wants it narrowly defined, it does not follow that this is the case. As Paul’s father, Louis Zukofsky once wrote: “The best way to find out about poetry is to read the poems.” Apparently, Paul would like to make that a lot more difficult and a lot more expensive. And, yes, Paul, quoting that was fair use.

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Politico: “Senate and House leaders are hoping to close up shop for the year by Dec. 18, even though neither chamber has figured out the end game for health care reform and must-pass appropriations bills.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Tuesday that both he and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., are targeting that day 18 as “a last day for this session of Congress.” This shared focus, though, is complicated by the ongoing challenges associated with health reform legislation among other to-do items. Meanwhile, “[t]he Senate … will begin wrestling with its version of health-care overhaul legislation this week and will likely need to push full-steam ahead to finish by the Hoyer and Reid’s target adjournment date” (Sherman, 11/17).

Roll Call: Reid “on Tuesday predicted Senate Democrats would get rave reviews for their forthcoming health care reform bill, even as he continues to wait for the official cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.” He was vague about when he was prepared to unveil the measure, but told reporters this afternoon, according to Roll Call, “that he would introduce a bill ‘in a little while.’ Democratic aides said Reid still expects the CBO score to be finalized sometime Tuesday” (Pierce, 11/17).

Roll Call: In other health overhaul news, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a leading proponent of the public insurance option, today rejected the idea the Senate use “filibuster-busting reconciliation rules to bypass opposition from Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and all 40 Republicans to a Democratic health care reform bill.”

“‘Reconciliation is a nonstarter,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work. … It opens itself up to an endless, unstoppable number of amendments.’” Reconciliation would allow Democrats “to pass a health care overhaul with a simple majority” and this route may be “the only one that would yield a public insurance option if Lieberman and Republicans follow through on a threat to filibuster any bill that includes one” (Dennis, 11/17).

And The Hill reports on comments made Monday by Sen. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., that Senate Democrats would prevail in winning the 60 votes needed to pass healthcare reform with a public plan. “‘My guess is, they’ll be able to pass something, and it will be very, very expensive and add a lot to our debt,’ the New Hampshire Republican [told CNBC last night], noting that Democrats are likely to allege the bill is ‘paid for (but) most of the pay-fors will never come to’ fruition” (Romm, 11/17).

Jim Kaiser, stained glass artisan from Girdwood, spent 9 days with the students and community of White Mountain as a part of the school’s 1% for art in the school. Jim created two large panels, which he installed above the front entryway and above the high school entryway. Jim also spent time working with the students creating a smaller window panel, which will go in each classroom. Adults had the opportunity to work with Jim in the evenings creating stained glass panels for the library windows.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google today announced YouTube Direct, an open source platform that lets media organizations directly connect with YouTube users to request and rebroadcast their YouTube clips.

The application allows custom YouTube uploaders to be built into another site, so users can submit their videos directly and track the viewing metrics in their own profile. Google highlights the rise of citizen journalism as a major reason for the program.

ABC News, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and more have already picked up on YouTube Direct, and examples can be seen on their respective sites. All involved content remains hosted by YouTube, and the only cost incurred is associated with the media company’s Google App Engine account, and is based upon the amount of traffic being served.

“Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization’s goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community,” Steve Grove of YouTube News and Politics said today. “Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.”

In short, the idea is to pull free content from YouTube and syndicate it on high-traffic sites.

But the most interesting part of this idea is that it puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of content control.

One of big media’s problems with YouTube has been that it lets anyone upload copyrighted content, regardless of ownership. As a result, we’ve seen TV networks, record labels, performing artists, and every type of copyright holder force users to take down content that may have contained copyrighted material.

But in this situation, the bigger media organizations would be looking to syndicate the users’ content, and the user retains the right to pull the video whenever he feels like it.

To quote YouTube Direct’s FAQ:

“If a user decides to delete a video after he or she has submitted it to your site via YouTube Direct, then this video will be removed from YouTube, and thus will no longer play anywhere on your site that the video has been embedded or linked to. When this happens, there will be a flag visible in the moderation panel indicating that the video is not longer live on YouTube, and any reference to it on your site should also be removed.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009