contentious.com

Intriguing window on how people perceive what the read. I'd love it if you could look up this info by specific genres, topics, or titles.

PRWeek has published the results of its latest study on the media and journalists—and bloggers are increasingly including themselves among their ranks. Just last year, only a third of bloggers considered themselves journalists; now 52% do. However, only 20% receive most of their income from blogging (but that’s up from 4% last year).

The problem with the dismissive way Google is reaction to a letter it received signed by several governments complaining about how the company handles privacy issues — and how G's response might be different if the US govt was one of the signatories.

Listened to this podcast today, and I'll probably listen to it again. So much good stuff here about how to make the decision about whether your social enterprise should be for- or nonprofit.

If you use bit.ly, check out the great collection of tools they offer for shortlink tracking and more.

"When you log in to a Website using your Facebook account that site can access the following pieces of information from your Facebook profile: your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, likes and interests, and your fan pages (according to recent revisions to Facebook's privacy policy your fan pages, likes and interests, current city, networks and friend list are now lumped into one category called ‘connections')."

"In a November 2007 e-mail, Goldman chief executive Lloyd Blankfein wrote that the firm "lost money" on the housing market, "then made more than we lost because of shorts."

"The release of the documents comes as Goldman Sachs is preparing its most detailed defense yet to allegations that it misled clients in its mortgage securities business, arguing that the firm was unsure whether housing prices would rise or fall and did not take any action at odds with the interests of its clients."

Why are people Democrat or Republican?

"A program of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), GISCorps coordinates short term, volunteer GIS services to underprivileged communities worldwide. Our services support humanitarian relief, community development, local capacity building, health and education. GISCorps is run by a Core Committee who e-meet monthly but e-communicate daily. Since its inception in October 2003, the Corps has attracted 100's of volunteers from over 75 countries. To date, GISCorps has deployed over 155 volunteers to 58 missions and 30 countries around the globe. These volunteers have contributed over 7,300 working hours towards those missions."

"I have already had creative, exciting conversations with others in this sector about how we could build a marketplace that:

allows end users surface ideas for tools or new functionality for existing tools
allows those ideas get support, gather feedback, get fleshed out by developers and users
allows funders (whether they are foundations, organizations, VCs, companies, etc.) identify tools to fund
allows developers to find work they know will be adopted and start working on tools with an active base of users
maintains an expectation that these tools will continue to be available for the people, by the people.
It is the last point that I think is the most important. It isn’t about having a crazy-liberal or Utopian version of the web. It IS about adopting tools that we feel comfortable deploying to our communities and building on, knowing they won’t close or leave without notice."

"There are dozens of ways to have a self-sustaining community. You can run your own ads on Ning-powered sites. You can sell swag through a Ning-powered store. You can get micropayments from your community and crowdsource the $25 per month you need to keep your network in business. But make no mistake: Even if you’re a nonprofit or a hobbyist, running any kind of website is a business. If you’re not able to pay a small fee for the resources you use, you might want to consider a free or inexpensive multi-author blog instead."

Article also lists Ning alternatives

"In this, the first post, we'll outline 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web:
- Native App and/or Browser Based?
- Privacy
- Emerging Wireless Standards

"in Part 2, we look at 4 classes of mobile applications that have become popular in 2010: geo-location, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, and mobile social networking."

"Social enterprises are social mission driven organizations which apply market-based strategies to achieve a social purpose. The movement includes both non-profits that use business models to pursue their mission and for-profits whose primary purposes are social. Their aim – to accomplish targets that are social and or environmental as well as financial – is often referred to as the triple bottom line. Many commercial businesses would consider themselves to have social objectives, but social enterprises are distinctive because their social or environmental purpose remains central to their operation."

"What does this mean for nonprofits? For one thing, they have to be aware of the cost of free, especially with software that supports their vital relationships with donors and supporters. In other words, don't put all your online relationships and donors in one free software basket and consider the alternatives before you adopt free technology."

"In this the final instalment, we look at three markets for mobile which promise to be hugely valuable: commerce, cloud computing and health"

Useful primer on understanding what Facebook Insights will and won't do. You can learn a lot, but you have a lot of constraints. Choose goals that can be measured by this tool.

"In these times of newspaper closings and sales, the Silverton Standard & the Miner has gotten a reprieve. When the owner of the Colorado newspaper, which has been part of the community for more than a century, decided to close it, the editor came up with an unusual idea: Ask the local historical society to take over the paper. And the society did, saving the Standard’s rich history and connection to the people it serves."

Mobile analytics service. I'll check this out, see how valid it might be — especially for feature phones.

Interesting, but unclear whether this research applies only to smartphones, or to feature phones too.

"Beyond sheer usage trends in social networking, data for the week ending April 4 indicates that mobile-centric social networking sites such as MocoSpace and AirG are better at engaging consumer than are with PC heavyweights like Facebook and MySpace."

"Pligg is an open source CMS (Content Management System) that you can download and use for free. Pligg CMS provides social networking software that encourages visitors to register on your website so that they can submit content and connect with other users."

"As a result of today’s news I suspect we’ll see quite a few active networks jump to whatever the cheapest premium option is; I don’t expect Ning to make it especially easy to port their data to a different service. There will also certainly be a backlash from Ning’s vocal community of Network Creators, many of whom have invested quite of bit of time building out their niche networks."

"we’ll be phasing out our free service. On May 4, 2010, we will share with you all of the details of our new offering, including features and price points, through a series of blog posts, emails, and conference calls. We recognize that there are many active Ning Networks for teachers, small non-profits, and individuals and it’s our goal to have a set of product and pricing options that will make sense for all of them. For Ning Creators using our free service who choose to move to another service, we will offer a migration path and time to make that change. We will still continue to allow free trials and test networks on the Ning Platform."

"This report takes an in-depth look at Hispanics who are ages 16 to 25, a phase of life when young people make choices that-for better and worse-set their path to adulthood. For this particular ethnic group, it is also a time when they navigate the intricate, often porous borders between the two cultures they inhabit-American and Latin American.

"The report explores the attitudes, values, social behaviors, family characteristics, economic well-being, educational attainment and labor force outcomes of these young Latinos. It is based on a new Pew Hispanic Center telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,012 Latinos, supplemented by the Center's analysis of government demographic, economic, education and health data sets."

"Text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group. However, voice calling is still the preferred mode for reaching parents for most teens."

"The Austin American-Statesman recently began to let advertisers pay for tweets that appear on two of the Statesman's Twitter accounts, @Statesman and @Austin360. Two local businesses — a restaurant and "Mansion of Terror," a local haunted house — took the Statesman up on its offer last fall and paid for a couple of days worth of tweets.

"For $300 per day, the advertisers were given one tweet in the morning and one in the afternoon. They sent their tweet to Quigley, who looked it over and then sent it to a Statesman advertising representative to publish. Quigley said he worked closely with the paper's ad department to establish some guidelines for advertisers."

Intriguing! "In addition to maintaining the free Printcasting.com service, which has been acquired from The Bakersfield Californian by FeedBrewer Inc. in exchange for an equity stake, FeedBrewer will expand Printcasting's democratized-publishing approach to apply to more than just print. We'll be adding additional outputs for smartphones, starting with the iPhone and Blackberry, and tablet computers, including Apple's new iPad."

Time Warner Cable Inc., the biggest pay-television provider in New York City, is pitching phone companies including AT&T and Verizon Wireless on a service that uses its underground cables to carry mobile calls and Web downloads — easing the congestion spurred by data-hungry users of smartphones like the iPhone.

The service, known in the industry as wireless backhaul, has become Time Warner Cable’s fastest-growing business after revenue tripled last year, said Craig Collins, senior vice president of business services. Across the cable industry, sales from wireless carriers may reach about $3.6 billion in 2012, according to researcher GeoResults Inc.

Today's giggle: Zombie weather report! LOVE IT!!!

a company that allows you to create and listen to audio tours strictly by voice over cell phones. VERY COOL! Create your own walking tours

Major mobile developer for news sites. Art Howe spoke at #rjimobile

"The company, which hosts 2.3 million social networks, says that it will shut down its free version and require network creators to either switch to a paid plan or leave Ning. It’s also laying off forty percent of its staff."

ME: I wonder whether if you don't pay up, they'll kill your site/content? What do you have to do to rescue your content? What are the prices like?

Peter Barclay recommended this service for creating a WAP site. Low cost. He uses it on http://m.vayamobile.com

"Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. …Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites."

"Our global technology and telecom analysts set out to do a deep dive into the rapidly changing mobile Internet market. We wanted to create a data-rich, theme-based framework for thinking about how the market may develop. We intend to expand and edit the framework as the market evolves. A lot has changed since we published “The Internet Report” in 1995 on the web.

We decided to create The Mobile Internet Report largely in PowerPoint and publish it on the web, expecting that bits and pieces of it will be cut / pasted / redistributed and debated / dismissed / lauded. Our goal is to get our thoughts and data into the conversation about what may be the biggest technology trend ever, one that may help make us all more informed in ways that are unique to the web circa 2009, and beyond."

"Steve Meyer, music industry veteran and publisher of the Disc and Dat Newsletter, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the evolution of the music industry and the impact of the digital revolution. After discussing his background and experience in marketing at Capitol Records and elsewhere, Meyer argues for the virtues and potential of the internet in enhancing the music industry. He points out that the internet allows numerous artists to make money through their music and particularly enhances revenue from live performances. He describes the challenges facing record companies as a failure of imagination and suggests that the full potential of the internet as a distribution channel has yet to be fully exploited."

Good overview of a strategy for figuring out what you need to do with information you gather on research forays, and then guidance on choosing tools to support that. Doesn't mention Zotero, but it should.

four intriguing GPS based API services. Mentioned in a recent Directions on the News podcast.

"Last week's SXSW Interactive event included lots of buzz about location based services, with just about every article noting the excitement around Foursquare and Gowalla. There were no huge announcements or "big winners," at the event, but judging from other recent LBS announcement our editors think the group of services that tap into location have reached a key milepost in their development and use. Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg share their evidence for drawing a line in the sand."

"The ALA Center for Public Life hosted an online training session on convening a public forum on “Who Do I Trust to Protect My Privacy?” on march 30, 2010. Materials supplementing the online training for convening a privacy forum are now available. Watch/listen to the training session by clicking here. Download background materials and the Privacy Conversation guides here. Additional tools for moderating a forum are available here."

"Users with Web-enabled feature phones are far more likely to click on ads than those on most smartphone platforms, even though the user experience is likely to be far inferior to clicking on an ad on a smartphone. According to Smaato’s analysis, Symbian users are more likely to click on ads while surfing the Web on their devices than users on any other platform. While we can only speculate as to why this is the case, chances are that this has more to do with the different user demographics than the actual user experience on these devices."

"Making matters worse is the proliferation of "apps," those bandwidth-sucking programs that make smartphones so much smarter. According to Apple, iPhone users have downloaded at least 140,000 different apps a total of 3 billion times. Watching broadcasts of Major League Baseball games and studying the globe via Google (GOOG) Earth on a palm-size device feels like a promise from the future, but the networks delivering all this data are still just catching up with the present. "We expected this was going to open up a new level of engagement, and we knew we'd be successful in the market," says AT&T Operations President John Stankey. "We missed on our usage estimates." Case in point: It's not atypical, he says, for 80% of a college football crowd to be using their iPhones."

"AT&T’s 3G cellular network is already swamped with data traffic from millions of Apple iPhone users, especially in New York and San Francisco. Users have complained of dropped calls and slow Web access.

"Some tech industry analysts fear the iPad could exacerbate the problem. AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said at a Mar. 2 investor conference in San Francisco that he expects the iPad to be mainly "a Wi-Fi-driven product." Some analysts have interpreted those comments to mean that AT&T could be surprised by higher-than-expected use of iPads on its 3G cellular network.

"The iPhone uses more power saving features than previous smartphone designs. Most devices that use data do so in short bursts. Normally, devices that access the data network use an idling state that maintains the open data channel between the device and the network. However, to squeeze even more battery life from the iPhone, Apple configured the radio to simply drop the data connection as soon as any requested data is received. When the iPhone needs more data, it has to set up a new data connection.

"The result is more efficient use of the battery, but it can cause problems with the signaling channels used to set up connections between a device and a cell node. Cell nodes use signaling channels to set up the data connection, as well as signaling phone calls, SMS messages, voicemails, and more. When enough iPhones are in a particular area, these signaling channels can become overloaded—there simply aren't enough to handle all the data requests along with all the calls and messages.

"Mobile data traffic in 2010 is conservatively predicted to increase by 50 percent, according to research firm Informa. But tellingly, Informa also predicts that while mobile data traffic is growing at a dramatic pace, the industry will only see a 13 percent increase in data revenues.

Why? The challenge for mobile network management, and the bottom line, rests with varied service models, increased uplink traffic and uneven usage. On top of these challenges, consumers are now utilizing multiple smart devices such as iPhones, Android-based smartphones, netbooks and laptops. As a result, networks are experiencing system-wide congestion and are in dire need of solutions to relieve the pressure, improve the user experience and increase the bottom line.

"A major intelligence gap exists in the industry today: what mobile subscribers are really doing on their Internet-enabled handsets. While we know that global mobile Internet user numbers are increasing, (according to Informa's latest mobile Internet research, active users of mobile Internet services are expected to grow from 666 million at end-2009 to 878 million at end-2010), analysing global mobile Internet traffic trends by specific metrics is beset by challenges. A comparative analysis of several publicly released trend reports on mobile Internet traffic during 2009 (of varying timeframes) from a variety of companies shows some clear indicators of usage trends by device, content type and geography."

"26% smartphone penetration is a whole lot more than a bunch of iPhone owners. ComScore said that as of December, only 17% of phones were of the app-loaded smart variety and the iPhone represented less than 7% of the total. But Pew also said 37% of cell phone users go online with their handset. What gives?

"It means is that a lot of people to whom we pay little attention are using phones to get news of some sort. A basic phone can still receive text alerts and many feature phones access Facebook, Twitter or other sites with simple browsers. Some people are paying the per-megabyte fee to access the Web without subscribing to smartphone data plans."

Good example of social entrepreneurship in actions. Lists resources, projects.

"Social enterprise has gotten an international boost through the creation of Fair Wage Guide software, a free tool that generates a localized price analysis of wages paid to artisans as they compare to international wage standards. In this audio interview with Stanford Center for Social Innovation correspondent Sheela Sethuraman, Audrey Seagraves talks about how staff at World of Good created the new tool and are working with artisans in global supply chains, particularly women, to increase their profits."

"With so many people listening to music, next to their eardrums, the incidence of hearing loss has increased dramatically. Many studies have been done warning of the dangers of listening to music through headphones. The issue is not just the volume of the music, but also the duration of time that you listen. The louder the music, the shorter your listening time. A good rule is 60% / 60 minutes. You can maintain hearing health if you listen to music for no more than an hour a day at 60% of the volume. Never listen to music through headphones at full strength. Medical professionals agree that listening at that level will cause hearing loss.

"The specific condition is called Sensorineural hearing loss, which is caused by repeatedly prolonged exposure to loud noises. The damage occurs in the inner part of the ear that connects to the brain. The result, is the kind of damage years down the road, when you are sitting in a noisy bar trying to understand the person next to you."

SMS Labor Link works by sharing this much needed information to homeworkers via text messages. Text messages sent to homeworkers are either “broadcast” or “survey.”
Broadcast text messages contain capacity building content and can be sent to very large groups of workers at once. While survey text messages, focusing on the same content, request responses from workers. Responses to survey text messages capture an immediate portrait of a homeworker, identify red-flag issues and customize content of broadcast text messages to meet needs in real time.

"I find the most exciting thing happening in the record business right now is the careers that are being built around viral videos. One great example of this new world is from the San Francisco band called Pomplamoose. Pomplamoose is actually two people: Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn. They met while they were both making music on their own and fell in love. Together, they've created a new format of music video called, VideoSongs. VideoSongs have two rules:

1) What you see is what you hear. There's no lip-synching for vocals or instruments and everything is recorded live.

2) If you hear an instrument, at some point you have to see it in the video. There are no hidden sounds.