contentious.com

Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: "Was this review helpful to you?"

A free service that enables you to claim your work, watch how it spreads and learn how it is used across the Web.

If it's text and published via RSS, you can claim it: Blog posts, poems, recipes, songs, essays, car reviews, game cheats, celebrity scoops, love letters, you name it.
1.You plug in your RSS feed (full text feeds are strongly preferred), select a Creative Commons license and give us your email address.
2.We'll confirm your email address and give you a FairShare feed to add to your RSS feed reader.
3. Sit back and relax for a few hours while we crank up our engines.
4. By the time you've finished your nap, the different pages on which your work has been reused will start popping into your FairShare feed.
5. For each page containing your work, we'll show you how the reuse compares to your license conditions and point you to a handy page where you can see more details.

We’re proud to be aligned with over 1,000 publishers of all sizes who are pledging their support for Fair Syndication. Based on the feedback from large syndicators like Thomson Reuters and Deutsche Presse-Agentur to smaller publishers like ScienceDaily, Urban Chickens, and Pure Contemporary, the Fair Syndication issue is enormous.

Finding out your opportunity is simple and free.

* Go to FairShare and provide an RSS feed of your text content.
* Create a FairShare account and select the option to get paid when others make money from your work.
* FairShare will monitor your feed(s) for full copies of your articles and, after monitoring your articles for a while, contact you with next steps.

Attributor works by scanning billions of Web pages to find unauthorized use of content. As part of the service, once it identifies pirated material, it contacts the hosting site and requests that the book be removed. Though Attributor has the ability to scan web pages in 13 languages, its main focus so far has been on English-language clients, which include the Associated Press, Thompson-Reuters, the Financial Times and CondeNet.

Based in Redwood City, Calif., the company originally catered to news services and periodical publishers when it launched in 2007.

The company began targeting book publishers this spring. Last month, Hachette Book Group became Attributor’s first publishing client. John Wiley & Sons has since signed on as well. Rich Pearson, Attributor’s vice president of Text Monitoring Services, said the company is currently in discussions with several major companies and expects to be adding more book clients by fall.

"Attributor’s plan rests on the idea that most of these pirate sites depend on networks like Google’s AdSense to place ads on their pages and send them a share of the revenue. Attributor proposes to scan the Web for pages that have articles of participating publishers. It will then notify any network with ads on those pages so the network can share the revenue with the copyright owner."

Craig Newmark's roadmap for open governmentg

Google has already started handing out invites to the company's experimental Google Wave product to developers interested in working with the Wave API. To date, there are about 6,000 developer accounts, and Google plans to open 20,000 more next month.

In a sign that Google's Android mobile platform has a future far beyond cellphones, San Francisco-based start-up Touch Revolution says a string of well-known companies will introduce a range of Android-powered household gadgets before the end of the year.

The devices will fall into three basic categories: home control devices, media control devices and home phones

Charlotte Anne Lucas: "I was marveling at the value (and civility) of the comments under "Monetize The Audience…" yesterday, while being dismayed at the lack of those attributes (by some of the same commenters!) over at CJR (http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/relax_bloggers_the…).
I think Bailey, CJR and others represent a legacy media, top-down, "I'm-telling-you" attitude that doesn't contemplate the Web-enabling notion that stories can be conversations that live on and grow better over time.
Many folks in today's newsrooms have forgotten that a huge part of their job is to listen to people. I say that from spending more than 30 years as a journalist, including the last 10 years online at places including the original "Freemium," TheStreet.com.
Yes, dealing with comments is like tending a garden.
Neglect it, and the weeds will overrun you.
Engage and cultivate, and the result is something quite special for all of us.

Not only is the proposed protection probably unworkable, expensive, and ultimately futile after the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU, and heaven knows how many other organizations with funding and lawyers get involved, but it also is already becoming a public relations nightmare. Might as well post people in front of newsstands, screaming “You can’t look at that if you don’t buy it!” at people browsing through material.

The AP would rather destroy the link economy. Oh, it probably won’t succeed, just because what it suggests is so impractical and illegal and ultimately undemocratic and unconstitutional. But like a bull in a knowledgeshop, it could do a lot of damage along the way, trying to rewrite the fair use that is the basis of the democratic conversation and rushing its members to even earlier graves by hiding their content from the readers it is meant to serve. Note well that most news organizations depend upon fair use every day when they quote somebody else’s story or comment on somebody else’s content. The AP is dangerous.

"Amazon.com exercises tight control over information related to its cloud computing business, a source of frustration to anyone trying to get a complete picture of Amazon Web Services. So I went in search of information from other sources. Here's what I found…"

Microformat that AP is adopting for its controversial "digital wrapper"

The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content. The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.

The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content, by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.

Today's media d'oh moment:

"AP cheif Tom Curley said that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news org that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

It can thus be argued that the use of monogamy as a defining feature of success in long-term relationships is little more than a major historical power play for which untold millions of people have paid with unnecessary emotional pain and in many cases literal bloodshed. None of this means that monogamy, as such, in necessarily bad, but is should give us pause for thought. Before putting all of their emotional eggs into the monogamy basket, people (especially women) might do well to seriously consider the possible historical roots of their own desire for monogamy. As children we are instilled with social values that, as adults, we must sometimes reconsider in light of our own mature interests, and the ever-changing times in which we live.

I don't agree with all the advice given here, but there are some useful tips

More Greek/Latin mashups

se this interactive exploration widget to map polyamorous relationships, and to examine their characteristics. This is used in my write-up for the Poly Equation.

This tool is written in Javascript, using the HTML Canvas. If your browser lacks a standard canvas, this will almost certainly be entirely useless. Your best bets are Firefox (on which this was written), Opera, Safari, and similar standards-compliant browsers.

WHAT IS TATTLER (app)?
Tattler (app) is an open source topic monitoring tool for today's Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on topics you ask it to monitor. Using semantic Web technologies, Tattler mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and other social media like Twitter, to find mentions of the issues most relevant to your organization.
Built and distributed on open source Drupal, Tattler's unique workflow and a toolset of intelligent content processors allow users to easily filter, organize, share, and take action on content gathered from the Web.

The giant telescope will have a single primary mirror that measures 30 meters across and is made up of 492 segments, giving it nine times more collecting surface than the the biggest telescopes on Earth today. The Thirty-Meter Telescope will surpass even the Hubble Space Telescope in some ways, giving scientists a new view of some of the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe, as well as planets orbiting nearby stars.

Does your community site project pass the Whiteboard Test? Here's how to find out.

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Among adults, MySpace is the most popular online social network.6 Half (50%) of adult social network users age 18 and older are on MySpace, while 22% of adult social network users have an account on Facebook. Another 6% have an account on LinkedIn, 2% have an account on Yahoo, and 1% each have accounts on YouTube and Classmates.com. Another aggregate 10% of adult online social network users have profiles on other sites, including BlackPlanet, Orkut, Hi5 and Match.com.

There is some variation in the types of people who tend to use each of the top three social networks. Typically, MySpace users are more likely to be women, Hispanic or black, to have a high school education or some experience with college. The median age of a MySpace user is 27 years old. Facebook users are more likely to be men and to have a college degree. The median age of a Facebook user is 26 years old. LinkedIn users are more likely to be men, to be white and to have a college degree, median age 40 years old.

"The Orwell incident was too rich with irony to escape criticism, however. Amazon was forced to promise that it will no longer delete its customers' books. Don't put too much stock in that promise. The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That's an awesome power, and Amazon's justification in this instance is beside the point. As our media libraries get converted to 1's and 0's, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections."

Great NYT story on Dan Pacheco's Printcasting.com

Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a community there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. You can use the tool on this page to get started.

Forrester's Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation (see short presentation). Based on our survey data we can see how participation varies among different groups of consumers, globally. We also analyze the participation of people who buy technology.

Want to profile your customers? We've asked about hundreds of brands and behaviors — customers of specific retailers and car owners by brand, for example. Work with us to profile your customer base, then develop a social technology strategy.

Great way to figure out how to make yourselve relevant in real time

"Friends are fun, but they're only on some websites. OpenSocial helps these sites share their social data with the web. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site's social data from anywhere on the web."

Facebook group for the conference I'm at today through Tuesday

Social media service oriented to African American youth. Mike Days says it's very popular in Philly for spontaneous gatherings

Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

What is YouCastr?
YouCastr makes it easy for parents, alumni, family members, and fans to follow high school sports and youth sports. Video of the games is available live or on-demand, and part of the proceeds help support your team!

One way to undo Amazon's damage — cumbersome, and I haven't tried it. I was able to restore my copy from my Mac Time Machine backup, much easier.

Amazon, advised that the sale of illegal copies of the still U.S. copyrighted '1984' and 'Animal Farm' were taking place on their site, removed those editions from their servers and from users' Amazon-area "book shelves" which, during synchronized wireless sessions, caused the books to be deleted, remotely, from customers' Kindles, and Amazon refunded the 99c cost of the book to affected customers.

However, there was no warning to customers, and the company's emailed explanation said only that there was a problem with the books. This was experienced, understandably, as invasive after the purchases had been long completed. Others point out that while physical stolen goods are taken away without payment made to buyers, Amazon is not a police dept. enforcing retrieval under a court of law.

the rules for unconference events that work for events and life.