contentious.com

"A business often needs to have its own merchant account with a credit card company to use one of these methods, though. Square Inc. takes a different tack: It has its own merchant account, so it takes on the responsibility for minimizing risk and fraud. This also means that anyone can use the service."

For inbound international flights only. But still: This is supposed to help?

"Straight from the TSA, and Chris Elliott's blog, we have the directives that the TSA has asked airlines to use "a best faith effort to implement, as soon as possible…" for international flights heading to the USA. Be ready to be incensed:

· Boarding gate crew will perform a pat-down of all passengers and inspect 100% of passenger's carry-ons
· The 3-1-1 liquids rule will be strictly enforced
· Passengers must remain in seats within one hour of plane's arrival, with their hands clearly visible. During this hour, there will be no access to carry-ons and all airline pillows and blankets must be stowed.
· The in-flight entertainment map will be disabled throughout the flight. (NO WAY. This was our favorite channel!) And no airplane position announcements will be made.

Um, not really. These stats are only for top *smartphone* brands. Smartphones still comprise only a small part of the mobile market, even in the US. Dumber, cheaper “feature phones” still comprise the overwhelming majority of the US mobile market.The mobile digital divide is likely to persist for some time, unless smartphones and their data plans get radically more affordable.

Smartphones are cool, and developers like to focus on them — but it’s disingenuous to present them as the only mobile market that matters. If you want to reach more people by mobile, you need to offer a good low-end mobile experience, too. And that includes strategies like SMS and e-mail.

I wrote this to explain how I hacked together social media integration for the RJI Collaboratory community.

#4 is: Growth in Hyperlocal and Community Models. And who did they highlight? A project I work on with Susan Mernit, OaklandLocal.com. The whole article is worth reading, too.

"Judge Wilbert said he would "leave the door open" for Roeder's defense team to argue to jurors that his religious beliefs about abortion compelled him to act.

"Wichita Eagle reporter Ron Sylvester, who attended the hearing and tweeted the proceedings, notes that could signal the defense could seek a conviction on lesser charges mitigated by Roeder's extreme views. A voluntarily manslaughter verdict could result in a prison term of less than 10 years rather than life imprisonment for first-degree murder."

"Any journalist who uses email for interviews should understand that using email gives the source the ability to prove that you asked a manipulative or opinionated question (if you did) or that you used an answer out of context (if you did, and if the question might provide some context for the answer that your story didn’t). If you and the source later have a dispute about what was asked and answered and what you promised or didn’t about the direction of the story, you would be in a ridiculous position claiming that the source can’t use your emails.

"What if, at the end of this email exchange, Bradshaw had told the journalist she couldn’t use his name? She would have argued (correctly) that he knew this was an interview and if he wanted anything to be confidential, he needed to say so up front. Journalists rarely grant confidentiality to a source after the interview. So how does a journalist claim after the fact that something was to be private?"

Paul Bradshaw ponders an issue I've been dealing with for years: If a journalist interviews you, are you both on the record? I say yes. That's been my policy for years.

"Backupify president Rob May has now announced that Backupify will back up all online accounts for free and with unlimited storage. The offer will be open until January 31, 2010. The move is an attempt to attract at lot more users. May noted that storage is cheap while customer acquisition is very expensive, and so he and the company want to give more users a chance to try out the full service."

"Paul Bradshaw asks: “Who owns the interview?” Steve Buttry says the reporter loses control over the interview as soon she hits the “send” guys and warns journalists not to put anything into writing that they’re not willing to see published. I largely agree with Buttry on this, though I don’t go as far as he does: The journalist was within her rights to ask Bradshaw not to publish her side of the conversation (and he obviously complied). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an arrogant, controlling thing to do, though.

"What I find most interesting about the case is the complete subjugation of transparency in the name of objectivity. Here, the reporter is willing to go so far to avoid transparency that not only does she choose not to reveal to her readers anything about her news-gathering itself (nothing wrong with not doing that, don’t get me wrong), but she actually refuses to allow a source — who has no obligation to her in this manner at all — to disclose anything about her, either."

"Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too. Done poorly — and I've looked recently at some topics pages that would curl my hair, if I had enough left to curl — a topics page leaves both loyal and occasional users with one of those "WTF" moments."

Kevin Sablan explains why topic pages are great "searchbait," and a useful tool to help improve traffic to news sites. This is something that could work on any kind of news site, including local or niche news.

"Unfortunately, e-reader technology also presents significant new threats to reader privacy. E-readers possess the ability to report back substantial information about their users' reading habits and locations to the corporations that sell them. And yet none of the major e-reader manufacturers have explained to consumers in clear unequivocal language what data is being collected about them and why.

"As a first step towards addressing these problems, EFF has created a first draft of our Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy. We've examined the privacy policies for the major e-readers on the market to determine what information they reserve the right to collect and share."

If this works, it might allow me toread my Kindle books on other e-readers, so if I want to switch to another e-reader my current e-books aren't marooned on my Kindle. Makes me less tied to that device in the long run. If it works.

Could local/niche news sites emulate any part of the Examiner's formula to improve their findability?

"Whatever the journalism value, the Examiner is honing a formula of SEO friendly headlines and body copy, Social Media links, sheer article volume and technology approaches that ought to make news sites envious and more than a little embarrassed they haven't done the job as well with their original journalism."

The data publicly released by ComScore — the stuff overlooked in the iPhone-beats-Windows-Mobile blog posts — is rich and revealing. Even the charts released by FierceDeveloper show trends overlooked by the aforementioned blogs.

Based on a survey of 2,300 U.S. consumers, among those planning a smartphone purchase in the next three months, 51 percent said one of several BlackBerries. By comparison, 20 percent plan to buy either an iPhone 3GS (14 percent) or iPhone 3G (6 percent). More surprising, 17 percent plan on buying one of several Android-based models. Almost half of these, 8 percent, said the Verizon Droid.

BlackBerry is iPhone's ceiling and Android the floor, and they're squeezing iPhone between.

If the CEO of Facebook is changing his default privacy settings, shouldn't you? Here are some things you can do…

Being a free speech organization, EFF is supportive of internet users who consciously choose to share more on Facebook after weighing the privacy risks; more online speech is a good thing. But to ensure that users don't accidentally share more than they intend to, we do not recommend Facebook's "recommended" settings. Facebook will justify the new push for more sharing with everyone by pointing to the new per-post privacy options — if you don't want to share a particular piece of content with everyone, Facebook will argue, then just set the privacy level for that piece of content to something else. But we think the much safer option is to do the reverse: set your general privacy default to a more restrictive level, like "Only Friends," and then set the per-post privacy to "Everyone" for those particular things that you're sure you want to share with the world.

Dan Gillmor explains the hoops he had to jump through to kill his old facebook account and start a new one that he could control more closely.

"Facebook's business rationale here is clear. Rival Silicon Valley startup Twitter has grown extremely quickly in the last few years, almost entirely on the back of public content — from celebrities, people's friends and users' professional colleagues. That has brought traffic, money from search engines and a $1 billion valuation.

"Facebook wants in on that kind of growth, and more public content means more traffic. But Facebook has historically been one of the most private of the social networks, functioning as a sort of safe alcove amid the chaos of MySpace and Friendster."

Kevin Muoio, discusses key drivers and trends in mobile content usage & advertising:

* What does the market look like today?
* What are mobile phone owners doing?
* What are the key technology & business drivers?
* iPhone – key consumer usage trends
* Mobile Advertising – Display, SMS and Short Codes
* Mobile Display Ads – current landscape for mobile

"NPD reports that overall handset sales in the United States grew 14 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2009 and that sales revenue increased by 18 percent. The average selling price of a phone also increased, by 4 percent, to $87.

“Feature phones are taking on more of the physical characteristics of smartphones, and often offer greater exposure to carrier services,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD, in the statement."

Examples of how several journos are currently incorporating social media into their workday

"OneWorld has demonstrated that a news service can talk up to its audience, surprising them with how much they can know and how much others like them are doing. It has sought to engage, inform and equip its audience to be vocal and active, and in doing so has created a model for news that is solution-oriented, that explains social problems and illustrates them, and that is based on knowledge of activists and stakeholders on the ground. Through Yahoo!, OneWorld U.S. has been able to bring this model to a mainstream audience, giving a voice to the unheard and bringing new attention to their untold stories.

"The partnership has also highlighted and encouraged an increasing appreciation for nonprofits as sources of news. Tremendous growth in the nonprofit-news sector, coupled with the expansion of opportunities for platforming nonprofit news on the mainstream news websites, has brought increased visibility and credibility to nonprofit news providers."