TechLuver.com

MySpace will open its doors to software developers allowing them to create games and media-sharing applications for the popular social network, reports the BBC.

MySpace will formally launch its “Developer Platform” next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up. The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook.

Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year. It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site.

These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble. However, despite its popularity, Facebook still lags behind MySpace in terms of overall users. MySpace has around 200 million registered users, compared to 63 million who use Facebook.

Last October MySpace announced that it would join OpenSocial, Google’s platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.

Other networks such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use the tools.

The tools, available from 5 February, will allow developers to build applications that make use of MySpace member profile information and their connections with other users.More at BBC News.

Armonk, NY — Dec 18, `07 — IBM today announced the availability of IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections, a corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool.

IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections is designed to help organizations maximize their investment in social software by answering questions such as who the key experts are on a given topic, how they are connected, and whom a user’s contacts know that they do not.

Developed by IBM Research, Atlas has four Web 2.0-based components — My Net, Find, Reach and Net. These components help users spot the important connections and the relationships between various groups and navigate their personal and corporate networks.

The Net component of Atlas provides a visual indication of the important hubs among topic experts and informal groups that have developed while working on similar projects.

My Net offers similar capabilities for a user’s personal network. For example, a salesperson can better manage and understand their social networks making sure they have connections across the right topic areas.

Reach, the social software dashboard feature in Atlas, helps users navigate the up to six degrees of separation that divide them from a colleague. The dashboard shows users the shortest path to reach an expert and ranks the expert based on the level of interaction across the network.

The Find component of Atlas builds upon core Lotus Connections expertise capabilities by taking searches beyond the corporate directory to include results based on social data such as reporting structures, blogs and communities.

Atlas is designed to work with IBM Lotus Connections, the industry’s first integrated enterprise social software platform. The latest version of Lotus Connections, version 1.02, is now available and features:

* Expanded support for operating systems such as SUSE Linux, browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and directories such as Microsoft Active Directory, enabling businesses to deploy and integrate social software across their IT environment.
* Plug-ins for IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Explorer and IBM WebSphere Portal, enabling people to interact with their professional networks using their everyday productivity tools.
* A rich API based on the REST and Atom standards allow other applications to utilize the profiles, community, bookmarking, blogging and activity services of Lotus Connections.

More on IBM Atlas at IBM.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif — Dec 17, `07 — A new telephony startup came out of stealth today, aiming to become “Silicon Valley’s first phone company.” Ribbit, unveiled a new platform for developing telephony services and a new business model for serving the new global telephony market.

The company also unveiled some of the first applications from its partner and 600-plus developer community, including an integration with salesforce.com.

The Ribbit Platform: Liberating Voice from Its Current Confines

At the core of Ribbit’s technology offering is a sophisticated, open platform that enables developers to bridge the worlds of traditional telephony and the Web. The Ribbit SmartSwitch - evolved from a Lucent-tested CLASS 5 softswitch - and open Flash/Flex-based API (application programming interface) enables non-telephony developers to quickly build innovative, rich voice applications and integrate them into web sites, communities and applications.

By connecting voice from any Flash-enabled browser to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and new VoIP (voice over IP) networks, over 750 million computers become the next generation of phones with developers deciding how they work. With an assortment of back-office and service delivery infrastructure, the platform also enables developers to not only build services, but sell them as well. More at Ribbit.

Beware of the Love Bots!

So you think you’ve found Mr. or Ms. Right online in, of all places, a Chatroom. Beware! A Russian company has just come up with software that can simulate online flirting, genuinely fooling people into thinking they’re making overtures to a real person.

The program, so far available only in Russian, will go on sale around February 15, just after St Valentine’s Day, said the CyberLover.ru website.

San Francisco, Calif — PC Tools, on Dec 12, uncovered new software developed in Russia that flirts with females or males seeking relationships online in order to collect their personal data.

The software, CyberLover, can conduct fully automated flirtatious conversations with users of chat-rooms and dating sites to lure them into a set of dangerous actions such as sharing their identity or visiting web sites with malicious content.

According to its creators, CyberLover can establish a new relationship with up to ten partners in just 30 minutes and its victims cannot distinguish it from a human being.

PC Tools is concerned about the program’s ability to mimic human behavior during online interactions and urges internet users to beware of this new breed of software that can easily be used for malicious purposes. The concept behind this software could be the catalyst for a dangerous new trend in malware evolution.

“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” says Sergei Shevchenko, Senior Malware Analyst at PC Tools. “It employs highly intelligent and customized dialogue to target users of social networking systems.”

“Internet users today are generally aware of the dangers of suspicious attachments and URLs they receive, the documents they open or the websites they visit, but CyberLover employs a new technique that is unheard of – and that’s what makes it particularly dangerous.”

“CyberLover has been designed as a bot [robot] that lures victims automatically, without human intervention. If it’s spawned in multiple instances on multiple servers, the number of potential victims could be very substantial,” says Shevchenko.

According to PC Tools researchers, the CyberLover software:

- offers a variety of profiles ranging from ‘romantic lover’ to ‘sexual predator;’

- uses a series of easily configurable “dialogue scenarios” with pre-programmed questions and discussion topics;

- is designed to recognize the responses of chat-room users to tailor its interaction accordingly;

- compiles a detailed report on every person it meets and submits then to a remote source – the reports contain confidential information that the victim has shared with the bot, which can include the victim’s name, contact details and personal photo(s);

- invites victims to visit a “personal” website or blog which could in fact be a fake page used to automatically infect visitors with malware.

Though Cyberlover is currently targeting Russian web sites, social networkers and online daters in the are urged to stay alert to unusual activity credited to programs like CyberLover.

To protect themselves, PC Tools recommends:

• Never give your personal details to anyone over the internet.
• Consider using aliases/fake names on social networking sites and when chatting online.
• Carefully monitor the online behavior of your family members and educate them of the dangers.
• Ensure you have up-to-date AntiVirus and Anti-Spyware installed, with real-time and behavioral protection.

PC Tools warns the security industry to prepare itself for this potential new trend of malware which uses “natural language dialogue systems” – already deployed within gaming technologies. PC Tools.

Part shopper, part geek, all penny-wise. All of us here at deal locker really truely love the rush of getting a great deal. Even more we love to help our friends do the same. Deal Locker is in its infancy, but is focused on building a suite of tools designed to help you and your friends save money. Says DealLocker.com.

Donna Fuscaldo of Fox Business writes about an entrepreneur turning his frustrations with Internet coupons into a business plan for a new Web site.

His plan turned into DealLocker.com, where users are told to type in a merchants’ name to find all the coupons associated with that retailer. You can also browse through different categories, giving you potentially more opportunities to save, the site boasts.

“The idea behind the Web site is a really easy place to find coupons to stores,’’ said Jonathan Lieberman, founder and chief executive of deallocker.com.

Deallocker.com was born out of Lieberman’s aggravation sparked by Internet coupons. Lieberman, a former Internet marketer, would spend hours paging through websites trying to find those ever elusive coupons.

“You’d get to that checkout page and the empty coupon box would mock you,’’ said Lieberman. “I was so frustrated that I never had that secret code.”

DealLocker.com, which went live in August, currently has 2,500 participating merchants. But consumers are encouraged to post any coupons they find on their own on the Web. All told, the website boasts about 5,000 stores with roughly 20,000 coupons being offered. Lieberman said the company sees hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. More at FoxBusiness.

On Dec 13, Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google announced - Knol - a knowledge project.

On official Google blog he elaborates, “The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable.

There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.”

Manber further goes on, “Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “Knol“, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors.

At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably.

It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.

We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a knol is here.” More at Official GoogleBlog.

Dec 13, `07 — Igor Skochinsky didn’t take too long to crack Amazon Kindle’s DRM. On his ‘Reversing Everything’ blog he details the workaround to read encrypted Mobi books on Kindle, which involves two Python scripts.

In his words, “We’ve known for some time already that Amazon’s AZW files are actually Mobi files, but Amazon didn’t share Kindle’s Mobi PID which would allow one to buy encrypted Mobi books for Kindle.

Well, I’ve discovered the algorithm used to generate the PID and was able to use it on Fictionwise, but there was another catch. AZW files have a flag set in the DRM info which is not present in books bought from other vendors. After fixing that, I could read the book on Kindle.”

And there goes Kindle’s DRM, so whats next?  Free EV-DO I guess! More at Igor Skochinsky’s blog ‘Reversing Everything’.

OAKLAND, Calif — Ask.com a search engine owned by IAC on Tuesday, Dec 11, announced the launch of AskEraser, the first product to give consumers privacy control over their online searches.

When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries.

An AskEraser link is featured prominently in the upper right corner of the Ask.com homepage and search results pages - clearly and constantly indicating to the user that their search activity will be ‘erased’ from Ask.com servers. AskEraser remains ‘on’ for searches conducted across Ask.com’s major search verticals: Web, Images, AskCity, News, Blogs, Video, and Maps & Directions - and can be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ by the user at anytime.

“For people who worry about their online privacy, AskEraser now gives them control of their search information,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. “AskEraser is simple, straightforward, and easy-to-use. It is an idea whose time has come.”

Earlier this year, Ask.com also announced that it is implementing a new data retention policy to disassociate search history from IP address and User ID after 18 months.

In addition, Ask.com has taken steps to further industry collaboration and dialogue on privacy issues. In July, Ask.com and Microsoft joined together in urging the online industry to develop global privacy principles for data collection, use and protection related to searching and online advertising.

AskEraser launched Tuesday in the United States and in the United Kingdom - and will be deployed globally in 2008. More at Ask.com.

Dec 07, ‘07 — UNICEF, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Google today announced the launch of ” Our Stories “, a joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages.

Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website, where they can be found on a Google Map.

By making these stories accessible around the world, the Our Stories project hopes to contribute to a better understanding of our shared humanity across countries and cultures, across religious traditions, across languages, and across generations.

Low-cost XO laptops by One Laptop per Child will serve as a foundation to help build this digital archive of personal stories by providing children in developing countries with easy-to-use technology to record their stories and interviews.

The Our Stories website will initially include stories collected by Brazil’s Museum of the Person and stories recorded for UNICEF by young people in Ghana, Pakistan, Tanzania and Uganda.

Our Stories has taken inspiration from the StoryCorps project in the United States founded by MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay. “StoryCorps is proud to lend its experience in recording the conversations of nearly 30,000 Americans to this global undertaking,” said Isay. “These efforts teach us that the lives of everyone – whether they are in New York or Nairobi – matter, and that they will not be forgotten.”

More stories from more countries will be added to the site every month in an effort to preserve an oral history of humanity in the 21st Century.

Leading figures have already lent their voices to the project: Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah, Queen of Jordan and UNICEF Eminent Advocate for Children, and Ishmael Beah, UNICEF Advocate for Children Affected by War and best-selling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, have all recorded messages welcoming users to the site and encouraging them to share their stories.

Listen to a story today at OurStories.org.

San Francisco, Calif — Dec 05, ‘07 — Beacon, the online advertising system that was supposed to light Facebook’s way to riches, has created such a dark storm of controversy that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg today told users they could turn it off.

The dramatic reversal in the face of huge public outcry is an attempt to restore the company’s battered image with its more than 55 million users and the marketers trying to reach them.

Excerpts from Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Thoughts on Beacon’ on The Facebook Blog

About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends.

It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we’ve heard about from you.

More at The Facebook Blog.

San Francisco, CA — Nov 29, ‘07  — Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies, the AP is reporting.

The AP further reports, “Under the changes outlined late Thursday, Facebook’s 55 million users will be given greater control over whether they want to participate in a three-week-old program that circulates potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activities.

Facebook provided two different opportunities to block the details from being shared, but many users said they never saw the “opt-out” notices before they disappeared from the screen.

With the reforms, Facebook promised its users will now have to give their explicit consent, or “opt-in,” before any information is passed along.

The concessions were made after more than 50,000 Facebook users signed an online petition blasting the system, called “Beacon,” as a galling intrusion that put the Palo Alto-based startup’s pursuit of profit ahead of its members’ privacy interests.

More than 40 different Web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users.” More at AP.

SEATTLE –BUSINESS WIRE– Nov 29, 2007 –Amazon.com today launched Askville.com, a website where users ask and answer questions, and discover answers to thousands of questions on everything from how to buy an HDTV to the best way to lose weight.

Askville.com users who share their knowledge by answering questions will receive Quest Gold, which, for a limited time and while supplies last, can be redeemed for $100 or $50 Amazon.com Gift Cards.

“Finding information or getting good advice is hard enough when you are searching the Internet by yourself,” said Joseph Park, Director of Askville.com.

Askville.com users who ask or answer questions earn Quest Gold. The amount of Quest Gold a user earns is tied to how well they answer questions on Askville.com and what level of expertise they have reached in a particular topic (users earn experience points in specific topics when they answer questions and are promoted to higher levels within each topic as they continue to submit high-quality answers in those topics).

Askville.com plans to launch another website called Questville.com where users will be able to use their Quest Gold for various activities and a chance to get other rewards.

For a limited time and while supplies last, Askville.com users can redeem their 10,240 Quest Gold for $100 and 5,120 $50 Amazon.com Gift Cards, Askville.com t-shirts(for 1,024 Q.G.) and coffee mugs(512 Q.G.).

More at Amazon, Askville.

Related Article: AOL Acquires Israeli Questions and Answer Service Startup Yedda.com

NEW YORK — News Corp’s Internet division plans to launch an online network to sell advertising across Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling empire and even to other media companies as early as the first half of next year, reports Reuters.

Reuters further reports, “Fox Interactive Media (FIM) President Peter Levinsohn told the Reuters Media Summit in New York on Monday, Nov 26, that the network, internally dubbed “FIM Serve,” is the subject of discussion across the company after first being built for its MySpace online social network.

“It could happen as early as the first half of next year,” he said. “We’re ready to go … we’re starting to have conversations outside now.”

The launch of a broader ad network follows a frenzied buying spree of privately held ad networks by Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner’s AOL and Google to dominate the fastest-growing segment of the global advertising industry.

He noted that the ad network focuses on graphical display advertising and would not conflict with the company’s partnership with Google, which provides search listings.

The seeds of News Corp’s online ad push come from its work to better target MySpace users, a project which it launched over the summer called HyperTargeting. The technology mines the profiles of its 110 million global users to bring them ads more relevant to their interests.

But across the Internet, subjecting users to more marketing has drawn the ire of privacy advocates. Rival social network Facebook faced a backlash from thousands of users after it allowed marketers to place ads on user pages based on products they bought online. More at Reuters.

Nov 27, ‘07 — Google wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives, in a strategy that could accelerate a shift to Web-based computing and intensify the Internet company’s competition with Microsoft. Says  Kevin J Delaney and Vauhini Vara of The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ further writes, “Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

Google’s push underlines a shift in how businesses and consumers approach computing. They are increasingly using the Web to access applications and files stored in massive computer data centers operated by tech companies such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Google. Such arrangements, made possible by high-speed Internet connections between homes, offices and data centers, aim to ease users’ technology headaches and, in some cases, cut their costs.

Other companies offer various Internet-based file storage services, but most have been slow to catch on with businesses and consumers. Some offerings, such as Yahoo’s Briefcase Web-based storage service, require users to go to a Web page and click through a few screens to upload a new file and set various limits.

For its part, Microsoft offers a test version of a service called Windows Live SkyDrive with one gigabyte of free storage.

Google faces hurdles on issues such as data privacy, copyright, the economics of adding storage capacity and the technical challenges of offering service without interruption.

For Google, one advantage of offering a broad data-storage service would be to potentially draw consumers to existing Google services that compete with Microsoft’s Office applications suite, which includes Word, Outlook and Excel.

The company has been tackling technical issues including how to get the storage service to work seamlessly with software on users’ computers so it appears like just another hard drive, say the people familiar with the matter.

A document Google inadvertently released on the Web in March 2006 said it was moving toward being able to “store 100% of user data,” citing “emails, Web history, pictures, bookmarks” as a few examples. The document referred to what appeared to be unannounced Google initiatives, including one dubbed “GDrive” and said they could help compete with Microsoft.” More at WSJ.

New York — Nov 26, ‘07 — Reuters is reporting on News Corp’s popular online social network, MySpace, planning to launch Facebook-style “news feeds” in the next 30 to 45 days, citing Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn.Reuters further reports, “News feeds, which alert a user to what their friends and colleagues are doing, have been one of the most popular features of MySpace rival Facebook.

“The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we’ll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days,” Levinsohn told the Reuters Media Summit.

He said his company also plans to let users express different versions of themselves by creating more than one profile, for example one for family, one for friends and another for work.” Reuters.

NEW YORK — Nov 26, ‘07 — International Herald Tribune is reporting on ABC News joining hands with popular social networking site, Facebook.

“ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership - the site’s first with a news organization - that allows Facebook members to follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “US Politics” category.

To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations plan to announce Monday that they are jointly playing host to Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the state’s primary elections.

The announcements are another sign that news organizations are looking to capitalize on the potential power of Facebook, which began as a database of college friendships, and other social networking sites.

Media companies like The New York Times, which owns the International Herald Tribune, and The Washington Post have produced program applications on Facebook and some newspapers, magazines and television stations have recently invited users to join fan pages. But ABC’s new relationship is intended to be deeper.

The collaboration between ABC News and Facebook started quietly several weeks ago, with personal pages of network reporters like Rick Klein, the author of ABC’s widely read political newsletter The Note, and Sunlen Miller, who has been following the Barack Obama campaign.

For ABC News, the collaboration puts political content on a site with 56 million active users. For Facebook, it adds an authoritative source and fresh content for the site’s political section.” More at IHT.

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Missouri — For nearly a year, the families living along Waterford Crystal Drive in this bedroom community northwest of St. Louis kept the secret about the boy Megan Meyer met in September 2006 on the social-networking site MySpace.He called himself Josh Evans, and he and Meier, 13, struck up an online friendship that lasted for weeks. The boy then abruptly turned on Meier and ended it. Meier, who previously battled depression, committed suicide that night.

The secret was revealed six weeks later: Neighbor mother Lori Drew had pretended to be 16-year-old “Josh” to gain the trust of Meier, who had been fighting with Drew’s daughter, according to police records and Meier’s parents.

After their daughter’s death, Tina and Ron Meier begged other neighbors to keep the story private. Let the local police and the FBI conduct their investigations in privacy, they pleaded. But after waiting for criminal charges to be filed against Drew, neighbors learned that local and federal prosecutors could not find a statute applicable to the case.

The community’s patience dried up. Furious neighbors — and in the wake of recent media reports, an outraged public — are taking matters into their own hands. In an outburst of virtual vigilantism, readers of blogs listed the Drews’ home address, personal phone numbers, e-mail addresses and photographs of the couple.

Cyberbullying has become an increasingly creepy reality, where the anonymity of video games, message boards and other online forums offer an outlet for taunts. Yet drawing the line between conduct that is illegal and constitutionally protected free speech can be difficult.

On Wednesday, Nov 21, City officials unanimously passed a measure making online harassment a crime, days after learning that a 13-year-old girl killed herself last year after receiving cruel messages on the Internet.

The six-member Board of Aldermen made Internet harassment a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail. Mayor Pam Fogarty said the city had proposed the measure after learning about Megan Meier’s death.

“It is our hope that by supporting one of our own in Dardenne Prairie, we can do our part to ensure this type of harassing behavior never happens again, anywhere,” Fogarty said, adding, “after all, harassment is harassment regardless of the mechanism or tool.”

The four-page measure defines both harassment and cyber-harassment, essentially making it illegal to engage in a pattern of conduct that would cause a reasonable person to suffer “substantial emotional distress,” or for an adult to contact a child under 18 in a communication causing a reasonable parent to fear for the child’s well-being.

City attorney John Young said constitutionally protected activity would be exempt. The measure would apply when one of the people communicating was in Dardenne Prairie.

City officials also passed a resolution encouraging state and federal officials to outlaw cyber-harassment and cyber-stalking. A state lawmaker has questioned how state law could be altered without running afoul of First Amendment constitutional issues guaranteeing freedom of speech.

Dardenne Prairie is an upper-middle-class enclave of about 7,400 people 35 miles northwest of St. Louis. Over the years, the flat expanse of farmland has been taken over by subdivisions, bistros and strip-mall cafes.

Helsinki, Finland - Fancy a dose of culture in the Finnish city of Oulu? All you need is a mobile phone. Says Reuters.

Get theatre tickets digitally, download a smart video trailer of how the play was directed, order and pay for snacks for the interval and, after a culture-packed night, order a taxi home — all by just swiping a cellphone over smart tags placed on the menus or around the foyer of the theatre.

The Oulu City Theatre in northern Finland, 373 miles (600 kilometers) north of Helsinki, says it is the world’s first cultural institution to use the hippest handset technology, expected to turn mobile phones into wallets.

NFC (near-field communication) technology is activated by waving phones over wireless readers, or smart tags, and is widely used in public transport access cards.

The theatre is running a pilot, involving technology from Finnish mobile phone-maker Nokia and telecommunications operator TeliaSonera, until the year-end and will extend its usage more widely if it proves successful. More at Reuters.

Targeted online advertising is set to face increased scrutiny from European Union regulators concerned about invasion of privacy, threatening the growth of a potentially big online revenue-booster for media companies. Reports, Astrid Wendlandt of Reuters.

“This is a very hot topic that can be expected to be part of our work programme next year,” Gabriele Loewnau, a senior legal adviser for the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, said on Friday, Nov 23. The German commissioner currently heads the European Union’s advisory body on data protection matters, the so-called Article 29 Working Party.

When an individual makes an online search or purchase, the computer can remember the entry through so-called cookies and pass on the information to advertisers.

Brussels’ heightened awareness comes as more than 13,000 Facebook users have signed a petition protesting against the networking site’s new advertising system which alerts members of friends’ purchases online. Members can opt for their transactions to be kept private but critics say the option is easily missed.

Some Facebook members have even threatened to leave, complaining the new system allowed their friends to find out what they were planning to give them for Christmas. The Facebook petition was led by the civic action group MoveOn.org.

FAST GROWING

Online advertising is the fastest-growing segment of the ad industry, gaining more than 25 percent a year, or more than five times the recent average annual growth all media included.

“Online sites have to make sure they are not intruding people’s privacy, otherwise targeted advertising will backfire,” said Vincent Bonneau from French telecoms research group Idate. More at Reuters.

Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.

Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on “No Thanks.” It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.

Users are given a second notice the next time they log on to Facebook, but they can easily miss it if they quickly click away to visit a friend’s page or check e-mail.

“People should be given much more of a notice, much more of an alert,” said Matthew Helfgott, 20, a college student who discovered his girlfriend just bought him black leather gloves from Overstock for Hanukkah. “She said she had no idea (information would be shared). She said it invaded her privacy.”

The new program lets companies tap ongoing conversations by alerting users about friends’ activities through the feeds. About 40 Web sites have decided to embed a free tool from Facebook, known as a Beacon, to enable the marketing feeds.

The idea is that if users see a friend buy or do something, they’d take that action as an endorsement for a movie, a band or a soft drink. But it also raises privacy concerns.

Users are able to decline sharing on a site-by-site basis, but can’t withdraw from the program entirely.Liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org formed a protest group Tuesday and had more than 6,000 members by Wednesday. The group is calling on Facebook to stop revealing online purchases and letting companies use names for endorsements without “explicit permission.”

Facebook user Nate Weiner, 23, said he uses a tool for the Firefox Web browser called BlockSite, which he says prevents sites from sending data to Facebook.

“What if you bought a book on Amazon called ‘Coping with AIDS’ and that got published to every single one of your friends?” he said. More at AP.

Related Article:  Young Warned Over Social Websites

Helsinki, Finland — Nov 23, ‘07 — Reuters is reporting on Small Finnish handset maker Benefon, which has changed its business name to GeoSentric, saying Nokia has picked its social networking application for the Nokia GPS handsets N95 and 6110.Reuters further writes, “The platform, branded GyPSii, which is already compatible with Windows Mobile software based devices and with Symbian and Nokia support, is now available on most mobile phones, Benefon said in a statement.

GyPSii will allow users to upload pictures, videos and sound clips recorded with their phones that are automatically encoded with the location where the picture was taken or the recording was made.

Using the platform, users can see where their friends are and see and search each other’s saved places.

Combined with mobile Internet access, GPS (global positioning system) is seen in the industry as adding a new dimension to social networking that could also have implications for the media business.” Reuters.

BBC News is reporting on The Information Commissioner’s Office in UK warning young people about the online footprint they leave on social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook.

BBC News further writes, “Millions of young people could damage their future careers with the details about themselves they post on social networking websites, a watchdog warns.

The Information Commissioner’s Office found more than half of those asked made most of their information public.

Some 71% of 2,000 14 to 21-year-olds said they would not want colleges or employers to do a web search on them before they had removed some material.The commission said the young needed to be aware of their electronic footprint.

The ICO also said young people could be putting themselves at risk of identity fraud because of the material they post on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

ICO deputy commissioner David Smith said: “Many young people are posting content online without thinking about the electronic footprint they leave behind.

“The cost to a person’s future can be very high if something undesirable is found by the increasing number of education institutions and employers using the internet as a tool to vet potential students or employees.”

“We have to help teenagers wise up to every aspect of the internet age they’re living in. It may be fun but unfortunately it is not the safe space many think it is.”" More at BBCNews, ICO.gov.uk

Nov 22, ‘07 — DiveintoMark.org shows us two sides of Jeff Bezos and of Amazon Here is how:

“When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.”

Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

“You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.”

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

More in-depth stories / discussion on Amazon Kindle at DiveintoMark.org

Los Angeles, CA — Nov 20, ‘07 – Sony BMG Music Entertainment has signed a licensing deal with Yahoo that clears the way for people to upload files with music or video content by the record company’s artists to Yahoo, the companies said Tuesday.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Like similar deals, the agreement calls for Sony BMG to receive a cut of advertising revenue, Yahoo said. The deal also covers the distribution of music videos via Yahoo player applications and widgets that computer users can place on other Web sites.

The agreement marks the first time Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has reached a deal with a major recording company over licensing content in user-created videos. Sony BMG, home to recording artists such as Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen and Slayer, reached a similar licensing deal with Google Inc. last year. That agreement also includes Google subsidiary YouTube.

Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG. The Sony BMG-Yahoo deal reflects the popularity of computer user-created videos, which often include copyrighted content.

Last month, a coalition of major media and Internet companies issued a set of guidelines requiring Web portals that host user-generated videos — as Yahoo does — to use filtering technology to block clips with unauthorized content from being posted.

Independently, Yahoo is deploying video identification and filtering technology early next year, the company said.

SAN MATEO, Calif – Nov 19, ‘07 /PRNewswire/ — Oodle today announced the launch of Oodle 2.0, a whole new way to shop classifieds. With a new suite of tools and a complete site redesign, Oodle radically improves the way consumers use classifieds.

“Most people have a love-hate relationship with classifieds,” said Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle. “They can find great deals but it’s incredibly frustrating and time-consuming. Oodle not only gives users access to millions of local listings, it now provides the tools they need to quickly discover great deals.”

With the launch of Oodle 2.0, users can: Relax While Oodle Does the Work 

Oodle recognizes that shopping through classifieds involves more hunting than traditional e-commerce. It typically takes weeks to find the right car or apartment which is why Oodle has introduced a personalized home page that includes recent searches, so when users return to the site they can quickly pick up where they left off. Between visits, users also receive detailed email updates of new listings that match their active searches.

Get the Inside Scoop

Oodle enables users to make informed buying decisions answering questions like, “What’s a great price?” and “How often do listings like this pop up?” The site also safeguards users against an increasingly prevalent problem in classifieds: fraudu