Why eBay seems to have cracks in its armor....

I read a number of stories about eBay prior to posting this. Some talked about ill-advised purchases (Skype, StumbleUpon), while others discussed the need to clean up some of the decisions of former CEO Meg Whitman, but the idea for this post actually started when my father-in-law asked me the difference between Craigslist and eBay. The answer should have been easy, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't that simple. Craigslist has decimated newspaper classified sections, and it still feels like a on-line garage sale, but it is growing forward into having a wider and wider number of items available. eBay, though slick, nation-wide, and easy to use, is restruggling with identity. How do they position themselves between Amazon.com and Craiglists.org? What is the future of eBay as you see it?

A Decade Ago...

Some of these company names may mean nothing to you, but it speaks to how quickly things are evolving. Many of these top 15 companies were search engines that competed for our business. Google won...The rest that still matter have e-mail services attached. Did anything on the 1999 list surprise you? Any thoughts that which companies on the current list willl slide and why? I think lists like these remind me to never hitch my horse to one internet idea since capitalism eats so many of these projects for dinner.

http://technologizer.com/2009/04/23/whatever-happened-to-the-top-15-properties-of-april-1999/

On-Line Principles....Really?

In what may be considered as an opening salvo to reign in the Wild West of the Internet. Facebook this week concluded their voting for its Facebook Principles and Bill of Rights. Though only .3% of the Facebook users voted, Facebook claimed success in responding to its customers concerns about its recent changes to its User Agreement. Certainly, there appears to be some democracy in action, but it will be truly interesting to see if these types of agreements continue to pop up for Web 2.0 companies or whether a different set of standards are on the horizon.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_12220966

Wordle

Don't forget to do your web cloud of the class. I would think that there should be 15-20 words of various sizes based on the intensity in which they were talked about throughout the semester.

http://www.wordle.net/

Protecting the News Business Model

I applaud AP for doing this. It is ultimately something that has to be talked about and discussed because without some framework to capture funding for real journalism, there will be hobby journalism and a lot of opinion out there, but not much in-depth coverage. What are your thoughts? Could this bring benefits to the 24 hour news cycle? Is AP overstepping? Is it bad that I am copying and pasting AP's information about information protection?

The Associated Press and Intellectual Property Protection

The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year gathering and sharing news of public interest from around the world. Licensing of this content by our members is critical to support our news operations. In the new digital content economy, however, a significant amount of AP news and news from AP members is used without permission or fair compensation. This situation has serious consequences: it dilutes the value of news for licensors and advertisers; it fragments and disperses content so widely that consumers end up relying on fragmented coverage to get their news despite the availability of comprehensive and authoritative coverage on a 24-hour basis.

Recently, The Associated Press Board of Directors announced it would undertake an initiative to affirm the value of original news reporting and protect the news industry’s content from being misappropriated online. The initiative would find new ways to enhance consumers’ ability to find authoritative news coverage online. In addition, the AP Board asked AP to examine creation of a rights-based service that would ensure content owners and publishers earn a fair return on their news investments

1.Why is this newsworthy?

The action by the AP Board was an important acknowledgment by the news cooperative that it needs to adjust its practices and work together to keep original journalism economically viable by promoting licensed used of original news content and increasing direct consumer engagement with the sources of that news.

2. What do AP and the news industry want to accomplish?
Our mission is two-fold: enable consumers to find news from authoritative and original sources in the most flexible ways and to ensure that those who gather, report and publish the news are properly reimbursed for it.

3. Why is this important?
The organized news media perform a critical function in a free society. The news media protect the public’s right to know by enforcing freedom of information laws, sending reporters into war-torn regions and covering everything from natural disasters, local legislators and more to file unbiased reports. Pressing for government accountability and covering global conflicts have significant costs -- both financial and human. The Associated Press alone spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year in its newsgathering operation, covering everything from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to every statehouse in the United States. AP journalists must be present whenever and wherever news occurs, at great cost to AP, and sometimes at great risk to themselves. The same is true of every news organization. Safeguarding investments to gather and share news is critical to a democratic society.

4. What does the initiative involve?
Our goal is to improve consumers’ ability to find the most authoritative news coverage while also ensuring a fair return to those who invest in the original reporting of news. The initiative will involve a variety of steps, including something we refer to as search pages, or a “news guide” that would help point consumers to sources of original reporting. It also will involve creation of rights-based services to help publishers and those who originate news to facilitate new distribution and revenue models.

5. What is meant by “rights-based services"?
AP already processes text content from more than 1,100 news providers as part of its “Digital Cooperative” program. This effort assigns tags to the content that make it easier to search and sort news stories by category, location and individuals named, among other things. The rights-based service will enable new licensing models for news distribution and consumption. We believe this will encourage greater innovation in how authoritative news is delivered to the public.

6. What do you mean by “search pages”?
When consumers look for news today on search engines, they often get directed in a random fashion to a wide variety of news sources, blogs and other Web pages. Searches on breaking news topics such as floods, earthquakes and shootings don’t dependably produce results from authoritative local news sources, and often not even to those media responsible for producing the news stories. AP will work with its member newspapers, broadcasters and other media to create a set of search-optimized pages that will guide users to the most timely, authoritative coverage related to their searches

7. Is AP going to put up a “toll booth” around its content?
No. The AP initiative is about opening up clear routes to authoritative coverage. Our first priority is to engage the audience with original reporting from trusted sources. We expect online revenue models online to evolve, with some content supported by advertising and premium content priced for subscription or a la carte purchase by users.

8. Why not just harness the so-called “link economy” to attract the audience?
The world has benefited from the link construct of the Web. The AP initiative is not about prohibiting this. Instead, it is about making sure that consumers have access to authoritative news sources and that they can engage with news content in a more robust and timely way at the same time publishers and content owners receive a fair return on their investments in newsgathering and distribution.

9. What does AP mean when it says it will use both legal and legislative approaches to protect its content?
AP and the news industry are eager to work with everyone – including portals and aggregators -- in a constructive way to make sure content owners are fairly compensated for their work. Like any other business, we may need to seek legal and legislative help to safeguard our business interests.

10. Is AP trying to crack down on what many feel is fair use of news snippets?
As a newsgathering organization, AP understands the importance of fair use. Fair use is a complex analysis done on a case-by-case basis. It defies easy generalization. The AP initiative is not about this; it is about making it easier for consumer to access and engage with news content in more robust ways.

11. Is this aimed at Google? At bloggers?
No. It is not aimed at any one company or Web site. We are eager to work with everyone to achieve a fair solution.

Can In-Depth News Survive

First check out www.mediastorm.org. Read the blog post below from http://changingnewsroom.wordpress.com. Then comment on the truth that you find in the remarks. I think that this organization may be on to something.

Serious, Long-Form Multimedia Journalism that WORKS

Since it’s so rare to find good journalism-related news these days, I thought I would report one of the positive things I learned from the College Media Advisers conference last week in New York City.

One of the keynote addresses at this conference, attended by journalism students and their professors/adivsors, was by Brian Storm of MediaStorm, who was also incidentally the speaker at my recent Mizzou PhD graduation. Storm is a funny, irreverent, and new media savvy guy, and his small multimedia production studio produces freelance work for the likes of The Washington Post and National Geographic.

If you’ve never checked out the MediaStorm Web site, I would strongly urge you to do so. Breathtaking photography and exquisite multimedia storytelling on the extremely important issues, such as the legacy of Rwandan genocide, that mainstream news orgs are increasingly short on budget to produce:

Their storytelling philosophy, Storm said, is to let the subjects speak in their own words. They use on-screen text to connect the dots and drive the narrative, but the audio is in their sources’ own words. They combine stills and video to great effect and always incorporate some kind of surprise for the audience.

Great and all, right? But there’s two exciting take home messages for other news organizations that had me frantically taking notes on my iPhone during the speech.

PEOPLE CARE. THEY WATCH. Get this. I’m not making this up: They have a 65 PERCENT completion rate for one of their 21 minute videos. Meaning that 65 percent of those that start watching stick with it to the end. Unbelievable.

I’m one of several folks who have wondered of late how much proverbial bang for the buck news organizations are getting when they produce beautiful, slick multimedia packages. I love those pieces, in theory, but in reality, I often see them and feel overwhelmed by the time commitment. I confess that I want to be able to skim text, not sit down and actually watch something or play around with various options and links. I feel guilty about this because I deeply appreciate good journalism in all its forms, but it’s true, and I wonder how many others have a similar issue.

Does Storm have an answer for this? How does MediaStorm succeed in getting and keeping those eyeballs?

1. Quality, quality, quality. They are selective about the work they do, and they invest time and money in doing it RIGHT. No denying that’s a part of their success. But it’s not hard to convince journalists of THAT. Most I know are dreaming of being told that is true. Check out number two.

2. AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS. If you plunk a big time-consuming multimedia project on a Web site where people have come to expect relatively short news and feature stories they can skim over fast on their coffee break at work, or where they come to find local breaking news in bite-size chunks, they will feel just as I do - appreciative of your effort but too overwhelmed to take the time to really explore what you have to offer. Instead, think about creating a separate site for your very best work, where you can cultivate a different set of expections.

3. Put your content in front of people in as many ways and on as many platforms as possible. Make it easy for them to share it - via email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Get your techie folks to work hard on making sure the user experience is as seamless and non-frustrating as possible. For example, they include the code that allowed me to add that photo you see above in this post to this blog in a matter of seconds: Cut and paste. Once you’ve created that separate home for your high-quality stuff, push it out to the online world in as many ways as possible.

Yes, MediaStorm is a small organization, so I’m not arguing that what works for them would necessarily work to sustain a large newsroom. But the fact that they are doing well financially while doing serious, long form journalism is a reason for hope.

In Storm’s view, if you stick to your values, you’d be surprised by what just might happen. I couldn’t agree more. Embrace the future and all new media forms, but stick to your guns when it comes to the enduring journalism values of accuracy, quality, good reporting, and engaging storytelling — and I predict a positive long-term future.

Update on File Sharing Story

We talked weeks back about the creepy file-sharing guy that ran Pirate Bay in Sweden. Well, the courts decided that they will spend a year for illegal file-sharing. Was it the right decision? Are file-sharers criminals?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/5170170/Pirate-Bay-four-jailed-for-breaking-copyright-in-Swedish-file-sharing-trial.html

Bad Acting, Interesting Ideas

The video attached is a relatively long one, but it is the video to make up for the early dismissal this week. Please take some time to watch all of the video, and discuss some of the new ideas that Mozilla, the open source company, is looking to bring to the market. What would be the positive impact of these ideas? What companies or concepts should be worried about these developments? Do you see any downfall to these ideas? Be specific about the ideas from video as you reference them.

Solution to the Dying Newspaper???

Read the article from nytimes.com below and react to the movement known as hyperlocal news. Is this a good way to target customers or an effort ripe with concern because it could completely cocoon us in our own little world?

If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants.

Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing.

The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments. “Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.”

Of course, like traditional media, the hyperlocal sites have to find a way to bring in sufficient revenue to support their business. And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Some have shouldered the cost of fielding a sales force to reach mom-and-pop businesses that may know nothing about online advertising.

One problem is that the number of readers for each neighborhood-focused news page is inherently small. “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who has followed the hyperlocal market for a decade. “Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”

Still, said Peter Krasilovsky, a program director at the Kelsey Group, which studies local media, many small businesses have never advertised outside the local Yellow Pages and are an untapped online ad market whose worth his firm expects to double to $32 billion by 2013.

One of the most ambitious hyperlocal sites is EveryBlock, a six-person start-up in an office building in Chicago overlooking noisy El tracks, which is stitching together this hyperlocal future one city at a time. Backed by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, it has created sites for 11 American cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.

It fills those sites with links to news articles and posts from local bloggers, along with data feeds from city governments, with crime reports, restaurant inspections, and notices of road construction and film shoots. (The New York Times has a partnership with EveryBlock to help New York City readers find news about their elected officials.)

One day last week, the EveryBlock page for Adrian Holovaty, the company’s founder, showed that the police had answered a domestic battery call two blocks from his home and that a gourmet sandwich shop four blocks away had failed a city health inspection.

“We have a very liberal definition of what is news. We think it’s something that happens in your neighborhood,” said Mr. Holovaty, 28, who worked at The Washington Post before creating EveryBlock two years ago.

In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups. In the last several years, neighborhood blogs have sprouted across the country, providing the sites with free, ready-made content they can link to. And new tools, like advanced search techniques and cellphones with GPS capability, help the sites figure out which articles to show to which readers in which neighborhoods.

Unlike most hyperlocal start-ups, Patch, based in New York, hires reporters. It was conceived of and bankrolled by Tim Armstrong, the new chief of AOL, after he found a dearth of information online about Riverside, Conn., where he lives. Patch has created sites for three towns in New Jersey and plans to be in dozens by the end of the year.

One journalist in each town travels to school board meetings and coffee shops with a laptop and camera. Patch also solicits content from readers, pulls in articles from other sites and augments it all with event listings, volunteer opportunities, business directories and lists of local information like recycling laws.

“We believe there’s currently a void in the amount, quality and access to information at the community level, a function, unfortunately, of all the major metros suffering and pulling back daily coverage of a lot of communities,” said Jon Brod, co-founder and chief executive of Patch. This month, the home page of The Star-Ledger’s Web site, based in Newark, twice referred to articles first reported by Patch.

Outside.in publishes no original content. The company gathers articles and blog posts and scans them for geographical cues like the name of a restaurant or indicative words like “at” or “near.” An iPhone application lets users read articles about events within a thousand of feet of where they are standing. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, licenses feeds of links to big news sites that want to deepen their local coverage, like that of NBC’s Chicago affiliate.

Venture capital firms have invested $7.5 million in the company, partly on the bet that it can cut deals with newspapers to have their sales forces sell neighborhood-focused ads for print and the Web.

One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.

That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online.

But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.

“In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

Flash Mob

Zombie Flash Mob shuffles past Saks Fifth Avenue store

































Last week in class we talked about the flash mob. Many of you were new to the concept, and I was mentioning that I thought that the flash mob has grown up into something useful with the recent protests in Moldova. Is it possible that all of these new web tools have an infancy in which they are fun and interesting, but lack a larger social context or good. Do you think that other new, fun tools will grow into important pieces of our social fabric? Think of an example from the past where this has happened.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob

http://www.flashmob.com/

One Billion Reasons to Twitter

Rumor world is stirring about the possibility of Twitter being absorbed by Google. There are two interesting points in the article below. One is that Google's interest makes cute, neat things legitimate, and the second is that big Google puts the brakes on innovation when it absorbs companies. What are your thoughts? How do you gain legitimacy without losing your successful model? Is Twitter worth $1,000,000,000?

While rumors of an imminent Google acquisition of Twitter were apparently offbase, it wouldn't be surprising to see the companies strike up a formal collaboration or partnership.

Twitter, a microblogging service in which millions of people post brief text messages, has emerged as the custodian of a valuable online index of real-time facts, comments, musings and announcements, information that is clearly valuable for Google's search engine index.

Google routinely collaborates with major Web sites to determine the best way to crawl and index their content for its search engine, so sitting down with Twitter for that purpose would be consistent with its modus operandi.

"Twitter is clearly hot. The phenomenon of real time search and the ability to capture this stream of 'tweet' discussions is an important development in social media and search because people are trying to mine data for information that might otherwise be sought in a search engine," said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence in a phone interview. "This whole phenomenon Twitter represents is here to stay and needs to be addressed by search engines."

However, it's much less clear why Google would want to spend major-acquisition money on Twitter at this time. After all, Twitter doesn't represent anything close to a clear and present danger to Google in the search market. "Twitter exemplifies the category of real-time search, but it's not a Google killer," Sterling said.

In addition, Google, like most companies, is in cost-cutting mode and Twitter, while wildly popular, hasn't figured out a way to generate much revenue yet.

"There's a very interesting parallel between Twitter and YouTube. When Google bought YouTube, they did it because it was extremely popular, got tons of traffic and represented this new trend of video hosting and sharing. Now, Google still hasn't found a way to effectively monetize YouTube in a big way," said Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst, in a phone interview. "Does Google really want to spend another huge amount of money on another extremely popular service that hasn't figured out a way to make money? I don't see it happening."

Others aren't so sure.

In an e-mail interview with IDG News Service, IDC analyst Karsten Weide said Google would gain "tremendous stickiness and traffic" from Twitter. "Microblogging is becoming an accepted new channel of online communications in addition to email and instant messaging, and it is here to stay," he said.

But he agreed that Google needs to know that it's highly likely Twitter will never make significant amounts of revenue. "That would mean -- just as Web mail -- it would be a loss leader that one cross-finances in order to have the indirect benefits," Weide said.

While Google doesn't need to boost its audience, the acquisition might keep Twitter out of the hands of competitors, namely Yahoo and Microsoft, he said. "I think an acquisition would make sense, and if they can get it for less than $1 billion, the better it is," Weide said.

Others believe Twitter should actively entertain the option of getting acquired by Google and strike while the iron is hot.

"Other tie-ins short of an acquisition could make sense, but would be harder to sustain since Twitter already uses such open interfaces. It will be hard to do something that others can't replicate. Now is the time for Twitter to sell. It is at the top of its hype range now. Monetizing on its own would be a long, hard slog," wrote Gartner research vice president Jeff Mann in a note e-mailed to reporters.

The rumors erupted late Thursday when tech blog TechCrunch reported the companies were engaged in "late stage negotiations" for an acquisition, citing two anonymous sources. TechCrunch later tempered that report, saying a third source characterized the discussions as "early stage" and possibly revolving around a search engine collaboration. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital tech blog, also quoting anonymous sources, said no acquisition discussions were on the table, but rather talks about collaboration on real-time search and better crawling of Twitter's content.

It would be interesting to see what emerges from a collaboration between the companies to fine-tune Twitter's usefulness for search engine users, Sterling said.

"Right now, it's problematic using Twitter as an alternative search engine. There's a lot of noisy results you get on Twitter's search," Sterling said. "If you can remove some of the noise, it could be quite powerful."

For example, Twitter could turn into the next evolution of question-and-answer search engines, especially for users tapping into it from mobile devices, Sterling said. "It becomes a word-of-mouth network that is kind of instantaneous," he said.

That would complement all the different ways in which Twitter is already very useful, like for marketing, Sterling said.

There would be technical challenges in making Twitter into a more useful search engine, and it would involve Google coming up with a way to weigh the reliability and authority of different Twitter users, Weiner said.

While Google declined to comment, Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone posted a note on the company's official blog saying the company's plans are to remain independent.

"It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects," he wrote. "Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we're just getting started."

Stone also encouraged people to apply for jobs at the company, an interesting document to peruse for clues to Twitter's current plans and business and technology strategies.

Interestingly, Stone appeared on Stephen Colbert's "Colbert Nation" on Thursday evening, and during the interview he also said the Twitter's intention is to be a strong and independent company.

"We're recognizing a difference right now between profit and value. Right now, we're building value," Stone told Colbert.

That means extending Twitter globally, tapping not only into Web-based users but also into mobile phone networks, as well as adding features and refining the service, Stone said.

"When we get to a certain point where we feel we've gotten there, we'll begin experimenting with a revenue model. This isn't unlike the way Google approached their revenue model," he said. The revenue-model testing and experimentation will begin this year, but Twitter will take its time getting it right, Stone said.

Stone's comments may signal a potential tension with Twitter's financial backers, who have poured $55 million into the company. "Investors may agitate for an acquisition because the idea of an IPO is unlikely if not impossible," Sterling said.

Another issue that might derail a Google acquisition is that several Twitter staffers, including Stone and co-founder Evan Williams, already went through the experience of working for Google, after Google acquired Pyra Labs and its Blogger blog publishing service in 2003.

At the time, Blogger was the undisputed leader in the blog publishing space, but as part of Google its rate of innovation slowed down and competitors like Wordpress and Six Apart delivered more sophisticated services.

"Blogger was ahead of the curve when Google bought it and then it became the AOL of blogging platforms: an early leader that then lost ground," Sterling said.

If Google bought Twitter, the Twitter service would see some immediate improvements, Sterling said. Twitter posts would be incorporated into Google search results. Twitter's own search would be improved. Google would monetize Twitter with ads. But in the end, it could face Blogger's destiny.

"You might see Twitter maintain its current leader status for a while, but maybe not see if evolve as dynamically as it would under the stewardship of its founders," Sterling said.

It can't be encouraging that Google decided to stop actively developing Jaiku, a Twitter competitor Google acquired in 2007. Instead, Google has decided to port Jaiku to Google App Engine, and later to release the Jaiku engine as an open-source project under the Apache license.

The Jaiku service is maintained by volunteer Google engineers. Google also recently put mobile social-networking service Dodgeball out to pasture.

Other signs that would point against a Twitter acquisition are recent comments made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who called Twitter "a poor man's e-mail" and wondered whether it will remain a stand-alone service or become an e-mail feature. Schmidt has also said recently he doesn't foresee Google making major acquisitions in the immediate future.

Hype about Skype

Last week, we talked about the launch of the new Skype app for I-Phone. I had a feeling that it would be well received, but a million downloads already is huge. With this huge success story, there is always some push back. In this case, it is from AT&T who views Skype as a competitor, and it is refusing to allow Skype to fly free on its 3G Network. We have certainly entered a time when every application feels a sense of entitlement to work on everyone's platform i.e iTunes in Windows, but I think that I understand AT&T's point. We spent a lot of time building infrastructure to allow for our business model to work, and the nimble, little Skype isn't going to eat us. Does our global value structures of information, innovation, and speed allow for a company like AT&T to draw a line in the sand? Should AT&T play nice with everyone wanting to use their stuff?

FCC Asked to Investigate Skype for iPhone Restriction

Dan Moren, Macworld.com

Since its release on Tuesday, Skype for iPhone has been downloaded more than a million times -- that's a rate of six downloads a second, according to the company. All this despite the fact the software only works via the iPhone's Wi-Fi connection, and not AT&T's 3G network.

Artwork: Chip Taylor

That restriction has angered some, who have argued that the practice is anticompetitive. Those allegations have been turned up a notch now, as the Wall Street Journal reports that an Internet advocacy group called Free Press has asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether or not the restriction is in violation of federal law.

Free Press bills itself as a nonpartisan organization concerned with media reform. In its open letter to the FCC (PDF link), it asks the government body to confirm that mobile wireless Internet access is subject to the same rules as traditional broadband Internet.

The letter cites the FCC's Internet Policy Statement (PDF link) which states that "consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice" in order to "preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet."

A USA Today article published earlier this week talked with an AT&T executive about the issue:

Jim Cicconi, AT&T's top public policy executive, says AT&T has "every right" not to promote the services of a wireless rival.

"We absolutely expect our vendors"--Apple, in this case--"not to facilitate the services of our competitors," he says.

"Skype is a competitor, just like Verizon or Sprint or T-Mobile," he says, adding, Skype "has no obligation to market AT&T services. Why should the reverse be true?"

Meanwhile, Apple has remained mum on the matter, though it's easy to see why the company might not want to get involved. After all, being able to use VoIP over AT&T's 3G network could help Apple sell more iPhones by providing another attractive feature--but, at the same time, Apple doesn't want to risk alienating their business partner.

The U.S. isn't the only place where VoIP restrictions are irking customers. T-Mobile, Apple's wireless partner in Germany, has said that not only will it prohibit use of VoIP applications on their 3G network, it'll also restrict its use on the company's Wi-Fi hot spot network and cancel the contract of any customers who try to work around the restriction.

In response, the Voice on the Net coalition, which includes Skype, as well as Microsoft and Intel, has asked the European Union to step in and enact policy that would protect consumers rights to choose what applications they can use.

How the FCC and EU proceed could have far-reaching implications not just for the future of VoIP, but in terms of what restrictions mobile operators can legitimately put on the use of their networks, which also may have impact on peer-to-peer programs, live video, and other services.

Death by Sexting

This is the sort of stuff that keeps me up at night. I can't believe the ordeal that this principal had to go through. In an era of anything goes on YouTube, it is no surprise that much of the criticisms and concerns about on-line video would reach mobile technology. As more of our information is received via mobile devices, sexting seems like a natural outcropping. Two questions...Should we try to regulate this? How can market pressures impact these types of moral atomic bombs?

Anti-sexting insanity out of control: False charges ruin vice principal

Posted by Richard Koman

The war against sexting has now reached absurd, outrageous, McCarthyite dimensions. I had thought this story about a prosecutor threatening prosecution of three girls for snapping pics of themselves in bras and a towel was bad enough.

But Kim Zetter’s story at Wired about the ordeal of Virginia vice-principal Ting-Yi Oei, who was assigned to check out rumors of rampant sexting at Freedom High School in South Riding.

Ironically, horribly, the assignment led to a Kafkaesque charge that Oei himself was a child pornographer. He spent $150,000 and year of his life clearing his name. Whether he can resurrect his career as an educator is yet to be seen.

“These charges are so toxic and incendiary,” says Diane Curling, a former teacher and Oei’s wife of 35 years. “Children need to be made aware of the dangers of sexting, but to intimidate public education officials and try to make it a felony to even touch something like this is terrifying. . . . If we are not careful, we will find ourselves with a new McCarthy era.”

Oei’s investigation led him to a 16-year-old boy who confessed to having a sext on his phone - a pic of a girl in panties but with her arms crossed across her chest.

Oei says he showed the image to his boss, Principal Christine Forester, who told him to preserve a copy on his office computer for the investigation. A computer neophyte, Oei didn’t know how to transfer the image from the boy’s cell phone, so the teen sent the picture to Oei’s phone, and told him how to forward it to his work e-mail address. When the process was complete, Oei instructed the student to delete the image from his phone.

Since the girl couldn’t be identified and was apparently not a student, Oei thought the matter was over. But when the boy was busted trying to pull a girl’s pants down and was given a 10-day suspension, the shit hit the fan when the boy’s mother learned of the photo incident. Oei refused to lift the suspension and the mom went to the cops.

Sheriff’s investigators came to the school, ostensibly to investigate the sexting issue. They helped the technologically-challenged Oei recover the photo from his cell phone and later determined the girl in the photo was a student at the school.

A month later, the first charges were filed against Oei: failure to report suspicion of child abuse, a misdemeanor. The charge alleged that Oei had a legal duty to report the girl’s photo to her parents, and to state agencies or law enforcement.

Of course, he hadn’t been able to identifiy the girl, so how would he alert her parents?

Loudoun County prosecutor James Plowman didn’t take that excuse and instead threatened Oei with a felony if he didn’t resign.

“We just feel very strongly that this is not someone who should be in the Loudoun County school system,” Plowman’s assistant explained to reporters. Oei refused, and on August 11, a grand jury indicted him for possession of child porn, a crime that carries a possible sentence of five years. The misdemeanor charge was dropped.

There were even more charges piled on. Read Kim’s story for the whole gory matter. But this week a judge put an end to the madness — and for Oei it must have felt like Joe McCarthy finally being silenced.

Last month, Oei’s defense attorney, Steven Stone, filed a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the photo didn’t constitute child pornography. In a ruling on Tuesday, Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas Horne agreed. Citing a long history of state appeals court decisions, Horne noted that nudity alone is not enough to qualify an image as child pornography. The image must be “sexually explicit” and “lewd.”

“As a matter of law, the photograph does not meet the requirements established by our appellate courts and the felony charge will be dismissed,” the judge wrote. “[T]he two misdemeanor counts will be dismissed as well.”

The prosecutor is unrepentant.

“The issue of whether it meets the definition under the statute … goes to whether it is lewd,” he says. “This one I felt was [lewd] because of the focus of the picture, which was the private areas … and the provocative pose she was in. The judge felt it didn’t meet the precedent case law for child pornography, but it was apparently provocative enough of a photograph that he saw fit that it should be sealed.”

Oei should have resigned, Plowman insisted.

“I thought that was a just and appropriate sanction for his behavior,” he says. “But he was unwilling to be responsible for any kind of accountability for what he did.”