press | Filome sharers have read the following articles about "press" | www.filome.com

Spam Magnet Blog Posts

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:15:26 -0400

Publisher - planetOzh
First shared by - StephenFoskett
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Lately, every time I manually flagged a comment as spam, I started to have the impression that they all were posted on the same post, namely an old announcement for my plugin "Absolute Comments".

An SQL query later, my impression was confirmed: this blog post *is* a spam magnet:

I suspect that some particular keywords in page titles act like pheromones to spammers. These keywords probably include "comments", "guestbook", "feedback" and anything that will make them think there's a form they can spam.

The SQL query I used to list blog posts sorted by the number of spam they get is:

PLAIN TEXT

SQL:

SELECT COUNT(wp_posts.ID) AS spam_count, wp_posts.ID, wp_posts.post_title
FROM wp_posts, wp_comments
WHERE wp_comments.comment_approved = 'spam' AND wp_comments.comment_post_ID=wp_posts.ID
GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
ORDER BY spam_count DESC

If you want to play with it, I made a quick standalone script that will run the query and output a pretty interactive pie chart. Download spam-magnet.txt, rename as .php and put it in your blog root (where wp-load.php is)

If you run it and notice a pattern on your blogs too, share your analysis! I've always enjoyed useless fun stats :)

Die-Hard Fans Follow Iron Maiden Into the Digital Age - NYTimes.com

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:35:15 -0400

Publisher - www.nytimes.com
First shared by - phillip
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Shared by phillip
Ordered from Amazon.

Heavy metal fans revel in their image as outcasts. For the music industry, however, followers of the British metal band Iron Maiden have become model citizens.

Enlarge This Image

Balazs Mohai/MTI, via Associated Press

Dave Murray, left, and Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden performed in Budapest in August.

Enlarge This Image

Iron Maiden's The Final Frontier album.

As music sales plunge and record companies face the future with angst, so-called Maiden heads are still flocking to record stores. Like the band's zombie mascot, Eddie the Head, Iron Maiden refuses to die, and its continued vitality may offer the troubled music industry some tips on survival.

Iron Maiden's 15th studio album, The Final Frontier, shot straight to the top of Billboard magazine's European album chart when it was released in late August and held that spot for a second week. The record also made its debut at No. 1 in other countries from Saudi Arabia to Japan, giving a much-needed lift to EMI Music, which owns the international rights. In the United States, where it was released by Universal Music, The Final Frontier opened at No. 4.

By the end of last week, more than 800,000 copies of The Final Frontier had been shipped to retailers around the world, said Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden's longtime manager. That is a far cry from the 12 million-plus sales of Lady Gaga's first album, The Fame. But Iron Maiden has a longevity that many pop acts can only envy; in its 30-year career, the band has sold about 85 million records.

A lot of bands could learn a lot from Maiden, Mr. Smallwood said. Maiden is essentially about the relationship with the fans, and nothing comes between that. They don't want to be rock stars. They just enjoy playing for the fans.

The six members of Iron Maiden, who are all in their 50s, are not the only veteran metalheads still on the road and in the studio. Bands like Metallica are also going strong, and hard rockers like AC/DC and Guns N' Roses have also found renewed success.

In its tribal image and extreme parameters, metal offers a complete home for those who follow it in a way that pop, hip-hop or any other genre does not, said Joel McIver, a London-based writer who is the author of Justice for All: The Truth About Metallica, and other books about heavy metal.

A close connection to fans, reinforced by a relentless touring schedule, has been a necessity for the band since its early days, when the music industry's main marketing tool, radio airplay, was largely off limits to Iron Maiden. Its songs were too long and too loud to fit conventional radio formulas, and some Christian parents' groups protested that they were laced with Satanic messages a charge that the group has always denied.

A lack of radio exposure may have created challenges, but these prepared Iron Maiden for the digital era, when the industry's traditional business model has broken down. Now, a hot radio single is more likely to send listeners to the Internet in search of a free, pirated copy than into the record stores.

Because Iron Maiden's songs do not fit the mold of a radio single three of them, on the newest release, are more than nine minutes long the band does not suffer as much from this problem.

Even as The Final Frontier hit the top of the charts last month, digital tracking services showed only small levels of illegal downloading of the album, said David Kassler, chief operating officer of EMI for Europe.

You'd expect some people to be pirating, but they don't, Mr. Kassler said. They want the physical album. They love the artwork, the lyrics. It's something they want to show their friends and family.

Digital sales of The Final Frontier are low, probably accounting for only 10 percent to 15 percent of its overall sales in the United States, Mr. Smallwood said. Over all, digital sales account for close to half of the U.S. recorded music market.

Yet Iron Maiden is no analog-era anachronism, Mr. Smallwood insisted. The lack of radio airplay and a reliance on word of mouth prepared the band well for the nuances of digital marketing, he said.

When the Internet came in, we were probably one of the first to understand the potential, he said.

Before the release of the album, Iron Maiden revamped its Web site, created a Facebook page and offered a free digital single, El Dorado, for fans to download. There is even a free Final Frontier video game.

To encourage sales of records, T-shirts and other goods linked to The Final Frontier, EMI has set up special Iron Maiden sections in European record stores like HMV, Media Markt and FNAC.

Sales of such merchandise can account for more than 20 percent of a record label's earnings from a band, Mr. Kassler said, though he did not provide specific figures for Iron Maiden.

Despite these efforts, it seems unlikely that Iron Maiden will regain the sales success of the 1980s, when a record like The Number of the Beast sold 14 million copies. Because fans are so loyal, they tend to snap up releases quickly, but sales tail off after a few weeks.

Still, Mr. McIver, the writer, said there were plenty of lessons for the music industry in Iron Maiden's continued success: Invest in the long term. Apply an image. Give the fans what they want. Tour and keep touring. Play the festival circuit. Embrace new technology. Be innovative. Be honest. Be original. Write good songs.

maiden iron sales final frontier maiden sales music fans final frontier album record band digital radio image industry metal smallwood iron maiden final frontier music industry record stores kassler said digital sales radio single united states heavy metal smallwood said radio airplay

Op-Ed Columnist - 1938 in 2010 - NYTimes.com

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:40:03 -0400

Publisher - www.nytimes.com
First shared by - ksmith
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

df

1938 in 2010

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 5, 2010

Here's the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president's policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

Go to Columnist Page

Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

Times Topic: The Great Depression

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

Read All Comments (62)

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it's both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today's public debate, discouraging because it's hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren't supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama's economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment and now it's fading out.

And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration's initial economic plan has landed it and the nation in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public's eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.'s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What's less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.

Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.

Then came the war.

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they're saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.

But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy public plus private actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.

The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don't apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible indeed, necessary for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.

But the story of 1938 also shows how hard it is to apply these insights. Even under F.D.R., there was never the political will to do what was needed to end the Great Depression; its eventual resolution came essentially by accident.

I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it's slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.

But always remember: this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will. Here's hoping we find those virtues in the not too distant future.

spending debt war economic depression spending debt economic depression public government deficit economy percent favored deficit spending government spending asked whether midterm elections paul krugman

First impressions of the Viewsonic Viewpad 7 Android tablet

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:15:29 -0400

Publisher - Android and Me
First shared by - phillip
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Viewsonic was showing off their first Android tablet, the Viewpad 7, at IFA this week and we got to spend some quality hands-on time with the device. What I found was a pretty remarkable first effort from Viewsonic, but the Viewpad 7 will not be able to take on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Android tablets are quickly being divided into two main categories. Those with cellular radios (more expensive) and those without (like the WiFi-only Archos lineup). Both the Viewpad 7 and Galaxy Tab feature 7-inch displays and support for cellular networks, so they will be directly competing against each other.

When you buy an Android tablet in the U.S. with support for 3G/4G, it will be subsidized by the carrier and attached to a 2-year contract with data plan. This means that the initial price of the device might not be that important because it is the 24 months of payments that make up the majority of the total cost of ownership.

So how do the two tablets compare when placed side by side?

The Viewpad 7 features a slower processor (600 MHz ARM11 vs 1 GHz Cortex A8), lower resolution display (800480 vs 1024600), less internal storage (512 MB vs 16/32 GB), and lacks support for Flash Player 10.1.

Viewsonic didn't make a bad device, but I can't think of one advantage it offers over the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

There is still hope for Viewsonic because I got the feeling someone at the company has a passion for Android and an understanding for the current industry. It was good to hear that Viewsonic worked with Google to achieve official certification (Google apps and Android Market pre-installed) and they went with the latest Android 2.2. The Viewpad 7 might not move a lot of units, but I'm curious to see what future efforts will produce.

Other impressions of the Viewpad 7 include:

Viewsonic kept saying it had a 600 MHz Snapdragon processor, but the CPU in the Viewpad 7 is ARM11 based. I'm not aware of any Snapdragons that are not ARM Cortex-A8, so I'm not sure what's up. We were told this device could not support Flash 10.1 for technical limitations, which leads us to believe this is not really a Snapdragon.
The case design makes it look like a giant iPhone 4 and the Viewpad 7 was pretty heavy.
Some 3D games like Raging Thunder 2 were playable, but I don't expect this CPU/GPU would be able to handle any of the Gameloft HD titles.
Software was very buggy. Several of the benchmarks I tried running would not complete and produced force close errors.
The virtual keyboard was terrible. It only supported a T9 layout when in portrait mode and you had to swap to landscape to see the QWERTY layout. The stock Android keyboard was not present in the test build they had installed.
Accelerometer controls did not work properly they were off 90 degrees.
It was impossible to wipe off the fingerprints from the back casing. It also appeared to scratch easily.
I didn't notice any haptic feedback from the touch capacitive buttons. Speaking of the touch buttons, Viewsonic used some non-standard icons that were confusing to identify.

Check out our hands-on video for additional details. Would anyone out there choose the Viewpad 7 when the Galaxy Tab will be available at the same time?

RSS feed brought to you by the Android and Me Store

android viewpad viewsonic galaxy tab android viewpad viewsonic galaxy support device galaxy tab samsung galaxy android tablet flash player tab android 600 mhz

Journo Writes 1,000+ Word Story on Twitter After Media Missed Major Breaking News

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 07:30:22 -0400

Publisher - ReadWriteWeb
First shared by - robdiana
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

There were no reporters present in Laurel, Miss. when a jury handed down a $131 million verdict against Ford after an Explorer rolled over, killing a young man who was on track to play baseball for the New York Mets. Hours after the verdict, there was no coverage of a case that involved a high profile victim, a major corporation, and the possibility that more than four million Ford Explorers are dangerously unstable.

Adam Penenberg heard about the verdict immediately from the defense lawyer. Hours later, he was amazed to see there had been no major media coverage at all. So he turned to Twitter.

Sponsor

Firing off more than 50 tweets in two hours, Penenberg related the entire story of the fatal accident, the case and the verdict. The result reads like an entry from Simple English Wikipedia, interspersed with tweets pleading reporters to pick up the story.

"Miss. jury awards $131 million in damages to family of Brian Cole, killed in Ford Explorer rollover accident. No news media there," he wrote. Then, "C'mon reporters. Am I only one who thinks $131 MILLION verdict against FORD in a product liability suit is news??"

"C'mon reporters. Am I only one who thinks $131 MILLION verdict against FORD in a product liability suit is news??"
-Adam Penenberg

Penenberg is a contributing writer for the magazine Fast Company who wrote a book about the dangers of SUVs. He knew about the verdict immediately from the lawyer in the Ford case, but had no venue for breaking the news where people would see it - other than Twitter, where he has more than 2,800 followers.

The story eventually emerged in the major news media. But Penenberg's tweetstream was longer than many of the stories. He even corrected an Associated Press story in a tweet.

Penenberg had an advantage over other reporters covering the case because he has written a book about the subject. A journalist who gets a complex, multi-million dollar unlawful death suit dropped in her lap is going to produce less robust coverage than one who already knows the history and the players.

That combination of better coverage, faster, is the exception rather than the rule. Every media outlet strives for both. But more often than not, the quality of an article is inversely related to the amount of time it took to create.

The Internet has made it possible to break news faster than ever, and Twitter epitomizes this. Typing 140 characters is faster than TV and much faster than blogging - especially if you can do it from your phone.

Penenberg said the experiment taught him how efficient Twitter is for breaking news, and he plans to use it from now on. What do you think - do you like your breaking news live-blogged from Twitter? Or do you think Twitter has potential for dumbing down the news by upping the emphasis on speed over quality?

Discuss

news penenberg twitter verdict ford news verdict penenberg twitter million ford reporters story media faster case coverage breaking major 131 million breaking news faster than against ford verdict against million verdict product liability liability suit thinks 131 verdict immediately adam penenberg news media mon reporters verdict against ford million verdict against 131 million verdict product liability suit

German court rules against YouTube over copyright

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 23:15:08 -0400

Publisher - www.physorg.com
First shared by - phillip
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Shared by phillip
hmm

A German court ruled Friday that Google Inc.'s subsidiary YouTube LLC must pay compensation after users uploaded several videos of performances by singer Sarah Brightman in violation of copyright laws.

The Hamburg state court said the standardized question to users about whether they have the necessary rights to publish material is not enough to relieve YouTube of the legal responsibility for the content, especially because the platform can be used anonymously.

The wording of the court statement appears to be a major blow to YouTube's business model, but Google Germany spokesman Henning Dorstewitz told The Associated Press YouTube will appeal the decision detailed in the 60-page ruling.

YouTube must not publish those videos any more and provide information to settle the amount of compensation in at least three cases in which Brightman videos were uploaded, the court said.

Arnd Haller, director of legal affairs at Google Germany, said the court ruling disregards the current e-commerce directive of the European Union.

"This decision results in a substantial legal uncertainty for all providers of video platforms, opinion forums, social communities, blogs and many other Internet services in Germany," Haller said in a statement.

The plaintiff was not identified and a court spokesman could not be reached for comment. The court statement only said the plaintiff has claimed to be the copyright holder for several of Sarah Brightman's performances.

Google said in a statement that the plaintiff was Frank Peterson. He is a German composer and producer for Brightman and other artists, according to his website.

court youtube brightman google statement court youtube statement google brightman google germany court statement court said sarah brightman german court

One social network to rule them all? A modest proposal

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:45:23 -0400

Publisher - here's the thing:
First shared by - robdiana
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

I realise this might sound like politician calling for a new taskforce, or a businessman calling for a new tax break, but: we need a new social network.

By this, I don't mean that we need a new standalone service for sharing a kind of media, be it short messages, photos, videos, sound, shopping lists or anything else. Rather, what's needed is a framework to pull all the existing Web 2.0 services together in a way that's fluid, attractive and easy to use.

Social networking versus social publishing

In the beginning of the internet, much time and energy was spent discussing its potential to enable people to reach outside the boundaries of their everyday lives and connect in communities of shared interest. The internet enabled us to explore areas of interest our real' lives didn't allow us to investigate: people who lived in small towns with no galleries could learn about art; fans of obscure bands or niche cuisines or unusual hobbies could connect all around the world.

Equally importantly, the web allowed us to adopt a second identity. People could embrace interests that might not be socially acceptable from kinky sex to stamp-collecting to simple silliness without risking their real-world reputations.

With the advent of Web 2.0' and the development of ever more methods for people to create and share content online from Flickr for photos to YouTube and Vimeo for vidoes to Blogger, WordPress and Twitter for written thoughts this potential of the web was enhanced. Secret identities are no longer the preserve of superheroes: now each of us can have a second persona under which we publish all manner of content and connect with strangers all over the world.

But just as these services were developing, a funny thing happened: real life started to intrude. Facebook, launched in 2004, grew like topsy to become the website many people spend most time on, and the most vital to people's lives outside email. In the process, it became the default method of sharing photos, videos and writing for millions of people.

Facebook's success stems largely from one thing: its grounding in real life. You join under your real name, with a real photo, and connect with your real-life friends. From its origins as a tool to grease the wheels of the stratified social scene at Harvard University, it's become the online complement to people's real lives, used to share holiday snaps and plan birthday parties with existing friends far more than it is to meet new people. It's a true social network' the only true social networking site because it exists almost exclusively as an extension of, and facilitator of, people's real-life social lives.

There's nothing wrong with this. Facebook demonstrates that many people probably the majority are happy interacting online under their real names, and have no great desire to adopt a second persona or make contact with strangers who share their interests.

But at the same time, the continued success of self-publishing services like Flickr and Twitter shows that there remains a substantial demand for services which let you broadcast to the whole world, rather than just your own social contacts, and which let you adopt a second identity to enable you to say things you daren't with your first. The success of Twitter, in particular, shows the power of this freedom many people I know joined Twitter with a username based on their real name, before adopting a name that's less identifying to free them to be silly or profane.

Millions of people have a non-identifying username which unites their online publishing activity on a host of services: Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, as well as endless comment forums. Each of these sites has its own flourishing communities.

But here's the thing. Facebook is so popular because it enables you to see what your friends are up to, across all different media, in one place. That's why Facebook, while technically inferior to Flickr as a photo-sharing site, is now the biggest photo-sharing site in the world it's convenient to share photos with the network you've already built.

But in the wider world of Web 2.0 services, there's no united network. My Flickr contacts can see my photos, but not my tweets; my blog subscribers can't see my YouTube uploads. Each service provides tools for finding your connections on other services, but it's laborious and you still have to visit each separate site to see what your contacts are up to. I check Facebook every morning, and frequently again later in the day. It takes a few minutes.

If I checked Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo every morning to see what all those I follow were up to, it'd take an hour or more.

What's needed is a portal which lets us conveniently and easily see what all those we follow are up to across the different web publishing services: to add social networking to social publishing. And it's needed for more than just convenience. As Facebook's power grows, there's an increasing danger that the convenience if offers will lead people to abandon other services and simply share through Facebook. Already I find myself clicking the Like' button where before I would have Dugg' a web page, or shared it on Twitter, because it's so damn easy. If young people joining the internet get in the habit of doing everything through Facebook, the whole idea of distributed Web 2.0 services and of the freedom to adopt a second persona online could wither on the vine.

More than the stream

The most successful attempt at this so far has been Friendfeed. The site, launched in 2007, does a pretty good job of aggregation' pulling in your contacts' activity on various web services into a single stream. Friendfeed was bought by you guessed it Facebook in 2009, and development of the site has basically ceased while its former owners are put to work on its parent's site. But even if it hadn't been effectively abandoned, Friendfeed has serious limitations. To follow a contact, they need to have signed up for the service themselves, rendering it useless for those whose contacts aren't signed up yet. It's ugly, better suited to sharing text-based items like tweets than photos and videos, and it displays links rather than whole entries for blog posts.

Moreover, Friendfeed offers you your contacts' content in a single stream, with photos and blog posts jumbled up with tweets and bookmarks. To be easily useable, a new aggregation service needs to be smarter, automatically separating material of long-term interest like blog posts and new batches of Flickr photographs from short-term material like tweets and TwitPic photographs, and showing them differently.

What's more, Friendfeed offers only aggregation. It does have rudimentary social networking features like messaging and groups, but they're secondary the focus is on, as the name implies, the feed.'

Let me sketch out what's needed from this new social network.

Users should be able to sign up using any of the services they wish to include, if those services offer a system for signing up to other websites (like Twitter, for example).
When a user adds a service to the site, they should see the entries of all the people they follow on that site in their unified feed, whether or not those they follow have joined the site. (This will depend on the service in question's API, but should generally be possible). For example, I should see all my Twitter contacts regardless of whether they've joined the site themselves.
Where the same person is a contact on two services, but they're not a member of the site, the site should suggest joining them together into a single virtual contact' based on username (so for example, my friend Joethedough's Tumblr and Twitter, which share a username, would be suggested as a virtual contact for me to approve). If that user then joined the site and connected the different services themselves, the virtual contact would be upgraded' to a real one.
The service should smartly separate long-form content and display it in a different, less-frequently-changing area to the main feed. For example, if a contact uploaded a single Flickr photo, it'd go in the feed, but if they uploaded a set of 50, it'd go in the long-term section.
Users should be able to filter the feed in advanced ways, limiting it to a single service, type of service (photos/videos/blogs/etc), or by groups of contacts. Service-based contact groups like Twitter lists would be imported and you could add to them on the site. For example, I have a Twitter list of tech journalists; on our new social network, this would show me not just their tweets but their Flickr accounts and blog posts.
As well as sucking in information from various services, users should be able to write information to those services from the service. If you want to add a short message to your profile, for example, you'll be able to post to Twitter from the service, adding the message both to your Twitter profile and to your aggregated service profile. Not using a particular service yet? You can sign up, with one click, without leaving the social network site, with an account based on your existing username and password there.
Users should have a profile' showing their own feed, and long-term content area, for all the services they've added. They should have considerable control over the colours, fonts etc of the profile (but they should not be able to dump in random HTML, MySpace-style).
A user's profile should be able to function as their OpenID provider, giving people a common, effective hub' to use as their online identity across the web (and acting as a counterweight to the growth of Facebook login).
Users should be able to message each other, form groups, organise events, and do all the additional things which social networks enable. Ideally these too would be based on external services, with users able to (for example) email each other at their registered email addresses through the site, or organise events through a sevice such as EventBrite.

Ideally, this service wouldn't need to store or produce any information whatsoever on its own systems, besides the basic network of users and their connected services. Everything else would be done through external services that users had connected.

None of this, to the best of my limited technical knowledge, is beyond the current potential of services' APIs the systems by which they let different web services talk to each other (for example, Twitter apps like TweetDeck use Twitter's API to read and write information). But put it all together, and you have a recipe for a fast-growing, super-useful site that could provide the natural balance to Facebook. Each morning, you'd look at Facebook to see what your real-life friends are up to, and our new site to see what your virtual friends are up to. Just as your Facebook profile is becoming a hub for your real-name online activity, your profile on this site this would become a hub for your online identity, perfect for putting in email signatures or on address cards.

You'll notice I haven't said anything about privacy. Facebook's complex and often-changing privacy features have put privacy issues at the heart of the debate about social networking. But for this project, I don't see it as a top priority. Users should probably have the ability to show parts of their profile to only certain people, and information imported from external services should be subject to any privacy controls the user has applied on that external service.

But when you look at the services this network would be designed to aggregate, you find their privacy features are basic and rarely used. Only a very small proportion of Twitter users protect their tweets, and only a small proportion of Flickr users post private photographs. These services are really about publishing in the literal sense of making things public, submitting them to be found and enjoyed by the world. It's normal to follow strangers, and be followed by strangers, on Twitter. That's why it's so vital this new service allows people to mask their real identities frankly, that ought to be privacy protection enough, at least at the start.

Why existing services won't do

There are a range of sites currently vying to be people's online hub. But none of them will do:

1. Facebook.

Facebook actually does aggregation very well; its Platform API makes it easy for services to create applications to suck your tweets, photos and blog posts into your News Feed. Indeed, Facebook's attractive previews of links in messages, and embedding of videos and photos, makes it a better displayer of someone's tweets than Twitter itself. And, with its recent moves to encourage users to share more information publicly, it's making a wholesale bid to be the centre of people's online lives as it is the online centre of the offline lives.

But Facebook's networks are, and will always be, based around real-life connections. Most people with some notable exceptions don't want accumulate hundreds of random strangers as Facebook friends' the way they do Twitter followers. And there remains the problem of Facebook requiring people to use their real names.

The recent introduction of Facebook Pages, which are automatically public and well suited to aggregating information, provides a partial answer. But while actors, musicians and politicians and even some journalists might find it appropriate to complement their personal profile with a public Page, most people find the idea nonsensical. And Facebook has recently increased its restrictions on the names users can give to Pages, making them no more psuedonym-friendly than personal profiles.

What's more, part of the purpose of a new social network would precisely be to counterbalance Facebook, which is acquiring a degree of dominance many find disquieting.

2. Google.

Google's Buzz' was generally tagged as a Twitter rival when it was launched earlier this year, but it's fair to say it's also intended as an aggregator it can automatically import Blogger blog posts, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts. But its appearance is heavily text-based, and it doesn't feel like it's committed to aggregation there's no reason to believe that Google would want to enable users to import content from the video site Vimeo, for example, as it's a direct competitor to YouTube, and the same applies for WordPress in relation to Blogger. It doesn't even import RSS feeds, which is pretty much the baseline feature for a decent aggregator.

Google is gearing up to incorporate Buzz into a new, expanded social network, a full-on Facebook competitor, later this year. But the signs are that rather than complementing Facebook's focus on real-life relationships, Google will seek to beat them at their own game. A recent presentation by Google employee Paul Adams, who's believed to be working on Google's putative social network, focused on how online networking can be made to more closely mirror our offline day-to-day activity. It's well worth a look at, and it suggests Google Me' might be really useful. But it's not an answer to this problem, which is not about interacting with your offline social network, but precisely about building new communities and connecting new ones online.

3. MySpace.

Once upon a time, MySpace fulfilled just this function people's public-facing home on the web, a place where bands, celebrities, microcelebrities and regular folk mingled and connected. Had MySpace seized on its potential as people's public-facing alternative to their Facebook profile, and quickly wired in advanced, attractive aggregation, it might have had a chance. (Imagine for a minute if MySpace, not Facebook, had bought Friendfeed, and launched a radically overhauled service with aggregation at its core. Wouldn't that have been something?)

But services with 250 million users don't tend to carry out radical overhauls, especially when they're owned by irascible conservative media tycoons. And MySpace has now fallen so far, in user visits and above all in prestige, it's simply impossible how they could experience any sort of renaissance. Besides, the latest plan for reviving the site is pretty much the opposite of what I'm describing, focused not on social media but on centralised traditional media like TV shows and record-company-approved music.

4. Twitter.

By rights, Twitter should be considered one of the many services to be aggregated by a new social network, a self-publishing platform like Flickr or WordPress. But there are signs that Twitter is becoming, almost by default, the leading aggregator of people's content most services offer tools to automatically update Twitter when there's a new photo upload/blog post/video, and it's common to look at a friend's Twitter feed and see their actual messages outnumbered by auto-generated announcements of new content on other services.

The problem is that as an aggregator, Twitter is really, really bad. An entirely text-based service, it's useless at showing links, photos or videos. A whole industry link-shortening services has sprung up to deal with its inability to handle long links. And it's also not much of a social network: there's no capacity for groups, event management or messaging of more than 140 characters.

5. Diaspora.

The young developers behind a new social network project called Disapora got a lot of attention earlier this year, becoming the focus of attention of the growing mass of people seeking an alternative to Facebook and its (supposedly) cavalier attitude to privacy. The four young men are smart and idealistic, and Diaspora sounds like a great idea. But I strongly suspect it's doomed to fail.

Diaspora's founding principle is that no central hub should be required for people to communicate with each other. They're proposing that users have their own node,' installed on their own server, which can channel information from different web services to their contacts. It's a good idea. But it's impossible to think that a service that requires users to install software on their own server will ever reach beyond a narrow tech audience.

Of course, a central site could offer hosted nodes,' much as WordPress.com offers the experience of a self-hosted WordPress installation on a central site. But nothing I've heard from Diaspora so far suggests this service will allow for the kind of richly multimedia and easy-to-set-up profiles and feeds this service will need to take off.

To provide a really good experience, I think this has to be a centralised, hosted service from the off. That does make it reliant on one company, but because the information being shared isn't stored on the service just on whichever external service the user adds it to there's minimal risk of data being lost if the service disappeared overnight.

It's also not clear how focused Diaspora are on easy aggregation from other web services. Right now their focus seems to be on building an internal structure for sharing messages, links etc. And, Diaspora's system appears to be based on symmetrical' relationships that is, user A and user B have to agree to friend' each other to see each other's content. This new service should be based around asymmetrical' relationships, as used by Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and most Web 2.0 services, where following' someone's content doesn't require them to follow' you back.

So far, Diaspora seems to be intended as an alternative to Facebook, a tool for messaging and content sharing, for the tech-savvy not unlike a decentralised Pownce. Good luck to them, but it's not what most users are looking for.

6. VIRB.

Possibly the most worrying precedent for this new social network would be VIRB. The little-known social network was launched in 2007, aimed at attracting web-savvy creative types the same types who were fleeing MySpace in droves, but weren't attracted to Facebook. It offered aggregation of external services, messaging, groups, attractive profiles with design tools, and many of the things this new social network all to have.

And it failed. Earlier this year, VIRB announced a total change of strategy, shifting from a social-network model to one of simple website provider. Users were invited to convert their profiles to standalone sites, and pay a monthly fee for them. The direction Virb was headed, just wasn't working for anyone especially our users, explained founder Brad Smith in a blog post. It was time we made an epic course correction, allowing our product to regain pertinence. Virb is not an answer to those seeking a Facebook alternative or a better-looking MySpace.

Pretty depressing stuff. But though VIRB got a lot right the importance of allowing users to style their profiles without letting them make them hideously ugly, for example it just didn't offer a rich enough experience to grow. Setting up a profile was pretty laborious, with profile information needing to be entered and decisions required about layout and theme. Aggregation was basic, with only a FriendFeed-style text-based list of aggregated material and no photo or video previews. And while you could aggregate all your services to your profile page, only certain services Flickr, blogs and Twitter, if I recall correctly could be properly integrated with the site so your contacts were aware when you'd imported new material.

Above all, what all these services have in common is that they require users to rebuild their contact lists on the site. The most crucial aspect of this new service should be that you don't have to do that each time you import a service, you import your contacts from that service, and the service helps with connecting the various profiles of a contact into a single presence in my network, even if that person hasn't signed up for the site themselves yet. This means people could begin using the site every day as their social media hub even before their contacts join, preventing the user-inertia problem that's killed so many aspiring social networks at birth.

If you build it, they will come

Tech is a business, and services aren't built simply because some blogger sees the need for them. But I'm convinced that a service such as this could be a viable concern. If getting started was easy enough, it could quickly become the chief place users go to check their contact's online activity outside Facebook giving decent potential for advertising without extravagant costs for servers, R&D, staff, etc.

Who'll build it? Well, in the industry of a thousand startups, it could be anyone. But here's an idea. Every major, independently-owned social publishing platform Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, FourSquare is threatened by the growing domination of Facebook and by the trend towards sharing with real-life contacts replacing social publishing. So why not work together? Each are small companies, but each could spare a little engineering time. Smaller companies still, who could stand to gain most from being plugged in to a service with built-in users, could contribute smaller amounts of time. These businesses could help the new startup get funding (and, of course, benefit from the ultimate advertising revenue). Users, eager to have a central home for their online identities and just one site to check in the morning after email and Facebook could make donations to help get things started, much as they did earlier this year for Diaspora.

Am I crazy? Probably. But you only need to look at the flurry of press surrounding the threat Facebook's new Places feature poses to Foursquare to see that the community of independent social services need to do something to combat the ever-growing Zuckerberg empire. By banding together maintaining their separate communities but adding a service that lets their users meet each other and subscribe to each other's additional services they can carve out a strong second network of social activity on the web to rival Facebook's. A user who thinks they need to check their Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr contacts' activity is likely to give up, not bother and just check Facebook.

Above all, users need this. What Facebook has done in helping people use the web to enhance their offline lives is admirable and valuable. But, if the social web is to fulfil its true potential as a place for people to connect and grow, to share interests and experiences, and to be creative, there must be a strong network of places where users can publish and network without using their real names.

Eric Schmidt of Google made headlines earlier this week when he predicted that, in the future, it would be routine for young adults to change their names to disassociate themselves from all the embarrassing youthful indiscretions recorded online in photos, videos and status updates. But you don't have these problems if people are free to use a pseudonym. And as well as reducing privacy problems, you get more interesting content put online. There's ample evidence that when forced to use their real name online, people are far more circumspect about how they interact and what they publish.

The web helps us do many important, everyday things shopping, organising events, sharing memories. These are great, and important. But much of the most exciting potential of the web lies in exploring interests and communities and building identities outside the boundaries of our real' lives. For that area of the web to survive and thrive, we need a new, public social network where people aren't restricted. I don't know what the name should be, but I can think of a slogan Be yourself.

Filed under: Technology Tagged: facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, Social network, Social network service, twitter, web 2.0, YouTube

services facebook social service twitter services facebook social service twitter site users network real online flickr contacts profile based content photos contact need aggregation information user example lives sharing publishing blog google friendfeed feed diaspora videos life privacy myspace tweets share posts activity potential name youtube world easy networking tumblr different single groups public second external profiles virb friends photo media pretty year themselves links earlier idea import username strangers launched wordpress connect communities email together names check central small problem offline messages outside growing enable existing alternative aggregator adopt attractive experience needed tech material term messaging automatically text morning joined whole focus identities offers vimeo identity connected virtual offer blogger post social network real life new social blog posts social networking real name text based web services external services social publishing photos videos new service twitter tumblr real lives second persona different web long term virtual contact rather than real names social networks facebook profile name online online activity offline lives publishing platform blog post own server central site social media public facing external service small proportion organise events privacy features tweets than publishing services photo sharing sharing site self publishing true social second identity life friends check facebook through facebook user adds site themselves write information services offer friendfeed offers contacts activity single stream online identity new social network real name online real life friends photo sharing site

Marvel is Cracking Down on Scanners

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:15:27 -0400

Publisher - Geekosystem
First shared by - RaynerApe
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

A couple of Marvel employee tweets from late last week, joking about the bedbug infestation of Google headquarters, were all the hint we had that Marvel and Google might be communicating publisher-to-search-engine about who-knows-what.

Bleeding Cool says they have an answer, and (as we all might have guessed) it's about piracy.

It appears that last week Marvel sent a DMCA Notice to Google regarding the popular pirated comics blog Comics Invasion. Google had jurisdiction in the matter because Comics Invasion, which would catalog links and direct downloads of scanned comics, was a blogspot blog, and Blogger/Blogspot is owned by Google. The site has since been taken down, although it has resurfaced with its archive back to 2008 on WordPress.

Seems odd that Marvel would actually visit Google offices in order to submit a DMCA, and Bleeding Cool's sources indicate that there was more to it.

I'm told that Marvel have asked Google to block links to all pirated comic books, but have been rebuffed. Instead, Marvel are to be issuing a number of DMCA notices, like the one that took down Comics Invasion, which Google will abide by.

This piecemeal whack-a-mole approach will surely be tiresome for both Marvel, Google, and the pirates. But hey, at least we don't have DRM on monthly floppies.

(via Bleeding Cool.)

google marvel comics dmca invasion google marvel comics comics invasion bleeding cool

Never Mind the Valley: Here's Paris

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:45:07 -0400

Publisher - ReadWriteWeb
First shared by - chrisbrogan
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

If you're capable of seeing past the old stones of Paris and the picturesque rural villages, you'll realize that France is every bit as technologically advanced as any other Western country - more so in some areas. Not only does the country have a higher percentage of homes with high-speed Internet than the U.S. (plus it's faster and costs half as much), it ranks first in the world for number of blogs per Internet user, and has a formidable market of Internet consumers who spent 5.5 billion online in the first quarter of this year.

When I came to Paris in 2006, I had a well-developed idea for a startup and nothing else. It's now been about three years since I joined the fray as an entrepreneur and tech blogger. In that time, I've discovered that the startup scene is infused with passion, energy and a strong spirit of collaboration.

Sponsor

Pamela Poole is a blogger, translator and tech writer, and founder of Francophilia.com, a social startup for Francophiles. Originally from California, she now lives in Paris, where her involvement in the vibrant startup scene keeps her from spending too much time in the bakeries.

There's a thriving geek culture in Paris, and no lack of software development expertise, thanks to superior universities that produce superior engineers. The startup scene is relatively young, however, which is partly due to some pretty fundamental cultural barriers. But these barriers are showing some wear and tear.

Want to start up in France?

While foreign entrepreneurs wait for the Startup Visa to become a reality so they can go launch their startups in the US, France has quietly had a similar program in place for some time. The French government has translated the JEI program into English as the Young Entrepreneurs Initiative, an annual competition run by the French Embassy to the US. The name is a bit misleading - you don't actually have to be young, but your project does. YEI is essentially the same as the JEI program, and winners of the competition can come to France and enjoy the same benefits as startups with JEI status. So what are you waiting for?

There are numerous events and organizations in Paris that exist solely to foster entrepreneurship and tech innovation, many of which get partial financial support from local, regional and national government. France is not a socialist country, but it's a socialized country, and the French get a lot in return for the taxes they pay.

The Big Players

Silicon Sentier is perhaps the best-known player in the Paris startup scene. It's essentially an ecosystem whose mission is the care and feeding of innovation. Among other activities and programs, Silicon Sentier runs La Cantine, a coworking center, hip geek hangout and bustling hub for Paris tech events and activities: barcamps, workshops, competitions, launch parties, press conferences - you name it.

Cap Digital and System@tic are among a number of tech clusters in Paris. The boards of these organizations include large companies, local and regional government representatives, universities/public research labs and SMEs. Through them, entrepreneurs can hook up with R&D resources in universities and companies, and get access to a robust support network that provides opportunities for visibility, growth and financing.

Fing, another major player, is "an idea accelerator, a think tank and a resource for innovators." Fing may be a think tank, but it fosters startup success in very concrete ways. Startups can submit their projects to Fing, which provides support to over 200 projects a year through events, programs, and access to a large network of resources.

LeWeb, Europe's largest (and the world's second largest) Internet conference is held in Paris every December. It was created and is run by French entrepreneur Loc Lemeur (Seesmic), and it includes a competition for European startups. Yes, it happens in Paris, but it's held in English because it's an international conference. LeWeb is a world-class tech conference, and the speakers on the program are always the crme de la crme of the startup world.

Incubators, Accelerators, Competitions

We have those too. Some, like Seedcamp, Startup Weekend, barcamps and the OpenCoffee Club are imports from other countries. Others are homegrown, like SeedNetworking, the brainchild of some alumni of HEC (one of France's best business schools) and Ecole des Mines (one of the excellent engineering schools), who tweaked the speed-networking concept to get entrepreneurs who need developers and developers who need projects in the same room for some fast and furious face time.

The major engineering and business universities have incubators for students and alumni, though some of them are less Internet oriented than others, and there are a few unaffiliated incubators as well, like Paris Pionnires, which receives both public and private funding and supports women-owned startups, and the incubators of Paris Dveloppement, which is funded by the city of Paris and the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Big names like Microsoft BizSpark and Sun Startup Essentials have a presence here, of course, and The Funded recently launched their Founder Institute in Paris as well.

One thing we are missing here in Paris is longer-term intensive accelerators of the Y Combinator variety, but they exist in the U.K., so it shouldn't be long till they hop across the Channel.

The Funding

The funding landscape is complex from a foreigner's point of view because the government is very often involved somehow. There are public entities that seem to be frequently renamed or merged, as well as semi-private and private organizations, and their activities are all very intertwined with each other. And it's acronym hell. But the bottom line is that there is money for startups, and a lot of it comes from those taxpayer Euros I mentioned earlier. In fact, about three fourths of startup money comes from public funds.

One obstacle startups have traditionally faced here is that public and private funding is largely skewed towards projects that involve an R&D/new technology component. French investors are more risk averse than their American counterparts, and the possibility of a patent is reassuring to them.

And, until recently, business angels have been relatively few and far between. This is in part because the government historically filled the seed-funding void, and that is where people tended to turn. But angels are getting more structured, more active, and there more of them. Plus there's been another important new development: Several highly successful French Internet entrepreneurs-turned-investors, who are considerably less skittish than your traditional French investor, are taking matters into their own hands (Meet France's New and Awesome Super Angels).

The chart below shows the general funding options available to French startups.

Startups can access public funding in a number of ways. A rite of passage for many is to go through OSEO, which will analyze and validate a project. OSEO validation in turn makes early-stage startups eligible for a variety of support services and funding options. OSEO can be involved during very early stage activities, such as business plan creation and feasibility studies. It also provides support and guidance well beyond that phase.

A startup can be designated a Jeune Entreprise Innovante (Innovative Young Enterprise). The JEI program was created in 2004 and is managed by the Ministry of Research. Having JEI status is pretty much a golden ticket to financing, and JEI startups also get tax breaks and other benefits. To qualify, your project has to have an R&D element. There is also the Concours national d'aide la cration d'entreprises de technologies innovantes (National competition to help create innovative technology companies). Winners of this contest can be awarded up to 450,000 for R&D.

Private individuals who want a tax break can put money into special investment funds (Fonds commun de placement dans l'innovation) that are meant to be invested in innovative companies. These are managed by various wealth management entities (Conseils en gestion de patrimoine indpendents, or CGPI). The condition for receiving the tax break on these investments is that 60% of the money must go to early-stage, innovative companies, and it must be invested within two years of receipt by the CGPI. OSEO can designate a startup as an Entreprise innovante au titre des FCPI, which makes it eligible for this kind of investment. This designation is similar to JEI but has a broader view of "innovative" and is less strict about the R&D element.

Ple emploi is the government agency that provides unemployment compensation, but it also helps those recipients who are creating a small business or startup by providing extended compensation and breaks on the social charges (retirement, medical, disability, etc.) that businesses normally pay to the government.

Rseau Entreprendre Paris, a network of business owners, and France Initiative, a network of local organizations, are examples of the many semi-private organizations that support startups. They themselves receive both public and private funding, which they use in turn to provide financial support to startups through incubators and other established channels.

I've focused on some options for early-stage startups here, and haven't discussed VC funding or the many organizations here that help French startups expand internationally. For a comprehensive guide (in French) to starting up in France, I highly recommend Accompagnement des startups high-tech en France [PDF], and for an overview of the funding cycle, Exemple de cycle de financement de startup en France [PDF]; both are by Olivier Ezratty.

Next page: The Jeunes Pousses

Photo by Konstantinos Dafalias

The Startups

RWW's Never Mind the Valley series:

You may think you've never heard of any French startups, but it's possible that you're using apps you don't even realize are French. If they've picked a name English speakers can pronounce and translated their sites into English, they blend right in. Take Netvibes, the pioneer in the personalized dashboard space, which has been written about a number of times here on ReadWriteWeb. They're going strong, and constantly adapting their platform to users' changing needs for information and social media aggregation. And there's DailyMotion, which is eating into YouTube's market share and had a 70% jump in US traffic in 2009.

There are plenty of successful startups in France that cleverly capitalized on the fact that startups in other countries didn't localize for the French market. The model of Sarenza is similar to that of Zappos, and it dominates the European market for footwear online. There are also original models that are either being copied or stealthily moving into English-speaking markets, like Vente-Prive and PriceMinister. PriceMinister, a site for C2C/B2C sales of new and used goods (at a fixed price) is the top e-commerce platform in France (recently surpassing eBay.fr and Amazon.fr). It has infiltrated the U.K., and I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. were on its radar, where it'll surely give eBay.com some healthy - and much needed - competition. Vente-Prive is a retail site selling designer products at invitation-only online sales. One of the top e-commerce sites in France, it has expanded into other European countries and its model has given rise to some me-toos in other countries.

The French have their share of exemplary startups in the enterprise space as well, including BlueKiwi, an enterprise social platform, and Exalead, which offers powerful and easily integrated search tools to help businesses and institutions get the most out of their information assets. Exalead's true entrepreneurial colors still show, thanks to its internal project incubator, Exalabs. (Exalead was just acquired by the technology giant, Dassault Systems.)

These are some French startups that have made it to the big time. But what about the little guys? All those struggling, bootstrapping, Ramen-eating founders? As a matter of fact, Paris is crawling with them. Some are clearly aiming no further than the French market, but a number of them are out of the gate in at least French and English with a view to conquering the Web. Just like anywhere else, French startups run the gamut from basic Web apps that focus on a specific niche need, to ambitious and powerful platforms that are likely to give the current leaders a run for their money. Here's a list of just a few of our jeunes pousses (sprouts).

(E= in English)

English Attack: Edutainment site that teaches English using Internet content that real people actually use: music, video, gaming, and more. (E)

GameCreds: Impressive social universe for gamers. (E)

Kontest: Ready-made solution for creating and managing a variety of interactive contests to provide user communities memorable experiences on Facebook and the iPhone. (E soon!)

Meetings: Nice collaborative app that manages all activities related to meetings: communications, attachments, agendas, action items, scheduling, etc.

MonArbre-MaTribu: Crowd-sourced reforestation project, very nicely done. One Euro plants a tree. (France only, for now.)

Pearltrees: A bookmarking site with a new approach to organization of content that resembles mind mapping. (Covered previously on RWW.) (E)

Plyce: Feature-rich location-based social network. They appear to be of the opinion that badges and mayorships are so last week. (Gotta like that thinking.) (E)

Regioneo: You know all those cute little French open-air markets where small producers sell their amazing artisanal food products? This site lets you order directly from the producers. (France only, unfortunately).

Synthesio: Web app that provides extensive data from multiple sources for companies that want to track buzz and reputation, and identify trends and influencers. (E and more)

TellMeWhere: A real-time urban guide powered by user recommendations on everything from bars to barbers across the globe. Web and mobile. (Covered previously on RWW.) (E)

Yoocasa: A private online space, developed in collaboration with child psychologists, where families interact in real time through photo slideshows, video chats, interactive games, and more. (E)

Ulule: Beautifully designed crowdfunding platform for projects that are artsy or for the betterment of society. (E)

Discuss

startups paris french startup france startups paris french startup france funding english private internet government tech public support organizations companies business social network site innovative money provides projects incubators project market entrepreneurs program activities competition world country stage platform scene countries universities online oseo french startups early stage startup scene private funding jei program innovative companies tax break france pdf covered previously vente prive french market jeunes pousses entreprise innovante funding options silicon sentier financial support jei status think tank provides support private organizations semi private stage startups early stage startups

Turn Your Blog to a PDF Book

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:36:30 -0400

Publisher - iLibrarian
First shared by - christomer
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers reviews BlogBooker, an application which will Turn Your Blog to a PDF Book. This brief posts provides a feature summary of the application and short screenshot tutorial for how to export your Blogger or WordPress blogs as XML files for use with BlogBooker.

blogbooker application book pdf blog pdf book

24 Impressive Blog Plugins You Should Consider

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:36:29 -0400

Publisher - iLibrarian
First shared by - christomer
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Denise Wakeman at the Social Media Examiner lists 24 Impressive Blog Plugins You Should Consider. Each of these add-ons is compatible with the WordPress platform. Here are just a few of the more interesting plugins that made the list:

Sexy bookmarks
FBLikebutton
CommentLuv
WordPress Editorial Calendar
WP Mobile
Photo Dropper

plugins impressive consider wordpress blog blog plugins impressive blog impressive blog plugins

Looking forward to AirPlay

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:50:26 -0400

Publisher - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
First shared by - christomer
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

As you may have heard, Apple had some sort of event on Wednesday. In amongst the Big News like iPods and iOSs and iTunes and ~~iTVs~~ Apple TVs, Steve Jobs briefly mentioned AirPlay, a replacement for the AirTunes music streaming system used in the Airport Express multi-purpose device. I've built my home audio solutions around AirTunes, so this was, for me, the most interesting thing Apple announced. Details on how the system will actually work are rather thin so far but TUAW has been sleuthing around to try and figure out what we can.

First, the best bit. Jobs showed an iPad (running the forthcoming 4.2 version of iOS) being fired up, pressing a few buttons, and streaming its output to a big screen TV via an Apple TV. This addresses my number one complaint: a friend comes to my house, I show them the Airport Express system, I show them the Remote app so they can use their iPhone to control my iTunes... and they ask me why they can't also stream their own music directly from their device. Sure, this is going to be tough on battery life, but it's not like I'm short of chargers. They want to listen to their own music and if you could see inside my iTunes you'd know why. And now they will be able to!

I was briefly concerned that this jazzy new functionality would not work with my existing Airport Express devices. Fortunately, Apple's sneak peak at iOS 4.2 confirms that an Airport Express will be able to receive a stream from any iOS 4.2 device, so more good news there too.

TUAW Looking forward to AirPlay originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

apple express airport music system express airport airport express own music

Welcome To The Worst Labor Day In History

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:00:17 -0400

Publisher - Business Insider
First shared by - chrisbrogan
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Welcome to the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor most of the rest of us are unemployed, underemployed or underwater.

The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, which, when added to the loss of public-sector (mostly temporary Census worker jobs) resulted in a net loss of over 50,000 jobs for the month. But at least 125,000 net new jobs are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force.

Face it: The national economy isn't escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working. Near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package, along with tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That's because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven't kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

1. The Origin of the Crisis

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn't receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn't squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we're left to deal with the underlying problem that we've avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn't have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation's total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

It's no coincidence that the last time income was this concentrated was in 1928. I do not mean to suggest that such astonishing consolidations of income at the top directly cause sharp economic declines. The connection is more subtle.

The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

What's more, the rich don't necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them anywhere around the globe where they'll summon the highest returns sometimes that's here, but often it's the Cayman Islands, China or elsewhere. The rich also put their money into assets most likely to attract other big investors (commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate), which can become wildly inflated as a result.

Meanwhile, as the economy grows, the vast majority in the middle naturally want to live better. Their consequent spending fuels continued growth and creates enough jobs for almost everyone, at least for a time. But because this situation can't be sustained, at some point 1929 and 2008 offer ready examples the bill comes due.

2. What We Learned and Didn't Learn From the Great Depression of the 1930s

This time around, policymakers had knowledge their counterparts didn't have in 1929; they knew they could avoid immediate financial calamity by flooding the economy with money. But, paradoxically, averting another Great Depression-like calamity removed political pressure for more fundamental reform. We're left instead with a long and seemingly endless Great Jobs Recession.

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage leveled the playing field.

In the decades after World War II, legislation like the G.I. Bill, a vast expansion of public higher education and civil rights and voting rights laws further reduced economic inequality. Much of this was paid for with a 70 percent to 90 percent marginal income tax on the highest incomes. And as America's middle class shared more of the economy's gains, it was able to buy more of the goods and services the economy could provide. The result: rapid growth and more jobs.

By contrast, little has been done since 2008 to widen the circle of prosperity. Health-care reform is an important step forward but it's not nearly enough.

3. What Else Should Be Done

What else could be done to raise wages and thereby spur the economy? I don't pretend to have all the answers but some initiatives seem worthwhile.

[Pause for a commercial announcement. These points, and others, are developed at length in my upcoming book, AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America's Future, out in two weeks from Alfred Knopf.]

We might consider, for example, extending the earned income tax credit all the way up through the middle class, and paying for it with a tax on carbon. The carbon tax would raise the prices of goods and services especially dependent on carbon-based fuels, which is appropriate given that the social costs of carbon-based fuels should be included in their prices. Consider how much our society now spends on such things as foreign wars designed to secure our sources of oil, as well as oil cleanups. But the wage subsidies would more than make up for these price rises, at least for most Americans in the middle and below.

Another step would be to exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes and paying for it with a payroll tax on incomes over $250,000. This, too, seems reasonable, given that under current law only the first $106,000 of income is subject to the Social Security portion of the payroll tax a particularly regressive system. Most higher-income people, who get good medical care, live longer and collect far more in Social Security benefits, than do lower-income people.

In the longer term, Americans must be better prepared to succeed in the global, high-tech economy. Early childhood education should be more widely available, paid for by a small 0.5 percent fee on all financial transactions. Public universities should be free; in return, graduates would then be required to pay back 10 percent of their first 10 years of full-time income.

Another step: workers who lose their jobs and have to settle for positions that pay less could qualify for earnings insurance that would pay half the salary difference for two years; such a program would probably prove less expensive than extended unemployment benefits.

These measures would not enlarge the budget deficit because they would be paid for. In fact, such moves would help reduce the long-term deficits by getting more Americans back to work and the economy growing again.

Here's the point. Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth and that's good for everyone.

The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that's barely moving. That's the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we'll be stuck in the Great Recession.

Join the conversation about this story

economy income percent jobs tax economy income percent jobs labor american work growth middle economic families wage decades worker growing americans rich social carbon paid first years term incomes class middle class american economy social security total income american families labor day work force payroll tax shared prosperity income tax carbon based widely shared based fuels continued growth long term decades ago male worker worst labor growing economy economic growth organized labor carbon based fuels widely shared prosperity

Woman Wins Libel Suit By Suing Wrong Website

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 04:05:26 -0400

Publisher - Slashdot
First shared by - RandumBoi
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the 'y' at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it."