Despite protest from the public, the UK Government continues to push forward with the adoption of the Digital Economy Bill (DEB), legislation that will supposedly protect copyright holders from online pirates.

This week the House of Lords approved the Bill and handed it over to the House of Commons who will deal with the most controversial elements – disconnections and site-blocking – without proper scrutiny during the so-called “wash-up” period.

This and other controversies have absolutely enraged those who oppose the Bill and has led more than 10,000 voters in the last few days to write to their MPs to demand a full debate.

Last night, musician Billy Bragg, TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney, Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group and Anthony Barnett from openDemocracy were joined by human rights activist Peter Tatchell, politicians from three political parties and numerous others to add their voices to the growing chorus of objection.

In an open letter they are demanding that the disconnections/throttling (aka technical measures) and site-blocking clauses are either properly debated or taken out of the Bill and “subjected to genuine democratic scrutiny in a new parliament.”

They emphasize that not only does the Bill threaten to breach human rights, suppress free speech and hamper legitimate activities on the web, but also poses a threat to the economy.

“Democracy and accountability will be sidestepped if this bill is rushed through and amended without debate during the so-called ‘wash-up’ process,” notes the letter, adding: “The thousands of people we know to be contacting their MPs with concerns will find their faith in politicians even further undermined.”

Indeed, the way this Bill has been handled from start to finish has proven deeply worrying but even if the Government ignores all dissent and presses ahead with its implementation, along with the suspensions, disconnections, site-blocking and all, one thing remains absolutely certain.

The main aim of propping up the “creative industries” (read: the BPI and its members) with this legislation will fail. People will not be heading back to music stores in their millions, they will feel bullied, intimidated and absolutely dedicated to finding new ways to carry on regardless, just as they are in France.

And there will be half a dozen ways to do just that and rest assured there will soon be plenty more – because people will create them. Welcome to the arms race.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Hit F5 for updates or turn on the automatic widget below. Email Tom Bryant at tommyturbo100@hotmail.com with your thoughts on the games, the week's football, or even if you just want some career advice. He's good like that

2.54pm: Wales are lining up 10 metres from the Italian line but are finding a wall of blue. Eventually, Italy turn the ball over and belt it into touch. Solid defensive stuff from the Italians.

2.52pm: Shane Williams drops the ball but is fortunate that it bounces into Welsh hands. He is less fortunate when, standing there taking a breather, he gets chopped in half by Bergamasco who believed he was still in possession. "Ooof," is more or less what his face looked like.

2.50pm: Wales concede a penalty a long way out but Bergamasco lines up the kick anyway. It's a decent effort, but it bounces off the upright. A minute later, there's some handbags after a perceived high tackle which the referee breaks up with the exceptional line: "You're seven foot seven and he's five foot four, don't duck into the tackle."

2.47pm: Wales' Tom Prydie, now the Six Nations' youngest ever player, is doing alright, by the way. Just thought you'd like to know.

2.46pm: The ref has a brief conflab with his assistant and ends up awarding Italy a penalty deep inside their own half. There's something admirable about the referees being miked up in the rugby. Somehow it increases their authority as you hear them working through the possibilities with their assistants. Certainly beats football where refs seem to now speak with their hands over their mouths in case someone lip reads them going, 'WaWas that an elbow to the face? Nah, mate, I didn't see it either'. Perhaps it's something that should be introduced to football - at least it would make some of the more baffling decisions a bit more understandable.

2.43pm: Lewes are not at The Dripping Pan today. Pity.

Bishop's Stortford v Lewes
Bishop's Stortford: Nick Morgan, Nunn, Matt Jones, Abdullahi, Duncan, Angus, Shulton, Prestedge, Jackman, Erskine, Docker.
Subs: Sackey, Boyle-Renner, Ritchie Jones, Pavett, Muin.
Lewes: Banks, Barness, Sutton, Pearson, Walder, Breach, Wheeler, Fraser, Rivers, Louis, Brinkhurst.
Subs: Manning, Hopkinson, Crellin, Sigere, Keehan.

Referee: A Serrano (England)

2.42pm: Wales are getting back into it and they emphasise the fact when Stephen Jones converts a penalty to make the score Wales 3-0 Italy.

2.41pm: Some other quite exciting stadium names, by the way: Bumthang Stadium, Bhutan; Middlefart Stadium, Denmark; Bargain Booze Stadium (now Wincham Park), England;sportsdirect.com@St James' Park, England.

2.38pm: Gower attempts a drop goal against the Welsh but it slides just wide. They've already had to make a substitution but, in the initial stages, appear to be on top against the Welsh.

2.32pm: As they kick off in Cardiff, here are some more teams for this afternoon's Premier League fixtures:

Everton v Bolton
Everton: Howard, Neville, Jagielka, Distin, Baines, Anichebe, Heitinga, Arteta, Pienaar, Cahill, Yakubu.
Subs: Nash, Hibbert, Yobo, Bilyaletdinov, Saha, Osman, Rodwell.

Bolton: Jaaskelainen, Steinsson, Andrew O'Brien, Knight, Robinson, Lee, Muamba, Cohen, Wilshere, Kevin Davies, Elmander.
Subs: Al Habsi, Cahill, Taylor, Riga, Mark Davies, Ricketts, Weiss.

Referee: Alan Wiley (Staffordshire)

Portsmouth v Hull
Portsmouth: James, Mullins, Rocha, Hreidarsson, Belhadj, Smith, Mokoena, Wilson, O'Hara, Owusu-Abeyie, Piquionne.
Subs: Ashdown, Diop, Brown, Finnan, Webber, Kanu, Basinas.

Hull: Myhill, Mendy, McShane, Mouyokolo, Dawson, Folan, Marney, Bullard, Kilbane, Fagan, Vennegoor of Hesselink.
Subs: Duke, Barmby, Geovanni, Garcia, Cooper, Olofinjana, Cairney.

Referee: Phil Dowd (Staffordshire)

Stoke v Tottenham
Stoke: Sorensen, Huth, Abdoulaye Faye, Higginbotham, Collins, Delap, Whelan, Whitehead, Etherington, Fuller, Kitson.
Subs: Begovic, Lawrence, Sidibe, Pugh, Sanli, Wilkinson, Moult.

Tottenham: Gomes, Corluka, Dawson, Bassong, Assou-Ekotto, Kranjcar, Kaboul, Modric, Bale, Crouch, Pavlyuchenko.
Subs: Alnwick, Palacios, Gudjohnsen, Livermore, Dervite, Parrett, Townsend.

Referee: Mike Dean (Wirral)

Sunderland v Birmingham
Sunderland: Gordon, Hutton, Turner, Mensah, Ferdinand, Campbell, Meyler, Richardson, Malbranque, Bent, Mwaruwari.
Subs: Carson, Bardsley, Zenden, Henderson, Da Silva, Kilgallon, Cattermole.

Birmingham: Hart, Carr, Dann, Johnson, Ridgewell, Gardner, Michel, Ferguson, Fahey, Jerome, Benitez.
Subs: Taylor, Bowyer, Larsson, Phillips, McFadden, Parnaby, Vignal.

Referee: Peter Walton (Northamptonshire)

Wigan v Burnley
Wigan: Kirkland, Melchiot, Caldwell, Bramble, Figueroa, McCarthy, Scharner, Diame, Thomas, Moreno, Rodallega.
Subs: Stojkovic, Gohouri, Amaya, Scotland, Moses, Gomez, Sinclair.

Burnley: Jensen, Mears, Duff, Cort, Jordan, Alexander, Elliott, McDonald, Paterson, Steven Fletcher, Nugent.
Subs: Weaver, Edgar, Blake, Bikey, Thompson, Eagles, Cork.

Referee: Michael Jones (Cheshire)

2.31pm: Wales v Italy teams

Wales: Byrne, Prydie, Hook, J. Roberts, S. Williams, S. Jones, M. Phillips, Jenkins, M. Rees, A. Jones, B. Davies, Charteris, Thomas, Warburton, R. Jones.
Replacements: Bennett, P. James, Gough, Delve, Peel, Bishop, Shanklin.

Italy: McLean, Robertson, Canale, Garcia, M. Bergamasco, Gower, Canavosio, Perugini, Ghiraldini, Castrogiovanni, Geldenhuys, Bortolami, Sole, M. Bergamasco, Zanni.
Replacements: Ongaro, Aguero, Bernabo, Vosawai, Tebaldi, Bocchino, Pratichetti.
Referee: W Barnes (RFU)

2.29pm: And here's the Welsh one. Not quite so exciting, it's fair to say. More noble. Yes, perhaps that's the best way to describe it. It's certainly getting the full welly from the crowd, though. Except from the coach Warren Gatland. He looks quite bored.

2.28pm: The Italians have their hands on their hearts and their other arms around each other's backs. Great anthem, the Italian one, somehow manages to be rousing, pompous, ridiculous, stirring and entirely characteristic of their country all at once.

2.25pm: The Italian side have run out on to the pitch at the Millennium Stadium and seem somewhat alarmed to discover the Welsh side are nowhere in sight. Instead, there are gian flame throwers belching fire from, apparently, the middle of the earth all round the pitch. Understandably they form a huddle and try to igrnore it all. Eventually Wales come trotting down the tunnel and it's anthem time.

2.23pm: As is now customary on a Saturday (i.e. when the important people are off the weekend and the website is left to casuals/chancers) virulent betting has broken out across the desk. The now enshrined in tradition weekly predictions game has broken out and, this week, it looks like this:

Gregg Roughley
Everton 2-0 Bolton
Portsmouth 2-1 Hull
Stoke 2-1 Tottenham
Sunderland 1-1 Birmingham
Wigan 2-0 Burnley
QPR 2-2 Swansea
Celtic 3-0 St Johnstone
Berwick 2-0 Elgin

Evan Fanning
Everton 2-1 Bolton
Portsmouth 2-0 Hull
Stoke 1-1 Tottenham
Sunderland 1-0 Birmingham
Wigan 2-1 Burnley
QPR 2-1 Swansea
Celtic 3-1 St Johnstone
Berwick 4-4 Elgin

Josh Widdicombe
Everton 2-0 Bolton
Portsmouth 1-1 Hull
Stoke 1-2 Tottenham
Sunderland 1-0 Birmingham
Wigan 2-0 Burnley
QPR 1-0 Swansea
Celtic 3-1 St Johnstone
Berwick 3-0 Elgin

Tom Bryant
Everton 2-0 Bolton
Portsmouth 1-2 Hull
Stoke 1-2 Tottenham
Sunderland 1-1 Birmingham
Wigan 1-0 Burnley
QPR 1-2 Swansea
Celtic 3-0 St Johnstone
Berwick 0-2 Elgin

Total stakes: £12. Retirement is imminent for someone.

Good afternoon: Welcome to this Saturday's clockwatch, taking in all the games below, the rugby and whatever else happens to float across the wires at the precise moment they're looked at. All of it will written in this style, but with this soundtrack.

Incidentally, last week I went to the home of Lewes FC and I'm struggling to think of a better-named club ground in the world. The Rooks, should you not know, play their football at The Dripping Pan. Does it get any better than that?

It's packed day of action at both ends of the Premier League table (if you count fourth place as being the top of the table). Tom will be here from 2.15pm with updates from all today's football as well as the Six Nations game between Wales and Italy at the Millennium Stadium.

There are five 3pm games in the Premier League:

Everton v Bolton Wanderers
Portsmouth v Hull City
Stoke City v Tottenham Hotspur
Sunderland v Birmingham City
Wigan Athletic v Burnley

While you're waiting for Tom, read how Sir Alex Ferguson has branded the FA "dysfunctional" over their failure to punish Steven Gerrard for his apparent elbow on Portsmouth's Michael Brown last Monday. But then, you wouldn't exactly expect him to say the FA is functional, would you?

Sir Alex Ferguson has described the Football Association's disciplinary department as a "dysfunctional unit" and called for a complete overhaul of its procedures after claiming that Liverpool were given preferential treatment to Manchester United.

Ferguson was responding to the FA's decision not to punish Liverpool's captain, Steven Gerrard, for the use of his forearm on Portsmouth's Michael Brown at Anfield on Monday. "I don't think they know what they are doing," the United manager said. "But I certainly think if it was a Manchester United player he would have been done, as was the case with Rio Ferdinand. It is crazy at times. You scratch your head. Everybody scratches their heads at some of these decisions. You scratch your head but it will always be that way."

Ferguson was referring to Ferdinand's three-match ban for swinging his arm into the face of Hull City's Craig Fagan in January, a punishment that was increased to four matches when the champions lodged an appeal.

Gerrard would have been banned from Liverpool's trip to Old Trafford tomorrow if he had been found guilty of an FA charge of violent conduct and Ferguson alleged that the Anfield club historically got away with more than United. "We know that. They do all right. They are lucky like that. Maybe one day we will get lucky."

Ferguson was in one of his more outspoken moods and, as well as several thinly disguised put-downs about Liverpool's league results, including the observation that they had overachieved last season, he was irritated to learn that the fit-again Owen Hargreaves had been talking of playing for England in the World Cup.

Hargreaves has been out for 19 months with knee problems after making 25 starts since signing from Bayern Munich for £18m and Ferguson said: "I think we deserve some service first, right? He needs to get his service in. Christ, talking about World Cups? There is nothing wrong with talking about it. But he should be concentrating on United, right? And he will do that."

His main ire, however, was reserved for the FA. "I didn't expect anything to happen to Steven Gerrard," he said. "It [the FA's disciplinary department] is a dysfunctional unit. There is no consistency for a start and I didn't expect any. But there should be set rules and for years the LMA [League Managers Association] have been trying to get involved.

"There are about 20 redundant managers around who have had good experience of the game, have good knowledge and played the game. They could get involved and it would save [the FA] a fortune because God knows what it costs them down there in London.

"It costs them a fortune and what results are we getting? You could ask every manager in the league, every week, and they will tell you about inconsistency. So therefore I wonder if it's worth the managers who don't have a job taking over that department. We could have a body of four sitting every Sunday assessing the TV issues of the weekend. These guys have played the game and that's the big advantage they would have over the people doing it at the moment."

Ferguson also questioned the conduct of Liverpool's players when asked about Nemanja Vidic's record of three red cards in three games against Liverpool. "The two at Anfield were definitely influenced by the crowd and the Liverpool players. I have looked at them again. The last one was two yellow cards and I don't think they were right."

Liverpool, fifth in the league, are 15 points behind United at the top, and Ferguson said he had no sympathy for Liverpool's manager, Rafael Benítez. "I don't know what they are mired in," he said. "Their challenge last year was obviously championship form but sometimes you peak with a particular team and it's difficult to do again. Everyone expected Liverpool to be better, but they are not. The challenge for them now, along with a few others, is to get that fourth spot, which is a league of its own."

Asked if he was saying Liverpool had overachieved last season, Ferguson said: "Yes. They did very well. When they got that run going they showed form and consistency. I thought it was an exceptional season for them but that it would be difficult to achieve that again."

He described Liverpool's 4-1 win at Old Trafford a year ago this week as "an abnormal blip" but insisted he was not motivated by the prospect of overtaking them on 19 league titles. "I don't think of it that way," he said. "If we win the 19th title the most important thing will be the next one, the 20th."

• Premier League
• Championship
• Six Nations rugby
• Rugby union

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Neuro-axonal degeneration occurs progressively from the onset of multiple sclerosis and is thought to be a significant cause of increasing clinical disability. Several histopathological studies of multiple sclerosis and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis have shown that the accumulation of sodium in axons can promote reverse action of the sodium/calcium exchanger that, in turn, leads to a lethal overload in intra-axonal calcium. We hypothesized that sodium magnetic resonance imaging would provide an indicator of cellular and metabolic integrity and ion homeostasis in patients with multiple sclerosis. Using a three-dimensional radial gradient-echo sequence with short echo time, we performed sodium magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T in 17 patients with relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis and in 13 normal subjects. The absolute total tissue sodium concentration was measured in lesions and in several areas of normal-appearing white and grey matter in patients, and corresponding areas of white and grey matter in controls. A mixed model analysis of covariance was performed to compare regional tissue sodium concentration levels in patients and controls. Spearman correlations were used to determine the association of regional tissue sodium concentration levels in T2- and T1-weighted lesions with measures of normalized whole brain and grey and white matter volumes, and with expanded disability status scale scores. In patients, tissue sodium concentration levels were found to be elevated in acute and chronic lesions compared to areas of normal-appearing white matter (P < 0.0001). The tissue sodium concentration levels in areas of normal-appearing white matter were significantly higher than those in corresponding white matter regions in healthy controls (P < 0.0001). The tissue sodium concentration value averaged over lesions and over regions of normal-appearing white and grey matter was positively associated with T2-weighted (P ≤ 0.001 for all) and T1-weighted (P ≤ 0.006 for all) lesion volumes. In patients, only the tissue sodium concentration value averaged over regions of normal-appearing grey matter was negatively associated with the normalized grey matter volume (P = 0.0009). Finally, the expanded disability status scale score showed a mild, positive association with the mean tissue sodium concentration value in chronic lesions (P = 0.002), in regions of normal-appearing white matter (P = 0.004) and normal-appearing grey matter (P = 0.002). This study shows the feasibility of using in vivo sodium magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T in patients with multiple sclerosis. Our findings suggest that the abnormal values of the tissue sodium concentration in patients with relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis might reflect changes in cellular composition of the lesions and/or changes in cellular and metabolic integrity. Sodium magnetic resonance imaging has the potential to provide insight into the pathophysiological mechanisms of tissue injury when correlation with histopathology becomes available.

If you’re a photographer and use a Mac, chances are you’re using Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom, since Aperture is less popular among pros — and the latest version seems to be an acknowledgment of that. The features added in version 3 are clearly intended to draw casual shooters using iPhoto to the paid image editing honey pot. Since so many of these amazing new features are direct side-loads from iPhoto, it smooths the process and makes the program as a whole more approachable, though whether existing Aperture users will find them helpful is questionable. Brushes, on the other hand, are a welcome addition to any photographer’s toolset, and depending on how dedicated you are, may be worth the price of admission.

Invasion of the iPhoto features

As long as I’ve been using Aperture, I’ve considered it a processing application. Its photo management was troublesome here and there, and iPhoto had the best ways of showing off your shots, but I dealt with it since maintaining two separate libraries of the same photos would be disk space suicide. I’ve only used Lightroom a little bit (and a version or two back) but all my friends say that it just has a better workflow for serious photo work — importing a couple hundred shots, scrubbing through them, doing the necessary adjustments, and outputting to the necessary format. Not that I have trouble doing that in Aperture, but apparently it’s faster and better in Lightroom.

Confronted with such a fearsome opponent, Apple decided that it would be better to flank than to risk a frontal assault. Hence the expansion of Aperture’s incorporation of iPhoto features Faces and Places. I question their relevance in a photo processing application, but given Apple’s tendency towards coalescing functionality, I’m guessing that iPhoto will eventually be Aperture: Gimped Edition, and the only real choice for organizing and messing with large numbers of photos will be Aperture.

There are some kinks to be worked out. Faces plainly doesn’t work. After it spent literally five hours going through my photos (about 1000 per hour), this is what it has come up with:

No, it didn’t have a lot to go on (I hadn’t “trained” it much yet) but really now. After giving it a few more pointers on what I looked like, it still mistook a three-year-old tow-headed girl, my friend Monica (who is Indian, and in a wedding dress), some E3 booth babes, and Casio president Kazuo Kashio for pale, bearded, Devin Coldewey. The cork board background is jarring and the interface for going through your shots is terrible. I realize this is a technology still being perfected, and that is why I am wondering: what is it doing in my RAW editing program?

Places is useful if you have a geotagging camera (still rare) or want to spend a few hours dragging and dropping stuff onto the map. It can be fun, actually, if you take a lot of pictures of your friends, and want to drag and drop this or that night onto the location you went to; it’s like creating a different kind of album (“Linda’s Tavern”), and indeed you can make a browsable smart album from locations. If you’re like me, you won’t feel complete until the photos are more or less where they were within the city, and not all grouped in a single pin, smack in the middle of the city. This could have some promise, but with a backlog of several thousand shots, getting a library up to date in Places is a task I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

It’s a mistake to judge Faces and Places by simply saying “well we were fine before them,” because it may just be that we found ways of working in the old system of organization (Project>Folder>Album) that approximated what these new features do. But I don’t think it’s wrong to say they just don’t really do much, and feel out of place to boot. You have to work at them, or shoot for them, in order for them to really be worthwhile. Still I have to give credit where credit’s due: if you just consider Faces and Places new columns to organize by (like rating or date) then they’re worth their salt. As flagship features, though, they’re duds.

Lastly, the slide show thing. It’s like finding a trout in the milk. Not that it doesn’t work — it works as well as iPhoto’s thing, and I suppose it’s better to have than not. It’s just a little weird to have a sort of… aftermarket feature popped in there next to the serious editing tools. Its little presets are, like in most Apple programs, 25% solid, 75% fluff. Who in the name of all that is holy is going to pick “Shatter” as their slide show transition? It’s ghastly.

The new features are very well explained in little videos accessible through the “Welcome” screen, which will be handy for new users — if they can find the screen after they close it (it’s in Help>Welcome to Aperture).

The good stuff

So if the iPhoto features are icing, the actual cake is the RAW editing, adjustment tools, and user interface. Let’s start with what I would say is the best new feature: Brushes.

You can see a pretty thorough overview of the feature at Apple’s site, but the gist is that it allows you to apply certain effects in limited areas using a brush of adjustable size and intensity. That’s great! I can’t count the number of times I’ve vacillated between two versions of a photo where an adjustment necessary for one part ended up blowing out another, or I just wanted to bring out the color in the eyes but not in the background. A lot of fiddling could usually approximate the effect I wanted, but it would be so much easier to just use a brush. I’ll be using the hell out of this feature, and it’s perhaps the only real step Apple took against Adobe in this update.

(combination Brushes and Help Video screenshot)

The brushes are non-destructive, like any of the dials and curves you can play with in the adjustments panel, so you can feel free to experiment, layer, and try out different effects. One thing I often have to do when shooting review shots is emphasize the color of LEDs, but if the subject is well-lit, the LEDs are going to be barely visible. No problem; make a little brush, add in a little contrast right there, bump the saturation just in the one area, and boom, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Brushes are useful for lots of little things like that.

The new full-screen browser is handy but not really a revolution. They’ve added the ability to get around your library a little more, which is nice, but it’s not as streamlined as the regular browser, which is always accessible by a single keystroke. The fullscreen presentation has definitely been improved, however, and when showing off photos to friends or clients, it’s a better option than either the plain editing window or a slide show.

The preset adjustments, I think we can agree, are being blown way out of proportion. These are the same kind of “professional adjustments” that you have been able to apply on cheap point-and-shoots since the beginning of time. There are a few quick adjust things like high-contrast black-and-white or exposure +1 that are nice to have previews for (the live preview window is handy), but let’s be honest, these are just filters. I’d like to be able to say that they’re carefully adjusted so you won’t see weird color effects, blackouts, or blowouts, but the fact is every one I tried looked cheap and overdone. The others, like white balance and so on, seem pretty redundant considering the actual controls for adjusting those aspects are mere pixels away in the same window.

Click to see it larger. You can’t really tell here, since this photo isn’t very high contrast, but in several of the other shots I tried this on, the vintage look was really purple, cross-processing was really green, and toy camera pushed the contrast way too far. Subtle adjustments these are not.

The good news is that people new to the program might try a couple, see that they were created by dragging curves and color bars around, and then make their own. I’ve had my own “base” adjustment for years now, which was just as easily accessible and just as customizable. Putting together a “look” for a shoot using this feature might be easier now than before, but it’s still just a toy at this point.

The ability to have multiple libraries is nice; splitting work and personal stuff would be my move, so that if a meteor crashed into TC HQ (or, more likely, I’m fired for insubordination), I could free up a couple gigs in one clean sweep. It’s also convenient for backing up and sharing; “here’s my whole ‘wedding’ library, feel free to do what you like with it” rather than “here’s a folder full of RAW files.”

A quick note

Just a PSA: installation of Aperture 3 took ages. Plan on losing at least a working day to 100% processor usage as it converts your library, searches for Faces, and reprocesses your RAW files with the new profile. I’m not holding this against Apple (it’s a LOT of data to sift through) but it’s just something to be aware of.

Conclusion

Aperture is still a great program, in my opinion, and the budding photographer would be a lot better off with this than with iPhoto if they’re planning on doing anything more than collecting snapshots. I’ve gotten used to Aperture’s workflow and they haven’t changed it much in 3, in fact they’ve provided a couple serious improvements with Brushes and potentially Places and Faces — you know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The trouble I see is that Aperture, once a rather single-minded program, is being diluted with features that have nothing to do with its core functionality. Why not have a new program, called “Collection” or something, that hooks into all your libraries, allows for creating robust slide shows, exporting directly to Facebook, and all that sort of thing? Putting all this junk into Aperture is doing to it what Apple has done to iTunes: once a sleek and straightforward program, it has now grown bloated beyond comprehension; it’s a bit like seeing a once-great fighter gone to seed. I have more of an attachment to Aperture than to iTunes, but if Aperture 4 continues along the vector indicated by Aperture 3, you can consider me a Lightroom conversion.

Give Aperture 3 a 30-day trial for free here. $199 to buy, $99 to upgrade.

The Iranian indie band talk about life as outlaws in their homeland, as documented in their new film No One Knows About Persian Cats

At first glance, Take It Easy Hospital look like any other aspiring indie duo. Dressed in impeccable Shoreditch chic – plaid shirt and skinny jeans for him, cute vintage dress, black tights and brogues for her – their teenage epiphanies came on copied cassettes of Nirvana and Pink Floyd, while these days they're more into Sigur Rós and Foals.

Their ambition for next year, once they find a drummer, is to get on to the bill at Glastonbury or Reading. The difference is that Take It Easy Hospital originally formed in Iran, where rock music is banned. When the local music industry is non-existent, gigs and recording studios are regularly raided by police and even MySpace is monitored, simply finding someone who shares your love of guitars and plaintive vocals is fraught with difficulties.

Ash Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi, the twin songwriters of Take It Easy Hospital, are the stars of a new Iranian film by garlanded Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, called No One Knows About Persian Cats (so named because pet cats, like rock musicians, are outlawed in Iran). The film is a fictionalised account of the duo's attempts to recruit a rhythm section in order to play a local underground gig and ultimately escape to the rock-friendly west. As the two indie innocents are taken under the wing of music-loving wide-boy Nader (Hamed Behdad), the film becomes a Linklater-esque romp through Tehran's clandestine rock underground. All the bands and musicians featured are real, but whether hairy blues rockers, jazz singers, class-war rappers or indie kids, they exhibit a love for making music that overrides the fear of being arrested the moment they switch on their amps. "If you were discovered playing rock music, you'd get arrested, you'd have to pay a fine," reveals Ash, matter-of-factly. "Sometimes you'd go to prison."

The film gleans affectionate humour from the various bands' ingenuity when it comes to hiding their rehearsal spaces from the authorities in diligently-soundproofed underground caverns, shacks constructed on the roofs of tower blocks or, in one case, in a working cattle barn (much to the cows' displeasure).

By coincidence, there is a British film out this month which also documents the struggle of a couple of indie dreamers to form a band – except 1234 is based in London, so the only obstacles are their own musical inadequacy and weedy sexual tension between bandmates. Persian Cats makes 1234 look rather pathetic.

In Iran musicians are forced to behave like fugitives, even though the charges invoked against them are vague (Ahmadinejad imposed a ban on "western and decadent music" soon after becoming president in 2005). "It's a not a written law," complains Negar. "There isn't this red line. You never know when you're crossing it. [The authorities] don't even really know what they're opposing. They don't see that music brings energy and good nature to society."

In 2007, Ash's former band Font staged an open-air gig in a private garden in a suburb of Tehran. Armed police arrived en masse to shut it down, arresting everyone in the audience, and slinging the band in prison for 21 days. "They didn't have any law that said what they should do with us, so they called us satanists. They said we were against the moral law and disgracing the face of society." Ash chuckles wryly at the memory. "It was an odd experience, sleeping next to a serial killer for three weeks. But it made me believe even more in what I was doing."

Font and Take It Easy Hospital are rarities: most Iranian wannabe rockers never even get further then their bedrooms, due to the subtle pressure exerted within families. "Under this regime, you don't have any opportunity to make a living from being a musician, so families prevent their children from learning music in the first place," Ash explains. "Families are a small example of big government. They don't trust the young generation."

When Ash and Negar were kids, the only opportunity they had to hear western rock music was when somebody from their community travelled abroad and brought back CDs. "They'd be copied on to a tape over and over again," says Negar. "We used to write the track names in class when the teacher wasn't looking and take it home with such excitement to listen to it." Even so, whatever they got depended on the tastes of the traveller; often hoping for something similar to Nirvana, they'd end up having to make do with ABBA.

The advent of the internet changed everything for Iranian teenagers, who were suddenly able to participate in global youth culture, employing their technological nous to stay one step ahead of government censors. The fact that the bands in No One Knows About Persian Cats wear Strokes T-shirts and pass around copies of the NME shouldn't seem that strange. But what is the attraction to Ash and Negar of the kind of fey indie music that even within its countries of origin is often considered a bit insular?

"Well, we are indie!" declares Ash. "We had to do it ourselves in bedrooms because if you step out into the streets, you cannot even tell anyone you've just written a song. We would make our own imaginariums in our rooms."

If they'd grown up in England, Take It Easy Hospital's wan, organ-driven indie-pop, topped with earnest observations about the "human jungle", might stand accused of being a little bit twee. But once you learn how hard Ash and Negar have had to fight just to get their songs heard, they take on a whole new complexion. And despite their ugly experiences in Iran, they are determined not to make rebel rock. "Me, I don't care about politics," says Negar. "The value of art is a lot more than politics. Politics is something that passes, but art stays for years."

Ash picks up the thread: "Politics is a tool to solve a situation at one moment. We believe that art is pure and always depending on human nature, so we've always kept ourselves far from politics. Our music is not dangerous, but the current regime in Iran feels that it has to keep people away from honest expression because if they face up to the reality they will soon find out what they are missing."

Ash and Negar agreed to star in Persian Cats not to make a political point, but to try to show the older generation, including their parents, that music is a force for good. But while Ash has received some positive feedback from older Iranians – "I've heard that they walk away after seeing this film to remember what they had before the revolution" – Negar is despondent that most of them haven't been able to overcome their prejudices. "I guess that when people decide to close their eyes to something, you can't force them to see the truth."

In the light of last year's post-election protests, the police crackdown on young people involved in music and the arts has intensified. When Take It Easy Hospital's old drummer went back to Iran several weeks after the election, he was arrested and beaten. Last January, the film's co-writer, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, was arrested in Tehran and handed an eight-year jail sentence on trumped up charges of being a US spy (she was eventually freed following a global outcry).

Reluctantly, Ash and Negar decided it was unsafe to return to Iran and have successfully applied for asylum in the UK, where they've been living since coming over to play at Manchester's In The City festival in 2008. In the film, the duo never make it to London, so in this case, truth is happier than fiction. However, Negar is at pains to point out that they never viewed England as the promised land, despite our rather more relaxed laws regarding the public airing of Farfisa-driven jangle pop.

"Some people say we've run away," says Negar. "But there is no running away. Moving from one country to another doesn't necessarily solve all the problems that are on your mind." Proof that indie introspection truly is an international language.

No One Knows About Persian Cats is out Fri; it previews at Brixton Ritzy, SW2, Tue

• World cinema

Kevin Nakao is VP of Mobile & Business Search for WhitePages, a Top 40 Web and Mobile Publisher. You can find him on Twitter, and on the Whitepages Blog where he writes about mobile, local, and social media.

While last year’s SXSW seemed to serve as the “coming out” party for location-based services (LBS), maybe this year’s conference signifies the migration of these platforms into mainstream culture. And perhaps the only real “new” concept to emerge this year is the idea that there is finally a real opportunity to make money via “location.”

Here are five things that companies should consider as they look to utilize location-based services (LBS) as part their mobile strategy.

From finding the nearest ski slope on REI’s Ski and Snow Report to a nearby movie on Flixter, there are plenty of Top iPhone applications that have incorporated a “lead with the offer, not the capability” philosophy into their mobile product offering to provide a better service. Build the best service first, then add the bells and whistles.

With all the hoopla surrounding location, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that location’s real appeal to advertisers is the fact that with this functionality, you can reach the on-the-go user, who is ready to buy and consume. Just because Twitter and Facebook offer location doesn’t make that valuable or new to advertisers. Location-targeting via IP address has been around a while. For the same reason radio is a great advertising channel for retailers, LBS advertising is also valuable: because it can reach the consumer near the point of sale.

Foursquare has clearly emerged as the location darling. Consider the fact that after only one year, they’ve reached 500,000 active users (Foursquare recently tweeted they added 100,000 users in 10 days).

However, if you apply any city’s share of the total U.S. population, the results show some pretty low estimates of Foursquare users in individual localities. What emerges is a very “long tail” — a steep, narrow graph — of local user adoption. This shows why it is important to achieve scale if you hope to see return on investment in the location marketing space.

For example, using these rough estimates of a city’s proportional share of the U.S. population, if a local pet supply store wanted to target people in San Francisco, the estimated reach would be 1,310 Foursquare users. Even if you double this audience estimate, the number is fairly small for even a local marketer. We had to hit around 4 million downloads of the Whitepages iPhone app to achieve the minimum scale needed for advertiser geo-targeting. Today, 80% of our campaigns from major brands are geo-targeted.

Editor’s Note: It’s important to remember that these are just rough estimates. Because Foursquare was initially only available in a handful of major metro areas, the geographic distribution of users may not precisely follow the geographic distribution of the population.

Battery life is the single biggest threat to location. With GPS on, the phone is asking the network where it is, and this chatter can drain battery life — anyone with an iPhone knows what I am referring to. Thus, phone manufacturers will play a critical role in the future of LBS. RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry devices, faced this problem early on with the energy-tax of e-mail polling, and as a result, their devices now have some of the best battery life.

Foursquare has helped us move forward here as well. “Check-ins” help to address the issue as they offer efficient geo-triggers without having to keep battery-draining GPS features on at all times.

Looking forward, I predict the mobile platform wars will be fought with location and maps. This is an important feature that a platform can use as a point of differentiation for consumers and developers.

In anticipation of that battle, Apple purchased mapping company Placebase, and Google is starting to provide unique mapping features like turn-by-turn navigation on its Android devices. The only hope I see for Windows Mobile is if they do something completely revolutionary on the mobile location front. A development like this was alluded to at the recent TED conference with its augmented reality layering of geo-tagged Flickr photos and real-time video integration.

At WhitePages, we monetize our mobile services through a mix of premium, national display, and sponsored links for local business. Our effective CPM (revenue per thousand ad impressions) for sponsored local links is $30-$50 — double the effective CPM (eCPM) rate we see for premium display ad campaigns from national brands. The eCPM multiple of local targeted ads over ad network rates is a staggering 10x.

Location-based inventory will also become scarce as Apple recently announced that iPhone apps will not be permitted to access GPS capabilities for advertising alone. There now needs to be some consumer benefit and functionality in order to access a user’s location. Geo-targeted inventory on mobile will continue to be at a high premium with no excess supply or ad networks to drive it down.

It is my hope that by this time next year, SXSW –- the festival of “emerging” music and technology –- will have finally moved on from location. It’s clearly happening now, and if integrated wisely, location will be making companies too much money to be called the “cool kid on the block” any longer

- 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing
- 10 Foursquare Apps You Can Use Right Now
- 6 Foursquare Apps We’d Love to See
- 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare
- Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Location-Based Throwdown
- Location, Location, Location: 5 Big Predictions for 2010

Tags: android, business, foursquare, geo-tagging, gowalla, iphone, List, Lists, location based advertising, location-based, Longtail, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, small business

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The key issue at the heart of Viacom's case against Google and YouTube, filed in March 2007, concerns whether an Internet service that probably knows that files are traded or shown illicitly or without license there, deserves the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protect ISPs from liability for their customers' actions. In a summary judgment motion filed yesterday with US District Court in New York and unsealed this morning, Viacom is bidding to have the judge wrap up the case -- an obvious signal that it believes its case is already strong enough.

As US law stands now, a service such as Grokster or the original Napster (not the Best Buy division that today uses that name) is liable when it intentionally establishes its service for the express purpose of trading in illicit files. It's especially liable when it finds some way to advertise itself for that purpose. An Internet Service Provider such as Comcast or Cox is not liable when its service is used for accessing one of these sites, when it doesn't advertise or offer these services explicitly, and when a customer can access them without direct intervention from the ISP. And a video site such as Veoh is not liable when any measure it might take to stop customers from sharing illicit files may also conceivably infringe upon the free speech rights of other customers who may not be trading such files.

Google, the current owner of YouTube, has been arguing the Veoh case in its own defense. But Viacom's argument -- which courts have been wrestling with for over two-and-a-half years and which we now know today -- is that YouTube is a different, special case. It's more like Grokster, it argues, in that it was founded on the principle of gathering an audience around illicit files.

"Defendants are liable under Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., because they operated YouTube with the unlawful objective of profiting from (to use their phrase) 'truckloads' of infringing videos that flooded the site," reads the opening passage of YouTube's founders single-mindedly focused on geometrically increasing the number of YouTube users to maximize its commercial value. They recognized they could achieve that goal only if they cast a blind eye to and did not block the huge number of unauthorized copyrighted works posted on the site. The founders' deliberate decision to build a business based on piracy enabled them to sell their start-up business to Google after 16 months for $1.8 billion. The Supreme Court in Grokster found no legal or societal justification for such intentional copyright infringement."

FOR MORE:

• Viacom and YouTube: Timeline of pertinent events by Tim Conneally

In a talking points document released today (PDF available here), Viacom cites various e-mails from various YouTube and Google executives, including YouTube founders Chad Hurley (CEO) and Steve Chen (CTO). Assuming these excerpts were not taken out of context, which is possible, they indicate that YouTube's founders were clearly building up a high-audience business with illicit files at their core, with the intention of selling out to somebody as soon as possible.

One excerpt has Chen suggesting that YouTube, apparently during its startup phase, "...concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil." Another suggestion, by an unnamed YouTube exec in response to an non-excerpted suggestion -- apparently asking, where should be get all this content -- reads, "Steal it! . . . We have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. How much traffic will we get from personal videos?"

And one excerpt attributed to Chen suggests that the whole legal process of handling DMCA takedown notices is so long and dragged on, that by the time YouTube should ever comply with one, it would be too late anyway: "But we should just keep that stuff on the site. I really don't see what will happen. What? Someone from CNN sees it? He happens to be someone with power? He happens to want to take it down right away. He get in touch with cnn legal. 2 weeks later, we get a cease & desist letter. We take the video down."

Viacom's argument that Google knows what kind of trafficking goes on via YouTube is substantiated by evidence in the form of e-mails, evidently sent prior to its acquisition of YouTube, from executives objecting to elements of what they perceived to be its business model. One message from Google's then-VP of Content Partnerships David Eun (now with AOL) to CEO Eric Schmidt cautioned, "I think we should beat YouTube . . . but not at all costs. [They are] a video Grokster." And in another excerpt, an unnamed Google executive asks, "Is changing policy [to] profit from illegal downloads how we want to conduct business? Is this Googley?"

Evidence cited in Viacom's motion for summary judgment tells the story of how Google Video failed to be competitive against YouTube, even though its engineers persisted with efforts to filter out illicit content. One memo cited says Google Video may have been throwing out 90% of its uploads, for containing suspected copyrighted material or for being generally indecent.

"But Google's good intentions and compliance with the law were not paying off," Viacom argues. "YouTube was way ahead of Google Video in the race to build up a user base. Google executives understood that YouTube's success was largely due to what they euphemistically labeled its 'liberal copyright policy' of freely allowing infringing material. Losing the user race to YouTube because of the latter's copyright infringement, Google Video executives engaged in a 'heated debate' in 2006 'about whether we should relax enforcement of our copyright policies in an effort to stimulate traffic growth.' A top senior executive, Peter Chane, Google Video's Business Product Manager, argued point blank that Google Video should 'beat YouTube' by 'calling quits on our copyright compliance standards.' Chane specifically advocated switching Google Video to YouTube's 'reactive DMCA only' policy because 'YouTube gets content when it's hot ([Saturday Night Live's] Lazy Sunday, Stephen Colbert, Lakers wins at the buzzer)' and it '[takes us too long to acquire content directly from the [legitimate] rights holder.'"

It is that statement which Viacom appears to present as a smoking gun: a suggestion from a Google Video executive that it should acquire its competitor solely because its allegedly illegitimate business model is more successful than its own, legally compliant one.

In Google's memorandum in support of summary judgment in its favor, filed after Viacom, its attorneys do not take the tack or rebutting Viacom's scorching citations -- which, if substantiated, could theoretically become the basis for future criminal complaints. Instead, Google reiterates the argument that it's a service provider which, like Veoh, is entitled to safe harbor since it looks the other way, and does not actively seek infringing uploads.

Citing the Veoh finding, Google's attorneys argue, "What matters is that Veoh 'established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users...Inasmuch as this is a means of facilitating user access to material on its Web site,' Veoh did not lose the safe harbor 'through the automated creation of these files.' YouTube is indistinguishable from Veoh in these respects."

YouTube, Google argues, did not have direct knowledge of the circumstances whereby the specific content Viacom claimed was infringed upon (much of it from Paramount) was shared with YouTube users. Since Viacom's arguments must, at some point, focus themselves upon the specific infringing of the content in question, the DMCA protects YouTube on that count as well, Google continues. But all that may be moot, Google points on, by virtue of the fact that under current US law, the alleged infringers must have directly profited from their actions. YouTube gains revenue through advertising.

Writes Google, "A service provider loses safe harbor eligibility only if the plaintiff can show both that the service provider had the right and ability to control the alleged infringements and received a financial benefit directly attributable to those infringements...As with knowledge, the DMCA's control inquiry is specific, not general. The analysis focuses on the service provider's legal and practical control over the particular infringing activity at issue. The statute's text makes that clear: The question is whether the service provider has the right and ability to control "the infringing activity" alleged by the plaintiff and to which a financial benefit is directly attributable."

A number of declarations in support of both motions were filed today. One supporting Google was particularly interesting, because it goes to specifically that last paragraph: It's from the owner of a marketing firm who promoted the works of recording artists who appear on MTV, a Viacom property. He claimed that some of the very works Viacom claimed were infringed upon through unauthorized uploading to YouTube, actually were authorized by none other than MTV itself, as part of the promotion of the artists under his contract.

If Google's interpretation of the law is affirmed, and if this gentleman's claims are proven, then this whole case could become history faster than a judge can even say "summary judgment."

Researching topics such as health, diet, and (especially) the effectiveness of dietary supplements can be hard and time-consuming. Obscured by thousands of marketing tricks, finding the truth takes days, if not weeks of research.

So, when someone puts in the time to do the research and create an infographic that makes certain aspects of these topics easy to understand, it can be a huge time saver. Read on for some of the best health-related infographics we’ve found online.

As always, consider the figures in these infographics with a grain of salt. No one guarantees that the numbers are correct, and some of them are definitely open to interpretation.

This is, without exaggeration, the most amazing and useful infographic I’ve ever encountered. It looks fairly simple, but it took many hours of research to create it, and it is, to my knowledge, the best resource about the actual efficiency of various dietary supplements out there. From the author:

“This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble.”

The graphic shows the effectiveness of health supplements on the Y-axis (higher is better), and uses the size of the bubbles to illustrate the popularity of that particular supplement among US adults. Anything below the “worth it line,” doesn’t have enough evidence of medicinal benefit and is probably not worth your time, according to the graphic’s creators, who looked at data from over 1500 studies on both PubMed (US National Library Of Medicine) and Cochrane.org. The infographic effectively combines data on both popularity and medical benefits to create a resource that points out the best health supplements, as well as which ones American consumers believe in the most.

Check out the interactive version, which lets you filter the supplements by function, here.

This is a look at five most and least polluted water systems in America (in larger cities), showing that not all tap water has been created equal.

If you’ve been struggling with the issue of drinking tap or bottled water, this info might help you make a decision. Of course, the data in this infographic, created by GOOD, covers only 10 cities, but it highlights an important point – not all chemicals that can appear in tap water are regulated. The graphic illustrates how many pollutants are found in each water system, how often they’re found, and what type of bacteria exists.

See a much larger version of the image here.

Obesity is a known problem in the USA, but which states are affected the most? This is the most recent infographic on the subject we could find, listing obesity rates in all US states, as well as obese and overweight children rates in the USA.

Besides these numbers, this attractive infographic highlights several important points; such as overall high rates of obesity among high school students, as well as the direct and indirect costs of obesity to the US budget.

The full version can be found here.

Right now, one of the most debated topics in the USA is health care reform, and how much the proposed health bill will cost individuals and business. But how much are people paying for health care in other countries around the world?

This infographic, created in a collaboration between GOOD and Way Shape Form, shows the average life expectancy in various countries (indicated by the fullness of the IV bags), as well as several other health-related stats, such as infant mortality rates, and the cost of health care.

See the zoomable version here, or a very big image here.

This visualization was created by David McCandless, the creator of the Snake Oil infographic mentioned above. It’s a slightly morbid chart, showing the average fatality rates for known diseases — the size of the bubble indicates how likely you are to die from a given disease (larger is more fatal).

It comes, however, with an optimistic second chart. The X-axis shows the fatality rate, but the Y-axis shows how long the cause of the illness can survive outside of the body in ideal conditions. Lesson: wash your hands!

Know of any other great health-related visualizations or infographics? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: health, infographic, visualization

Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke all meditated on the development of social contracts that they considered necessary for people to operate in large societies. Game theory gives scientists a chance to test some of these ideas with hard data. By having people play anonymous games with money, researchers found that people from larger societies, ones that are more integrated into the market, are more likely to be fair in anonymous dealings; these same people are more willing to punish others when they are unfair. These findings suggest that fairness and punishment in dealings with strangers are largely learned behaviors, and that we need these norms and institutions to prevent our communities from fragmenting.

Before ten thousand years ago, localized groups probably had fairly limited contact with more distant human populations. Fast forward a few thousand years, and large, complex, and cooperative societies had become prevalent. Scientists have long been uncertain what facilitated the social changes that allowed people to feel comfortable trading with others they hardly knew.

Read the comments on this post

Once upon a time, you had to bring travel guides, maps and paper tickets on every trip. Today, you can just take your smartphone and get access to all of this information without having to lug a couple of books and magazines around with you. Today, according to a new study by analytics firm Compete, 38% of smartphone users conduct travel research on their devices and 28% use their phones to book at least some of their trips and travel activities.

Sponsor

Compete found that the most popular travel-related activity for smartphone owners is finding more information about a destination while they are already traveling (34%). Close to a third of smartphone owners who responded to Compete's survey also use their phones to check up on the status of their lodging and transportation reservations. For most smartphone owners, this probably means checking up on the status of their flights. A quarter of smartphone owners also use their phones to research lodging, destination and transportation options. Marketers will be happy to hear that 22% of users look for a specific transportation company's or hotel's website and 21% use their devices to do research on a specific travel agency's site.

Interestingly, though, while about a third of smartphone owners use their devices for travel-related activities, only one-fifth of all smartphone owners have installed travel apps on their devices yet. Those who haven't installed travel apps yet are looking for comprehensive services that can notify their users of unplanned schedule changes (52%), notify users of rate changes (48%) and consolidate all travel reservations into one itinerary. While there are already numerous apps like WorldMate and TripIt that solve these problems, there is clearly an opportunity for these companies to market their apps to a wider audience that isn't aware of them yet.

With a possibile vote to finalize passage of health care reform approaching, Fox News has thrown everything but the kitchen sink to rally opposition, with guest host Laura Ingraham proclaiming, "Let's kill the bill." For example, Fox News personalities have portrayed the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as unreliable, falsely claimed that a 2006 earthquake did not occur and attacked an 11-year-old and his family that support reform.

Ingraham on hosting for Fox News: "Let's kill the bill!" Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham posted the following message on her Twitter account: "I'll be hosting the O'Reilly Factor on Friday, 8pm eastern. Let's kill the bill!"

From Ingraham's March 19 post on her Twitter account:

Beck encourages viewers to hold candlelight vigil against health care reform. Glenn Beck asserted: "It is time that you have a candlelight vigil. You peacefully assemble in front of your Congressman's local doors. You go to his office locally, not to Washington. You gather your friends and you stand there, you sleep there. You make sure the press covers a peaceful assembly of people saying, 'We will remember your name 'til the end of time, sir.'" [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 3/15/10]

The Fox Nation highlights "call to arms" in opposition to health care reform. On March 18, The Fox Nation published a headline, "Alert: Jon Voight's Call to Arms - Come to D.C. Sat. to Oppose Obamacare."

Fox & Friends channels GOP on "facts that people need to know" about health care reform. Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy announced: "So the Republicans have put out some facts that people need to know about this." Fox News then displayed images under the heading, "GOP: What you need to know. Facts on the Dem health bill." Doocy continued: "For instance, they say, what they're not talking about is the fact that there's going to be a new Medicare tax on capital gains." [Fox News' Fox & Friends, 3/19/10]

Cavuto promotes weekend coverage tilted toward conservatives. Your World host Neal Cavuto has promoted his upcoming "Health Care Showdown: What's really up Doc?" coverage, which will air on Saturday, March 20. Cavuto will host conservative radio host Mark Levin, Rep. Jason Altimire (D-PA), Dom Imus, and Mike Huckabee. Cavuto also promoted Friday's Your World guests, including Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), conservative radio host and columnist Jeri Thompson, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Republican candidate for California governor Carly Fiorina.

Fox hosts Gene Simmons to bash health care and promote his insurance company. During Fox News' America Live, host Megyn Kelly hosted K.I.S.S. front man Gene Simmons to discuss health care. During his appearance, Simmons called health care reform "horrific" and promoted his life insurance company.

Fox falsely attributes doctor survey to New England Journal of Medicine. Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Brian Kilmeade, Sean Hannity and Marc Siegel all pushed the false claim that a New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) survey found that 46 percent of primary care physicians would consider leaving their profession if health care reform legislation passes. In fact, NEJM says they didn't publish or conduct the 3-month-old email "survey," which was actually conducted by The Medicus Firm and published in an employment newsletter.  

Fox News erases 2006 Hawaii earthquake to attack Obama. Responding to President Obama's statement during a Fox News interview that Hawaii "went through an earthquake" and could benefit from a health care reform provision that would help Louisiana cope with Medicaid shortfalls resulting from Hurricane Katrina, Doocy asked, "What Hawaiian earthquake?" In fact, as Fox News itself reported at the time, President Bush declared a "major disaster" after Hawaii was hit by a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in October 2006. [Fox News' Fox & Friends, 3/18/10]

Beck attacks family of 11-year-old who spoke about his mother's death at health care event. Following 11-year-old Marcelas Owens' appearance at a health care reform event to speak about his mother, who reportedly died after losing her health insurance, Beck asked, "Where was grandma" when Marcelas' mother was sick and attacked her work with the organization Washington Community Action Network, saying the group was "all about economic, racial, gender, and social justice for all," which he called, "pesky phrases." [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 3/15/10]

Fox calls CBO score untrustworthy. After the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the health care reform reconciliation package would reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years, Fox News -- led by Beck, Hannity, Doocy, Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer and The Fox Nation -- attempted to portray the nonpartisan CBO as untrustworthy and unreliable. By contrast, after the CBO gave a "favorable" score to the GOP health care plan, Fox praised the office as "nonpartisan" and advanced false GOP claims about the CBO's findings.

Fox News suggests Dems were bought off to support health care reform. Dick Morris suggested that Obama "illegal[ly]" nominated Rep. Jim Matheson's (D-UT) brother Scott "to a judgeship with an implicit quid pro quo." Rep. Matheson's office and the White House have called the smear "ridiculous" and "absurd," former Bush-appointed judge Michael McConnell definitely debunked the smear and conservatives have stated that Scott Matheson is "plenty qualified for the job." Likewise, following Rep. Dennis Kucinich's (D-OH) appearance on Fox & Friends to discuss his decision to support the bill, Fox News displayed a graphic stating: "What was Kucinich promised? Congressman changed vote from no to yes."

Fox anchors falsely attack House rule as undemocratic. Fox News anchors, during their self-described daytime "news hours," repeatedly forwarded the false suggestion that by using a legislative procedure known as the "self-executing rule" to finalize health care reform in the House, Democrats would be passing health care reform "without actually voting for it." In fact, passing legislation by using the procedure would require a majority vote. Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich criticized the rule as "incredible" and "passing bills without voting on them," despite the fact that the Republican Party "set new records" for its use of the self-executing rule in the years following Gingrich's ascension as Speaker.  

Fox repeatedly inaccurately reported on abortion funding. Doocy, Hemmer, Kilmeade, Bill O'Reilly, Carl Cameron, Dana Perino and Greta Van Sustren pushed the debunked claim that the Senate health care reform bill contains language that would allow federal funding for abortion beyond what is currently allowed under federal law. In fact, the Senate bill -- which will be considered by the House -- prohibits health insurers from using federal subsidies to pay for abortion services restricted by current federal law.

Hemmer perpetuates debunked health care myth: "Could people be going to jail for not owning health insurance?" Hemmer revived the debunked myth that not buying health insurance "could lead to prison" and asked: "Could people be going to jail for not owning health insurance?" In fact, the penalty for failure to purchase insurance is a tax, not jail time, and willful failure to pay taxes of any sort can result in civil or criminal penalties.

Perino misleads on Medicare tax impact on small businesses. Guest hosting on Fox & Friends, Perino trumpeted the myth that a Medicare investment tax on those making more than $200,000 would affect most small business owners. In fact, fewer than 1.3 percent of small business owners would be affected by the tax.

News broke yesterday that popular online Q&A startup Formspring.me had raised some $2.5 million in venture funding and would be relocating to Silicon Valley from Indianapolis. As a user and fan of the service, I am happy to see the company rewarded for its success, and I am excited to see how they can improve their already great product. However, as a follower of the national and global startup culture, it is a little disappointing to see the company leave their home and head west to the Valley.

Sponsor

Formspring.me was spun out of Formspring.com, a platform for creating online forms, when users began creating forms to answer personal questions. According to the New York Times' Brad Stone, Formspring.me has raked in $2.5 million from investors based solely in Silicon Valley. VC firms Baseline Ventures and Freestyle Capital teamed with angels Kevin Rose, Dave Morin and Ron Conway's SV Angel to provide Formspring.me with some well deserved, and high profile funding.

Silicon Valley is certainly the mecca of venture capital and social web applications, and in many ways, moving the company to the Valley is a smart move. As we mentioned back in January, Formspring.me plans to rewrite its application to scale more efficiently as the product grows in popularity - something that requires talented programmers. The company has already listed four job openings in San Francisco for a pair of developers, a designer and a data analyst.

By moving to the Valley, Formspring.me will be able to tap the enormous talent pools to find top tier programmers and designers to take their app to the next level. If they want to build out an API and create mobile applications for their app, they are in the right place to do it. When the time comes to look for further funding, having set up shop in the Valley will certainly benefit the company in their efforts.

For other cities outside of the Valley looking to build competitive startup and venture capital communities, these are unfortunate truths. It is not uncommon to see successful startups leave their cities of birth for the Valley to find talented employees and raise their chances for finding funding. We recently discussed Chicago's growing startup scene, which is not far from Indianapolis, but the opportunities in the Midwest do not yet compare to those available in other booming startup cities.

Had Formspring.me been founded in a city like Austin, Boulder, New York or Boston, they would have likely remained there upon receiving funding. That is, perhaps, if they received funding locally. While the Midwest is growing its startup culture, there are far fewer VC firms, and far smaller talent pools when compared to other locations. Until more cities have their own thriving startup scene, stories like Formspring.me's will continue to play out across the country.

The fact that Formspring.me attracted funding from the Valley before relocating raises the question of whether the decision to move was theirs or if it was a recommendation or stipulation of the investors. We have reached out for comment on this question and will update this post as more information becomes available. In the meantime, let us know what you think of Formspring.me or any other startup moving to the Valley in the comments.

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb

LHC breaks its own energy record, still less powerful than Lady GaGa originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Google Apps for business has a number of benefits over traditional business IT and desktop software. Using the full suite essentially places all of your data and entire workflow in the cloud, meaning you can access it all anywhere, any time, from any Internet connection.

At $50 per year per user, the fully integrated apps system is certainly cost-effective, and even adding the free versions of Gmail, Calendar, and Google Docs into your workflow can keep your employees coordinated.

For more casual users, or even those who might not be acquainted with Google Apps, here’s a guide to how the software can benefit your small business.

The many advanced features of Gmail really make it a leap forward in the web-based e-mail space, and a lot of these are ideal for business.

If you’re not ready to take the full plunge into the paid Google Apps suite, you can still configure Gmail to function as your business e-mail client through your existing domain name by following the steps outlined in my post, “How to Set Up Gmail as Your Business E-mail Client.”

The first big advantage of Gmail, like all the apps discussed here, is that it functions in the cloud. You don’t have to worry about downloading messages to multiple locations or syncing various devices. Your inbox will look the same from any web or mobile connection. And with 25 gigs of e-mail storage per user (with a paid apps account), it’s unlikely you’ll ever have to clean your inbox or delete old messages.

Gmail works a bit differently than traditional desktop clients and webmail services in that conversations are “threaded.” This means that e-mails with the same or related subject lines are grouped together in a thread so you can see all the messages sent and received on a topic in one place. When a new message is received, the entire thread is bumped to the top of your inbox, making tracking complex and multi-party conversations easy.

Gmail also has a chat feature built right into the interface that lets you send a quick update or discuss a project with an employee if you’re not in the same office. Chats are also stored in Gmail so that you can search and refer to them later.

Google search, the asset that started it all for the company, is of course built right into Gmail, which makes finding information from e-mail conversations (even very old ones) extremely efficient.

Additionally, Gmail Labs offers some extra settings for your inbox that can be extremely valuable for business use:

• Signature Tweaks puts your e-mail signature before the quoted text in a reply the way that Outlook would.
• Default ‘Reply to All’ allows you to reply to group e-mails with one click, instead of from a drop-down menu.
• Forgotten Attachment Detector will notify you if you’ve mentioned an attachment in an e-mail, but forgotten to add one.
• Undo Send gives you a few seconds after sending a message to click “undo” in case you forgot something, or sent it to the wrong party by mistake.
• Title Tweaks is a great feature that puts your unread message count first in the title of the inbox web page. If you have many windows open while you’re working, you’ll still be able to see when new messages arrive.

Google Docs is a web-based suite for word processing, presentation building (similar to PowerPoint), spreadsheets, and web forms. All the work is done in a web browser, and all the data is saved in the cloud.

The software can be a bit quirky at times, which may frustrate users of more stable products like Microsoft Office, but the payoff in online storage, shareability, and collaboration options may be worth the adjustment for many small businesses.

Because the data is online, streamlined document sharing and collaboration are big perks with Google Docs. Any file you’re working on can be shared with individual team members, or the entire group within the apps system. You can also set permissions for specific users to view and edit documents. And, multiple users can simultaneously view and edit documents, which can be useful for real-time collaborative projects or presentations during conference calls. You can also grant permission for those outside your office network to view and edit documents, which can be especially useful for sharing information and presentations with clients or colleagues.

As you create and share documents, your Google Docs dashboard may start to get a little messy. Be sure to create folders to keep your work organized just as you would on your desktop. You can also share entire folders if you need to collaborate on multiple documents related to the same project.

Google Calendar provides an efficient and intuitive way to keep appointments and events synced across your entire business. With calendar sharing and permissions (similar to those in Docs), you can add other employees’ calendars to your own, and vice versa, in order to see and manage the big picture of your team’s time.

For example, if an executive has an assistant, their calendars may be shared so that the assistant could manage his boss’s appointments remotely from his own account. It’s also a smart tool for coordinating meetings, calls, and shift staffing for multiple employees to avoid scheduling conflicts. Sharing multiple calendars with one “master calendar” creates a color-coded scheduling table for the coordinator that updates automatically when users make changes or additions.

The Calendar app can also be used to create events through Gmail. By adding your employees’ e-mail addresses to an event, they will receive an invitation to respond. Responding ‘yes’ automatically adds a shared event to your calendar that each invitee can view and add notes to. It’s a smart way to coordinate meetings and keep everyone in the loop.

Google Sites is a drag-and-drop web development tool that you can use within your business’s apps to create online information hubs for employees. The websites you create exist within your Google Apps domain, can be public or private, and permissions for employees to add, change, and contribute information can be set from the main account.

Beyond simply being a WYSIWYG web editor, Sites makes it easy to integrate data from other Google Apps into dynamic pages that team members can use to collaborate on projects. Integrating spreadsheets or data charts from Docs, a deadline schedule from Calendar, and team-specific messages from Gmail could essentially create a one-stop project dashboard full of dynamically updating information.

Sites here can be purely functional or informational, or with the aid of some built-in templates or a good designer, a full-fledged dynamic public website for your business that team members have easy access to.

Google Groups have long been public forums where users across the web gather to discuss specific interests or get technical support. Groups for business brings that same functionality into your private internal network.

E-mail can sometimes be cumbersome when coordinating a team. When you need a central space to collect ideas and share documents (but you’re not interested in building a web page in Sites), Groups offers a solution.

Employees can create discussion groups on their own and subscribe, either by e-mail or via a Groups dashboard, which lists new posts like a news reader.

Rather than e-mails going out to individual inboxes, a group thread remains visible to all of your subscribed team members, and users can go back to it for reference, to add more information, and even share docs and calendars.

Using Groups for business discussions and project management creates a communal and searchable database of information that employees can go back to whenever needed.

Google’s recently launched Google Apps Marketplace allows developers of other business web apps to integrate their offerings with Google and sell software directly to Google Apps users. The marketplace currently has over 50 partners, including Intuit, Zoho, and Aviary. This additional space for third-party software means that Apps users will have even more options to tailor their suite for specific business purposes.

While each app has worthwhile features, perhaps one of the best advantages is the way that they all integrate with one another. Documents and appointments can be easily shared via e-mail, and your inbox can be used as a portal for productivity via embeddable widgets, chat, and other notifications.

If your small business is ready for a web-based, collaboration-minded IT solution, Google Apps is certainly a cost-effective way to go, and you can investigate the free versions simply by signing up for a Gmail account to determine if the suite is right for your workflow.

- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, CostinT

Tags: business, gmail, Google, google apps, Google Calendar, google docs, google labs, List, Lists, productivity, small business

As one of ReadWriteWeb's iPhone users, I'm always looking for new applications to try out. Some get downloaded for a day and then deleted right away, others slowly inch their way closer to my homescreen. Even rarer are the ones that become actively used on a regular basis. Occasionally, we like to share our findings regarding our favorite new apps. (See, for example, last month's list here). Although I can't guarantee that all of the ones on the list below will become favorites forever, they piqued my interest enough to get a coveted spot on my iPhone this month. Let us know what you think about their potential for long-lasting success.

Sponsor

I've been playing with Miso off and on for a week or so. Dubbed a "Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies" by yours truly, this app lets you "check-in" to the TV shows and movies you're watching and earn badges. While I like the idea, I've found that the app suffers from the lack of an easy way to find and follow other users. That leaves us TV-watching "stay-at-home" folks feeling a little too isolated when already taking part in a rather non-social, non-interactive activity. However, if the app can improve the ability to find and follow other like-minded entertainment consumers, there's potential for a fun "niche use" type of app here. (Review: Miso: A Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies)

MediaServer seems so promising, but I've had trouble getting all aspects of it to work properly. The app is designed to be an easy way to view your iPhone media on your TV set by way of a Media Center-type hardware device (XMBC, Boxee, etc.) or game console (PS3, XBox 360). And it is easy to use. You install the app, launch it, and boom!, your media console sees your iPhone - no configuration required. As far as viewing user-created videos or photos, the app excels. But streaming music or video? Not so much. Due to varying degrees of DRM applied to the files themselves and codec support on the hardware device, playing media on your TV is harder than it should be. (I tried with the Xbox in my tests.) Whether it's the app that's to blame or the hardware, I can't tell. However, MediaServer did become a great way to do iPhone photo slideshows on the TV and that alone is keeping it on my phone for now. Hopefully the rest will be improved in time.

The RWW bloggers who attended the recent SXSW festival have come back raving about the barcode-scanning Stickybits app (iTunes link). The app, which debuted at the conference, goes hand-in-hand with the online service that lets you either print your own barcodes or buy pre-made stickers which you can then associate with real-world objects. Using the Stickybits iPhone application, anyone encountering these stickers in the wild can scan them to discover whatever data theyv'e been associated with. Will Stickybits actually stick around though? It's too soon to tell, but it sure is fun to play with in the meantime. (Review: Stickbits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds?)

Although not brand-new, the Siri app which debuted in February on the iPhone is rapidly becoming one of our all-time favorites and therefore has to make this list again. If you have not installed Siri yet, do so now! Built with artificial intelligence technology, Siri functions as a personal assistant which can provide information on a variety of topics from weather to movie listings to restaurants, events and more. You can either type into the app's search box or speak your query to get started. And the more you use it, the smarter it gets. The voice recognition works well, too, although it never understood "Alice in Wonderland movie" no matter how many times I said it. (Maybe it already knew I wouldn't like that movie?) We'll give it a pass there, though - voice recognition is a tough nut to crack. Still, the intelligence of this app will soon have you relocating the apps it replaces (movie listing apps, restaurant finders, etc.) to back screens of the iPhone. (Review: Siri: Your Personal Assistant for the Mobile Web)

Obsessed with ego-tracking your Twitter stats or tasked with managing a corporate account of some kind? Then Tweeb's new Twitter analytics tracker (iTunes link) is a handy app to have. For $1.99, you get access to real-time, on-demand statistics including tweet counts, follower counts, retweets, mentions and clickthroughs on your tweeted links. You can also use the app to tweet, manage your friends, block or unblock users, view Twitter profiles, view your following lists and manage multiple Twitter accounts. The data is presented in clean, easy-to-read layouts and there is even a history section so you can measure your growing influence over time. Well worth a couple of bucks if you access this data on a regular basis!

The first app to access Google Buzz natively is pretty great, but I'll admit that I'm more likely to switch over to Buzz from Google Reader's mobile website than launch a standalone app. If the iPhone had app multitasking though, that would be a different story. Still, Buzzie has a few standout features - photo-sharing and photo browsing, most notably. It also feels "a lot snappier" than Google Buzz's web app, noted Frederic earlier this month during his demo. (Review: Buzzie: The First Native Mobile App for Google Buzz)

Part of Springpad's service, this Evernote competitor functions as a mobile note-taking and reminder app. Similar to Evernote's offering, you can write a note or snap a photo to remember something (which is then added to your online account), but it also introduces barcode-scanning as another way to "remember" an item. You can use the app to access all your saved data, too - handy for accessing shopping lists, recipes and restaurants you want to try while you're out and about. (Review: Springpad Takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner)

Other apps getting demoed on our iPhones include the following:

• Brizzly for Twitter: Will we leave Tweetie 2 for this new Twitter iPhone app? It could happen!
• Feathers: Want to have a little fun with your tweets? Feathers lets you decorate them with symbols, icons or even post them upside-down.
• Notifio: Just launched, this app tries to bring Android-style notifications to one central place on the iPhone, but it's dependent on others to use its API to do so. If successful, it could be amazing...but that remains to be seen.

You can see all the apps on my iPhone courtesy of AppsFire here.

Following the Congressional Budget Office's score of the health care reform reconciliation package, Fox News has attempted to portray the nonpartisan CBO as untrustworthy and unreliable. By contrast, after the CBO gave a "favorable" score to the GOP health care plan, Fox praised the office as "nonpartisan" and advanced false GOP claims about the CBO's findings.

 Beck mocks CBO score of health care reform: "Well, that's a party in my pants." On the March 18 edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck, Beck asked, "How would the CBO numbers even make any difference? You know, 'Only 900 and' -- what is it -- '$954 billion.' Ooh. Well, that's a party in my pants. Thank you for sending that one by. How does that make a difference?"

 Doocy: "[C]an you really rely on the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office comes out with?" On the March 19 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy claimed, "Democrats say it will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion over the first decade." After guest host Dana Perino responded by saying, "Well, but there are other members who say that it actually will cost $2.4 trillion over the 10 years once you add it all up," Doocy asked, "Because, can you really rely on the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office comes out with?"

 Perino: "[C]an we trust these numbers?" Introducing an interview with Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) on the same edition of Fox & Friends, Perino said, "Nine hundred and forty billion dollars over the next decade. That's the preliminary price tag for the Democrats' health care bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It also says the plan will cut the federal deficit by $130 billion in that time, but can we trust these numbers?" Weiner said the score "came out really better than we thought it would. It was a great savings number, and so the deficit hawks now have things that they can point at and say, 'You know what? This really does save money." Perino then asked him, "But do you think ... that those numbers can be trusted later on?"

 Johnson Jr.: "I don't expect or anticipate that their numbers are real." On the same edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said that the "average person" would say, "[I]f a plan costs $940 billion, tell me how I'm saving 130 billion. So it doesn't make any sense." Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. then noted that Perino had asked, "Do we really trust these numbers?" and claimed that "if you read carefully the latest CBO things, they say, 'Well, we don't usually project out another 10 years.' And there's so many variables and so many wiggle words that I don't expect or anticipate that their numbers are real." He later said, "I think we're being spun."

 Hannity calls CBO score "budgetary gimmicks and tricks." On the March 18 edition of Fox News' Hannity, host Sean Hannity called the CBO score of the health care bill reflected "budgetary gimmicks and tricks" and said that it is "[f]lat-out dishonest" that the score didn't contain separate legislation that cancels scheduled cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. After guest Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) claimed "the only way that [Democrats] pay for those additions is to reduce seniors' health care benefits on their Medicaid or raise taxes," Hannity responded, "[W]hy would the CBO not highlight this to give a truly educational, informational, you know, scoring of this to the American people?"

 Hemmer asks Juan Williams "do you believe" the CBO long-range forecast. On the March 18 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, Fox News contributor Juan Williams called the CBO score a "deal-maker" because it will "reassure those independents and, by extension, those Democrats that have been on the fence because they are deficit hawks" because of the deficit reduction. Co-host Bill Hemmer then said to Williams, "That's 20 years out. You've lived in Washington a long time. Do you believe that?"

 Fox Nation headline: "CBO Score Called a 'Lie.' " On March 18, Fox Nation posted a National Review article under the headline "CBO Score Called a 'Lie.' " From Fox Nation:

 Fox's Shively touted "favorable" CBO report on GOP health care bill and advanced false GOP claim that GOP plan would lower premiums more than Democrats' plan. On the November 5, 2009, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, contributor Caroline Shively adopted the GOP spin by reporting, "Now, on the other side of the aisle, Republicans have gotten favorable reports from the Congressional Budget Office on the cost of their health care bill. GOP lawmakers say that means premiums for millions of families will be almost $5,000 lower under their plan, compared to the cheapest plan in the Democrats' exchange." In fact, the $5,000 difference Shively cited ignored premium caps in the House Democrats' plan. As Media Matters for America has noted, because the Democrats' health care bill provides premium caps on a sliding scale based on income, the lowest amount that a family would have to pay in premiums is significantly less than the GOP alternative.

America's Newsroom attributes Republican talking point to CBO. On the November 5 edition of America's Newsroom, host Martha McCallum claimed, "The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is saying that the Republican bill ... will carry lower costs for Americans. The CBO estimates that health insurance premiums would be nearly $5,000 cheaper under the Republican reforms than the Democratic ones." In fact, the CBO never made that claim. The comparison was based on calculations done by Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee. From America's Newsroom:

Fox & Friends report obscures that GOP plan wouldn't cover uninsured, wouldn't significantly lower premiums, would reduce deficit less than Democrats' plan. Shively's Fox & Friends report ignored that the GOP plan would not cover most uninsured Americans. Shively also did not report that the CBO estimates indicate that House Democrats' bill lowers the deficit more than the GOP's proposal.

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be "popular" Twitterers, but that's not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don't always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.

Sponsor

The findings from this research project have been published in an research paper available here on the project's homepage.

The data the researchers had access to is astounding: 54,981,152 user accounts, 1,963,263,821 social (follow) links and 1,755,925,520 tweets. In order to collect this massive store of data, the researchers contacted Twitter and asked permission to crawl Twitter's service. Twitter granted them access and white-listed the IP address range for the 58 servers that were used in the data collection. In total, the crawler was able to scan 80 million Twitter accounts during the month of August 2009. Only 54+ million of those accounts were actually in-use at the time, which, in and of itself, is an interesting finding about how many people create a Twitter account and then abandon it. Only 8% of the active accounts were set to private, so they were ignored during the data analysis. The researchers also used the Twitter API to gather additional information about a user's social links and tweets.

The study focused on the largest part of the Twitter network - the "single disproportionately large connected component," notes the paper, that contained 94.8% of users and 99% of all links and tweets. Within that large network of "in-use" accounts, the researchers further narrowed down the data to focus on the "active users." These users where those who had more than 10 tweets and had a valid screen name that could be retweeted by others. (Interesting - it's possible to have an account and not a screen name?) That left "only" 6,189,636 active users out of the initial 80 million to examine.

To measure the influence of these 6+ million users, the researchers looked at how the entire set of the 52 million users interacted with these active users.

After examining the data, the researchers found that the most followed individuals spanned a wide variety of public figures and news sources and included accounts like CNN, New York Times, Barack Obama, Shaquille O'Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and others. However, the most retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services like TwitterTips, TweetMeme, and, interestingly enough, they counted the tech blog Mashable as an aggregation service, too. Other heavily retweeted users included Guy Kawasaki, the humor site The Onion and again, The New York Times. Meanwhile, those users with the most "mentions" - not a direct retweet including the original content of someone else's tweet, but just a casual mention of their name - were celebs.

These three measures of influence - followers, retweets and mentions - has surprisingly little overlap when looking at the top influentials. The top 20 lists from these three categories only had two users in common: Ashton Kutcher and Puff Daddy.

The researchers also examined the ability of Twitter users to influence others. They determined that the most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area.

Out of the 6 million active Twitter users, the researchers picked the top 100 users in each of the three categories. Due to the overlap, there were only 233 distinct users on these lists. These were dubbed the "all-time influentials." Some of these accounts belonged to news organizations or celebs, but others were just regular users. Regarding that last group - it appears that those users who limit their tweets to a single topic are the most likely to increase their influence scores.

In the end, what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy measure of determining influence. Other factors come into play as well. Although some heavily-followed accounts are also mentioned and retweeted a lot, just looking at audience size doesn't reveal an account's ability to influence and impact the Twitter universe.

According to the project's homepage, the researchers are hoping to make the data they collected available to the community at large. Before doing so, they will discuss it with Twitter in order to determine that their data sharing plan agrees with the company's policy. They plan to have an update on this situation - possibly the data itself - by May 2010.

Leyl Master Black is a Managing Director at Sparkpr, one of the world’s top independent PR agencies. Leyl has more than 15 years experience driving high-impact communications programs for emerging technology companies.

While more than three million businesses, brands and celebrities have created Facebook Pages, many are struggling to figure out how best to use them. Companies are finding that even when they keep their pages updated with fresh content, they still aren’t seeing steady growth in their fan base.

And yet there are many brands who’ve surpassed the one million fan mark, while their peers have languished in the thousands. What’s their secret? These companies have figured out how to move from “broadcast” mode into engagement. They have engaged people so well that their fans even invite others along for the ride.

Here are four ways that savvy Facebook marketers are using the medium to engage with their fans.

If you post something on your Facebook Page, you might generate a good number of comments. But if you post your content in the context of a question, you provide an easy call to action. With a question, you engage people’s egos and provoke viral distribution of your content — everyone loves to share their opinion!

At the DigiDay: Social conference this month, social media marketing application developer Fan Appz highlighted an example of how a simple question can boost engagement. One of their customers — a leading video content provider with over 300,000 Facebook fans — routinely posts videos on their Facebook Page. The company found that when they paired videos with a question, video plays jumped by a whopping factor of 7 to 10. This simple yet effective strategy also generated 100 times more Facebook media impressions, as people posted videos to their walls in the context of their response to the question.

The NBA has also adopted this approach, issuing a steady stream of “Top Five” polls and other engaging content that has propelled the organization to top the two million fan mark, an unprecedented number for a sports league on the social networking site. The NBA routinely invites fans to rank their top five shooters, point guards and more. During the 2009-10 NBA season, their Fan Page generated nearly 500 million status update impressions and more than six million video views.

Consider testing people’s knowledge with a fun, relevant quiz, and even tying the results to a giveaway or promotion (more on that later). A clever quiz is not only entertaining, but also lengthens the time a user spends engaged with your brand.

One company embracing this approach is Molotov, a digital marketing agency whose clients include comedians such as George Lopez, David Spade and Jamie Kennedy. Molotov worked with George Lopez to create quizzes such as How Well Do You Know George Lopez? to push his fan base over the one million mark and drive viewership for his TV show.

In another Molotov program to promote a client’s new TV show, the company ran a series of quizzes about the celebrity in conjunction with a sweepstakes for signed merchandise. The quizzes were tests of knowledge about the comedian, his comedy, his routines, even about what happened on last week’s show. Giving people the opportunity to test their knowledge got them into a competitive mode and provided an additional incentive to share their results with friends. In the span of a little over a week, the campaign drove over 12 million brand impressions — and the premiere of the show was the highest rated show on the cable network for the year.

While a contest or sweepstakes may get you some e-mail addresses, simply posting these on your page provides limited incentive to share with friends or even to participate. The way to boost participation is by tying the offer to content. People taking a brand-related quiz are great targets for your message. They may already have an affinity for the brand, so this is the best time to make them an offer.

In the example mentioned above, Molotov gave fans a chance to enter a sweepstakes to win signed merchandise — but the offer was made within the flow of the quiz. This strategy resulted in a 50% conversion rate. For every ten fans who tested their knowledge, five signed up to participate in the promotion, generating over 30,000 sign-ups for the weekly e-mail blast to promote the show.

The offer doesn’t even have to be big. Before the Super Bowl, the NFL ran a How Well Do You Know the NFL? quiz, with one lucky participant selected to receive a $50 gift card to NFLshop.com. Over 10,000 people took the quiz. If you estimate that each participant has 200 friends, that’s a possible two million impressions in the news feed with a relatively small giveaway.

Giving your fans something of value — whether it’s as simple as a coupon, or as flashy as tickets to the Tonight Show — is a great way to show that you appreciate their continued support.

But what about picking one fan at random to get something really special?

The NBA again shows that they are on the leading edge. This brilliant strategy taps some of their biggest stars to record personalized video clips thanking select fans. Here’s a picture of Shaq thanking fan #385. If you’re an NBA fan, you could be next!

You don’t have to be a major brand like the NBA to turn your Facebook Page into an engaging destination. Any business can take these ideas and get creative. A restaurant could pair a quiz about famous restaurant movie scenes with a $100 gift certificate sweepstakes, or a Ford dealership could run a poll gauging people’s reactions to the Toyota recall news and give away interest-free financing to one lucky winner. The trick is to think about what your users would be interested in, what’s trendy or fun, then try it out.

In what ways are you engaging with your Facebook fans?

- 5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From
- HOW TO: Build a Facebook Landing Page for Your Business
- HOW TO: Block FarmVille on Facebook
- How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
- 10 Musts for Marketing to Women on Facebook

Tags: business, celebrities, engagement, facebook, facebook fan page, facebook fan pages, Facebook Lists, List, Lists, NBA, quiz, small business