Social Networks bergen eine Menge Gefahren - auch für Kriminelle. Ein 17-Jähriger Einbrecher im US-Staat Washington beging den Fehler, sich in dem Laden, in den er eingedrungen war, in sein MySpace-Profil einzuloggen - von einem Geschäfts-Computer aus.

Burglar Helps Washington Police Find Him By Using Store's Computer To Log Onto MySpace

 Parce qu'il avait imprudemment consulté son compte MySpace sur le lieu d'un cambriolage, un adolescent américain a été retrouvé en un clic par les policiers.
Le cambrioleur trahi par MySpace

Sociotoco Search helps you find online profiles in most commonly used social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook - all on one place. Date Updated: 2010-03-20
Developer: sociotoco
Tags: search, social
APIs: Bing, Blogger, Digg, Facebook, FeedBurner, Flickr, FriendFeed, Friendster, Google Ajax Search, Google Analytics, Hi5, Hyves, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Posterous, Twinfluence, Twitter, Twitter Grader, TypePad , Vimeo, Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo Search, YouTube, ZoomIn

A Facebook, a MySpace ĂŠs a tĂśbbi kĂśzĂśssĂŠgi oldal ugyan kivĂĄlĂł talĂĄlkozĂĄsi lehetĂľsĂŠget biztosĂt az adott hatalommal szemben ĂĄllĂł csoportok szĂĄmĂĄra, de ugyanilyen jĂł szolgĂĄlatot tehetnek a diktatĂşrĂĄk kiszolgĂĄlĂłinak is.

Want to perform?

2010 TEMfest is Toronto's Female Music Showcases to promote Toronto independent female recording artists. Also includes Variety Showcases. See the event here http://www.temfest.org . All events held at the Smiling Buddha Bar 961 College Street West (Dovercourt and College)

FEMALE MUSIC-MAKERS NETWORKING PARTY
Monday March 29 / 8:00pm with performers and guest speakers. Email us for your free VIP pass to get in. Its a meet and greet, exchange of ideas and services, and meet potential new clients or representation. Its the gathering for 100 women. Free for women with the VIP pass. Guys will make a donation.
Invited are:
Female independent artists/singers, Female producers, Female promoters, Female photographers, Female publicists, Female writers, Female studio owners, Female vocal instructors, Female radio announcers and more. http://www.temfest.org


OTHER EVENTS BELOW

Sunday March 21 / 5pm-8pm Singers and Musicians Networking Party.

Sunday March 21 / 9:00pm All Female Showcase
featuring
Sound of Pop/Fontana North recording artist Candice Chantrell http://www.candicechantrell.com
Alexandra Kane http://www.myspace.com/alexandrakanemusic
Bianca Dreml http://www.myspace.com/biancadreml
Claire Hayek http://www.clairehayek.com
Karina Es http://www.myspace.com/karinaes
Michelle Mondesir http://www.myspace.com/michellemondesir

Sunday March 28 / 8:00pm All Female Showcase featuring
Lauren Lamando http://www.myspace.com/laurenlamando
Darcei Giles http://www.myspace.com/darceionline
Missy Knott http://www.myspace.com/missyknott
Just Gita http://www.myspace.com/justgita
Jessica Paquette http://www.myspace.com/jessicapaquette
Jennifer Cortez http://www.myspace.com/jennifercortez1280
Joanna Mohammed http://www.myspace.com/joannamohammed
Nala Burdyna http://www.nalaburdyna.com
Lucy & Bela http://www.myspace.com/duolucybela


Sunday April 4 / 8:00pm-Singers Showcase/Dancers Showcase VARIETY

Monday April 5 / 8:00pm-Variety Showcase featuring
Jessica Paquette http://www.myspace.com/jessicapaquette
Jazzmine Raine http://www.myspace.com/jazzminerainemusic
Luca http://www.youtube.com/user/LucaSarcanin
Joel Chico http://myspace.com/joelchicomusic

Sunday April 11 / 8:00pm Variety Showcase

Monday April 12 / 8:00pm Urban Female Showcase

You know those special amps used by Spinal Tap that go to 11, in order to provide "that extra push over the cliff"? It appears Fox News has gotten a hold of some and hooked them up to its coverage of health care reform.

As the reform bill moved closer to a vote in the House, the Fox News noise machine went into overdrive, hurling every false and misleading claim it could muster.

The week in Fox News health care hysteria began with an oldie-but-goodie -- Steve Doocy, Bill Hemmer, and Bill O'Reilly all claimed or suggested that the bill will, in O'Reilly's words, "require American taxpayers to fund abortion." But it doesn't, at least not beyond what is currently permitted under current law. Fox News, unfortunately, is not alone in repeating this falsehood.

Then, Doocy and Hemmer, joined by Neil Cavuto and several other hosts, jumped on the idea that a legislative procedure the House is reportedly considering to pass the Senate's version of health care reform would allow them to do so without a vote. Wrong again -- the House would need to vote to implement that procedure.

Carl Cameron, however, broke through the noise on this issue, pointing out that the process would simply pass the bill "in one vote instead of two" and that the process "has been used, literally, for centuries" -- indeed, Republicans made copious use of the "self-executing rule" when they controlled Congress. Even Charles Krauthammer conceded that it's constitutional. Still, that didn't keep Alisyn Camerota from scoffing that the rule "might as well be a self-immolating rule."

Fox News then pounced on a survey claiming to have found that 46 percent of primary care physicians would consider leaving their profession if health care reform passes. O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and contributor Dr. Marc Siegel all portrayed the survey as having been published by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

Except it wasn't. The article was written by the physician-recruiting firm that conducted the survey, and it actually appeared in an employment newsletter produced by the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, not the Journal itself. Further, the survey itself was not all that scientific -- done via email contacts taken from the recruiting firm's database -- so any claim that the survey's results accurately reflect the view of the American medical community is dubious at best.

Fox News' Megyn Kelly did eventually note that the survey was "not a scientific poll." But that didn't keep Glenn Beck from insisting -- hours after Kelly corrected the record -- that "The New England Journal of Medicine says that if this bill is passed nearly one-third of doctors will quit practice medicine."

(Beck, meanwhile, is keeping up the long tradition of Fox News hosts pushing partisan political agendas by joining with Republican Rep. Steve King to promote an anti-reform rally in Washington.)

Fox News contributor and serial misleader Dana Perino made her own non-contribution to the health care debate, asserting that the reform bill's Medicare investment tax on those making over $200,000 a year is "so disturbing ... because the people who make that money are the small business owners." In fact, fewer than 1.3 percent of small business owners would be affected by the tax.

When the Congressional Budget Office released new numbers detailing how the reform bill would reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years, Fox News didn't want to talk about that -- it spent far more time highlighting how much the bill would cost instead of how much it would save. And when that didn't seem to work, it tried to discredit the CBO as untrustworthy and unreliable. Never mind that when the CBO issued "favorable" numbers last fall on a Republican health care reform plan, Fox News praised the CBO as "nonpartisan."

The Fox News spin is even confusing its own hosts. Brian Kilmeade can't quite comprehend how a bill can cost money yet reduce the deficit, and Kelly admitted, "I don't understand anything they're talking about when it comes to this potential law."

Fox News' inept war against health care reform, while in keeping with its function as the communications arm of the Republican Party in exile, is making itself look like the Spinal Tap of news. It doesn't really need that "extra push over the cliff" -- after all, that's what it's been speeding toward for years.

At this rate, it probably won't be too long before a Fox anchor spontaneously combusts.

Other stories this week

A whole lot of shaky earthquake claims goin' on at Fox

How much does Fox News oppose health care reform? It's pretending natural disasters didn't happen if they're inconvenient to the anti-reform agenda.

On March 18, Doocy took exception to President Obama's statement that a provision in the health care reform that would help Louisiana cope with Medicaid shortfalls resulting from Hurricane Katrina might also help Hawaii because it "went through an earthquake. "Hold it. What Hawaiian earthquake?" Doocy asked. "There was an earthquake in 1868 that killed 77. There was an earthquake in 1975 that killed two." After noting that the provision applies to states that have suffered a natural disaster "within the last seven fiscal years," Doocy added: "Essentially it boils down to just one state, and that is Louisiana."

Doocy seems to have forgotten that there was an earthquake in Hawaii in 2006. Not only did it cause tens of millions of dollars in damage, the Bush administration "declared a major disaster exists in the State of Hawaii and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts" as a result of the quake.

But Doocy didn't need to rely on federal agencies for information on the quake -- Fox News reported on it at the time. (Investor's Business Daily similarly ignored its own reporting to suggest there was no recent Hawaii quake.)

It seems that rather than trust the federal government or his own news organization, Doocy chose instead to trust right-wing bloggers, who were spreading the misinformation. That runs counter to a 2007 memo -- issued after Doocy and other Fox hosts falsely claimed that Obama was educated in a madrassa -- in which Fox News vice president John Moody reportedly wrote, "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC."

Media Matters has written Fox News requesting that Doocy correct the record. We shouldn't have to, since Fox News is supposed to have a "zero tolerance" policy toward on-air mistakes, but then, these are the same folks that ludicrously insisted that a Fox & Friends graphic in which poll numbers added up to 120 percent contained no errors.

The latest right-wing witch-hunt target: Jim Wallis

Fox News has long been a leader in witch hunts against Obama and his administration (or, really, anyone who can be remotely tagged as liberal). Now Glenn Beck, as an extension of his repeated challenged Beck to a debate over social justice, Beck demurred, his vaguely threatening statements making it clear his witch hunt was more important than reasoned debate: "In my time, I will respond. ... Just know the hammer's coming. ... And when the hammer comes, it's going to be hammering hard and all through the night, over and over."

Right-wing website WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, blundered into the breach with a poorly written article that attempted to put words in Wallis' mouth. WND claimed that Wallis was a "champion of communism," even though Wallis has declared communism to be a "failed" system; asserted that Sojourners has published "a slew of radicals" while ignoring that it has also published a slew of conservatives; and alleged that "Sojourners' official 'statement of faith' urges readers to 'refuse to accept [capitalist] structures and assumptions that normalize poverty and segregate the world by class,' " even though the word "capitalist" -- inserted by WND -- actually appears nowhere in the statement. WND even falsely claimed that Wallis "labeled the U.S. 'the great captor and destroyer of human life.' "

Somehow, we suspect that Beck's upcoming assault on Wallis will be just as divorced from reality as WorldNetDaily's.

Erick Erickson joins the "scumbags" at CNN

Should a blogger who once called a retiring Supreme Court justice a "goat f---ing child molester" be rewarded with a regular commentary gig on CNN? Doesn't matter -- the deal's been done.

CNN announced this week that RedState editor Erick Erickson has joined the network as a political contributor, mainly appearing on John King's new show. The network claimed that Erickson is "a perfect fit" for King's show, adding that "Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach."

Media Matters has detailed Erickson's history of outrageous statements, of which the aforementioned is but one.

Predictably, conservatives defended Erickson's new job, his fellow RedStaters among them. One of Erickson's RedState defenders, however, went a tad off-message: "From Non-Conservatives, to Academics and Liberal Elitists, to self-soiling and unprincipled Professional Politicians and firmly-entrenched good ole boys inside the M(ostly) S(cumbags) M(edia), each of these clowns has a tale of doom about the hell we're headed for compliments of CNN's hand basket."

We have to wonder: Does Erickson consider his new CNN colleagues to be "scumbags"?

This week's media columns

This week's media columns from the Media Matters senior fellows: Eric Boehlert examines the media myth of Obama's "falling poll numbers," and Karl Frisch tells you how to annoy Glenn Beck in five minutes or less.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Digg

Media Matters maintains active online communities on the nation's leading social networking sites. Be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Digg and join in on the discussion.

Media Matters Minute now on YouTube

For some time now, radio shows and stations throughout the country have been carrying the Media Matters Minute, a daily, minute-long recap of our work topped off with the "most outrageous comment" of the day. We encourage you to subscribe (YouTube / iTunes /RSS) to the Minute's daily podcast, hosted by Media Matters' Ben Fishel.

This weekly wrap-up was compiled and edited by Terry Krepel, a senior web editor at Media Matters for America.

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

Sam Richardsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fugitives and felons use Facebook (and MySpace and YouTube) for virtual confessionals or unwitting trails to their whereabouts.

According to the Nielsen Company, the global average time spent per person on social networking sites is now nearly five and half hours per month (February 2010 data), with Facebook accounting for the majority of that time. That’s up more than two hours from last year.

In arriving at that conclusion, Nielsen measured social network usage per person across 10 countries and compared that to data from the same time last year.

When looking at specific countries, Italy tops the charts with social network time per person just under six and a half hours per month (6:27:53), and Australia is a close second (6:02:34). The United States — which has the largest unique social networking audience — ranked third in usage with the average person spending just over six hours (6:02:34) on social networks.

What’s even more interesting is that Facebook — with its 400 million members — is far and away dominating the rest of the competition.

Facebook is the number-one social network destination worldwide and accounts for nearly six hours (5:52:00) per person with the average user logging in more than 19 times per month. What that boils down to is that the time spent on Facebook is almost five hours longer than the time spent on MySpace (0:59:33), the second closest social network in terms of time spent on site per person.

Nielsen also found that:

- Globally, the average Twitterer conducts three unique sessions for a total of 36 minutes per month.

- In the U.S. the active unique social network audience grew roughly 29% from 115 million in February 2009 to 149 million in February 2010.

- Active unique users of social networks are also up nearly 30% globally, rising from 244.2 million to 314.5 million collectively.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sbayram

Tags: facebook, Nielsen, social media, social networks, stats

I caught up with Kieran Hannon the other day. He was in the Bay Area for a meeting with the Irish prime minister (he's on the board of Enterprise Ireland) and I realized it had been a good few years since I had last seen him.

He used to be co-managing director of Grey Advertising, then had gone off to Texas to work as VP of Marketing for Radio Shack, and then moved to Santa Monica, in Southern California. He's now working as COO at a promising startup called Sidebar, which has an interesting mobile technology that recommends content based on what people like, very useful for online retailers and others.

Kieran and his family had spent 18 years living in San Francisco, and I was curious what life in Southern California (SoCal) was like.

He said life was good, and that the startup scene was healthy and that there are a lot of media/technology centers there. I often write about how Silicon Valley has become Media Valley, because of all the media companies here (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc) so it makes sense that SoCal, with its rich media history, would be a fertile breeding ground for media technology startups.

Earlier this week, Mark Suster, a VC based in SoCal, wrote an excellent post about startups in LA. Want to Start a Technology Company in LA?

He makes some great points:

...LA [is] the second largest city in the country with a population if 16 million. We have universities like Caltech, UCLA, USC and many more. We have many seasoned entrepreneurs who have built successful companies here and made a lot of money for investors and themselves. But LA is not Silicon Valley and we don't need to aspire to be so. We will never be Silicon Valley in the way that Toronto will never be Hollywood. But we have a great city for building technology companies.

He goes into details about how LA is not like Silicon Valley.

- Funding is different, there are smaller "A" rounds of around $3m rather than $10m here.

- Recruiting is different. There aren't huge pools of engineers, but it is possible to build 100+ sized teams.

- Commuting isn't as bad as people think it is, most people live close to where they work. And hey, commuting isn't that easy here.

- Lots of content creation skills. This is an interesting point to make because software engineers can be found almost anywhere in the world today, but content creation skills are very culture specific, you can't outsource this work.

- There are now larger numbers of successful entrepreneurs, many are on the their second and third successful company.

Here are a few success stories:

There is a lot of innovation happening in LA from places like Eqal, Deca.TV, DemandMedia's studios, Clicker, Filmaka and other initiatives.
. . .
The whole category of "sponsored search" came from a successful LA company, Overture. (my firm, GRP Partners, was an investor). LA produced Applied Semantics that created AdSense and was bought by Google. We were also an investor in the early local listing company, CitySearch - an LA company. LA was a leader in lead generation (LowerMyBills), comparison shopping (PriceGrabber, Shopzilla), social networking (MySpace ... I know, I know - Facebook won - but it was still a big business). If we extend a bit North up the coast line we have many affiliate marketing innovators including ValueClick, Commission Junction and FastClick. They also produced GoToMeeting and CallWave.
. . .
A great team from MySpace has created Gravity. Gil Elbaz from Applied Semantics has now created Factual. Zorik Gordon is tearing it up at ReachLocal. TechCoast Angels backed GreenDot should be a major IPO this year. Frank Addante has created Rubicon Project. Douglas Merrill, the former CIO of Google, is building his next company in LA. Scott Painter, founder of CarsDirect has created two new generation LA startups (Zag and TrueCar, both backed by GRP Partners). Brett Brewer (ex MySpace) has AdKnowledge, there is Adconian, Legal Zoom and many more. Hautelook, Gogii, Magento - all very high potential companies building in LA.

Mr Suster is one of the organizers of Launchpad LA V2, which was announced today. This is a project aimed at helping first-time entrepreneurs and helping to educate them and guide them in building successful companies.

We will be selecting 10 startup companies to participate. There is no cost but you must physically be based in or move to Los Angeles for the 6 months of the program. Applications are due April 6th, 2010, the form is on the website and the Twitter address is@launchpadlad

A West Coast corridor of innovation...

It won't be long before we have a West Coast corridor of innovation stretching from Silicon Valley to Southern California, and beyond.

In fact, if you fly from San Diego heading north along the coast you pass over tons of innovation centers:

- The communications and biotech industries of San Diego;

- The electronics industries of Orange County;

- The media centers of Hollywood and Santa Monica;

- Then you reach San Francisco/Silicon Valley with its electronics, software, media tech, biotech, cleantech industries;

- Then Portland with its thriving startup scene plus Intel's big presence there;

- Seattle with a thriving tech scene mostly spun out of Microsoft, and Amazon;

- Vancouver and its software industry.

Wow. 1400 miles of innovation. There's no other region like it, hundreds of miles of world-class, industry leading, innovation and creativity.

Interestingly, it's all built on top of one of the most unstable fault lines in the world. A disruptive reality. Is there a connection?

I've always said that innovation has to be disruptive otherwise it's not innovation.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

This week, documents from Viacom's billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement were published, and the three-year-long-and-counting lawsuit has again been brought to the public's attention. In case you haven't been following the case, here's a quick timeline of the major events that led up to the lawsuit, and those that occurred since the original complaint was filed:

May 24, 2005- Viacom subpoenas YouTube for information about a user who uploaded clips from Paramount Pictures' "Twin Towers."

June 2005- Viacom's board of directors approves a plan to spin off assets, which become known as the new Viacom, Inc. That new company is given control of Paramount, while the core company reforms as CBS Corp.

January 2006- 20th Century Fox sues YouTube to have content from Fox TV shows such as The Simpsons and 24 removed from YouTube.

June 2006- YouTube and NBC partner to create NBC channel on YouTube for Internet exclusives, clips, and trailers.

July 2006- Viacom and NBC Universal back journalist Robert Tur in his suit against YouTube for illegally posting his videos of the 1992 L.A. riots. The legal brief said, "YouTube incorrectly contends that the DMCA permits it to avoid any responsibility for the content on its commercial website and completely shift the burden to content owners to discover and notify it of infringements."

September 2006- YouTube signs content deal with Warner to host the company's music videos.

October 9, 2006- CBS and YouTube announce a strategic content and advertising partnership.

October 2006- Viacom and YouTube reach a content syndication agreement.

October 20, 2006- Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion.

December 2006- Viacom reportedly walks away from negotiations with NBC Universal, CBS Corp., and Fox Interactive about creating a TV-centric YouTube competitor site.

February 2007- Viacom retracts its content agreement with Google, pulls everything off the site.

February 2007- YouTube's pending content deal with CBS halts.

March 2007- Viacom Sues Google for over 63,000 separate counts of copyright infringement seeking $1 billion in damages. YouTube protects itself with the "Safe Harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

March 2007- Viacom General Counsel Michael Fricklas in a Washington Post op-ed says that YouTube was not just a passive content host, and that it is fully aware of what it does. "If the public knows what's there, then YouTube's management surely does. YouTube's own terms of use give it clear rights, notably the right to take anything down."

May 2007- Google signs YouTube content deal with record label EMI.

May 2007- British Premier League files class action suit against YouTube for copyright infringement, says Google "knowingly misappropriated and exploited this valuable property," when it allowed users to post footage from its football games.

June 2007- YouTube introduces Content ID to help content owners identify if their content is being used, gives them the option to remove unauthorized content, or monetize it.

July 2007- Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Viacom was "built from lawsuits."

August 2007- Google asks Comedy Central personalities Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to testify against Viacom in copyright hearings. Comedy Central is a Viacom property.

October 2007- Viacom joins MySpace, Microsoft, Veoh, and Dailymotion in signing the "Copyright Principles for User Generated Content Services," hoping it will become a sort of "television code" of online copyright protection.

March 2008- Viacom President and CEO Phillippe Dauman says "We've already achieved a number of things with this lawsuit. It took a long time, but because of our actions, YouTube has moved in the right direction. They're where they should have been all along."

May 2008- Google claims Viacom's suit threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression," claims it could have a chilling effect on all Internet communications.

June 2008- New York District Court rules that Google has to turn over user IDs and IP addresses to Viacom. Angry users upload nearly 5,000 "Viacom Sucks" videos to YouTube. Google is later allowed to make this data anonymous.

July 2008- Movie studio Lionsgate partners with YouTube for a branded channel with ad-supported official content from the studio.

October 2008- The McCain/Palin presidential campaign asked YouTube to stop taking down campaign videos that incorporated clips of news broadcasts. YouTube said that it was doing so at the request of broadcasters who objected to the use of their copyrighted footage.

April 2009- Content owners discus "TV Anywhere" plan to tie Web-based video content into cable subscription fees. Viacom CEO Dauman says, "People are used to paying for video subscriptions," sees it as a good idea.

June 2009- "TV Everywhere" network scheme launches.

July 2009- Some claims from the Premier League's 2007 suit against YouTube are dismissed, but claims for "statutory damages for works not registered in the US" are allowed.

September 2009- Google gives individual copyright holders access to the Insight metrics of YouTube videos that contain their intellectual property according to Content ID.

October 2009- Viacom presents "smoking gun" evidence for its case: internal e-mails from YouTube staff that show "actual knowledge" that copyright infringement was taking place on the video sharing site.

November 2009- Google announces YouTube Direct, a system where media outlets can directly communicate with users and arrange rebroadcasting rights on a one-to-one basis.

March 2010- Some of Viacom's "smoking gun" documents go public, company claims "YouTube was intentionally built on infringement."

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Web sitenizde veya blogunuzda yayınlamak istediÄŸiniz resim ve fotoÄŸraflarınızı, ziyaretçilerinizin beÄŸenisini kazanacak bir görsel sunum eklentisi ile yayınlamak istediÄŸinizde kullanabileceÄŸiniz bir MooTools eklentisi olan slideGallery, esnek yapısı ile farklı tasarıma sahip web sayfalarında kullanılabilecek bir eklenti.

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Andover, MA-based website conversion company SeeWhy today launched Conversion Manager, an automated web analytics service that allows publishers and e-commerce companies to optimize website conversion rates through real-time ‘remarketing’ campaigns.

The company claims that their solution can recover up to 50 percent of website abandoners (i.e. people who start but never complete a sign-up or payment process) by triggering automated campaigns using email and social media.

The company fences with study results that highlight the importance of real-time follow up with website abandoners, citing research from MIT that says 90 percent of e-commerce leads go cold within the first hour. SeeWhy CEO Scott G. Silk compares such leads with fine wine, stating that unlike the latter e-commerce leads don’t get better with age. Cute.

SeeWhy’s new product builds upon the functionalities of its predecessor, Abandonment Tracker Pro, which we wrote about earlier. With added support for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, Conversion Manager is able to track individual visitors’ behavior on e-commerce and other websites and trigger automated, real-time messages to shopping cart, online form, and other abandoners by email and social media the moment abandoners leave the site.

Conversion Manager is available now at an annual fee of $15,000.

SeeWhy has so far raised $6.5 million in venture capital: $4.5 million in May 2009 and another $2 million from the same investors in December 2009. SeeWhy’s CrunchBase profile doesn’t list any competitors and a Web search doesn’t immediately turn up potential rivals – if you know alternative services feel free to share their names in comments.

CrunchBase InformationSeeWhyInformation provided by CrunchBase

Disponible via la version Anglaise du moteur de recherche depuis le mois de décembre dernier, la recherche en temps réel va débarquer dans les heures (dans les minutes ?) sur l’intégralité des versions de Google. Dont Google France évidemment. Concrètement, qu’est-ce que ça va changer ? Et bien, il sera désormais possible de voir les dernières dépêches d’actualité et articles publiés depuis quelques secondes seulement, mais également de consulter en temps réel les mises à jour Facebook, Twitter, MySpace et j’en passe.

Pratique par exemple si vous cherchez des résultats sur un sujet brulant…

A l’appui d’un document de l’association de juristes EFF, la Justice américaine pourrait apporter des informations trouvées sur les réseaux sociaux lors d’un procès. Un guide des bonnes pratiques sur Facebook et autres MySpace et Twitter.

Not so long ago, calling something “Web 2.0″ increased its value. It meant fresh, new, interactive, responsive. Now, if someone uses that term you know they’re woefully out of touch.

For me, it’s been a trip to re-adopt my former web beat on GigaOM after spending a few years writing for our sister site NewTeeVee. I made the leap to the world of web video in the fall of 2006, when YouTube had just been bought, Facebook had just opened to the general public, and only a few people cared about a little service called Twittr.

Since then, one thing that’s gone by the wayside is the term “Web 2.0,” which got its start as a marketing phrase to build a conference around, and spawned both a new class of companies and sites dedicated to writing about them, such as TechCrunch and Mashable. TechCrunch, whose original tagline was “tracking Web 2.0,” itself declared the death of the term in February 2009, citing a perceived drop in the number of pitches mentioning it. Indeed, while the AJAX-y web services and user-generated content at the core of Web 2.0 haven’t gone anywhere, now the preferred term seems to be “social media.” Google Trends says that search volume for “social media” surpassed “Web 2.0″ right in the middle of January this year, though the new hotness has yet to reach the heights of “Web 2.0″ circa 2007.

Feel free to chalk it up to a matter of trendy semantics, but here are the material differences I see between these two mini-eras:

Building for the Mainstream

These days, starry-eyed entrepreneurs are building for the mainstream, not just for themselves. One of the reasons I was happy to leave the GigaOM Web 2.0 beat the first time around was that I didn’t want to write about yet another social bookmarking service trying to copy the innovative but narrowly used Delicious (then spelled del.icio.us, which kind of says it all). Sure, one of the best ways to come up with something truly useful is to build something you yourself want, like a repository for saving all the web sites you visit — and as Twitter has proven, niche products can evolve to satisfy the needs of those beyond just early adopters. But some of the most exciting new services online today are aimed at serving broader interests, such as the search for deals (Groupon, Gilt Groupe), and procuring real physical products and human services (Alice.com, Sears’ ServiceLive).

I think MySpace and Facebook deserve a lot of credit for bringing the Web 2.0 era to the mainstream, helped along by major portal offerings like Gmail. Those services and products continue to provide value to a broad audience. On the flip side, startups like Foursquare and the many folks who pitch us on, say, tweaks to Google Reader aren’t building with Middle America in mind. They may get there eventually, but not just yet.

All the World’s a Platform

The rise of platforms, app stores and mobile makes web applications better, more accessible and more useful. Facebook, with its platform launch in 2007, showed the value (and eventually, the dangers) of building on top of someone else’s pre-existing audience, making use of inherent viral channels and the continuity of experience provided by a popular platform. The distribution power of the platform was huge.

Then the iPhone App Store came along, offering far more functionality and exposure to developers (if they could get through its approval process). On the user side, just about every web app is better when it rides along in your pocket, ready when you need it. The iPhone and all the knock-offs and competitive one-ups it has inspired are tremendously popular. And as a corollary, the benefits of the mobile app platform model is now so obvious that the number of them grew to 38 from eight in the span of 2009 alone, according to new research.

The Most Obvious Answer

Of course, the one thing that affected every business, web or otherwise, was the economic downturn. However, Web 2.0 startups — until of course their funding ran out and/or they had to layoff employees — seemed woefully out of touch with the rest of the world.

Valleywag, which never missed a chance to declare something dead, might have actually been right when in it ran with the headline “It’s the end of Web 2.0 as we know it” in reference to a carefree music video released by Web 2.0 entrepreneurs cavorting in Cyprus to the tune of Journey. It was October 2009. Their timing was pretty bad.

Meanwhile, one of the sectors hit hardest by the downturn was the media, which was already being brought to its knees by its failure to adapt to the web. Now, your Facebook newsfeed really is your hometown paper (though its investigative reporting skills may be limited to relationship status changes), and Twitter really is your personal real-time newswire. And accordingly, social media referrals from sites like Digg and Twitter are increasingly important to media business models — and sites like Facebook and YouTube are among the most-trafficked, and therefore most powerful, on the web.

Maybe “social media” just sounds less like a buzzword or a brand name than “Web 2.0,” while at the same time pointing to a sort of social facelift for all content — a feature that can be included or integrated into everything on the web, rather than being segmented in its own category. Or perhaps it was the futile attempts to brand disparate things “Web 3.0” that made people realize how silly the naming convention was. But “social media” has its issues, too. As Aliza argued earlier this month on WebWorkerDaily, many new web tools are just useful, not necessarily social. Perhaps what was wrong with “Web 2.0″ was that the term implied a fixed version — while it’s cute, the metaphor of a software upgrade doesn’t carry over very well in reference to something that changes every day. Innovation on the web is fluid and builds on itself, and that naming convention just got stale.

Middle photo and post thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user chegs.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Literally every day at Betanews, we get at least one security vendor "alert" of some type, warning us to be on the lookout for the latest malware. The message is always the same: Advise users to stay vigilant, to keep patching, to upgrade their antivirus to the latest editions. But the profiles of the malware typically look the same, too -- stuff you might click on by accident, links pretending to be from your "best friend" in an e-mail message, ads for products that look too good to be true.

For many of us, the situation is getting to be like the US' terror alert level, which has remained at "Yellow" since the fall of 2007. We starting to forget what "elevated" vigilance means. And maybe that's a problem, because lack of attention to advice about real threats could become as dangerous as lack of attention to any one of those miracle weight-loss links.

This isn't an ad, it's my opinion: Over the years, I've trusted the engineers at Sophos Labs to present down-to-earth analyses of possible security scares. This morning, I forwarded two recent reports from other well-known security vendors to Sophos' Chester Wisniewski, reports about malware that didn't fit the ordinary profile we tend to see from day to day.

The first report comes from ALWIL Software, publishers of Avast anti-virus, and it's been heavily circulated since it was first issued last February. It speaks of the horrors of receiving unsolicited malware by way of JavaScript elements embedded in the ads that appear on Web sites -- the sources of which, sometimes, innocent publishers have no control over.

"The malware usually spreads through Web infection placed on innocent, badly secured Web sites," reads last month's initial warning from the Czech Republic-based Avast's Jiri Sejtko. "The ad infiltration method is growing in popularity alongside with the Web site infections. Now we are facing probably the biggest ad poisoning ever made -- all important ad services are affected. It means that users might get infected just by reading their favorite newspaper or by doing search on famous Web indexers. User interaction is not needed in this attack -- infection begins just after poisoned ad is loaded by the browser -- it is not a type of social engineering."

A chart from the ALWIL security research team showing what it claims to be the number of detected instances of malware sent by advertising platforms over a six-day period.

ALWIL's research found the Fox Audience Network as among the ad platforms spreading the alleged infection, which the firm dubbed "JS:Prontexi." On Tuesday, a public relations effort by the firm dubbed the malware a "widespread campaign," leading to blanket coverage such as this story in Media Post on Tuesday, this story in the Danish BizReport earlier today, and this blog post on Photoxels, which contains the original press release in its entirety.

That press release stated as many as one in two online ads served worldwide was in danger of being infected by the malware the ALWIL team discovered. "JS:Prontexi highlights the lack of care shown by advertising services providers to actively screen the content they are distributing," Sejtko is quoted as saying.

Can this problem truly be this bad -- a malware component with a 50% worldwide Web reach?

"Infections on ad services are certainly of heightened concern," Sophos' Chet Wisniewski told Betanews earlier today, "yet this is almost a month old, and the miscreants who caused this incident have since moved on. To claim it as the biggest ad server compromise ever seems to me to be a bit of hyperbole." The moral of the story, according to the ALWIL press release: Pay attention to situations where you may think antivirus software like Avast is returning false positives...they may not be false. Again quoting Sejtko, "Consumers shouldn't immediately accuse their antivirus program of a false positive when a familiar site gets blocked. There can be a real danger."

The other "red alert" this week comes from McAfee Labs, as part of its new program of publishing "Consumer Threat Alerts." One of the first such alerts yesterday concerns a worldwide "Facebook password reset scam." Here, users worldwide are sent an ordinary e-mail -- no graphics, no text formatting, just an e-mail with an attachment: "Dear user of facebook [sic], Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed. You can find your new password in attached document. Thanks, Your Facebook."

As McAfee's threat alert from yesterday reads, "This threat is potentially very dangerous considering that there are over 400 million Facebook users who could fall for this scam. This is also the sixth most prevalent piece of malware targeting consumers in the last 24 hours, as tracked by McAfee Labs." Since this is also the type of phishing scam that we see here at Betanews every single day (sometimes every few hours), certainly this can't be the kind of malware delivery mechanism that people fall for, can it? Haven't people smelled this kind of scam long enough to spot it at a distance?

Surprise. As Wisniewski told us, this one deserves the red flag and the blaring klaxons.

"We are seeing very high volumes of this attack. Sophos detects the attachments as TROJ/Invo-Zip, which we talked about being involved in a similar MySpace attack this January. It then proceeds to infect you with Mal/FakeAV-BW (Fake Anti-virus). The same malware is also making the rounds as a fake delivery notification from DHL. The only thing unique is the extremely high volumes and the large user base that Facebook has that could be convinced to run the malware."

So to recap: A completely unsophisticated e-mail attachment, of the garden variety we've seen for the last 15 year, is seen by Sophos as being more dangerous and widespread than an embedded JavaScript that one security researcher says has the potential of appearing in half the world's online ads. The only way to ever find out the truth, is to ask the right questions of the right people.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Music is moving into the cloud, right? Access is replacing ownership of albums and song files, online streams are replacing desktop playback and mobile access is renewing interest in on-demand music subscriptions. Older services such as Rhapsody and Napster now appear prescient, though they never quite went mainstream, and newer ones such as Spotify and MOG are attracting big VC dollars.

So how come I’m still not ready to pay for any of them?

I’m a voracious music listener, one with varied but quite specific tastes and as such, a large collection of albums and songs in both physical and digital form. After taking several different subscription services for a test-drive, however, I found that they provide a good — but still very flawed — experience. Here are five reasons why:

There are still significant gaps in the catalog. As I wrote yesterday, the services may offer all you can eat, but their menus aren’t always complete, and they keep changing. It’s frustrating to pay for a service that doesn’t have songs you want, and even more frustrating when songs that used to be there aren’t anymore.

I still can’t merge things I own with things I just want to stream. Nearly all music fans have songs in their collections that aren’t on any subscription service. It could be an unlicensed mashup, your friend’s band, the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. But there’s still no subscription service that lets me make a party playlist that includes both Beach House and the Beatles. I choose not to own the former, and I’ve got MP3s of the latter, but I can’t have them both side-by-side. (Spotify, for one, may be working on a remedy for this, but as far as I know it hasn’t gone live anywhere yet.)

Ownership of music still provides a smoother listening experience. Try listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” or any live album with applause between songs on these services, and you might start wondering where your CD player is. When the next song doesn’t load fast enough to pick up where the previous one leaves off, you’ll hear an abrupt silence –- a major turnoff during album-length pieces with continuous “banded” tracks that run together. When I use iTunes, there’s sometimes an audible seam but no pause, with an option to crossfade; physical formats have no such issues. In this respect, the cloud-based experience can be a degraded one.

I can only share music with fellow subscribers. If playlists are the new mixtapes, as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said this week at SXSW, I’d like to share them with my friends. In a market as fragmented as music-as-a-service is shaping up to be, playlist sharing won’t be that compelling until we’re all using the same service — or at the very least, compatible ones. This isn’t as big an issue when there’s a free component, as with Spotify and Rhapsody, but in general, until a critical mass of my friends are subscribing, there will be better ways to share. (I miss you, Imeem. You too, Muxtape.) The MP3 file is very flexible; cloud-based subscriptions still aren’t.

I can still hear things that I don’t already own without paying for them. I’ve already got a lot of music, and there are still new records I’d prefer to own, and for which I will happily pay. (You might be very different.)  But I can also hear an awful lot of on-demand free music via both legitimate and legally questionable channels: Hype Machine, Lala.com, Grooveshark, Play.me, YouTube, Blip.fm, FreeAllMusic, BeeMP3.com, Skreemr, MySpace and elsewhere. Pandora and Last.fm help me discover things through a sort of customized serendipity, while the blogosphere provides curated discovery. Yes, an on-demand subscription gives me more, sometimes in a better-quality experience. But for things I might not choose to own, free options are often still good enough. (Remember, more than 95 percent of Spotify’s users think the free version is good enough, too.)

Music subscriptions are improving, and I imagine that most of my quibbles will be dealt with in time. (See my further discussion of the services in this GigaOM Pro piece, sub req’d.) But for now, I still view subscription services as supplementary — not primary — sources of music, and ones that haven’t done much to change my preference for a hybrid of music ownership and free options.

As I said, I’m a voracious music listener with varied but quite specific tastes. And if subscription services’ numbers are any indication, there are millions of subscribers out there who are quite satisfied with what they’re paying for. So I’d love to hear more about how subscriptions work for you -– or don’t.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user itchy73

Related content from GigaOM Pro:

Rankings: Spotify Leads the Streaming Music Scene

Here’s today’s wacky theory: Maybe the reason Viacom has gone after YouTube so litigiously is because YouTube is “the one that got away” — and anyone who’s ever had an unrequited crush knows how much it hurts to see something special slip through one’s fingers.

In today’s blog post by YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine, Levine takes issue with some of Viacom’s accusations towards YouTube,, given Viacom made repeated attempts to acquire YouTube before the Google deal happened:

Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.

According to CNET, Viacom was in fact serious enough about acquiring YouTube that it extended an offer prior to Oct. 9, 2006, when the deal was announced. What they proposed was that the two companies buy it together as a partnership, and thus “Viacom [would legitimize] the content on the site by providing content and developing a business model,” former Viacom exec Adam Cahan told CNET writer Greg Sandoval.

Before Google bought YouTube, Viacom was looking at the site, and even cautiously saying so publicly: On Oct. 4, 2006, Viacom Founder Sumner Redstone told Charlie Rose that YouTube was a potential acquisition as opposed to Facebook. “It’s a very good company,” he’s quoted as saying (video embedded below).

Five days after that interview, though, Google officially announced it would acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion. And five months after that, Viacom took its first legal action against YouTube, demanding that more than 100,000 clips be removed.

It’s interesting to consider what might have happened to YouTube had the Viacom acquisition occurred. You probably wouldn’t hear talk like “YouTube has become a metaphor for the democratizing power of the Internet and information” (per today’s blog post by YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine) if the site hadn’t remained independent from big media.

Instead, YouTube might have resembled MySpace following its acquisition by News Corp, working overtime to promote its parent company’s media properties. YouTube’s allegation that Viacom used YouTube as a promotional device after the Google acquisition only supports that theory.

Perhaps as an apology, Google offered Viacom $590 million for a licencing deal (per Peter Kafka on Twitter). But that doesn’t change the fact that like a cheerleader with too many options, YouTube decided to go with someone else to the prom. And so in the Viacom filing made public today, Viacom attacked YouTube’s principles and ethics with statements like:

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.

You have to admit, that kind of sounds like something a bitter ex would write.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Will Three Strikes Laws Take the Field in U.S. Copyright Ballgame?

[Finishing up our GDC written coverage, we were going to pick just one lecture, but we decided to just go with all of the major ones, as well as the big announcements - lots of neat stuff to check through here.]

With Game Developers Conference 2010 now at an end, we've rounded up the top announcements, from Sony Move through OnLive's release specifics, and write-ups of the biggest talks into one handy news story.

The official GDC 2010 page on Gamasutra has more than 100 news stories on one of the biggest events of the gaming year, but we're now highlighting the biggest product-related announcements of the show.

This will be followed by our pick of the top ten most intriguing write-ups from the more than 450 sessions on display at this year's GDC in San Francisco - created by the UBM Techweb Game Network, as is this website.

Here are some of the top announcements and write-ups from last week's show:

The Announcements

GDC: Sony's Motion Controller Is 'PlayStation Move'
"At GDC on Wednesday, Sony revealed more details about its PS3 motion controller, which isn't called Arc or Gem, but 'PlayStation Move,' a product Sony says will bring on 'the next generation of motion gaming.'"

GDC: OnLive Gets Launch Date, Reveals Initial Publishers
"Cloud-based game streaming service OnLive has announced an official U.S. launch date of June 17, 2010, including games from Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment."

GDC: Microsoft Announces XNA Game Studio 4.0
"Microsoft has announced version 4.0 of its XNA Game Studio development package, which includes support for its new Windows Phone 7 Series, as well as enhancing features for Xbox 360 and PC game development."

GDC: InstantAction Reveals Platform For Instantly Playing Large-Download Games
"InstantAction unveiled its platform allowing users to play full PC games in their browser as they download titles, made possible with a delivery mechanism that CEO Louis Castle tells Gamasutra is superior to OnLive."

Valve Confirms Mac Versions Of Steam, Valve Games
"Valve will release its Steam digital distribution service for Mac along with Mac-native versions of its own games, the company confirmed today, calling the Mac a 'tier-1 platform.'"

Other notable GDC-timed announcements include: Bigpoint Announces Battlestar MMO, Unity Partnership, San Francisco Office; Unity Announces 3.0 Platform, Support For PS3, iPad, And Android; Palm to Debut webOS Plug-in Development Kit at GDC 2010; MySpace Launches New Games Experience, Tools.

The Top Lectures

GDC: Will Wright Peels Back Layers Of Entertainment, Games
"Will Wright (The Sims, SimCity) explained how 'perspectives are more valuable than solutions' in a fascinating talk during the closing hours of the Game Developers Conference 2010 on Saturday."

GDC: Jenova Chen's HeavenVille Wins Game Design Challenge
"HeavenVille, Jenova Chen (Flower), took this year's top prize at the GDC Game Design Challenge, which also featured games by designers Kim Swift, Heather Kelley, and Erin Robinson."

GDC: Sid Meier's Lessons On Gamer Psychology
"'Gameplay is a psychological experience,' according to legendary Civilization creator Sid Meier, who gave tips on taking advantage of player psychology during his GDC keynote Friday."

GDC: Hecker's Nightmare Scenario - A Future Of Rewarding Players For Dull Tasks
"It's possible that an over-reliance on metrics-driven design and extrinsic rewards for in-game actions could lead to a future of 'designing shitty games that you have to pay people to play,' warns independent developer Chris Hecker."

GDC: Blizzard's Core Game Design Concepts
"Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo shares Blizzard's core design concepts, offering examples of places where the World of Warcraft developer succeeded and failed in creating compelling multiplayer experiences."

GDC: Nintendo's Sakamoto's Four Creative Tenets
"Nintendo's Yoshio Sakamoto explains the methodology that allows him to create two franchises as polar-opposite as Metroid and Wario Ware -- and drops hints on Other M."

GDC: Peter Molyneux On Simplifying And Enhancing Fable III
"Lionhead's Peter Molyneux talked about the 'angst' Lionhead went through on whether to de-RPG Fable III -- and why and how the team went through that process, from a design perspective."

GDC: ThatGameCompany's Santiago, Hunicke Talk Exploratory Development
"An exploratory development process can be a solution to the anxieties of game development, but only if it's managed with confidence and honesty, say Thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke."

GDC: Indie Keynote - Championing Immediacy And Depth
"Tiger Style co-founder Randy Smith (Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor) delivered the keynote of the Indie Games Summit, encouraging indie developers to embrace a philosophy of immediacy and depth to hasten their popular ascendancy."

GDC: 2D Boy's Carmel On A New Alternative For Indies
"At the 2010 Independent Gaming Summit at GDC, 2D Boy's Ron Carmel talked about why traditional publishing just doesn't work for indies -- and why the newly-unveiled Indie Fund hopes to offer alternatives."

Other notable GDC 2010 lecture write-ups include: Facebook Keynote Discusses True Multi-Platform Gaming; Taking Inspiration from EVE Online's Espionage Metagame; Creating Deus Ex Human Revolution's Cybernetic Renaissance; Refining The Real-Time Combat In Mass Effect 2; EA's Cousins Talks Social Gaming's Wal-Mart Parallel.

Twitter est un service puissant et largement plus ouvert que n’importe quel site internet dit « 2.0 ». Sa structure et son api permettent par exemple d’utiliser le service sur des applications plus efficaces que le site lui-même.

Cette souplesse permet égalements à Twitter de s’intégrer dans les réseaux sociaux tels que LinkedIn, MySpace ou bien Facebook.

Mais cette année, Twitter devrait aller beaucoup plus loin grâce à sa plateforme @anywhere.

Techniquement, @anywhere va permettre à des sites tierces de profiter directement de la capacité de communication de Twitter.

L’explication est encore assez floue mais on peut imaginer par exemple, que le simple fait d’ajouter une ligne de JS sur votre site transformera tous les liens @quelquechose en lien dynamiques qui affichera un mini profil et les derniers tweet de la personne au survol.

En allant un peu plus loin, le fait de passer sur le lien de @unestardeciné devrait permettre d’interagir avec cette personne sans quitter le site en cours.

Les premiers partenaires seront Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, le New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, et YouTube.

Bien que chez nous, on ne trouve pas encore d’interdiction de tweeter en cas d’incendie, le réseau de communication fait de plus en plus de bruit. Avec ce genre d’évolution, Twitter pourrait devenir de plus en plus populaire et même indispensable pour profiter de toutes les fonctionnalités des autres sites internet.

A suivre sur Twitter @anywhere

#sxsw Just a sliver of what's upcoming... Converse is presenting its 'Get Out of the Garage Showcase' tonight at 9 pm at t...

La Fauna, el programa dedicado al rock estatal de Radio Enlace, grabará este jueves 18 de marzo a las 16:30 horas una edición especial en la Escuela Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicaciones de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid en la que será entrevistado el grupo Zodiacs, que después ofrecerá una actuación en acústico. Esta grabación se enmarca dentro de la IV edición de las jornadas musicales del club Delta (http://historiasdeldelta.blogspot.com/), y la asistencia es libre y gratuita. Posteriormente, el programa se emitirá a las 20 horas en radioenlace.org, aunque si te lo pierdes podrás descargarlo a partir de mañana en www.myspace.com/lafauna.

Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg’s audience has a mixed bag of interests.

This is all according to online advertising network Chitika, who set out to analyze the interests of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users by comparing the genres of sites that receive traffic from these social networks. 287,090 impressions were used in the report, and based on this research, each social site has a distinct makeup of users with unique tastes.

The graphic below breaks it down. What’s most interesting is that nearly half the traffic (47%) that Twitter generates falls into the news category. In fact, Twitter users’ interest in the news genre surpasses that of Facebook users by nearly 20%, which would appear to make it the number-one social network for newsies.

Another interesting tidbit is that MySpace users have no interest in news whatsoever. Instead that corner of the web splits its interests between video games (28%) and celebrity and entertainment content (23%). This aligns with what we’ve seen in terms of MySpace’s business strategy around securing exclusive entertainment content over the past few months and where it’s likely headed for the future.

If anything this data points to the varied interests behind our current obsession with popular social networks. It’s important information for marketers, advertisers and brands hoping to appropriately leverage each site.

Image courtesy of ChrisAt, iStockphoto

Tags: digg, facebook, myspace, social media, stats, twitter

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