Luxury hotel suite in Hawaii Luxury hotels are showing some signs of life, but they’re coming at a hefty price. As of early March, the battered sector is reporting 7.2% more bookings for the upcoming second quarter in the top 25 markets vs. the April-June period in 2008, according to travel market research firm Rubicon. But rooms [...]

inXile RPG heading to PC, PS3 and 360.

Bethesda has announced plans to publish Hunted: The Demon's Forge for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, developed by Brian Fargo's inXile Entertainment.

We got the chance to go and check it out recently, so wing over to our Hunted: The Demon's Forge preview and screenshot gallery for in-depth coverage.

Fargo's name may already be familiar to gamers of a certain vintage, as he's one of the names behind the likes of Bard's Tale, Baldur's Gate and Fallout, and Hunted is a return to the classic dungeon crawler but in a next-gen guise.

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Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?

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Even Moka Pantages, the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation, said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled "Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right". Here's the thing - we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise.

Tackling Real-Time Content The panel featured journalists from the New York Times, SeattlePI.com, Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content - whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise - could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency.

Each panelist spoke about a specific case study - the New York Times' coverage of last summer's protests in Iran, for example - and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage.

"When you're sitting in an office in New York and you're trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you're not going to be able to verify that," he said. "The idea is that its a conversation on the web about this event."

The Newsroom Moves Online Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website's breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter.

"The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter," said Guzman. "We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff."

While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? "Common sense," she answered.

The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story.

Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks Then came Pantages' turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn't be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper.

One particular user, Kensplanets, was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations.

"It's not just U.S.-centric information," Pantages explained, "You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India - they're all there."

According to Pantages, by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is "really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom." Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news.

Wikipedia As News Aggregator Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection.

"There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation," Pantages said.

So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals.

In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors.

While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow.

With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own.

Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it's all laid bare for the world to see.

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SHANGHAI/BEIJING - Google says it remains in talks with Beijing about censorship of its Chinese-language search portal but is adamantly opposed to the practice amid mounting signs the company could soon shut the site.

A mere few weeks removed from inking a deal with EMI Label Services, Jim Kaufman's American Voodoo Records has launched its brand new, comprehensive, state-of-the-art web site.

EVEMASTER — the Finnish "dark metal" band which features in its ranks BATTLELORE's Tomi Mykkänen — has inked a deal with Supernova Records, a division of Bonnier Amigo.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China Mobile's 3G outlook will take center stage this week as China's three telecoms carriers begin to kick off quarterly results, with market focus on whether the nation's dominant player will turn up the volume in its low-key 3G roll-out.

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) - Google said on Monday it remained in talks with the Chinese government about censorship of its Chinese-language search portal, despite mounting signs the company could soon shut the site.

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) - Google said on Monday it remained in talks with the Chinese government about censorship of its Chinese-language search portal, despite mounting signs the company could soon shut the site.

One of the most significant changes in the new uTorrent is uTP, the ‘micro transfer protocol’. UTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be more network-friendly than its predecessor.

With uTP, uTorrent has become more network aware as it will throttle itself if congestion is detected in the network. The uTorrent teams hopes this improvement will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic, while its users should see less interference with other local applications.

The effectiveness of uTP is still being debated, but some people in the BitTorrent community have noticed another issue. According to some owners of private BitTorrent trackers, uTorrent is no longer playing fair. Since uTorrent users are the only ones using the new protocol, uTorrent favors its own kind over other clients.

This means that when connecting to other clients, uTorrent users will give preference to other uTorrent users, behavior that some have characterized as unfair. As a result, several private BitTorrent trackers have refused to put the newer uTorrent releases on their whitelists, effectively banning the client and forcing their users to stick with the older versions.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management admits that the tracker owners have a point, but says that it is very hard to innovate without having to face such technical downsides. “This is part of the challenge of innovation... but hopefully a challenge we’ll overcome,” Morris told TorrentFreak.

“We’re well aware of these discussions and have been very receptive to the feedback we have received. uTP is being constantly tuned and like any advanced technology on the internet there are edge cases where there’s room for improvement,” Morris adds.

BitTorrent Inc. has opened up the specifications of the uTP protocol and hosted a conference in their San Fransisco offices a few weeks ago to discuss uTP in detail with developers of some of the most popular Bittorrent clients. According to Morris, other popular client developers have shown interest in implementing uTP into their own applications.

Widespread support for the new protocol would of course be the easiest way to get rid of the unfairness allegations, but uTorrent’s major competitor Vuze has no plans to support uTP in the short term. On the other hand, Vuze doesn’t believe the unfairness will result in a noticeable disadvantage for its users.

“In terms of speed, we do not buy-in to the ‘threat’ cited by some, claiming that uTP can result in slower downloads for non-uTP clients due to uTP clients favoring each other during the torrent cold start phase,” Olivier Chalouhi, CTO told TorrentFreak.

Vuze is keeping a close eye on how uTP evolves and will consider adding it to their own client as the technology matures. For now Vuze will continue to work on their own congestion solutions and speed improvements. They have already added UDP transfer support, but not as the primary protocol.

“Vuze added support for UDP transport a few years ago, as a fallback for when TCP connection attempts fail. To date, Vuze chose not to implement UDP as a first-class protocol, as we consciously wanted to avoid claims of a Vuze-specific protocol bias, which we do not believe serves the BitTorrent community at large,” Chalouhi said.

Whether uTorrent’s choice to push uTP forward results in any significant disadvantages for users of other clients is still open for debate. BitTorrent Inc. is, however, committed to play fair and will make the necessary adjustments where needed.

Thus far, only a few private trackers have decided to ban uTorrent and there are currently no signs that it will spread out to more.

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

Political Lunch creators Rob Millis and Will Coghlin today at SXSW demoed a new tool for makers of content looking to distribute video under a micropayment system during a panel called “Beyond Advertising: Can Online Video Finally Pay?” Dubbed Dynamo, the new fully embeddable player features an extremely simple sign-up process that allows audiences to make direct payments to producers using PayPal, thus allowing producers to embed video on their own sites and directly profit from it.

Millis and Coghlin, who in September told us they were ending Political Lunch to focus on developing Dynamo, opened the discussion with an exhaustive comparison of the options currently available to independent producers hoping to monetize their content — including making deals with advertisers directly, partnering with indie film distributors like Indie Flix, and working with bigger dogs like Amazon VOD and the YouTube rental system.

The problems with those systems, according to the pair, include the challenges of finding the right advertisers to partner with content, overly complicated contracts that greatly favor the distributor and take a long time to set up, and a lack of transparency when it comes to the actual amount of payment. A major issue was said to be the fact that when a creator signs up to distribute their content via YouTube, there’s no disclosure of the percentage of sales you’ll actually get; the contract only specifies “a portion.” Millis theorized at one point that the reason for this might be that “YouTube is giving a better deal to the bigger guys [aka Hollywood studios] — you’re subsidizing that.”

Meanwhile, during the hour-long panel, Coghlin filmed a short video, uploaded it to Dynamo, embedded it on a Blogger blog and demonstrated the payment process.

People who already know that they might be interested can sign up for the beta version by emailing beta@dynamoplayer.com, but if you want more detail first, tomorrow I’ll be getting an up-close look from Millis and Coghlin. So stay tuned!

The competition between Apple and Google has reached "incendiary" levels that aren't likely to cool down anytime soon, a detailed story from within the two companies has shown. While signs of the split have become increasingly public, a Bay Area investor claims that the two sides, particularly Apple, are getting "emotional" as it becomes a personal battle between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his Google equivalent, Eric Schmidt. At Apple, Jobs' infamous attack on Google at a post-iPad town hall has been followed by repeated shots at Android in d...

The competition between Apple and Google has reached "incendiary" levels that aren't likely to cool down anytime soon, a detailed story from within the two companies has shown. While signs of the split have become increasingly public, a Bay Area investor claims that the two sides, particularly Apple, are getting "emotional" as it becomes a personal battle between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his Google equivalent, Eric Schmidt. At Apple, Jobs' infamous attack on Google at a post-iPad town hall has been followed by repeated shots at Android in d...

Word vs Icon. Which will win? Should the US ditch the classic red “exit” sign and replace it with a green man? There are arguments both for and against. For the red: The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative [...]