Diablog

T-Mobile USA could put the new HTC Android phone on sale for select customers as early as the middle of September, according to the blog TmoNews.

The news comes as other rumors circulate that Android phones could be delayed into 2009. But TmoNews says it has a reliable source that says the Android device made by smartphone manufacturer HTC will go on sale through T-Mobile USA on September 17.

The price tag will be $399 full retail or about $150 for a subsized phone with a two-year contract. The site also said that only existing T-Mobile customers will be able to buy the phone during the presale timeframe with other customers able to buy the phone a few weeks later in early October.

The new phone, which is being called the HTC Dream in blogs, will support 3G services. A recent video that is posted on YouTube shows that the phone has a touch screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a 3-megapixel camera. Google software and services like Gmail will be tightly integrated into the device. And TmoNews reports that a Gmail account will be required to set up service for the new device.

CNET News.com

NBC, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, spent most of Friday trying to keep it that way.

NBC's decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall - by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place.

Tape Delay by NBC Faces End Run by Online Fans - NYTimes.com

In my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. (See "Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview" for a quick overview of IR technology.) IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations.

Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want. User expectations from search have rightly increased. We work hard to fulfill the expectations of each and every user, and to do that we need to better understand the pages, the queries, and our users. Over the last decade we have pushed the technologies for understanding these three components (of the search process) to completely new dimensions.

Official Google Blog: Technologies behind Google ranking

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

For example: say you're an entertainment executive looking to stop some incredibly popular kind of online information transmission – infringing music copyright, say. Where would you look to find a rich history of this kind of online battle? Why, the Spam Wars, of course. Where else?

Electronic spam has existed in one form or another since 1978. For 30 years, networks have served as battlefield in the fight between those who want your mailbox filled with their adverts and those who want to help you avoid the come-ons.

Cory Doctorow: Lessons from the bloody war on spam | Technology | guardian.co.uk

A French court has ruled in favour of a media watchdog website accused of libel for claiming that footage of a shooting incident in Gaza in 2000 was fake.

The website, Media-Ratings, said the pictures of a father and son being fired on had been staged by a cameraman working for France 2 television.

BBC NEWS | Europe | French TV loses Gaza footage case

... iPlayer is only the beginning of the story. Because when that iPlayer moment is over, the programme disappears and we are still having to apologise to the audience. And yet those programmes do still exist and increasingly may be available elsewhere on the web - on iTunes, for example, or in other on-demand offers like Kangaroo, the BBC's new UK commercial partnership with ITV and C4, which we expect to get regulatory approval for soon.

That fact formed part of the thinking behind this – a permanent page for every episode of every programme the BBC has ever broadcast.
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Each page and clip will be promotional for that programme in perpetuity. They will offer the possibility of hits that go on and on, or are re-discovered when the time is right.

There are already over 160,000 individual pages. Eventually, we will add our programme back catalogue to produce pages for programming stretching back over nearly 80 years - featuring all the information we have on the richest TV and radio archive in the world.

The BBC is committed to releasing the public value in that archive and these pages are going to play a central role in allowing us to do that.

BBC - Press Office - Jana Bennett speech at Banff World Television Festival

Many of the bloggers who gathered on 27-28 June 2008 in Budapest, Hungary for a Citizen Media Summit organised by Global Voices Online had at first glance an unlikely appearance. These representatives of a growing worldwide network of citizen journalists and digital activists looked rather studious, a touch morose, even - to many bloggers themselves a key marker of social distinction - uncool.

Moreover, these idealistic people did not talk much about gadgets, fashion, or campaign-financing; nor rush to praise or scorn Barack Obama or John McCain; nor fret over the latest celebrity-hunt or political trick in the style of Gawker or the Huffington Post. Instead, they got into heated discussions (often in heavily accented English) over a different set of topics: internet filtering, human-rights violations, and the future of freedom of expression.

The right to blog: freedom’s next frontier | open Democracy News Analysis

The Norwegian public service broadcaster needs to register users for comment and discussion services, access to geo-restricted video material and blogs among other things. The growth in user generated material, interaction with users and increased flow across NRK’s various content platforms raises the issue of a single sign-on system and the OpenID framework -which is an open, decentralised free framework for user-centric digital identity (quoting openID)- is considered to fulfill most of NRK’s needs.

OpenID can be implemented on two levels, you can choose to become a “relying party” relying on OpenID credentials coming from third parties, or you can go all the way and become a “provider”.

NRK has chosen to become a provider, seeing the need for a national provider with a certain size and level of trust. The general public in Norway has a high degree of trust in it’s national broadcaster (at last survey 95% found us “quite” or “very” trustworthy), and NRK finds it timely to leverage this trust for a common open sign-on system and sees it as a natural part of being a public service body in the 21st century.

NRK goes OpenID

Microsoft is aggressively pushing a new low-cost version of its operating system intended for use with "ultra low cost PCs," competing with Linux on machines like the Eee and the One Laptop Per Child XO. However, Microsoft isn't willing to sell the low-cost license to any ULPC -- rather, the company has set out onerous conditions governing the maximum spec of these machines: 10.2" screens and no more than 80GB of storage, and no touch screens allowed.

Microsoft is trying to distort the market for cheap, tiny laptops by setting up artificial incentives to manufacturers to limit the power and capability of their lowest-cost units -- even if a vendor can figure out how to put more storage, a bigger screen, or a touchscreen into its machines, Microsoft doesn't want it there, and they'll punish any vendor that tries by refusing to license XP Home Edition on the same preferential terms that lower-spec machines get.

Microsoft tries to put a ceiling on ultra-low-cost PC power - Boing Boing

Berlin Measured by Hand for the Multimedia WallGuide

The Berlin Wall came to epitomise the history of the Cold War and its most visible border in the heart of a divided Berlin. Even though the Wall has largely disappeared from the cityscape, year after year increasing numbers of tourists from the world over come to Berlin to see the traces of this place of remembrance for themselves. In the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, the Berlin Senate authorities have now licensed an official guide as part of their integrated Berlin Wall information campaign to be launched on 1 May 2008.

ANTENNA AUDIO - The Customised WallGuide

As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

The great unbundling: newspapers and the net

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Douglas Merrill, Google Inc.'s chief information officer, is charged with answering that question. His job is to give Google workers the technology they need, and to keep them safe -- without imposing too many restrictions on how they do their job. So the 37-year-old has taken an unorthodox approach.

Unlike many IT departments that try to control the technology their workers use, Mr. Merrill's group lets Google employees download software on their own, choose between several types of computers and operating systems, and use internal software built by the company's engineers. Lately, he has also spent time evangelizing to outside clients about Google's own enterprise-software products -- such as Google Apps, an enterprise version of Google's Web-based services including email, word processing and a calendar.

Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff - WSJ.com

Indeed, a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).

Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17). Video posting was the sole area in which boys outdid girls: boys are almost twice as likely as girls to post video files.

Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain - New York Times

The 2007 Digital Economy Fact Book is a 200 page PDF of statistics and data about the internet and usage; as the Hill Library Blog writes, “a tightwad researcher’s dream: In-depth, statistic-heavy, well-cited, and freely-available online. One could hardly ask for more.” It’s published by The Progress and Freedom Foundation, which sounds a little scary - they’re “a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy”, according to their mission statement.

jill/txt - the 2007 digital economy fact book: 200 pages of (pro-copyright, anti-government regulation) statistics for free

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

Peter Suber, an open-access activist with Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, said on his blog that the new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications.

Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who proposed the new policy, said after the vote in a news release that the decision "should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated."

chronicle.com

A recent survey by the National Internet Development Agency reveals that nearly eight in 10 Koreans over the age of six use the Internet.

That's about 34 million people nationwide, and among them more than 80 percent use e-mail and 40 percent run their own blogs.

40% of Korean Web Users Run Blogs

Bored? Don't blame your job, the traffic or your mindless chores. Battling boredom, researchers say, means finding focus, living in the moment and having something to live for.

Scientific American: Bored?

As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in helpful and sustainable ways, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Philanthropy and government aid channel our caring for those who can't pay, but the resources run out before they meet the need. But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don't fully benefit from market forces. To make the system sustainable, we need to use profit incentives whenever we can.

At the same time, profits are not always possible when business tries to serve the very poor. In such cases, there needs to be another market-based incentive—and that incentive is recognition. Recognition enhances a company's reputation and appeals to customers; above all, it attracts good people to the organization. As such, recognition triggers a market-based reward for good behavior. In markets where profits are not possible, recognition is a proxy; where profits are possible, recognition is an added incentive.

Bill Gates - Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The record business - in which 85 per cent of artists are lossmaking and EMI pays £25m a year to scrap unsold CDs - "is stuck with a model designed for a world that has changed and gone forever"

FT.com / Home UK / UK - EMI chief confident of ability to call a new tune

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

Wired Science from Wired.com

In research by Nass and Reeves at Stanford (The Media Equation, Nass and Reeves, Cambridge University Press) 125 adults viewed segments showing a variety of scenes, on two different screen sizes. They concluded that picture size does affect memory. The bigger the screen the better the retention. Interestingly screen size also affected levels of arousal and their evaluation of the content, the larger screen eliciting more positive evaluations.

Big screens for e-learning?
What’s interesting here is the possibility that larger screens may significantly enhance the effectiveness of e-learning. It also has some interesting consequences for mobile learning, as the effectiveness of the learning, conversely, is likely to be considerably diminished.

Donald Clark Plan B: Big screen - big brain?

Marc Andreessen, who helped create the first Web browser, Mosaic (which became Netscape), and who today is an Internet entrepreneur, says, “The game plan is to do everything. Google is Andy Kaufman”—the late, enigmatic comedian. “The whole thing with Andy Kaufman was you could never tell when he was joking. Google comes out with a straight face and says, ‘We’re just going to be a search engine. We’re not going to be doing any of this other stuff.’ But I am quite sure they’re joking.”

Annals of Communications: The Search Party: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

In preparation for the Beijing Olympics and a series of other international events, some American companies are helping the Chinese government design and install one of the most comprehensive high-tech public surveillance systems in the world.

China Finds American Allies for Security - New York Times

Several years ago, a teacher who regularly invited her students to "drop everything and read" their favorite books was asked by a colleague whether she was still setting aside class time for that purpose. She replied, "We haven't been doing any reading since we started preparing the kids for the reading test." That response says as much about the collateral damage of our focus on test scores as it does about the poor quality of the tests themselves -- and thus how little the resulting scores really tell us. I thought of that teacher's comment just before Thanksgiving, when the National Endowment for the Arts released a report claiming that young Americans spend less time reading for pleasure these days.

Do Kids Read Less for Fun? Blame Standardized Tests - Education Blog