There is a twitter feed on the left which is very helpful, as well as a lot of other information. Check it out.

Google Inc. has warily watched the rise of social-networking site Facebook Inc. Now the Internet companies are bringing their rivalry to a new area: the race for local business-ad dollars.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced an initiative called Facebook Places, which allows its users to share their physical locations online. It paves the way for the start-up to become a player in the growing Web business of supplying local information and advertising.

The rollout of Facebook Places follows the launch of Google Places in April. Google Places, building on prior Google business listings, offers up Web pages dedicated to individual businesses, showing where they are located, street-level images, and customer reviews of services or products, be it Joe’s Pizza or the dry cleaner. Businesses can also advertise through their Google Place pages.

With these services, both Google and Facebook are attempting to organize and provide information about any location, including schools, parks, and tens of millions of local businesses.

Read it all.

“The Web is dead” proclaims the September issue of Wired Magazine. Hard to believe, given how much time people spend online. But Chris Anderson, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, tells Steve Inskeep that the end of the web is likely just the next evolutionary step for the Internet.

Read or listen to it all.

Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game””as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do””make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy….”

Mr. Schmidt is surely right…that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says.

Read it all.

In 1993, not so terribly long ago, I signed up for my first e-mail account. I remember using it to compose and exchange haikus with other novice faculty about our daily travails, to keep up with friends from graduate school, and to sign up for more electronic mailing lists than I could possibly follow.

One year later, while I was still goofing around with my new electronic toy, cultural critic Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies, “Ten, fifteen years from now the world will be nothing like what we remember, nothing much like what we experience now. . . . We will be swimming in impulses and data””the microchip will make us offers that will be very hard to refuse.”

He must have had a crystal ball. In precisely the amount of time Birkerts predicted, I have gone from marveling at the novelty of e-mail to being simultaneously resentful of its hold on my life and unable to imagine how I would live without it.

Read it all.

College students who download music and movies from peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as LimeWire and KaZaA will find themselves cut off when they return to campus this fall.

Every college across the country must either have installed software to block illegal file-sharing or have created some other procedure for preventing it. The requirement is part of the 2008 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which took effect July 1.

Some schools have been working to comply with the provisions for several years.

Read it all

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another. In its place, consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.

Read it all

The other day, a citizen went before a House committee and urged its members to stop their burdensome interference with her business. “At its most basic level,” said Annie Duke, “the issue before this committee is personal freedom, the right of individual Americans to do what they want in the privacy of their homes without the intrusion of government.”

I know what you’re expecting: At that point, the politicians all had a good laugh and told her to get lost so they could get back to meddling in people’s lives.

But no. Not only did they hear out the winner of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, they did exactly what she suggested. The committee voted to lift the federal ban on Internet poker and other online gambling, while approving a measure to tax and regulate it.

Read it all.

In July, Rice decided she had had enough. She announced her decision on her Facebook page:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

But, the decision wasn’t an easy one.

“It was very painful,” Rice tells NPR’s Michele Norris. “But I’ve always been public about my beliefs, and I’ve always been public about wanting to make a difference.”

“And frankly,” she continues, “after doing it, I felt sane for the first time in a very long while.”

Read or better listen to it all.

Not so long ago, the LDS Church prohibited its missionaries from using the Internet, even to contact their families. The system then loosened a bit to allow weekly e-mails home and some occasional viewing of church materials.

Now the nearly 14 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is attempting to revolutionize the way Mormons find converts and it’s all online.

This involves experimenting with blogging missionaries, self-produced member profiles and stereotype-bursting videos. The American-born church, which has been harnessing technology to promote the faith since the 1920 radio days, sees great potential in fast-paced storytelling.

The Internet is the new “town square,” said Ron Wilson, manager of Internet and marketing for the church. “And Mormons are taking to it like never before.”

Read it all.

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing ”” where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border ”” and barred permanently from visiting the country ”” after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants ”” including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

Read it all.

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Communications Subcommittee, said Tuesday that he will introduce an online privacy bill that will create standards for how consumer data is collected and used for marketing. It will also give users more control over how their Internet activity and profiles are accessed by advertisers and Web sites.

Kerry’s bill, announced in a news release during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on consumer online privacy, comes after two privacy bills were introduced in the House in recent months that would protect sensitive information such as health and financial data unless expressly volunteered to be collected by users. Kerry said he hopes his bill will be passed at the beginning of the next Congress.

The legislative proposals add momentum to a push by consumer groups to create stronger federal rules for how companies such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google can track user activity and place ads based on that information. Facebook faced criticism for creating complex changes to its privacy polices late last year that made some information more available to the public. Apple and AT&T were criticized for a data breach that revealed the network identities of its iPad users. Google said it accidentally snooped on residential Wi-Fi networks around the world as it collected technical information for location-based applications.

Read it all.

In Congress, House leaders were rushing to hold a vote on a critical war-financing bill as early as Tuesday, fearing that the disclosures could stoke Democratic opposition to the measure. A Senate panel is also set to hold a hearing on Tuesday on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.

Administration officials acknowledged that the documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, will make it harder for Mr. Obama as he tries to hang on to public and Congressional support until the end of the year, when he has scheduled a review of the war effort.

“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”

Mr. Obama is facing a tough choice: he must either figure out a way to convince Congress and the American people that his war strategy remains on track and is seeing fruit ”” a harder sell given that the war is lagging ”” or move more quickly to a far more limited American presence.

Read it all.

More than 90,000 secret US military records have been leaked to the media, revealing hidden details of the war in Afghanistan, newspapers report.

The documents are said to include unreported killings of Afghan civilians as well as covert operations by US special forces against Taliban leaders.

UK daily The Guardian and the New York Times say the records were shown to them and to German weekly Der Spiegel by online whistle-blower Wikileaks.

Read it all.

[The editor of Newsweek]… ignored the truth that the old newsmagazine editors lived by: journalists who write to satisfy people like themselves will soon run out of readers. The magazine that lies dying in Don Graham’s arms violated this rule week by week.

To cite one obvious example: newsweeklies annually marked Christian holidays with a cover story on a religious theme, always respectful and sometimes celebratory in tone. I’m sure it was a strain, an exercise in self-denial; few journalists are religious in any conventional sense. The new Newsweek, by contrast, published holiday issues that any good secular journalist would like to read. One issue near Christmas offered a long and fallacious cover story on “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage.” Easter came and the magazine feted “The End of Christian America.” Pieces like this weren’t so much a challenge to traditionally religious readers as a declaration of war. Why not just put a bullet in the Easter Bunny while you’re at it?

Read it all.

Pre-Facebook, the very phrase “social media consultant” would have produced only blank stares from the typical layman.

Now, people like Marcia Conner make their living advising companies on how to use Facebook and other social networking sites.

“The work I do focuses on helping organisations to use social technologies to connect the people in their organisations,” says Ms Conner, a partner in the Altimeter Group and author of the forthcoming book The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media.

“They are complementary technologies that can be used to get that same sort of community feeling.”

Read it all.

Amazon.com Inc. said it reached a milestone, selling more e-books than hardbacks over the past three months.

But publishers said it is still too early to gauge for the entire industry whether the growth of e-books is cannibalizing sales of paperback books, a huge and crucial market.

In a statement Monday, Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also countered the perception that sales of the company’s Kindle e-reading device had suffered due to competition from other devices, such as Apple Inc.’s iPad.

He said the growth rate of Kindle device sales had “reached a tipping point,” having tripled since the company lowered its price to $189 from $259 last month, following a similar move by competitor Barnes & Noble Inc. to cut the price on its Nook e-reader.

Read it all.

There may be no country on the planet more vulnerable to a massive cyberattack than the United States, where financial, transportation, telecommunications and even military operations are now deeply dependent on data networking.

What’s worse: U.S. security officials say the country’s cyberdefenses are not up to the challenge. In part, it’s due to a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge necessary to do battle against would-be adversaries. The protection of U.S. computer systems essentially requires an army of cyberwarriors, but the recruitment of that force is suffering.

“We don’t have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,” says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Energy Department.

Read or listen to it all.

Courtney Purvin got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.

The friend had died in April.

“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” she said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”

Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, knows a lot about its roughly 500 million members. Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the company has had trouble automating the task of figuring out when one of its users has died.

That can lead to some disturbing or just plain weird moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shuffling a dead friend through its social algorithms.

Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle the ghosts in its machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution.

Read it all.

Earlier this month, the full version of Inspire, a new English language journal, surfaced on the Internet. It’s publisher? The Yemen-based terrorist organization, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Although al Qaeda has long employed the Web, DVDs and video games to reach mass audiences, the sophistication and provocative nature of this publication suggests it is intended to “go viral”””or spread rapidly among many Internet users””in the English speaking world, especially in the United States.

Many in the West will ridicule Inspire’s boring sermons and awkwardly written stories, such as one that tries to portray joining “jihad” as a summer camp, or another with Osama bin Laden’s views on global warming. Commentators will undoubtedly condemn the journal’s reprehensible article “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” They’ll also say that the publication’s naming of certain Americans as targets is a public relations gaffe.

Read it all.

Teens in Oklahoma and other states are experimenting with what they say is a new way to get high: listening to online music and tones that they say can cause a drug-like state of euphoria.

The youths plug into what they call ‘i-dosers’ by putting on headphones and downloading music and tones that create a supposed drug-like euphoria, according to some school officials.

The technology is designed to combine a tone in each ear to create a binaural beat designed to alter brainwaves.

Read it all.

These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.

Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

Read it all.

Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

With his typical self-confidence, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old chief executive, recently said it was “almost guaranteed” that the company would reach a billion users.

Read it all.

The only thing tiny about the tiny house movement is the size of the houses themselves. There are a slew of websites devoted to the scene, and tiny house evangelists based in California and Vermont are busy traveling around North America helping people build these little homes.

“I’m just a freelance, insane guy working out of his backyard building stuff for people when the need arises,” says Derek Diedricksen, 33, a tiny house enthusiast who lives outside of Boston.

Diedricksen’s backyard resembles a junkyard with piles of unlikely building materials and a handful of already-completed structures. His web video series, Tiny Yellow House, might be described as Wayne’s World meets This Old House.

Read or listen to it all.

Internet users are complaining that the privacy settings on Facebook are confusing, and lawmakers are questioning Google about its gathering of e-mail and other personal data from Wi-Fi residential networks. The boundary between private and public information is becoming murkier every day, a blurring that is perhaps inevitable in the world of online surfing and social networking.

But how about religious communities? The boundaries are shifting there as well, because of a growing emphasis in congregations on honest and open sharing in small groups.

Vibrant churches today have Bible studies and support groups for every demographic, and congregational vitality is found in the relationships that develop among people in these groups. I am pushing my own church in this direction, after spending a sabbatical studying Christian hospitality while visiting congregations that are skilled at welcoming and including people.

Read it all.

How many times in life must we engage in self-description? Let us count the ways: There’s the anxiety of college applications. The ignominy of Match.com dating. The embroidery of a C.V. sent to prospective employers. And, of course, there is Facebook.

The profile page of every Facebook acolyte has an enticing little Info tab, presenting the opportunity to demonstrate wit or wisdom, bravado or timidity, personal agenda or professional bona fides. A few categories are suggested by default ”” Likes and Dislikes, Favorite Quotations ”” but there’s a big yawning hole in the section labeled Bio. There’s no pull-down menu: the format is fill in the blank, every man for himself.

“It’s unnerving to sum yourself up and convey your personality,” said Gretchen Rubin, a former lawyer in New York and author of “The Happiness Project,” who opted for tongue-in-cheek: Red-haired, left-handed, legally blind, massive consumer of Diet Coke.

Read it all.

Take a look.

Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.

As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents.

Read it all.

Three years ago Ben Huh visited a blog devoted to silly cat pictures ”” and saw vast potential.

Mr. Huh, a 32-year-old entrepreneur, first became aware of I Can Has Cheezburger, which pairs photos of cats with quirky captions, after it linked to his own pet blog. His site immediately crumbled under the resulting wave of visitors.

Sensing an Internet phenomenon, Mr. Huh solicited financing from investors and forked over $10,000 of his own savings to buy the Web site from the two Hawaiian bloggers who started it.

“It was a white-knuckle decision,” he said. “I knew that the first site was funny, but could we duplicate that success?”

Mr. Huh has since found that the appetite for oddball Internet humor is insatiable.

Read it all.

Authorities are banding together ever more closely with the financial sector and Internet providers in hopes of disrupting the multibillion-dollar global child-pornography trade.

These concerted efforts come as the child-porn industry has shifted in the last five years to a more anonymous, web-based system for moving funds, according to law-enforcement officials, technology specialists and money-laundering experts.

To root out the companies that supply an estimated $20 billion annual global child-porn market, the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography — comprised of Internet service providers, financial heavyweights and technology companies — is working closely with law-enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world.

Read it all.