Category: Gigaom

If you’ve used a smartphone — like an iPhone or an Android, or one of the newer BlackBerrys — for a fairly long time, here’s a challenge: go for a day or two without your phone, and see how it feels. And I don’t mean going skiing or hiking the Appalachian Trail or something like that either; try to go without it during a regular day in a city, or better still try to do without it when you are on a business trip to an unfamiliar city. I did that — not deliberately, mind you — on a recent day in San Francisco, when my iPhone suddenly decided to lock me out (maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention to it). And it was a painful experience.

Why was it painful? Simply put, I was disconnected. And I don’t mean that I couldn’t make phone calls — in fact, that was the part about the phone I missed the least. But I couldn’t look up where I was in Google Maps or any other GPS-based service, to try and find out where I was going, or measure how long it was going to take me, or get directions on how to get there (I was trying to get to the Apple store, so they could help me fix the phone, which suddenly started asking me for a passcode, even though I hadn’t set one). Particularly in an unfamiliar city, this kind of tool is hugely useful — and even in the city I normally live in, I use it all the time.

But it was more than just that. I couldn’t take photos of my surroundings, which is another thing I like to do a lot (especially in a city as great-looking as San Francisco), because the iPhone is my main camera, and I have it with me at all times. I used to like to snap shots and upload them to Flickr or Facebook — and now I share them with Instagram — a service that posts your photos to a stream your friends can follow and comment on, but also automatically cross-posts them to other services as well, including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Tumblr.

Twitter and Facebook were the other two things I missed. As anyone who follows me on Twitter (I’m @mathewi) probably knows, I share a lot on Twitter — thoughts, but mostly links to interesting content. It’s become an integral part of my day (and often of my night as well); not just posting things that I come across, but reading and commenting on the things that others post. I know it’s an overused term, but it really is a conversation, and it was something I missed a lot. And probably above all else, I missed being able to do that while killing time waiting in line — like the line I was waiting in to get my phone fixed.

But it was more than that. I missed the ability to look up anything I was curious about in Google at a moment’s notice. What is that building? Why is it called that? What does that sign mean? Why is there a giant bow and arrow sticking in the ground near the Embarcadero, which is right on the bay in San Francisco? Lots of questions like that occurred to me, but I was incapable of finding the answers. Sure, I could have bought a guidebook or something, or I suppose I could have stopped someone, but the ability to do it from a handheld device on a whim is something I have become fairly addicted to. And I have learned a lot as well.

This isn’t about the iPhone either — I am a big fan of the iPhone, but I think it’s fine if other people use a BlackBerry or an Android. My point is that smartphones have changed our lives in hundreds of tiny ways, and it isn’t until we try to spend a day or two without them that we find out exactly how dependent we are on them. Is that a good thing? I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe not. Maybe I should remember more things, instead of relying on my ability to look them up in Google. But I do know that having those tools at my fingertips is incredibly powerful — it may change the world, but it has certainly changed mine. And I think for the better.

If the WikiLeaks saga was a comic book, it would be starting to look a lot like the Justice League of America vs. the League of Supervillians — or maybe it’s more like Star Wars, with the plucky rebel alliance up against the might of the Empire. As the U.S. government and a variety of corporations such as Visa and PayPal keep up the pressure on the document-leaking organization that they see as a traitor and a scofflaw, a rough alliance of WikiLeaks supporters have taken it upon themselves to wage a cyber-war in its defense.

Leading the fight is a shadowy group called Operation Payback, which in turn is loosely affiliated with Anonymous, an organization (although that term makes it sound more co-ordinated than it really is) that grew out of the alternative website 4chan, and became infamous for its attacks on Scientology, among other things. At last check, the Operation Payback site itself was offline — another symptom of the back-and-forth battle in which the group has been co-ordinating “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attacks on Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard.

All of those corporations have cut off support for WikiLeaks in the past week, despite the fact that it’s not clear the organization has actually done anything illegal by publishing classified military documents — something the New York Times and The Guardian have also done. In a statement on its website, Operation Payback quoted digital guru John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who said on Twitter that “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” Operation Payback added that:

While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.

It’s not clear how much disruption the group and its supporters have been able to create, however. MasterCard’s website was down for at least part of Wednesday, but the company said its cardholders and payment systems were not affected. PayPal said that it suffered a denial-of-service attack on Monday but that it was dealt with fairly rapidly, and Visa has not reported any issues at all so far. The website for the Swedish bank that froze WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s accounts went down for at least part of Tuesday, but the bank’s other operations appeared unaffected.

In other words, the Empire remains strong. Meanwhile, after sending out a plea for ways to keep the site up and running following the removal of DNS services by its provider EveryDNS, the organization now has over 1,200 mirror sites set up — many of them in Europe — through which it can publish any documents instantly. The site has also taken a number of other steps that will make it virtually impossible to remove it completely from the Internet (including having at least some of its servers hosted by The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing network based in Sweden) and Assange has said that there are over 10,000 sites that have full copies of the diplomatic cables.

The cyber-noose is tightening around Wikileaks: Visa has joined the list of corporations that will no longer allow its users to send payments to the organization, which is looking for funding support as it continues to release thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. MasterCard has done the same, and so has online payment service PayPal. All three have said they have legal concerns about dealing with WikiLeaks — but is there any real justification for this? Not really. In fact, it’s not clear that what WikiLeaks is doing is even illegal.

As media analyst Jeff Jarvis and others have pointed out, Visa and MasterCard and other payment services allow online users to send funds to a wide range of questionable entities, including sites that offer pornography. So why are they so concerned about WikiLeaks? Visa said that it had suspended support for payments to WikiLeaks while it “investigates” the organization, while MasterCard said that its rules prohibit customers from “directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal.” PayPal also said its terms of use prevents the service from being used to “encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

Needless to say, the phrasing of those rules casts a pretty wide net — not just engaging in illegal activity, but encouraging it or instructing others in how to engage in it. But do even these broad rules apply to what WikiLeaks is doing? It’s not clear that they do. All the organization has done is to publish classified documents that originally belonged to the U.S. government — something that may be uncomfortable and embarrassing, but is not obviously illegal (even the Justice Department doesn’t seem too sure about whether WikiLeaks is guilty of anything). The only obvious crime that was involved in the release of those diplomatic cables was committed by the person who originally took them, since doing so is an offence under the U.S. Espionage Act.

Publishing those documents is not illegal — or at least, not yet, which is why Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn), the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, has put forward his proposed SHIELD law (which stands for Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination), which would make it a crime to publish leaked classified information if doing so endangered U.S. agents or was otherwise not in the national interest. And this law would not just apply to WikiLeaks, but potentially any mainstream or online publication or media outlet that chose to publish any of the information, since — as I have tried to argue before — WikiLeaks is effectively a media entity.

Interestingly enough, while companies such as Amazon, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have cut off the organization, Facebook released a statement saying that it has no issue with WikiLeaks — although so far no classified cables have been posted to the site’s Facebook page. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks’ leader Julian Assange is in court in London facing possible extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.

Google today launched its long-awaited electronic book store, called simply Google eBooks, with more than 3 million titles and 4,000 publishers participating as partners, including most of the major industry names. Independent booksellers will also be able to offer Google eBooks through a relationship with the American Booksellers’ Association, and the company is launching an affiliate network as well. The web giant’s offering — which it said is based on a “buy anywhere, read anywhere” philosophy — is likely to ramp up competition in the electronic book market, which until now has been dominated by Amazon and Apple.

James Crawford, director of engineering for the Google Books team, said the company has scanned in over 15 million books through its massive book-scanning project, which “makes us one of the largest libraries in the world.” In the Google eBook store there will be 2.8 million books available to download free of charge, since they are in the public domain, and the rest will have a “buy” button next to them that takes readers directly to the eBook store. Google’s publishing partners include major names such as Random House, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, but also a range of smaller publishers and scholarly houses such as the Oxford University Press and Reed Elsevier.

Google will pay the publisher 52 percent of the list price if sold through Google’s store, or 45 percent if it is sold through the company’s retail partners. The web giant said it did not take a stand on whether to accept the relatively new “agency model” for selling e-books (which was introduced when Apple joined the market with the iPad), in which the publisher gets to set the price in the e-book store, rather than letting the retailer choose. Less than 10 percent of the company’s publishing partners asked for an agency deal, but they represent over half of the best-sellers in the store, the company said.

In addition to the publisher partnerships, Google is also launching an affiliate network — although Amanda Edmonds, director of strategic partnerships for the Google Books team, said the company so far only has one affiliate signed up, a site called Goodreads, which is devoted to books and discussion about books. Anyone reading a discussion forum or thread about a book that is available in the Google eBooks store will be able to click “buy” from within the discussion and go directly to the checkout at Google’s store, Edmonds said.

As part of today’s launch, Google is releasing a dedicated eBook-reading app for Android devices, and Crawford said the company also is “working on getting an app into the iTunes store” for the iPhone and iPad. Google e-books will also be compatible with the Sony Reader and the Nook reader from Barnes & Noble — but only titles without digital-rights management controls will be available for reading on the Kindle, he said, because the Kindle has a closed content-protection system for its books. And most books will also be available in the open source ePub format.

“We’re not peddling devices here –we want to focus on selling books,” Crawford said. Google e-books will be readable in any modern web browser, and for books that the company has scanned in, readers will also be able to toggle between standard view and image format, which will show the actual scans of the physical book’s pages and any photos or illustrations from the original book.

The Google e-book manager said that the company is focused on what he called a “cloud-based model of consumption,” in which “you never have to worry about where your book is, what page you were on, or where you bought it,” because it is always available in your browser or app. “We think ultimately e-books should be like physical books,” Crawford said. “Most people don’t have bookshelves sorted by which retailer they bought it from.” In the longer term, the Google manager said, “maybe the industry can come together and agree on a standard for e-books so they can be shared” across devices.

The past week has seen plenty of ink spilled — virtual and otherwise — about WikiLeaks and its mercurial front-man, Julian Assange, and the pressure they have come under from the U.S. government and companies such as Amazon and PayPal, both of which have blocked WikiLeaks from using their services. Why should we care about any of this? Because more than anything else, WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection.

Not everyone agrees with this point of view, of course. Some argue that there is nothing journalistic about the organization whatsoever, and that it is simply a lawless group of misfits spreading information around that it doesn’t have the right to distribute, without caring for the effects of its actions. That may be true — but it’s also true that the same description fits more than one allegedly journalistic entity in the traditional media sphere, and they are all protected by the First Amendment and its principles regarding freedom of the press. So why is WikiLeaks not worthy of the same protection?

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn), the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, is the one who put pressure on Amazon to remove support for WikiLeaks (although the company claims it removed the organization’s site from its servers because Wikileaks did not own the rights to the content, not because of political pressure). Senator Lieberman has proposed legislation called the SHIELD law — short for Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination — which would make it a crime to publish information that might harm U.S. agents or informants, or would otherwise be contrary to the national interest.

This might as well be called the WikiLeaks law, since it is clearly targeted at the organization — which did not actually leak the documents (something that is already a crime under the Espionage Act) but is clearly publishing them. But the heavy hand of this law would not just fall on WikiLeaks; it would also potentially cover anyone who has published the cables, such as the New York Times. Just as sources used to leak secret documents to newspapers, which often published them regardless of whether the government disapproved, now those sources can go to WikiLeaks and accomplish the same thing.

So what makes WikiLeaks different from the New York Times? There are the obvious things, of course — the latter publishes a print newspaper, is a member of a variety of self-regulatory bodies involving the media, and is a venerable institution with a long history of journalistic integrity. WikiLeaks, meanwhile, is a shadowy organization with an uncertain history, opaque motivations and publishes only online. That said, why are we so eager to protect one and not the other? WikiLeaks’ stated intention is to bring transparency to the political process and expose wrongdoing. Isn’t that the same thing the Times does? And yet one is being hounded by government agents, forced to remove its documents from Amazon’s servers and blocked from using PayPal, while the other is free to publish whatever it wants. What if the Times were to store some of its content on Amazon’s EC2 servers or use PayPal for transactions — would it be subject to the same treatment? And if not, why is WikiLeaks?

Some would argue that we don’t need entities like WikiLeaks, because traditional publishers like the New York Times are good enough. And it’s true that leakers took their information to newspapers before WikiLeaks came along — but it’s also true that many of them refused to publish it. And in some cases, information that should not have been published actually took the spotlight away from the truth, as in the case of the Times’ reporting leading up to the Iraq War. An independent source of documents like WikiLeaks (which journalism professor Jay Rosen has called the world’s “first stateless news organization”) would have been a very valuable thing to have during that time.

The fact is that freedom of the press, like freedom of speech in general, is a crucial part of the fabric of a free society. Every action that impinges on those freedoms is a loss for society, and a step down a slippery slope — and that applies to everything that falls under the term “press,” regardless of whether we agree with its methods or its leaders. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, online speech is only as strong as the weakest intermediary. Any action that the government or its representatives take against a publisher like WikiLeaks should have to meet a very high bar indeed — and as Dan Gillmor argues, everyone working at the New York Times or any other media outlet should feel a shiver when they see Joe Lieberman attacking WikiLeaks, because it could just as easily be them in the spotlight instead of Julian Assange.

The international cat-and-mouse game continues between WikiLeaks and various governments over the diplomatic cables the organization recently published: in just the past few days, the site has been kicked off Amazon’s cloud-hosting platform and had its domain-name service cancelled by a second company — and even a data visualization project based on the WikiLeaks cables has been shut down. All of which raises a number of questions, including: Does the world need a stateless, independent data haven to protect the kind of freedom of information that WikiLeaks represents?

Just to recap, Amazon removed WikiLeaks’ website from its EC2 cloud on Thursday, after Senator Joe Lieberman — the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — complained about U.S. companies helping to distribute what he called illegal documents. The web company released a statement late on Thursday saying that it was not pressured into removing the WikiLeaks data, but did so because the organization breached its terms of service, which require those uploading data to have the rights to publish that information, and to refrain from uploading data that could lead to personal injury (some have argued that the leaked cables could jeopardize the lives of human-rights workers and U.S. informants).

WikiLeaks moved its site back to another hosting provider — one which apparently uses a server farm deep within a Swedish mountain, similar to the fictional data warehouse in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon. But within hours of making that move, the organization’s website was again taken offline, this time by its DNS provider, EveryDNS.com. According to the company, WikiLeaks’ website was being besieged by hackers using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which risked affecting other customers (WikiLeaks originally moved its site to Amazon’s servers for the same reason). After moving its data to a server host in Switzerland, the site was back up again on Friday.

Although both Amazon and EasyDNS had what seemed to be valid reasons for removing support for WikiLeaks, both companies were undoubtedly also painfully aware of the mounting political pressure from the U.S. government — both from Senator Lieberman and others — to disassociate themselves from WikiLeaks or face potential legal action. And while many critics accused Amazon of bowing to pressure and failing to uphold freedom of speech, the reality is that private companies are entitled to do whatever they wish in the interests of their business and shareholders (within certain limits), as Derrick pointed out in his recent post.

So where does that leave WikiLeaks? Switzerland’s Pirate Party is hosting the site for now, but it could easily decide that it doesn’t want to risk the ire of the U.S., just as France apparently has. The organization has been working with Iceland to develop what it calls an “information haven” that would be protected by new laws designed to shield whistleblowers, but it’s not clear where that effort stands, or how it has been affected by the latest political uproar. Some have wondered why WikiLeaks hasn’t already turned its data into BitTorrent files, which can be hosted in multiple locations and are therefore virtually impossible to remove.

More than anything, what WikiLeaks needs is a stable place to host its data — and potentially a separate DNS system — that is not susceptible to government interference or the kind of pressure that Amazon came under for dealing with the site (although Assange said in a Q&A Friday at The Guardian that the most recent data has been distributed to 100,000 people in encrypted form). The pictures of the mountain bunker where WikiLeaks’ data is stored, and the comparisons to the data warehouse in the novel Cryptonomicon, reminded a number of observers of an early attempt to create such a data haven: the idea was to store servers in a former military platform in the North Sea known as Sealand — whose owner claims that it is an independent country — but the effort never got off the ground.

With millions of servers in locations around the world, Google seems like a natural partner for WikiLeaks — and the company has refused in the past to remove controversial content from its sites, despite requests from the government, defending its actions based on the principle of freedom of speech. But even Google likely doesn’t want to take on Homeland Security and face potential prosecution. And so WikiLeaks will no doubt continue having to roam from from hosting country to hosting country, like the 21st century equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the digital oceans forever.

As newspapers everywhere struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many continue to debate how much emphasis they should put on digital versus their traditional print operations. John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, says the time for debate is over: newspapers need to be digital first in everything they do, he says, and more than that, they need to take the same approach to media and their content business that many web-based startups have, and that means being transparent, crowdsourced, collaborative and flat.

In a speech he delivered Thursday at the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass. (put on by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association or INMA), Paton said that the Journal Register — which he took over in February — has been living and breathing these principles for the past year, and that they have paid off in terms of revenue and profit growth for the company, which was effectively bankrupt last year.

In effect, Paton says, the Journal Register — which publishes about 170 daily and weekly papers in Philadelphia, Michigan, Connecticut and New Jersey — is already a digital-first company whether it wants to be or not, because its total online audience is bigger than its print audience. “We are already a Digital company,” he said in his presentation, “with small sales in the area of growth and a burdensome cost structure on the declining business – Print.” The newspaper CEO said the company has dealt with that cost structure problem by outsourcing everything that it can to others who can do it cheaper or better.

We are getting out of anything that does not fall into our core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers. Get rid of the bricks and iron [and] focus on core competencies — meaning, get rid of those things that don’t add value to the business. Reduce it or stop it. Outsource it or sell it.

What’s most interesting about the Journal Register’s approach is that it doesn’t rely on putting up paywalls, the way that media mogul Rupert Murdoch has done at his newspapers in Britain — which led to a decline in online readership of more than 90 percent — and the way some other media outlets such as the New York Times are planning. Instead, Paton is focused on expanding the relationship that his newspapers have with both readers and advertisers in their local communities, and taking that online. And he says it is working even better than expected.

Digital Ad growth is 2 times better than the industry. More importantly the Company’s digital revenue has grown from negligible to 11 % of ad revenue in November – in less than a year. The Company will write about 1,000 digital ad orders this month and has expanded its revenue streams from about 13 basic revenue streams to about 60. And all of that with less costs.

In addition to the advertising growth, Paton says that his papers are reaching out to the communities they serve, to make them part of what he calls the “new news ecosystem.” For one paper, the Register Citizen in Connecticut, that means creating a new community newsroom, which the newspaper is moving into later this month — the new offices have no walls, Paton says, and feature “a newsroom café with free public wifi, a community media lab and a community journalism school.”

The Journal Register CEO has also been taking the same approach to his own company: earlier this year, Paton launched a project called ideaLab, in which employees from across the company were chosen from an open application process that generated almost 200 comments on Paton’s blog (his post about the lab is here). Armed with their choice of mobile phone, a Netbook and iPad, members of the ideaLab get 10 hours of paid time per week to experiment and innovate — and only one rule, Paton said: there are no rules, and no sacred cows. Paton also had strong words in his presentation about why most newspapers are not changing:

The reasons… are simple: Fear, lack of knowledge and an aging managerial cadre that is cynically calculating how much they DON’T have to change before they get across the early retirement goal line. Look at the grey heads in any newspaper and you will see what I am talking about.

The solution, according to Paton?

Stop listening to newspaper people. We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the Web and as an industry we newspaper people are no good at it. No good at it at all. Want to get good at it? Then stop listening to the newspaper people and start listening to the rest of the world. And, I would point out, as we have done at JRC – put the Digital people in charge – of everything.

Whether anyone decides to take the Journal Register Co. CEO’s advice, it seems clear that the approach is working for Paton’s chain — he says in the year to date, the company outperformed the newspaper industry, with ad revenue growth that was three times better than the industry average and classified ad performance that was six times better.

the Journal Register Co., which . Journal Register’s new CEO, John Paton, has been aggressively launching new-media related ventures at the company, including a community journalism lab aimed at training local bloggers.

Amazon has removed WikiLeaks’ website and related files from its servers, a move that appears to be a result of pressure from the U.S. government not to support the document-leaking organization. According to several news reports, Senator Joseph Lieberman — the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — had asked the web company to remove its support for WikiLeaks, which moved some or all of its website and related files to Amazon’s servers after it suffered a “distributed denial of service” attack by unknown parties.

It’s not clear whether Senator Lieberman’s actions led to Amazon’s decision, but the senator said in a statement that the company had informed his staff Wednesday morning it was no longer hosting the website, and that he wished Amazon “had taken this action earlier.” The senator added that the release of classified diplomatic cables was illegal and outrageous, and that this had “compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world.” Lieberman said he was going to ask Amazon about “the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks,” and what the company planned to do in the future to prevent being used in a similar way to host illegal material.

On Wednesday afternoon, WikiLeaks posted a comment on Twitter saying that its servers at Amazon had been “ousted,” and that its money would now be spent “to employ people in Europe,” suggesting that its website had been moved back to a hosting service outside the U.S. The organization, which has come under fire for hosting classified documents belonging to the American government — including videotapes related to attacks on civilians in Iraq — later posted a message saying that “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told Reuters that he was unaware of the latest situation on servers, but that the organization had “ways and means to bypass any closure of our services.” A number of prominent members of the technology industry criticized the move by Amazon, including SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha — who called the decision “disappointing” in a Twitter message — and Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, who said the decision showed a “lack of spine.”

It’s worth noting that the U.S. State Department reached out to Twitter during the Iran protests last year, and asked the micro-blogging network to postpone some work that would have taken the network down, since it was such an important way of getting information out about the military action in that country. But when it comes to information about political matters involving the U.S. itself, the government seems more than happy to do whatever it takes to get certain things offline.

As companies add social software to help their employees work together more efficiently, and software makers add social features to take advantage of the kind of behavior seen on Twitter and Facebook, there is a growing risk that workers could get overloaded by all the information coming at them, says Jive Software chairman and former CEO Dave Hersh. A big part of what companies and workers have to deal with now is simply “noise management,” Hersh says, because the amount of data coming at them is so overwhelming.

“There’s just so much information out there, and it’s coming at people at a deafening rate,” the Jive founder said in a recent interview. The risk, Hersh says, is that some employees are going to start retreating from these newer tools (if they haven’t already) and take refuge in the old applications and behaviors that they are comfortable with — even if they don’t work very well. “Many people are reverting back to the things they are familiar with, such as email and face-to-face meetings,” says Hersh, because they feel overloaded by all the new tools they have to use.

The Jive founder and I will be talking about these and other issues involving what we call the “human cloud” and the future of work at our Net:Work conference in San Francisco next week, at the Mission Bay Conference Center on December 9th, along with Google’s vice president of product management Bradley Horowitz (the full list of speakers for the conference is here). There isn’t much time left, so if you haven’t registered already, be sure to get a ticket soon.

Hersh says that the increasing problem of information overload puts pressure on both companies and software makers to emphasize ease of use and the needs of users over feature-creep and the desire to have an all-in-one solution. “It’s like the TV remote problem,” the Jive founder says. “Everybody has eight remotes and they are a hundred buttons on each one, so eventually people just give up.” New tools need to be designed in such a way that they make people want to use them, he says. “They have to understand inherently why they are worth using or they just won’t do it.”

A comment from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sparked much discussion recently about whether the company was planning to create a news service using its network. Our response was that Twitter already functions as a news network, since it allows anyone to publish quickly and easily from virtually anywhere. And we’ve seen another excellent example of what that means for real-time “networked journalism” over the past few days, as a 17-year-old resident of one of Brazil’s biggest slums used Twitter as a live-reporting tool during the riots and crackdowns by the police in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil has been under increasing tension over the past weeks and months, as the government tries to clean up some of the crime and other issues in its second-largest city, which will be the host site for the 2014 World Cup of soccer as well as the 2016 Olympics. The country has promised to improve security as part of its bid for both, and Rio de Janeiro’s governor has also promised repeatedly to crush the drug gangs that have effective control over many of the “favelas” or slums in the city. This has included raids during the past week on the so-called German Complex or “Complexo do Alemao.”

One of the residents of that favela is 17-year-old Rene Silva. As the BBC describes in a story today, however, the teenager has been much more than just a bystander during the police raids in his neighborhood: using Twitter and a network of friends and fellow residents throughout the German Complex, he has been acting as a kind of one-man news service, reporting to the outside world in real-time as armored vehicles moved into the shantytown and heavily-armed drug dealers escaped into the hills around the city.

In addition to simply posting and re-tweeting observations from the ground on his Twitter account @vozdacommunidade (Voice of the Community), Silva even set up a mobile phone with video capabilities on the roof of his house and streamed video of the raids. And it’s clear that reporting on his community using whatever means possible was in the teenager’s blood even before Twitter came along: the name of his Twitter account is also the name of the community newspaper he started when he was just 11 years old. By Sunday night, Silva had over 20,000 followers and was being interviewed on prime-time television.

This is about more than just a kid using Twitter though. As co-founder Evan Williams described it recently in an interview, one of the powerful things about the micro-blogging network is that it lowers the barriers to publishing, and that this results in “more voices and more ways to find the truth.” Silva’s use of the service to provide an eyewitness view of the Rio raids is a powerful example of that at work.

As the BBC describes, the images of the raids in Rio de Janeiro — burning buses, firefights in the street with drug gangs, and so on — were readily available to anyone watching CNN or any other news program, along with analysis and reactions from “a succession of security experts, sociologists, lawyers and anthropologists.” But missing from much of this coverage are the people living inside the favelas themselves. In that sense, Silva’s coverage via Twitter served a crucial real-time, news-gathering function, one that would likely not have been possible otherwise.

If you were searching the Internet for information on heart disease or depression, would you find it helpful to see an ad for medication or resources related to that medical problem, or would you see that as an invasion of privacy? That’s the question at the core of a formal privacy complaint launched by several advocacy groups, including the Center for Digital Democracy and the World Privacy Forum. They are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate dozens of websites and services — including Google and WebMD — which they say are “profiling” users based on their web-surfing behavior in order to show them related advertising.

In the complaint, the groups make a number of allegations, including that these sites engage in what they call “disease-condition targeting,” in which:

Consumers or patients who express a particular health concern or interest are digitally profiled, tracked, and served ads and content based on the collection and analysis of such information. Among the many sensitive categories used in condition targeting are depression, COPD, diabetes, and asthma.

In other words, these sites look at the search terms that brought users to the page, as well as any searches within the site, comments that might be posted, links that are clicked on, etc. — and then they deliver ads and content that is based on that information. Search for heart disease and you might get ads and other content related to heart disease. But is this intrusive, or is it actually helpful? I know that when I have been searching for medical information, seeing related content — even if it is clearly advertising-oriented — has often been useful.

The privacy groups involved in the complaint seem concerned that advertising specific medications to consumers who are searching for information is also a problem, along with “social media monitoring” and “viral and word-of-mouth buzz marketing” aimed at specific medications. They describe how sites such as QualityHealth promote their services to pharmaceutical companies by saying they can reach potential patients before they make a trip to the doctor, and theoretically influence them in terms of what medication to ask for.

Here again we have the question of utility vs. privacy. If I am looking for information about an illness, isn’t it useful to find out what medications might be helpful in treating that problem? Just because I ask for it doesn’t mean my doctor is going to prescribe it. The groups involved in the complaint say they are also concerned about insurance companies and others getting their hands on the profiling data collected about users and their medical issues, and using this to make decisions about their coverage. That seems more like something we should be worried about — not whether I get ads for Gaviscon when I search for information on indigestion.

A minor flurry erupted on Twitter and in the blogosphere today, after Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mused during a Reuters interview about creating a “Twitter News Service,” which he described as a kind of partnership with major news organizations to extract news from the micro-blogging network. A spokesman for Twitter later posted a message saying the company “no plans for a Twitter news network” and that Stone was simply thinking out loud.

Twitter staffer Matt Graves’ response was closer to the point, however: He said that the company was not thinking about creating a Twitter news service because “it already exists — it’s called Twitter.” In other words, Twitter is already functioning as a news network or distributed wire service, something we have pointed out a number of times in the past. When you can get live reports from victims and observers of earthquakes and other disasters within minutes of them happening, you have a news network.

That said, however, there is something interesting in what Stone seemed to be describing: using the massive stream of 100 million tweets a day that flows through Twitter as the basis of a kind of digital-age Associated Press or Reuters newswire, which news organizations could share and use as a tool for distributed eye-witness reporting from around the world. Reuters had the same thing in mind when it formed a partnership with NowPublic, the Vancouver “user-generated content” company that is now part of the Examiner group.

As Reuters chairman ** said at the time — not long after the tsunami in Indonesia — the newswire has thousands of reporters around the globe, but none of them happened to be anywhere close to Indonesia when the tsunami struck. Why not take advantage of the people who were there, and their ability to send reports and photos and video to the world? That’s exactly what Twitter allows, and we’ve seen it happen in dozens of cases already, from earthquakes in Haiti to bombings in London.

What news organizations really need is a way to filter through those millions of tweets and find the ones that really matter, and really add something verifiable to a breaking news story. The New York Times created its own verified lists of Twitter users during a shooting at Fort Hood and other news events, and there are tools like Storify and Curated.by that can make it easier to pull threads together during a live news story, but it is still not as easy as it could be.

What if Twitter had tools that could help them do that? That would really be interesting. Maybe the company isn’t thinking about it, but it should — there is a need, and someone is going to fill it.

If there’s one thing that seems to define work in the digital age, it is the blurring of boundaries between our work lives and our personal lives. As we all know, work expands to fill the time available, and thanks to the ubiquity of email and instant messaging and smartphones and iPads, virtually any time is work time — and that includes family-oriented holidays like Thanksgiving, according to a recent survey from Xobni and Harris Interactive. The email service found that almost 60 percent of people check their work email during the holidays, and almost 30 percent of that group check their mail multiple times a day during their time off at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Of those who checked email of any kind during the holidays — work or personal — 79 percent said that they have gotten a work-related email from either a colleague or a client. And more than 40 percent of that group said that they were either annoyed, frustrated or resentful at getting work-related mail while on holiday. Interestingly enough, those in the 18 to 34 age range felt the strongest about this, with 56 percent saying they felt annoyed or resentful at this intrusion into their personal lives. Only 30 percent of those aged 45 to 54 said that they felt this way.

So why do people check their work email? One reason seems to be that they know if they don’t, they will wind up with a ton of email when they return, and will have to spend hours wading through it or dealing with the fallout from not having responded. The Xobni-Harris survey found that 42 percent of those who said they check work email while on holiday believe that doing so eases the workload when they return. This is something I can personally identify with — but it creates a kind of Catch-22 at the same time: checking mail might reduce the volume after the holidays, but it can also suck you into a vortex of work that leads to even more emails.

Another interesting statistic from the survey, the full version of which is here: almost 20 percent of those who received work-related email during their holidays said that they were thankful for having gotten the messages, because it was a distraction from the family holiday. There’s a boatload of material in that kind of response for psychologists to plow through, but it seems to suggest that just as family time can provide a welcome relief from work stress, work can also sometimes provide a relief from family.

If you’re interested in issues like work-life balance, and how both workers and companies are handling the future of work in a digital age — including a look at what we like to call the “human cloud” — please join us for Net:Work in San Francisco on December 9th at the Misson Bay Conference Center. We’ve got a great lineup, including John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox’s PARC research center, and Brad Horowitz of Google. There’s a description of the event and a full schedule of speakers here, and you can register here.

There are red-hot, rocket-fueled online startups — and then there is Groupon. While plenty of other web-based companies are growing fairly rapidly, Groupon is said to be growing faster than virtually any tech-related company in history (including Google and Facebook), and is expected to close the year with revenue of more than $500 million, an incredible amount of money for a company that is barely two years old. Started by Chicago entrepreneur Andrew Mason, Groupon now has almost 1,000 employees and operates in over 300 cities in the U.S., as well as several other countries.

Not surprisingly, given this incredible growth, the company has been the subject of rumors that see Google, eBay, Amazon or some other giant acquiring it for as much as $3 billion. Groupon is also reportedly looking for new financing, after already having raised more than $170 million in several rounds of funding.

Making the coupon digital

The secret to all of this success isn’t some kind of radical new technology or device — in fact, it’s deceptively simple: Groupon has simply modernized the traditional store coupon, which it distributes to members via email. Stores, restaurants and other merchants can offer deals and discounts to their customers, and those deals are dependent on a certain number of people signing up (hence the company’s name). If not enough do so, the discount is withdrawn — but if enough people accept, then everyone gets a deal until the offer is over or the merchandise is gone. Groupon gets as much as 50 percent of the revenue from each deal.

The viral aspect of these deals — in which users pass them on to friends and acquaintances, hoping that they can gather enough people to trigger the discount — makes them an incredibly powerful tool for retailers, and the distribution that email and the web provide helps spread the news even faster. Some retailers have reported hundreds of shoppers showing up at their locations within hours of a deal being sent out to Groupon’s network. More on that a little later.

The downside

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the effect that Groupon can have on their business. In several high-profile cases, retailers have become overwhelmed by the number of customers coming in for discounts and found themselves cleaned out of inventory or actually taking a loss on an offer — but many observers have put this down to inexperience on the part of the retailer in terms of projecting demand, or their ability to fill that demand. For the most part, Groupon says merchants love its deals, and most advertisers sign up for repeat offers once they have a chance to try the system out.

One small business owner recently wrote in the New York Times about doing the math on a Groupon deal and described it as “a beast — a beast that can propel your business or smother it. It depends on your business.” Offering discounts via the service is just the same as advertising, this owner says: “It costs money. Instead of writing a check for an ad, you are choosing to lose money on sales.” In effect, he says, each business owner has to make assumptions about how many groupons will be redeemed and for how much, and then figure out if they can live with that.

Success breeds competition

The success of Groupon, not surprisingly, has also brought forth an explosion of competitors. These include some national competitors such as LivingSocial and Buy With Me, as well as local versions in dozens of major markets, both in the U.S. and internationally — where Groupon has expanded in part by buying local competitors in Russia and Japan. One company called Tippr offers a white-label group-buying platform that companies and publishers can use to run their own offers at a cheaper rate than Groupon charges.

On top of that, the company has been getting competition from both real-world giants such as Walmart (which recently launched a Facebook-based group-buying effort called CrowdSavers) and from online players such as Facebook — which has been experimenting with offers tied to “check ins” via its Facebook Places feature — and soon from online payment giant PayPal, which is close to launching a “social shopping” service called Shoptimist.

The secret: making shopping social

Groupon started as a company called The Point, which was designed to help people find others who were interested in the same social causes and co-ordinate efforts around issues. But cofounder and original angel investor Eric Lefkofsky said in a recent interview that the key to the company’s runaway success was when it combined shopping discounts with the social element that gave the company its name. Giving people a tangible reward — namely, money off merchandise or meals, services, and so on — combined with the incentive to get others involved in order to trigger that reward was the magic recipe for Groupon.

Other companies have tried the digital coupon or emailed discount offer before — in fact, there are dozens of them. But it wasn’t until Groupon came along that it became obvious how powerful this could be when combined with social tools such as email, Twitter and Facebook. And that success has convinced cofounder Lefkofsky, who has started an investment fund, that the use of social tools is the future of almost every business, particularly those with an online component. “We think that the most disruptive business models will take advantage of that social graph over the next five to 10 years,” he told the New York Times.

The lessons:

While Groupon tries to grow large enough that it can fend off competitors such as Walmart and Facebook, it’s worth looking at what other companies can learn from its incredible growth. Here are just a few:

** Social shopping is a real phenomenon: Groupon’s success and the arrival of mainstream competitors such as Walmart shows that this is more than just a fad, and that social shopping is something plenty of people want to participate in. How can you build that into what your company does?

** Making things social accelerates engagement: As Lefkofsky points out, the idea behind the company’s service didn’t really take off until it combined shopping and being social. How can you add social elements to your product or service, to encourage people to share their experiences or their interest in it? Give people a chance to be social and they will take it.

** Being social requires planning: One of the biggest lessons that online businesses can learn from Groupon’s critics is that being social can’t be an add-on to what you are doing — you have to think about how it is going to affect the other parts of your business, and take steps to deal with the potential fallout.

** Anyone can do it: As Groupon is discovering, the addition of social features to what is effectively the digital version of traditional coupons is not difficult. In other words, there is virtually no barrier to entry except for size and scale. If you aren’t doing it, one of your competitors probably is, or is thinking about it — and if they get the scale, you could be left on the outside looking in.

Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” is not someone to be dismissed lightly, especially when it comes to communications and media trends. In his recent book “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” — and in a related piece in the Wall Street Journal — Wu argues that just as AT&T was a monopoly during an earlier phase of communications history, companies like Google and Facebook and Apple now have what he calls “information monopolies” that could be just as damaging to our society. But does he present a convincing case that this is true? Not really.

In his WSJ op-ed piece, Wu asks: “how hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google?” Just for the record, I routinely go days without using Amazon, Skype or eBay and haven’t noticed any problems, and I spend most of my time online. In any case, Wu says that doing without Google and Amazon would be inconvenient, but:

Forgoing Facebook or Twitter means giving up whole categories of activity. For most of us, avoiding the Internet’s dominant firms would be a lot harder than bypassing Starbucks, Wal-Mart or other companies that dominate some corner of what was once called the real world.

What is a monopoly?

The author goes on to argue that despite the Internet’s reputation for encouraging freedom, it looks “increasingly like a Monopoly board” with most of the major sectors controlled by “one dominant company or an oligopoly.” According to Wu, search is “owned” by Google, while Facebook owns social networking, eBay rules auctions, Apple “dominates online content delivery” and Amazon owns online retail. But as more than one person has pointed out, none of these examples — with the possible exception of Google and search — meets any kind of real test of the term monopoly.

It’s not clear what Wu even means by saying that Apple has a monopoly on “online content delivery,” although he seems to be referring to iTunes and the control that the company exerts over distribution of music, movies, books, magazines and so on, either directly or via its mobile apps. But that doesn’t really qualify as a monopoly either — record labels, movie studios, newspapers and other content companies are free to distribute their content in other ways and still reach the same audience (or an even broader one), using the web and other services.

Google probably comes the closest to a classic definition of a monopoly — not so much on the search side, but when it comes to advertising and particularly search-related advertising, where the company clearly has a dominant position. As a result, Google has already come under scrutiny for acquisitions such as the purchase of the mobile advertising service AdMob (which got cleared after Apple bought Quattro Wireless) and others have recommended that regulators investigate the proposed purchase of the travel-information service ITA as well. But even so, arguing that Google is a monopoly is not a slam dunk.

Facebook and Apple don’t qualify

Facebook and Apple, meanwhile, don’t really fit any definition of monopoly — unless you broaden the word to mean “a really big company with products that a lot of people use.” It may be true that Facebook doesn’t make it easy for certain kinds of data to be exported from within its walled garden — something that has recently been criticized by the father of the web himself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee — but that doesn’t really make it a monopoly. If Facebook is a monopoly, then Friendster and Myspace could just as easily have been accused of being monopolies when they were top dogs in the social-networking space. Instead, they are proof of just how fragile such a position is.

Facebook seemed like an also-ran just a few years ago — similar to Friendster and Myspace, but with not as many features. Now it is valued at more than $33 billion and is feared by everyone. Could it be the next Microsoft, and therefore deserving of our criticism for being a quasi-monopoly? Perhaps, but that case has yet to be made. And look at Twitter: in just three years, it has gone from being a quirky toy used primarily by geeks to a digital-age communications network that is used by hundreds of millions of people as a real-time news medium, and has a theoretical market value of more than $3 billion.

Wu argues that while they may not be strictly defined as monopolies, these companies are large enough and have integrated themselves into our lives in such a way that they might as well be monopolies. The risk with this argument, of course, is that governments tend to take a dim view of monopolies, whether metaphorical or otherwise, and talking about Google or Facebook in those terms could make it even more appealing for regulators and politicians to get involved in legislating technology markets and services — which is rarely a good thing.

The network effect works both ways

In his WSJ piece, Wu says that he believes the Internet is more prone to monopolistic behavior because “a single firm can dominate the market if the product becomes more valuable to each user as the number of users rises. Such networks have a natural tendency to grow, and that growth leads to dominance.” But what Wu is describing — the so-called “network effect”– is a double-edged sword. Just as it built the former empires of Friendster and Myspace and AOL, it just as efficiently dismantled them when a better (or at least more popular) network came along.

Should we be aware that Apple is trying to control too much? Undoubtedly. And we should also be vigilant when networks like Facebook try to control too much of our information, as Tim Berners-Lee advocates. But Wu seems to want to draw a comparison between AT&T’s control over telecommunications and companies like Google and Facebook, and the analogy just doesn’t work. There are too many variables now, and the ubiquity of the web arguably makes monopolies more difficult to maintain, not less.