Among the myths of the negative impacts of technology is the myth that new media and "texting" are inherently destructive forces that are degrading our ability to write properly, and that, in the young, the continual compression of communications, and in particular the use of abbreviations (like ICU), is destroying a full appreciation for 'language'. This turns out be a misguided fear and a completely unsupported myth. In fact, research shows that the best text-ers are the best spellers, and that twitters often write relatively long and carefully crafted sentences. Text-ers also use fewer abbreviations than one might expect, because they are striving for precision, and in their efforts to communicate clearly the abbreviations are simply too indeterminate. Studies over the past decade show repeatedly that new media 'writers' are intensely aware of language issues, and that they are fully able to switch between conventional language and the highly compressed code that they sometimes use in their new media posts. Text-ers totally enjoy writing and language. More than 'literate,' these new media writers have become become 'multi-lingual' students of literary expression, and are actually more likely to score well on language tests.

Watch renowned linguist David Crystal discussing the impact of new media on language in this very interesting video:

Mac users are often smug about security because there are so few exploits against Macintosh that reach the news. But the reason for this has more to do with the fact that Macs have historically been attacked less, than it has to do with the inherent security of the Mac platform. Hackers 'go with the flow', that is, they attack the most 'popular' target, not necessarily the easiest. Hacking today is done for money in most instances, and for profit seeking computer criminals there is much more money to be made attacking the dominant computing platforms, than the niche products. The great popularity of Adobe Flash and Acrobat are great examples of powerful magnets for malware. Acrobat and Flash on Windows are far and away the most successfully hacked products today. If a hacker wants to make a pile of money, it only makes sense that they will go where the potential yield is greatest. With the phenomenal success of Apple's iPhones, iPads, and Mac laptops, users of these products should take heed; times are changing. Complacency is an extremely dangerous posture for users of any 'popular' computer product.

I frequently tell readers and audiences that the most widely used software in a particular category is successfully exploited the most. ...As the popular saying goes, bank robbers rob banks because that's where the money is.

Read the whole story at InforWorld

Pure and simple. Macs contain no special, secret security sauce that makes them more attack-resistant than Windows Vista (which was released in November 2006). Macs and OS X do not contain a single computer defense mechanism that the competitors do not already have or haven't had longer.

Read about Mac security here

With Ford's new SYNC technology, it has now become easy to simply talk to your car and ask it to send a Tweet. Now we need 'mobile specific' social experiences that integrate the fact that we are rolling down the road and our need to 'social-ize' with our similarly mobile cohorts. New applications are in the works that will build on mobile location awareness and help us make sense of our social lives 'in motion'.

Ford, the University of Michigan, Microsoft and Intel gave students a rare opportunity to develop their ideas of future in-car connectivity. The research project resulted in experimental applications combining social networks, GPS location awareness, and real-time vehicle data in ways that help drivers get where they want to go efficiently, while having fun along the way.

In the class, the students explored and built applications based on access to Fiestaware: a Ford developmental application platform built on Windows 7 and Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. This enabled them to harness the power of social networks that safely and responsibly connect to the cloud. The software system is the first of its kind, and provides access to vehicle performance data, networking services, voice recognition, social networking tools and other data, as well as the Windows Azure cloud services platform. Students in the class were able to use the platform to conceptualize and build a new class of applications as class projects. ...Like: Caravan Track - software that allows clusters of vehicles traveling together to track each other along the journey.

Read the whole article at TheFordStory.com

For years we've said "content is king". The promise of the web was that we'd have so much more data that we'd be able to make truly informed decisions. But it appears now that we are generating too much data, and we have no good way to understand or integrate all of the data that we have collected. We are literally drowning in data, as individuals, as businesses, as a culture. The amount of media that is available to the average citizen is vastly greater than at any time in history. With Google now indexing 'Tweets' we are on the verge of an internet with trillions of pages of information that are all indexed and available... but only useful if we can figure out the right search query. We desperately need to structure all this data; we need to find the relationships. The Semantic Web promises to automatically discover the relationships for us. On the Semantic Web content may not be all there is, rather, CONTEXT may be "king".

Web 3.0 by Kate Ray - This 15-minute film is a pretty good general overview of the semantic web. That is, turning all of the data on the web into structured data so as to define relationships between it and derive meaning... The video includes interviews with Dixon, Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Nova Spivack, Jason Shellen, Lee Feigenbaum, John Hebeler, Alon Halevy, David Karger, and Abraham Bernstein.

Watch Kate Ray's film - Web 3.0

There has been a great deal of complaining and hand wringing about the fact that the Apple iPhone does not support Adobe's Flash. Apple has said repeatedly that, for significant technical reasons, it doesn't think that Flash is the right solution for mobile devices. Adobe has accused Apple of blocking Flash for narrow business reasons. This might seem like a silly squabble between business rivals, but it actually has huge significance for web designers, web developers, and any one trying to deploy video on the web. Who's right? Here's what Steve Jobs has to say:

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe's Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven - they say we want to protect our App Store - but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain. First, there's "Open".

Read the rest of Steve Jobs's article at Apple .com

Wi-Fi on the go is a promise that we've been teased with for quite a while, but the reality is that mobile Wi-Fi is often a hassle, and generally overpriced. Whether you are in an airport, a hotel, or a coffee shop, there is a wide spectrum of possible payment structures, some of which are just plain highway robbery, and others that are refreshingly free... it all depends on the enterprise that it offering it. It's like a road system with out any standards, a variety of toll roads, mixed with occasional free roads, and no interoperability. For the mobil user it's a nightmare. For web designers and internet marketers it is a growing aggravation.

The promise of anywhere access when on the go is old hat, promised but not delivered by all sorts of providers for more than a decade. How long have you heard about Wi-Fi on airplanes, Wi-Fi hotspots wherever you travel for business, municipal Wi-Fi, and so on?...

Where we are today is that there's more mobile Wi-Fi available, but the fractured fiefdoms add hassle and cost. The providers need to figure out how to stitch their services together and stop trying to carve out all these separate silos -- they inhibit usage that way. I figure in another five years, this mobile Wi-Fi thing may finally work right.

Read Galen Gruman's story at InfoWorld

Wi-Fi on the go is a promise that we've been teased with for quite a while, but the reality is that mobile Wi-Fi is often a hassle, and generally overpriced. Whether you are in an airport, a hotel, or a coffee shop, there is a wide spectrum of possible payment structures, some of which are just plain highway robbery, and others that are refreshingly free... it all depends on the enterprise that it offering it. It's like a road system with out any standards, a variety of toll roads, mixed with occasional free roads, and no interoperability. For the mobil user it's a nightmare. For web designers and internet marketers it is a growing aggravation.

The promise of anywhere access when on the go is old hat, promised but not delivered by all sorts of providers for more than a decade. How long have you heard about Wi-Fi on airplanes, Wi-Fi hotspots wherever you travel for business, municipal Wi-Fi, and so on?...

Where we are today is that there's more mobile Wi-Fi available, but the fractured fiefdoms add hassle and cost. The providers need to figure out how to stitch their services together and stop trying to carve out all these separate silos -- they inhibit usage that way. I figure in another five years, this mobile Wi-Fi thing may finally work right.

Read Galen Gruman's story at InfoWorld

Wi-Fi on the go is a promise that we've been teased with for quite a while, but the reality is that mobile Wi-Fi is often a hassle, and generally overpriced. Whether you are in an airport, a hotel, or a coffee shop, there is a wide spectrum of possible payment structures, some of which are just plain highway robbery, and others that are refreshingly free... it all depends on the enterprise that it offering it. It's like a road system with out any standards, a variety of toll roads, mixed with occasional free roads, and no interoperability. For the mobil user it's a nightmare. For web designers and internet marketers it is a growing aggravation.

The promise of anywhere access when on the go is old hat, promised but not delivered by all sorts of providers for more than a decade. How long have you heard about Wi-Fi on airplanes, Wi-Fi hotspots wherever you travel for business, municipal Wi-Fi, and so on?...

Where we are today is that there's more mobile Wi-Fi available, but the fractured fiefdoms add hassle and cost. The providers need to figure out how to stitch their services together and stop trying to carve out all these separate silos -- they inhibit usage that way. I figure in another five years, this mobile Wi-Fi thing may finally work right.

Read Galen Gruman's story at InfoWorld

While there are an astounding 55 million tweets per day on twitter, there are and even more impressive 600 million Twitter searches per day. Twitter has become THE real time search engine for the internet itself as well as social media. If you want to know what's happening NOW, search Twitter.

Microblogging service Twitter announced that it now boasts close to 106 million registered users--up more than 1,500 percent over a year ago--and continues to add 300,000 new users each day. Speaking at the company's first Chirp developer conference in San Francisco, Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone added that Twitter now fields 55 million tweets and 600 million search queries per day. Despite the popularity of the service, Williams said the firm is still seeking ways to make Twitter more mainstream, adding that when consumers begin to type "I don't get..." into Google search, "I don't get Twitter" is the second suggestion, followed only by "I don't get drunk I get awesome."

Read the whole story at FierceMobile

While the court's ruling on Net Neutrality is infuriating, it sets the stage for the FCC to start over and restructure the problem... and move jurisdiction back to where a "common carrier" issue should be decided, at the FCC... not in the court.

When FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski took office last summer, he was probably hoping to have fun with things like broadband plans, spectrum reform, and other stuff that excites telecom geeks. But the Bush administration had left behind a surprise. Last week, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared that, thanks to Bush-era rulemakings, the FCC lacked many of the powers Genachowski needs to do his job. An alarmist, in fact, might see the decision as leveling the FCC almost as cleanly as an actual bomb would. The calmer view, however, is that the ruling doesn't really mean the death of net neutrality, the National Broadband Plan, spectrum reform, or the FCC itself. It's a pain, but mostly it sends Genachowski on a cleanup mission. The FCC is a delayed victim of Bush's Grover Norquist program.

Read the whole story at Slate

This is a serious set back for advocates of a completely open network. The success of the global internet as a force for positive change in the world, is severely impacted by this ruling. We can compare this decision to the recent actions by the Chinese government to control what flows over the internet in China. Political and economic progress demands an open and free public internet; carriers and governments that choose to close them selves off from the inevitability of this open network, will hurt themselves and the cause of progress. It looks like we will need some legislation on this front.

A federal appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. Tuesday's ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for the Comcast Corporation, the nation's largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC's authority to impose so called "net neutrality" obligations.

See the whole story at the New York Times

All of us use Google search, most of us use it multiple times every day. Some of us can't imagine how we got our work done before we had Google search. But how many of us know how use the 'power features' of Google? Google search can actually do far more sophisticated searches than most people ever attempt. By learning a few very simple techniques you can take advantage of the inner workings of the Google search engine and perform all kinds of advanced searches that will return what you are looking for faster and more reliably. For example:

Search exactly as is (+).
Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.

See more Google Search tricks here.

Google is proving to be much more than just a search engine. I think we all have learned to rely on Google for a variety of things that we used to do in much more cumbersome ways, but that we now do effortlessly with this amazing service. Here are some special Google features you may not know about that make things even easier. Trust me, some of these are amazing:

See the whole list of Special Google Features here

When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, due to come on stream in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. "What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data--and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level," says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. "Every day I wake up and ask, 'how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?" says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.

Read the whole story in The Economist

Finally we have a decisive take down of a criminal botnet. This was a highly orchestrated action that involved Micorsoft and leading researchers operating under the auspices of a court order. The botnet in question is now completely eliminated, and we have a marvelous technique for doing it again with a different offender. We should see more of this.

Four days ago, top-notch computer security researchers launched an assault on Waledac, a highly sophisticated botnet responsible for spreading spam and malicious software.

As of Thursday, more than 60,000 PCs worldwide that have been infected with malicious code are now under the control of researchers, marking the effort one of the most highly successful coordinated against organized cybercrime.

Read the whole story at InfoWorld

I'm suspicious. Google says that it wants easier access to renewable energy to power its operations. Sounds like a good political move, but I think there's something else going on. They are now a licensed electric utility! Google is simultaneously branching out into retail bandwidth delivery with their 100 mb per second network experiments and plans to operate as some kind of Super ISP in 50 urban and rural markets. Excuse me - rural markets? How are they going to do that? I think I know. With their electric utility license in their pocket and their ultra high speed delivery network aspirations, is Google zeroing in on a Broadband Over Power play?

Google has received federal approval to buy and sell energy on the open market, giving it more options for the way it powers its data centers and opening the door to a potential move into the energy-trading business.

Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved its application Thursday, granting Google "market-based rate authorization," or the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis.

Read the rest of the story at InfoWorld

There are many aspects of human stimulus response that are involuntary. Artists build paintings around involuntary visual responses, writers craft literature around our response to particular words and combinations of words, music is no different. Good art makes us experience what artists want us to. Advertising professionals have historically experimented with these same techniques in the hope that they can compel consumers to buy when prompted. The evidence is that it works.

If you're like most people, you're way too smart for advertising. You flip right past newspaper ads, never click on ads online and leave the room during TV commercials.

That, at least, is what we tell ourselves. But what we tell ourselves is hooey. Advertising works, which is why, even in hard economic times, Madison Avenue is a $34 billion--a--year business. And if Martin Lindstrom--author of the best seller Buyology and a marketing consultant for FORTUNE 500 companies, including PepsiCo and Disney--is correct, trying to tune this stuff out is about to get a whole lot harder.

Read the whole story at MartinLindstrom.com

If you're like me you've been waiting for this. This may not be a surprise but it will still be a nightmare for computer lugging travelers, and an expense for manufacturers and resellers trying to ship a laptop computer by air. Airline safety rules could make it very difficult and hugely expensive to transport lithium batteries by air.

Buying your next laptop computer or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move.

Airline passengers would be affected too, as rules banning spare lithium-ion batteries in checked-in luggage would also be extended to alkaline and nickel metal-hydride batteries...

Read the whole story at ComputerWorld

This is some of the best news we've seen on the security front in a long time. Security developers have created a system that that can map the physical location of computers infected with the malicious software, or malware, used to run botnets. Additionally it can identify the type of bot software on the infected machine and even pre-empt the next moves of the bot.

A TELESCOPE that can peer into the depths of the net to spot the gathering threat of a botnet could help combat cyber-attacks.

Botnets - networks of compromised computers that are controlled by someone with malicious intent - are an increasingly common feature of the internet. They can be used to flood a target website with useless data to bring it down, launch spam, or spy on computer users by looking for their banking logins and passwords.

To combat this threat, Endgame Systems of Atlanta, Georgia, has come up with a system, called the internet telescope, that can map the physical location of computers infected with the malicious software, or malware, used to run botnets. It can even identify the type of malware on the machine and pre-empt its next moves.

Read more at New Scientist

The Mobile/Social Internet is ramping faster than the original internet breakout, and will prove to be an even more disruptive factor in the global economy. Facebook is evolving into a unified communication platform and multimedia creation tool. Social Media is the new 'killer app' running on mobile.

Sounds like a sensationalistic headline, but if you read Morgan Stanley's latest series of reports on the Mobile Internet, you'll walk away with the same impression. Morgan Stanley's global technology and telecom analysts documented the rapidly changing mobile Internet market to provide a framework for emerging trends and direction. To set the stage, Morgan Stanley forecasts that the mobile Internet market will be at least 2x the size of desktop Internet when comparing Internet users to mobile subscribers.

According to the report, Apple's iTunes + iPhone/Touch ecosystem has created what "may prove to be the fastest ramping and most disruptive technology product / service launch the world has ever seen.

Read the whole story at Brian Solis PR2.0

Mobile messaging revenues worldwide are expected to grow to $233 billion in 2014, up from about $150 billion in 2009, according to a new forecast issued by Portio Research. Portio reports that global SMS traffic exceeded 5 trillion messages in 2009, a total expected to double by 2013--more than 4 billion subscribers have now embraced texting, the firm adds. In addition, MMS continues to grow, with full-year revenues for 2009 close to $27 billion worldwide (comparable to what SMS generated five years ago).

Despite the recent economic carnage experienced the World over during the last two years mobile messaging revenues continue to rise and the sector as a whole looks to be in excellent health. The appetite for mobile messaging continues unabated and is likely to be sustained for the foreseeable future. The new edition of the report, 'Mobile Messaging Futures 2010-2014', discusses the vast mobile messaging industry worldwide, currently generating revenues in excess of USD 150 billion, and set to continue growing to more than USD 233 billion by 2014.

Read more at Fierce Wireless

The Future is Here!

Conservatives like to talk about "free markets", and extrapolate for this principle that Verizon and AT&T should be left to price and limit the use of "their" networks as they see fit. Hey, free market competition will take care of everything...won't it? The evidence actually supports the opposite conclusion...Letting the big ISPs impose discriminatory pricing would actually stifle innovation, cripple content providers, and ultimately damage the broader economy. Conservatives who believe in "free markets" should be standing up for "net neutrality".

Without Net neutrality rules, new technologies could lead to pricing practices that transfer wealth from content providers to ISPs, a form of price discrimination that would reduce the return on investment for Internet content -- meaning Web site owners, bloggers, newspapers, and businesses would have less incentive to expand their sites and applications.

Read the whole story at InfoWorld.

The amazing thing about internet security is that while passwords are something that individuals have complete control over, they are, too often, treated completely casually. It tuns out that 20% of the time it is actually very easy to 'guess' your 'weak' password.

Let's see... here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I'll probably get into all of them.

Your partner, child, or pet's name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they're always making you use a number, aren't they?)
The last 4 digits of your social security number.
123 or 1234 or 123456.
"password"
Your city, or college, football team name.
Date of birth - yours, your partner's or your child's.
"god"
"letmein"
"money"
"love"

Read more at OneMansBlog

I've been accused of beating the issue of 'password security' to death over the years, but it continues to be a very serious problem, so I have to bring it up again. What is so hard to understand about this issue?

Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent attacks on Google's e-mail service, many people have reacted to the break-ins with a shrug...

Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used "123456" as a password. The second-most-popular password was "12345." Others in the top 20 included "qwerty," "abc123" and "princess."

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.

"We tend to think of password guessing as a very time-consuming attack in which I take each account and try a large number of name-and-password combinations," Mr. Shulman said. "The reality is that you can be very effective by choosing a small number of common passwords."

Read more at the NYTimes

The category is escalating its name for itself - from 'cell' phones, to 'mobile' phones, to 'smart' phones, and now 'super' phones. It seems like the term 'phone' is getting outdated. We need a new umbrella concept for this category.

Just when the world got familiar with the smartphone, the mobile phone community is starting to talk about the "superphone." Google dropped the superphone title on the general public when it launched its Nexus One phone on Tuesday. Now, at CES, industry analysts and others are describing any mobile phone with 1Ghz processors, or even phones with especially sophisticated design, hardware or software, a superphone.

Read the whole story at Computerworld

Add this to the debate about the "harmful" effects of cell phone exposure. New research provides evidence that cell phone use may actually protect against and even reverse Alzheimer's disease.

"It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer's symptoms," said lead author Gary Arendash, PhD, USF Research Professor at the Florida ADRC. "It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer's mice."

Read the whole story at Physorg.com

Ford definitely get's it! They're firing on all social media cylinders. They've made a huge commitment to social media, and it looks like it is really paying off. Ford is seriously 'listening' to customers. As a result sales are going great, they're profitable, and they are the only American car company that did not require a government bail out. Is it any wonder that they are able to make cars that people actually want to buy? CEO Alan Mulally even has his own Twitter account!

Ford Motor Co. this year will spend 25% of its marketing dollars on digital media, more than twice the amount spent by the industry.

According to J.D. Power, about 9% of spending this year by automakers will be digital, but that will rise to about 12% by 2012 as more companies embrace social networking, online gaming and rich media ads in place of traditional TV and print.

Speaking at J.D. Power's Internet Marketing Roundtable in Las Vegas today, Ford's chief marketing executive James Farley says the company has made a bigger digital and social media bet than rivals because, "If you are trying to communicate, as we are, that you have been reinventing the company , you can't just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other."

Ford is also adding tweets to its Sync in-car technology

Ford Motor Co. is adding Twitter messages andInternet radio to its in-car entertainment and communication service, known as Sync, and suggests that the voice-activated system is safer for drivers than trying to manipulate applications on their cell phones.

Ford definitely get's it! They're firing on all social media cylinders. They've made a huge commitment to social media, and it looks like it is really paying off. Ford is seriously 'listening' to customers. As a result sales are going great, they're profitable, and they are the only American car company that did not require a government bail out. Is it any wonder that they are able to make cars that people actually want to buy? CEO Alan Mulally even has his own Twitter account!

Ford Motor Co. this year will spend 25% of its marketing dollars on digital media, more than twice the amount spent by the industry.

According to J.D. Power, about 9% of spending this year by automakers will be digital, but that will rise to about 12% by 2012 as more companies embrace social networking, online gaming and rich media ads in place of traditional TV and print.

Speaking at J.D. Power's Internet Marketing Roundtable in Las Vegas today, Ford's chief marketing executive James Farley says the company has made a bigger digital and social media bet than rivals because, "If you are trying to communicate, as we are, that you have been reinventing the company , you can't just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other."

Ford is also adding tweets to its Sync in-car technology

Ford Motor Co. is adding Twitter messages andInternet radio to its in-car entertainment and communication service, known as Sync, and suggests that the voice-activated system is safer for drivers than trying to manipulate applications on their cell phones.

Just as Microsoft get's its security sorted out, the bad guys shift to the next most widely distributed software vendor - Adobe.

Adobe Systems' Flash and Acrobat Reader products will become the preferred targets for criminal hackers in 2010, surpassing Microsoft Office applications, a security vendor predicted this week.

"Cybercriminals have long picked on Microsoft products due to their popularity. In 2010, we anticipate Adobe software, especially Acrobat Reader and Flash, will take the top spot," security vendor McAfee said in its "2010 Threat Predictions" report

Read the rest of the story at ComputerWorld.

While it might seem hard to believe, the 'mobil revolution' promises to be faster and more wide spread than the general internet explosion of the last decade. As cell phones morph into "smart" phones and ultimately into hand held computers in the next few years, more and more people will be logging on to the internet with mobile data devices. The trend lines predict that by 2015j more people will access the web via mobile devices than from desktops.

"We believe Facebook has the potential to serve as a communications platform/engine of one-to-one, one-to-some and one-to-many (and visa versa) for the mobile Internet," Morgan Stanley says. "Facebook has already become a primary way for millions of people to stay connected and Facebook's lead is likely to be extended as more consumers use increasingly powerful mobile devices (with photo/video + high-speed access) and the communications options on Facebook (like voice/video chat and other services) continue to rise."

Read the whole story at FierceMobile

The trend is clear - mobile communication is growing at an astronomical rate, with no end in sight. Contributing greatly to the adoption of mobile technology is Twitter. Twitter use is up 3500% in the first half of 2009! Twitter status-updates offer uniquely compelling properties for social media raconteurs.

Microblogging site Twitter is having a positive effect on the number of consumers using their mobile phone to access the web, says research firm Novarra. Research by the internet mobility company revealed that page views of Twitter from handsets increased by 3500 percent in the first half of 2009. Novarra also said that page views of URTL shortening services bit.ly and tinyurl.com grew by 1,068 percent this year.

Read more at PCWorld

Is seems counterintuitive but, young people are not automatically attracted to Twitter. The average age of a Twitter user is 31. This statistic may be changing with time, but Twitter appears to be an example of an Internet application that skipped a generation and was adopted first by an older group.

They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is.

Even so, more young adults and teens - normally at the cutting edge of technology - are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140-character microblogging site.

Read the whole story at CBSNews.com

You may not think that Twitter is for you, or that it is very important in the larger scheme...but...
Titter is becoming a very big deal. The numbers alone make this an important phenomenon, and companies that are using it are seeing a positive impact on sales. The more you know about Twitter the more sense it starts to make. If nothing else, think of Twitter as a mechanism for broadcasting bookmarks, and links to cool stuff on the web. What's not to like?

Microblogging service Twitter topped the 5 billion tweet threshold earlier this week according to a counter posted on the GigaTweet website, which analyzes Twitter messages in real time. GigaTweet notes that Twitter is currently averaging about 23 million tweets per day, down from earlier in October, when users broke the 25 million per day benchmark. Mashable notes that the GigaTweet counter stood at 1.6 billion tweets as of April 2009, meaning Twitter users have posted about 3.4 billion tweets in just the last six months. Twitter currently boasts about 54 million users worldwide, and is valued at about $1 billion despite the absence of a discernible revenue model.

Read more at FierceMobile.com

The inverse of the 'strong' password is when you get tricked into 'voluntarily' giving away your password. The practice of extracting this information from unwilling victims has come to be known as "phishing", and it is a rampant problem on the net today. We've all seen these phishing attempts. But it's not just consumers that are falling for these tricks, it's major corporations and government organizations that are naively giving away their private information to 'phishers'. As many as 4 billion phishing e-mails are sent on the net every day.

The massive phishing scam broken up by federal authorities this week is only a hint at what many say is an insidious and growing problem on the Internet.

Federal authorities on Wednesday indicted 53 people in the U.S on various charges related to a phishing scheme that victimized thousands of customers of two major U.S. banks. Authorities in Egypt arrested another 47 people there on the same charges.

The bust, dubbed "Operation Phish Phry," was described by the FBI as the largest ever cyber-crime investigation and they held it up as a shining example of international cooperation in the realm of cybersecurity.

Read the whole story at ComputerWorld

Password security is a tremendously problematic area; it is without question the weakest link in your chain of defense against criminal access to your computer, your email, and your online assets. But it is really pretty easy to defend yourself on this front. See my earlier post about how to create really strong passwords - "Your weakest link", Oct 5th. Passwords are the one thing we each have very good control of; we should be able to make this an area where the bad guys are decisively blocked. Unfortunately many people completely dismiss their responsibility in this area and leave themselves wide open to the most trivial attacks.

1234567 may not be a very secure password, but it's popular on Hotmail.

That's according to Bogdan Calin, a security researcher who got hold of10,000 stolen Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords that were posted to the Web site PasteBin late last week.

Other Web mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL have also been hit by the phishers, according to the BBC, which reported that it had seen a total of 20,000 accounts, half of which were the same ones that Calin analyzed.

After taking a look at the passwords, the security researcher found that two very weak passwords -- 123456 and 123456789 -- were the most common ones used by the victims. Of the 9,843 valid passwords he found, 82 of them used one of these two combinations. 12345678, 1234567 and 111111 also made the top 10 most common passwords.

Read the whole article at ComputerWorld

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones? .....Bob Dylan

We've heard this before (starting with Radio, TV and Rock-and-Roll), new communications break-outs have always been accused of "rotting" our "brains", and as far as I can see, in hindsight, there has never been much to support these condemnations. Of course our 'brains' have the potential to 'rot' for a wide variety of reasons, most notably due to addictive behavior. And addiction is potential in any activity that is practiced in excess. Twitter is just the most recent human activity to reach the level of intense engagement that we can see becoming an excessive and addictive practice for 'some' individuals. There is no question that some people have become addicted to Twittering, but I'm not sure that this makes Twitter a fundamentally damaging activity. Instead, I think that the net's often excessive enthusiasm about Twitter just highlights the tremendous power and significance of this new medium. As with other such cultural break-outs, the reality is far more interesting than the critique. None-the-less, a Twitter Backlash is growing.

Dr. Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, claims that his research shows that using Twitter "diminishes intelligence." Specifically, she says that it weakens "working memory," which is the ability to remember information and to subsequently use it. Dr. Alloway also claims that working memory is far more important to success and happiness than one's IQ measurement.

See: the Twitter Backlash Journal

Read more about Twitter hating: Twitter haters and why they hate

Think you're secure? Think again. Have you tested your important passwords to see if they pass minimum security standards? The likely hood is that your passwords are not as good as they could be, or should be, to protect your data. Here's a great little tool that will guide you to better passwords:

The Password Meter

I tested my current set of passwords and was surprised to learn that they were far from good enough for today's security environment. Minimum security standards are changing fast. The passwords I used to use, only a couple of years ago, are now judged by "The Password Meter" to be completely worthless against a determined attacker.

Let's be honest, passwords are annoying. These days, we need a password or PIN everywhere. We have so many that we can't keep track of them all. We forget to update them; and when we do, it's difficult to come up with effective ones that we can still remember, so we procrastinate changing them for months, even years. We all know this is bad, but the alternative - the painful, irritating password creation and memorization process - is sometimes more than we can tolerate. There is hope! Passwords don't have to be complex cryptograms. A few simple methods can help make living with passwords a little easier.

Read the rest of this article at SecurityFocus.com

Most of us were raised on mass market advertising that intruded on our lives, and irritatingly badgered us with messages about products that we were generally not interested in. But in a world where 'everyone' watched prime time TV, classic mass marketing was actually effective and efficient. Today we simply won't stand for these kinds of approaches; it's all too easy for us to 'Tivo' out the TV commercials. And of course we switch channels like crazy; with hundreds of channels on TV, and even more video on the net, there are no 'captive' video audiences anymore. Advertising is way beyond 'simple TV' now; to reach consumers today we have to go 'broadband' and multi-media.

Integrated advertising strategies driven by a promotional idea that creates consumer engagement are increasingly being recognized as essential for success. The power of promotions to cut through clutter and capture interest and attention is also beginning to blur the line between advertising and promotional marketing strategies. Increasingly, these two separate budgets are being considered as part of one single integrated strategy, with digital technologies and media being used together with traditional media channels. This trend will become even more dominant as digital consumers -- brought up in the online world -- do not consider advertisements a mandatory part of their media experience.

Read the whole article at Team Digital

Social media is rapidly becoming an important component of almost every enterprise's marketing efforts. As expected, businesses are now trying to measure the ROI of these efforts, but they are having to adjust to entirely new metrics:

"If you're using the available mainstream social media that you don't have to serve, host or secure, then you're talking about a number of different value drivers," ... "And when you look at the value of conversations with people, then you can ask whether you can spend less time in a 140-character tweet versus a 15-minute conversation on the phone. So we're beginning to measure that: Is it a less costly service channel than phone or e-mail, and is it preferred?"

Read more at ComputerWorld - What's Your Twitter ROI?

If you've been fretting about how quickly you'll get an ultra-fast 'fiber' connection from the internet to your home, it may be time to relax and shift focus. Mobile connectivity may be more important to your future than fixed bandwidth delivered via 'fiber to the home' (FFTH) can ever be. A growing body of communication industry trends and indicators is adding up to a clear picture of our internet supercharged future, a future where the key to personal and professional success lies not how much total bandwidth you have at your desk, but rather in how much practical internet functionality you can take with you everywhere you go. From ultra portable handheld computers like iPhones, Blackberrys and now netbooks, to rapidly evolving high speed wireless protocols like 3g, 4g, LTE and WiMax, all the signs point to 'mobility' as the defining feature of our internet future; a future where 5 Mb/second of bandwidth in your hand may well be worth more to you than 50 Mb/second of bandwidth at your desk.

Read the whole story at Telephony Online

In time everyone will have one of these in their kitchen, and it will fabricate literally anything you want. Need a new pair of sun glasses? Just make a new pair before you go out. Need a ball point pen. Just make one. These machines will eventually be able to make ANYTHING and EVERYTHING; just tell your "replicator" to go on line and download the blueprint for what ever you want to make. Talk about bringing manufacturing back home... Imagine the year 2020 iTunes online catalog with a section that includes 'objects' you can download and fabricate at home for 99 cents each.

See the video

For a wonderful novel about a world in which 'fabricators' are commonplace, read: Neil Stevenson's "Diamond Age"

Online sales are expected to grow by a mere 11% in 2009. This is a decline from 13% growth in 2008. Given the horrendous declines in other areas of the economy this is not too bad. Growth, after all, is lots better than no growth, and dramatically better than negative growth.

According to Forrester Research's five-year e-commerce forecast, e-commerce in the United States will climb back to last year's levels by 2010. The reasons: the new president, the government's plan to stimulate the economy and the fact that recessions rarely last more than one year.

Read the rest of the story...

New York Times regular contributor David Pogue had mixed feelings about the utility of Twitter, until he tried a little experiment. In the middle of a live presentation he was giving at a conference on Web 2.0 in Las Vegas this week, he decided to test Twitter, on the big screen at the front of the ballroom, by asking for some help from his twittering followers. The results are hilarious and fascinating. Twitter is turning out to be a marvelous way to communicate, and not at all as silly and trivial as its name suggests.

Read the whole story at the New York Times

Clients generally have an abysmal understanding of what constitutes "usable art" for their various graphic design projects (like web sites and printed brochures). Most people tend to think of digital versions of logos, photos, drawings, and illustrations as an undifferentiated category of 'visual stuff' without a great deal of thought about how different kinds of digital images can be functionally different from each other, or how those differences apply to their particular graphic design projects.

"Why can't we use a logo from my web site on my business card? How can a single graphic look great on the web, and look completely terrible on a printed page? What's going on here? Clients are understandably mystified by things like this.

Designers, on the other hand, know full well that their success in bringing a project to completion will depend critically on their ability to sort through the various image type and quality issues and secure the right digital image type, with sufficient digital resolution, for each application. The catch is that clients are often the gatekeepers to the required image assets, so, for designers, educating clients about fundamental image quality issues will often be a prerequisite to acquiring the 'best' art for the job.

Here's a great little video that explores, in layman's terms, the difference between Pixels and Vectors. You've probably heard of pixels, but what are vectors? This is a major area of public misunderstanding about digital graphics. The bottom line: understanding the difference between Pixels and Vectors will make conversations with your designer a lot easier, and it could easily save you time and money on your next graphic design project.

See the video at MacMerc.com

This is comforting, now we learn that the "Downadup" worm is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. The people who created this disaster-waiting-to-happen are expert programmers with a great deal of experience writing malware. We can see the detail of their skill in the code they have turned loose on the web, but we still don't know what this thing is supposed to do. And apparently these criminals are looking over their shoulders for other bad guys who would like to steal their wonderful new botnet.

The worm that has infected millions of Windows PCs is a "very well-engineered" piece of malware, according to one security expert. But researchers still have no clear idea what the hackers plan to do with the collection of computers they've compromised with "Downadup."

"This is a very well-engineered piece of software," said Alfred Huger, vice president of development at Symantec Corp.'s security response group. "It's very well thought out. Whoever wrote it, it's not their first time writing malware. It looks as if the author has had a great deal of experience writing software, and is fully versed in writing network-level code."

Read more at Computerworld

Showing their intense awareness of the need to control and leverage the internet presence of the President and the White House, the Obama team took control of Whitehouse.gov within seconds of the swearing in ceremony. Whitehouse.gov will provide information for Americans who are hungry for information about the new administration's plans. And as we might expect, the White House site is already the theme of a multitude of malicious pretender web sites that will take visitors to virtual replicas of the official site where they will be quickly infected with malware.

Obama Quickly Takes Over White House Site

President Barack Obama's transition team wasted little time taking over the White House Web site, switching over from former President Bush's site within seconds of Obama's swearing in. The first post to the site was from Macon Phillips, the director of New Media for the White House, who wrote, "Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov."

Read the whole article at Eweek.com

Visit the official White House web site

Malicious Sites with Fake Obama News Infect Users with Malware

Spammers are luring victims to a malicious site with false reports by President-elect Barack Obama. The spam is being sent out by the Waledac botnet, which security researchers say is a reincarnation of the infamous Storm botnet.
It should come as little surprise that spammers are taking advantage of interest in Barack Obama, who is slated to be officially sworn in as the United State's 44th president today.

In the past few days, security vendors have reported spam with links to malicious Web sites. Clicking on the link will take users to a virtual replica of Obama's official site, except this one tries to infect visitors with variants of the Waledac Trojan.

Read the whole article at Eweek

It's been nearly two months since the Downadup worm hit the streets and the number of infected computers is growing rapidly. While there is no way of knowing for sure, some members of the security community are claiming that 9 million computers have been compromised. This is definitely a botnet ploy but no one seems to know what the botnet is for. Once again, this threat only applies to Windows computers, but it infects virtually ALL Windows computers, and it does so by spreading via a wide variety of mechanisms. This is a very nasty threat that should be a concern to all Windows users and to all system administrators.

Downadup is downright nasty. And that's even before it does much more than just spread.

But as analysts argue about how the compromised computers will be used -- to build a massive, new botnet, perhaps -- or how much information hackers will steal from infected machines, users like you have a more immediate concern: "How do I keep my PC from joining the ranks of the hacked?"

That's a simple question. Unfortunately, because of this worm's flexibility, the answers aren't.

What's the worm again? Thanks to the lack of an industry-wide labeling system, the worm goes by more than one name. Some companies dub it "Downadup," others call it "Conficker."

No matter the name, it's the same threat.

Read the whole story at ComputerWorld

We've been hearing about the eventual shift to solid state storage for years, but now it really seems to be happening. Soon we won't have hard drives in our lap tops; we'll use chips like the ones we use in our cameras for storage. The math is pretty clear: Flash memory like the kind need to create solid state storage devices (SSD's) is coming down in price (because of Moores's Law) at a rate of 60% per year. A Gigabyte of SSD costs between $2 and $3.50 today. A Gigabyte of hard drive costs 38¢ today. In two or three years the cost of the SSD will be less than the hard drive of the same capacity. The fun is that SSD's will deliver speed improvements of that could immediately double or even triple the speed of internal data storage; this will change a lot of things. You lap top will be lighter, faster, and much more rugged... it will also get thinner. It's all good!

As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

By making the drive part of a system's core architecture -- instead of a peripheral device -- data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat.

"Instead of using a SATA interface, let's break that and instead of making it look like a disk drive, let's make it look like part of the memory hierarchy," McGregor said. "Obviously, if you break down that interface, you get more performance."

Read the whole article in ComputerWorld

We trust each other more than we trust producers and advertisers. In the age of information overload, and overwhelming market choice, consumers are looking for 'authentic' reports from peers to help them make purchasing decisions. While we have long been warned to be careful when we get information from the web, that such information has not been vetted and proven to be true, blogs are nonetheless growing in stature as a trusted source of 'truth' in the marketplace.

While the rise of blog readership in recent years is no secret, the power of blogs to influence what people buy is less established. But as a recent study reveals, that power is significant -- so much that a majority of blog readers say blogs are useful when they make purchases.

The study, which polled 2,210 people and was released this fall, found that the increase in blog readership from 2004 to 2008 was 300 percent; 47 percent of online consumers now read blogs. Half of blog readers said blogs were useful when they were considering what purchases to make, and more than half of that group said they looked at a blog just when they were about to buy something.

Read more of this story

With young people everywhere eschewing fixed lines and going 100% cellular for their primary phone service, it's not much of a stretch to imagine that these same people will want to use the next generation of mobile data devices to surf the web while they are moving around. Mobility is the next "big thing".

Most consumers will be accessing the Web through their mobile phones by 2020, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Pew conducted surveys with about 1,200 online experts, journalists and technologists, and the majority predicted that the affordability, easy accessibility, widespread use and portability of mobile phones will make them the "primary" Internet connection.

http://www.adotas.com/2008/12/report-most-will-access-net-via-phone-by-2020/

A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.

They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/270/report_display.asp

Thanksgiving this year will bring us a momentary break from the relentlessly bad economic news and a pause before we see what happens on Black Friday. By all accounts retail is going to take a beating this year, and friday, normally the busiest shopping day of the year, will present a grim preview of our holiday retail season. An interesting bright spot in all the gloom is the growing consensus that mobil technology in the form of smart phones will escape the grim economic picture and enjoy strong holiday sales. People may be cutting back on their land line subscriptions but there's no let up in the upward trend in cell subscriptions. Mobile data is fast becoming the place to be for advertisers.

Subscriptions including broadband Internet access, mobile phone plans, pay-TV and content subscriptions such as Netflix are the most insulated from the economic downturn. 63% of respondents expect their spending to be about the same next year as it was this past year, and 9% plan to spend even more. Only 28% plan to spend less on network subscriptions.

Read the whole article

A stunning prediction from my friend Tom Evslin. Tom knows more about telecom issues and technology than anyone I know.

By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country. One of the challenges facing the Federal Communications Commission and the new administration is how to deal with the fallout from the end of this venerable technology. It's gonna get ugly for some people - people who can't afford to do without communication - unless we're proactive about this problem.

Here's what's happening as you probably know. Young people don't bother with landlines (unless they live beyond cell coverage); they just use their mobile phones or Skype for voice communication. The slightly older set are buying cable's bundle of entertainment, Internet access, and VoIP. They cancel their landlines. People who have broadband access don't need the extra line they used to rent for their dial-up Internet access.

Read the rest of this article

Google is rolling out video and voice capabilities for the chat function that is embedded in the Gmail interface. It's a bare-bones voice and video-conferencing service, but it's simple to install and use and is a very good addition to Gmail.

It's no Skype, though. Gmail Video and Voice, as it's called, can't connect to the plain phone network, as Skype's paid service can. And there are plenty of other optional features missing, like a voice call recorder.

I found a demo of voice and video quality on the service excellent, although to be fair I was connected from CNET's corporate network to someone at the Google campus. I do expect Gmail Video quality to be a bit more consistent than Skype, since unlike the point-to-point architecture of Skype, Gmail Video traffic all runs through Google servers. I expect that Google has the bandwidth and server capacity needed.

Read the whole article

Does this mean that Google can search phone conversations that we make with their new gMail VOIP functionality?

Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company's search software for the Apple iPhone.

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like "Where's the nearest Starbucks?" or "How tall is Mount Everest?" The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google's servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

Read the whole article

While the relief may only be temporary, this incident nicely illustrates the nature of the criminal spam business. It only take s few of these bot hosting networks to generate significant fractions of the total volume of spam on the net.

Spam plummets after Calif. hosting service shuttered. Despite 41% drop, respite likely just temporary.

Spam volumes plunged by more than 40% after a major bot hosting network was shut down, researchers at IronPort Systems Inc. said today. On Tuesday, McColo Corp. was kicked offline when its primary Internet providers severed its connection to the Web, reported The Washington Post, which led an investigation of the San Jose-based hosting service. According to the newspaper, McColo's clients included cybercriminal groups that ran some of the biggest spam-spewing and malware-spreading botnets.

Read the whole story

Google Suggest is a feature that analyzes what you're typing into the search box and offers relevant suggested search terms in real time. You can choose one of the suggested queries by moving up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.

This is an important consideration for advertisers who thrive on less popular keywords. When Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) first introduced AdWords in the early 2000s, it was very cost effective to secure the most popular keywords and drive quality traffic to your site. As advertisers became more sophisticated, however, competition for those most popular keywords increased dramatically.

Read the whole article

With no end to the overall Botnet threat in sight, industry and government agents say that they are making some progress in identifying and prosecuting criminal Botnet Herders. Microsoft says they are tracking 1000 botnets at any given time, each of which can have literally tens of thousands of compromised computers in its nefarious control. It takes about 30 seconds for a brand new 'unprotected' Windows computer to become compromised after it is attached to the internet for the first time.

Botnet attacks now come with their own antivirus software, permitting the programs to take over a computer and then effectively remove other malware competitors. Mr. Campana said the Microsoft investigators were amazed recently to find a botnet that turned on the Microsoft Windows Update feature after taking over a computer, to defend its host from an invasion of competing infections.

Botnets have evolved quickly to make detection more difficult. During the last year botnets began using a technique called fast-flux, which involved generating a rapidly changing set of Internet addresses to make the botnet more difficult to locate and disrupt.

Read the whole article

Gartner says smartphone sales to women doubled last year, and that these sales figures continue top grow at a faster rate than among men. We've known for some time that Japanese teenage girls were the most aggressive users of state of the art mobile communication devices in the world. We should not be surprised that western women would eventually discover the social and community enhancing powers of mobile technology. Mobile tech is simply not about geeks anymore, it's about community; having something to contribute, a need to participate, things to say, and to learn from each other. Clearly women have something powerful to bring to the table in this area.

In general, women may not be the earliest adopters of new gadgets or technology, this is true. However, as a New York Times article by Laura M. Holson tells us, that doesn't mean women haven't been scoping out the scene the whole time, waiting for their perfect moment to buy. They are experienced shoppers, and when they do go to make that purchase - they've already done all the research and will quickly become their new tech gadget's biggest fan!

Read more

Sales of "smart" phones doubled in North America in the first quarter, outstripping the category's growth in the rest of the world, research firm Gartner, quoted by an Associated Press report, said.

Read more

In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends.

Read more

After years of hype the mobile advertising medium is starting to gain real momentum. Advertisers who are willing to invest in customizing their messages for this new medium are gaining real advantage in their markets, particularly with localization. The future belongs to mobil devices; if you doubt this just look at what your kids and their friends are doing with cell phones; the small size of the screen is no impediment to this group.

The differences between advertising on the mobile Internet and the PC-based Internet are due to the physical differences between the devices -- most notably the limited size of the interface, which creates new user habits and necessitates innovative approaches for those advertising on the mobile screen. This may seem obvious, but advertisers who recognize how to turn these differences to their advantage are far ahead of the game in mobile advertising.

Read the rest of the story at Adotas

If you have Flash on your web site you know how huge this development really is.

In a move that could add substantial volumes of Flash content to Internet search results, Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to provide optimized Flash Player technology to enhance the searching of this content. The project, being announced Tuesday, will enable searches on Flash content to return text and links, which can then be indexed, said Justin Everett-Church, Adobe senior product manager for the Flash Player. Content from a Flash application or even a game or advertisement will be available to search engines. Pages containing a Flash .SWF file will be returned in a search.

Read the whole article in InfoWorld

Here's more evidence that we're going to be pushing more an more web content and web applications onto mobile devices; eventually everything will be delivered to small mobile devices that are decedents of your cell phone. The future belongs to the wirelessly connected "pocket computer", not the tethered desktop, or even the laptop computer.

Your laptop is likely to soon go the way of 5.25-in. floppy disks, made obsolete by smaller, more useful technology: the smart phone. Based on current trends for low-power chips used in devices like cell phones and iPods , we're likely to see eight times the CPU power in handheld devices by 2010 that we have today... The progress behind such advances isn't the overall boost in processing capabilities seen under Moore's Law (doubling the density of transistors on a chip every two years), Cockcroft said, but the increasing robustness of low-power chips and devices that use them. In other words: handhelds are advancing faster than laptops. For example, laptop memory capacity typically doubles every two years, while pocket devices are seeing such doubling annually.

Read the whole article at ComputerWorld.com

Imagine that you are traveling in an unfamiliar area and you need to know where to find a public rest room; or you need to locate a store that sells AA batteries. Or imagine that you would like to know if any of your friends are within a few blocks of you, so you can arrange a lunch get together. Or imagine that you are trying to figure out what that land mark building on your right is, as you drive from the airport into an unfamiliar city. By now we are all aware of in-car GPS devices that offer driving directions, but very soon, building on increasingly cheap and ubiquitous GPS technology, we will be immersed in a flood of amazing new 'location aware' services that will be deployed over GPS enabled smart phones. Not only will we always know where we are, but we'll always know where everyone else is as well.

With the imminent availability of the iPhone 3G, we're seeing the emergence of a new category of personal productivity applications that will prove as important as e-mail, word processing, and the spreadsheet: Location-aware applications, software that knows where you are and helps you take better advantage of what's around you.

Read the whole article

As mobile data becomes ubiquitous and wireless connection speeds climb higher and higher, the boundary between desktop and handheld is blurring more and more. Your cell phone is morphing into a mobile computer with an interface to the global network; an interface that is becoming as capable as your desktop connection. Combining this capability with social networking will usher in an explosion of localized personal social communication services that will reach deeply into all aspects of our lives.

Mobile social networks are quite popular with the Millennial generation, just as social networking is, reports In-Stat http://www.in-stat.com . Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, the high-tech market research firm says. The mobile handset will simply become an extension of the user in most aspects of life.

Read the whole article

Google is at it again. This time they're layering global news items on top of their magnificent Google Earth application. Bucky Fuller would have loved this; he predicted just such an interface to global data in 1962 with his fantastic Geoscope concept in his book Education Automation. This idea sounded impossibly far out in 1962, but Google is actually doing it! Google is building the Geoscope!

This brings some new meaning to the idea of local news: Google has added a new layer to Google Earth that shows Google News related to the area shown on the screen. The search company announced the addition on its Lat Long blog about geographic matters. Google Earth now can show Google News.

"By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide,"

Read the Google Earth mashup story at CNET

Bucky Fuller describing the Geoscope in 1962:

"This giant sphere is a miniature earth. Its entire exterior and interior surfaces will be covered with closely-packed electric bulbs, each with variable intensity controls. The lighting of the bulbs is scanningly controlled through an electric computer...

All world data would be dynamically viewable and picturable and relayable by radio to all the world, so that common consideration in a most educated manner of all world problems by all world people would become a practical event."

Education Automation - R. Buckminster Fuller, 1962

This report explores the ethical dilemma encountered by researchers who successfully cracked one of the largest and most prolific robot spam networks on the internet. What do you do when you successfully manage to take over an evil spam empire; do you just turn it off? What do you become liable for if your "good deeds" have unintended consequences?

Researchers seize control of one of the world's largest spam-spewing botnets, but there is disagreement about what should happen next. Researchers at TippingPoint Technologies' Digital Vaccine Laboratories have found a way to infiltrate and seize control of one of the world's largest spam-spewing botnets, a breakthrough that has ignited an intense debate over the ethics of "cleaning" infected computers.

Read the whole article

Accessing the internet from smart phones and mobile devices is changing the game. While we have been watching for this development for some time, it appears that the necessary technical infrastructure is finally matching up with an audience in the marketplace. The mobil web is about to explode; is your web site 'mobile ready'?

The Nielsen Company today reported that mobile Internet extends the audience reach of many leading Internet sites by an average of 13 percent over home PC traffic alone. For some categories, such as weather and entertainment, the extended reach can be even greater. Nielsen's data show that for many Internet publishers, mobile Internet increases the overall size of their audience.

Read the whole story.

As marketers scramble to figure out how to effectively spend suddenly smaller advertising budgets in an increasingly competitive marketplace, social media has become the hot platform for brand building, and "motivating consideration".

The looming economic downturn will inevitably lead to a decrease in ad spending, but marketers are likely to continue shifting money into social media, according to a new study. According to the Forrester Research report, marketer moves into areas like word of mouth, blogging and social networking will withstand tightened budgets. In contrast, marketers are likely to decrease spending in traditional media and even online vehicles geared to building brand awareness.

Those findings stand in contrast to the previous economic downturn, when spending on Internet advertising cratered as marketers turned to tried-and-true media.

Read the Article in AdWeek

In a sure sign that they have achieved success in the marketplace, Firefox and Safari have finally become the target focused hacker exploits. After years of flying under the radar this is a new and unwelcome note of celebrity for browsers that were previously touted as safe alternatives to MS Explorer.

Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys.

Case in point: We have no IE bugs to report this month, but both Firefox and Safari have been hit hard.

So forget the idea that just because you've switched to a new browser, you're magically safer. You may be for a time, but to stay safe with any software, you need to keep current with fixes.

Read the Article in Inforworld

Consumers are increasingly using web applications across the Internet. Google is the leader of this trend, with email, word processing, spreadsheet, and calendar functionality. Data is not stored locally, on each computer, but in large "server farms" operated by Google. What are the implications of this transition? Nicholas Carr makes an analogy to the development of the electrical grid 100 years ago.

Cheap, plentiful electricity changed society and culture, spurring the rise of mass media, mass consumerism and modern advertising. We can expect that cheap, plentiful computing will have similarly far-reaching consequences, once again overturning many of our assumptions about how we work and live.

What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast, by Nicholas Carr