WillisCreative.Com

via “Facebook privacy hole ‘lets you see where strangers plan to go’” at guardian.co.uk:

Facebook’s new system for connecting together the web seems to have a serious privacy hole, a web developer has discovered.

Some people report that they are able to see the public “events” that Facebook users have said they will attend – even if they person is not a “friend” on the social network.

The discovery was made by Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer for the charitable arm of Google, who was trying out the search query system known as the “Graph API” released by Facebook last Friday. In some cases – though not all – it will let you see the public events that people have said they will attend, or have attended.

Yee demonstrated the flaw by showing how the API – which plugs directly into Facebook’s databases – can show you a list of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s planned public events. Read more

See Ka-Ping Yee’s website.

Is Social Media a Fad? Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?  Welcome to the Social Media Revolution by Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics. Read a rough transcript of  stats in the video with sources as of April 2009.

This could be the St. Crispin’s Day speech of the Digital Millennium. Hear him! Cory Doctorow via guardian.co.uk:

Digital Economy Act: This means war

With the rushed passage into law of the Digital Economy Act this month, the fight over copyright enters a new phase. Previous to this, most copyfighters operated under the rubric that a negotiated peace was possible between the thrashing entertainment giants and civil society.

But now that the BPI and its mates have won themselves the finest law that money can buy – a law that establishes an unprecedented realm of web censorship in Britain, a law that provides for the disconnection of entire families from the net on the say-so of an entertainment giant, a law that shuts down free Wi-Fi hotspots and makes it harder than ever to conduct your normal business on the grounds that you might be damaging theirs – the game has changed.

I came to the copyfight from a pretty parochial place. As a working artist, I wanted a set of just copyright rules that provided a sound framework for my negotiations with big publishers, film studios, and similar institutions. I worried that the expansion of copyright – in duration and scope – would harm my ability to freely create. After all, creators are the most active re-users of copyright, each one of us a remix factory and a one-person archive of inspirational and influential materials. I also worried that giving the incumbent giants control over the new online distribution system would artificially extend their stranglehold over creators. This stranglehold means that practically every media giant offers the same awful terms to all of us, and no kinder competitor can get our works into the hands of our audiences.

I still worry about that stuff, of course. I co-founded a successful business – Boing Boing, the widely-read website – that benefits enormously from not having to pay fealty to a distributor in order to reach its readers (by contrast, the old print edition of Boing Boing folded when its main distributor went bankrupt while owing it a modest fortune and holding onto thousands of dollars’ worth of printed materials that we never got back). My novels find their way onto the bestseller list by being distributed for free from my website simultaneous with their mainstream bookstore sales through publishers like Macmillan and HarperCollins and Random House.

My whole life revolves around the digital economy: running entrepreneurial businesses that thrive on copying and that exploit the net’s powerful efficiencies to realise a better return on investment.

Parliament has just given two fingers to me (and every other small/medium digital enterprise) by agreeing to cripple Britain’s internet in order to give higher profits to the analogue economy represented by the labels and studios.

But today, my bank-balance is the least of my worries. The entertainment industry’s willingness to use parliament todi impose censorship and arbitrary punishment in the course of chasing a few extra quid is so depraved and terrible that it has me in fear for the very underpinnings of democracy and civil society.

In the US, the MPAA and RIAA (American equivalents of the MPA and the BPI) just submitted comments to the American Intellectual Property Czar, Victoria Espinel, laying out their proposal for IP enforcement. They want us all to install spyware on our computers that deletes material that it identifies as infringing. They want our networks censored by national firewalls (U2′s Bono also called for this in a New York Times editorial, averring that if the Chinese could control dissident information with censorware, our own governments could deploy similar technology to keep infringement at bay). They want border-searches of laptops, personal media players and thumb-drives.

They want poor countries bullied into diverting GDP from humanitarian causes to enforcing copyright. And they want their domestic copyright enforcement handled, free of charge, by the Department of Homeland Security.

Elements of this agenda are also on display (or rather, in hiding) in the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty being drafted between a member’s club of rich nations. They’ve turned their back on the United Nations to negotiate in private, without having to contend with journalists or public interest groups. By their own admission, they intend to impose this treaty on poor countries as a condition of ongoing trade, and in the US, the Obama administration has announced its intention to pass ACTA without Congressional debate.

I’m not such a techno-triumphalist that I believe that the free and open internet will solve all our socio-economic problems. But I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

Chekhov wrote that a gun on the mantelpiece in act one is sure to go off by act three. The entertainment industry’s blinkered pursuit of its own narrow goals has the potential to redesign our technology to be the perfect tools and excuses for oppression.

On the Media produced two radio stories documenting the significance of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995.

Suspicious Minds: “In the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing 15 years ago, both media and law enforcement leaped to the conclusion that the attack must have come from Islamic terrorists. As a result, Oklahoma City’s Muslim population underwent a crisis. Why were they under suspicion? Had one of them done it? Reporter Scott Gurian looks at the ongoing impact of that misguided rush to judgment.”

Killing by the Numbers: “Since the “shot heard round the world” rang out on April 19th, 1775, the date of April 19th and/or April 20th have been imbued with significance. From Hitler’s birth to the killings at Waco, Columbine and Oklahoma City, each event echoes or evokes the anniversary of the last. Bob Garfield  and Brooke Gladstone weigh in on the numerology of terror.”

Follow the links for transcripts.

Via Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb:

The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization’s offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big. Read more.

Marshall concludes:

It’s hard to imagine a more significant milepost in social media’s early march toward becoming an essential component of our social experience.

The Library of Congress used a tweet to announce its acquisition of the complete Twitter archive:

via Spreading Digital Revolution In A Cuban Living Room : NPR:

Twice a week, Yoani Sanchez transforms the living room of her small Havana high-rise apartment into what she calls the Blogger Academy. About 30 students cram inside to learn how to use WordPress, Wikipedia and the other tools of a digital revolution that Cuba's government views warily.

The small group of young Cuban bloggers has drawn international attention to their campaign for greater freedom of expression and Internet access. The government treats them as a security threat, backed by anti-Castro forces abroad.

… Sanchez’s blog, Generation Y, is political, but not with the kind of overheated rhetoric that has characterized the Cuba debate for so long. It’s earned her several international awards, and though the blog is blocked on the island by the Cuban government, it’s accessible through third-party Web sites.

Because she isn’t allowed to have an Internet connection, Sanchez says, she writes her blog from home, then goes to tourist hotels and e-mails several postings at a time to friends abroad who run the blog for her. They send back reader comments, which often number in the thousands.

In This Week in Google #35, Leo Laporte says the Constitution’s second amendment should be amended to protect the right to bear data, not arms, to defend us against tyranny. TWIG 35 opens with a wide-ranging discussion of Intranet freedom and censorship following Google’s decision to pull out of China.

Talking heads this week are Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani, and Kevin Marks. See the show notes and Friendfeed links. Topics discussed include:

• Google Blog: A new approach to China
• In response to new rules, GoDaddy to stop registering domain names in China
• China, the Internet and Google: Rebecca MacKinnon’s Congressional testimony
• A Bill of Rights in Cyberspace
• How China’s internet generation broke the silence
• So Awkward: Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt’s Body Language Analyzed
• Google Nexus One outsells iPhone: perhaps because everyone has an iPhone already?
• Apple says new iPad orders won’t ship till April 12th
• WSJ iPad Pricing Leaked
• For The Media Business, The iPad In 2010 Is The Same As The CD-ROM In 1994
• Rupert Murdoch’s pathetic paywall

TWIT live stream | TWIT Channel on YouTube | TWIG 35 permalink

When I started out in the university communication biz 25 years ago, you had to buy satellite time (remember all those transponder coordinates?) to deliver a video news release (VNR). That cost was above and beyond the cost of producing the video. Today delivering a VNR is as simple as giving away the video embed code on a website. Here’s an impressive example produced by Washington University School of Medicine, which I fetched via an NIH news release embargoed until just an hour ago.

Here’s part of the NIH news release:

An international research consortium has identified more than 800 genes that appear to play a role in the male zebra finch’s ability to learn elaborate songs from his father. The researchers also found evidence that song behavior engages complex gene regulatory networks within the brain of the songbird — networks that rely on parts of the genome once considered junk.

The zebra finch genome sequence and analysis published in the April 1 issue of the journal Nature was funded in part by the National Human Genome Research Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health.

“By comparing the finch genome with the human genome, we should now be able to expand our understanding of learned vocalization in humans. Such information may help researchers who are striving to develop new ways to diagnose and treat communication disorders, such as stuttering and autism,” said NHGRI Director Eric D. Green, M.D., Ph.D.

The zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), which derives its name from the black-and-white stripes on the male finch’s throat, serves as a valuable model for studying human speech, communication and neurological disorders. The finch is the first songbird — and the second bird, after the chicken — to have its genome sequenced. Read more.

My inbox gets scores of pitch emails from the education support industry. Truth be told, I seldom read them. This one was an exception due to the topic (using Facebook for institutional development) and the product (an online seminar). It’s far too long for an email pitch, in my opinion, and I want to know the price up front, not at after scrolling to the end.

Dear  Mark T Willis,

For those looking for the latest and greatest tips, tools, and techniques to make the most of Facebook in your alumni and development efforts, there will be a live, 60-minute Webinar:

“Latest Facebook Tools Tips, & Apps to Connect with Alumni & Donors” Wednesday, April 14, 2010 – 1:00 – 2:00 PM (ET)

http://www.higheredpro.com/W2/0/2/p3JDTNc/p4G8WT6Gi/p0e

Chances are you already know that Facebook is a powerful platform to get your college’s events and messages in front of alumni and donors quickly and inexpensively.  As more schools invest in Facebook they learn new and more creative ways to use it to their advantage.  Not to mention all the new apps Facebook adds regularly.  Join us for a 60 minute webinar where you and your colleagues will discover:

**   The latest & greatest ways to utilize Facebook for alumni & development
**   Apps, Ads, Causes, & Fan Pages: New Ways to Connect Alumni & Donors
**   How to integrate the latest Facebook tools into your existing strategy
**   Examples of how Facebook is being used by alumni & development today

Devin T. Mathias has spent over ten years in the development field, most recently serving as vice president of benchmarking, philanthropic analytics with Grenzebach Glier and Associates. In this role, he developed and refined benchmarking products and services. He also worked to reconstruct the firm’s outlook on broad-based development and annual giving efforts, relative to report generation, program analysis and benchmarking opportunities. Clients with which he was directly engaged included the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Duke University, University of Florida, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.

**   Before joining GG+A, Devin spent three years as director of annual giving at the University of Michigan. He oversaw the central annual giving team, providing service to over 20 schools, colleges, campuses and units. He also worked to develop social-networking strategies relative to philanthropic efforts.
**   Prior to Michigan, Devin spent over five years with the University of Florida Foundation, most recently as the director of The Florida Fund, UF’s annual giving programs. He has also worked with Penn State’s Office of Annual Giving and the Stewart Howe Alumni Service, a private alumni relations firm. His first leadership role in philanthropy was as an undergraduate student with Penn State’s Dance Marathon, the largest student-run philanthropy in the world.
**   Devin founded the Southeastern Student Development Forum, the SEC Annual Fund Conference, and the SEC Challenge, modeled after the Big Ten Challenge. He contributed a chapter entitled “Recognition and Stewardship of Young Alumni – Transitioning from Educating Potential Donors toSecuring Lifelong Donors” for the upcoming CASE book Fundraising for Young Constituent Groups. He has presented at various CASE, Association of
Fundraising Professionals (AFP), and other development conferences and workshops.
**   Devin received a bachelor’s degree in communications from Penn StateUniversity and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Florida.

Hosted by Higher Ed Hero, this webinar gives you the opportunity to add immediate, money-saving impact to your work environment that is:

FAST – No wasted time here. Get right to the heart of the matter with  a 1-hour block designed to easily fit into your busy schedule.

CONVENIENT – No airlines. No travel. No time out of the office. Listen in from the comfort and convenience of your desk.

EASY – A telephone and a computer is all the equipment you need. Just dial in, punch in your access code, and you’re in. That’s it. Follow along with the webinar handouts provided in advance.

ACTIONABLE – Our webinars provide money-saving tactics you can start using as soon as you hang up the phone.

IDEAL FOR MULTIPLE LISTENERS – Use a speakerphone and as many people as you want can listen in – at no extra cost to you. These sessions are a cost-effective, time-efficient means of training Higher Education professionals and staff, and reinforcing key issues in a  fresh, new manner that they will remember and act on.

AFFORDABLE – Priced at $199, a fraction of the cost of travel and attendance fees for a lengthy, high-priced conference or seminar.

** “Latest Facebook Tools Tips, & Apps to Connect with Alumni & Donors”
** Live, 60-Minute Webinar **
** Wednesday, April 14, 2010 – 1:00 – 2:00 PM (ET) **

Register now for this exciting event by clicking the following link

http://www.higheredpro.com/W2/0/2/p3JDTNc/p4G8WT6Gi/p0e

or calling 800-964-6033.

As usual we provide a full refund if not satisfied from now until 7 days after the event.

If you do not wish to receive further notices about this conference, or future conferences, please click here

http://www.higheredpro.com/W2/4C/2/p3JDTNc/p4G8WT6Gi/p0e

Please do not reply directly to this e-mail, as we are unable to process it. We sent this to you from a “send only” mailbox.

I hope you’ll join us.

Sincerely,

Higher Ed Hero
370 Technology Drive
Malvern, PA 19355

I grew up with Captain Kangaroo and missed the original “Schoolhouse Rock” on how a bill becomes a law. After Congress passed the health care reform bill this week, On the Media decided it was time for an update: