The Washington Post has reported that a Nevada newspaper has been served a grand jury federal subpoena to reveal the identities of commenters on its website. The newspaper editor is fighting the request.
The editor, Thomas Mitchell, received the subpoena after his paper covered the prosecution of business owner Robert Kahre in a federal tax fraud case. He is quoted as saying that anonymous speech, including online comments, is "a fundamental and historic part of this country," but that his publication might cooperate if specific crimes or threats were a factor.
Tweetdeck, one of the most popular Twitter clients on the desktop launched its iPhone app today, just in time for the release of the iPhone 3.0 update. That, by itself, would be interesting news, but TweetDeck's desktop app also got a major overhaul, in part to support syncing with the iPhone app. In addition, TweetDeck on the desktop now gives users the ability to mange multiple accounts and the 10 column limit has been lifted. Among other things, TweetDeck now features a 'conversation window,' which presents an entire dialogue at once. TweetDeck can now also recommend new and interesting users to follow, and it is now very easy to block a user and report a spammer directly to Twitter.
Glue, a browser-based social network that appears on sites such as Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, and Citysearch, today announced their public API for third-party developers.
Glue joins a family of available semantic APIs with a mix of unique semantic and social API features. The API is currently demoed in three apps: Glue Stream, Glue Quilt, and Glue Spider.
When Apple announced the new 3.0 version of its iPhone operating system last week, the company focused on a number of major additions to the phone's bag of tricks: cut, copy, and paste; push notifications; new features for Safari; MMS; the ability to use the keyboard in landscape mode in Apple's apps like Mail, Notes, and Messages; as well as the new Spotlight search. All of these are important updates, but Apple also made a number of smaller updates to the firmware that it didn't stress at WWDC, including better scrubbing controls in the iPod app, new features for playing back podcasts, and the ability to sign in to YouTube to sync bookmarks and easily find and play your own videos.
In this post, we will have a closer look at the updates that are coming to the iPhone tomorrow, with a special focus on some of the features that Apple hasn't talked about much yet.
With Twitter and Facebook playing such an important roll in getting information out of Iran this week, the last thing the world needs is an appearance of The Fail Whale. CNN's State Department Producer, Elise Labott, reported this morning on the Anderson Cooper blog that "the State Department is advising social networking sites to make sure their networks stay up and running for Iranians to use them and helping them stay ahead of anyone who would try to shut them down."
Twitter decided yesterday to delay a scheduled downtime for maintenance until the middle of the night, Iran time. CNN reports that the decision was made at the suggestion of the State Department, but a large number of users suggested it as well. Incidentally, open source Twitter alternative Identi.ca, which has the potential to be much more useful due to its decentralized nature, followed Twitter's lead and also made major changes at a time convenient for Iranians.
I've long fantasized about being able to walk down city streets and get information on my phone about area demographics, histories of buildings I see and block-by-block news. A new Android app being talked about today makes that fantasy feel a little closer to reality.
Dutch software firm SPRXmobile will soon release an application for the Android phone that it calls "the world's first Augmented Reality browser." Called Layar, the app is a platform that makes sets of data viewable on top of the viewfinder of your mobile phone as you pan around a city and point at buildings. Real estate, banking and restaurant search companies have already created layers of information available on the platform, which is limited to use in the Netherlands for now. The demo video of the service is quite striking.
Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais team did a keynote speech today at SemTech in San Jose. His presentation was a wonderful wrapup of current semantic technology trends, and what we can expect over the next few years.
To open, he said that where we are now in the evolution of the Web is content rich, but information poor - plus "experientially deficient". He suggested that 'web 3.0' is about cleaning up the mess of web 2.0 and improving interfaces. In terms of semantic technology, he explained that over the past 5 years it has evolved from invention of standards to a period of commercial innovation on top of those inventions. While standards are still being worked on, now "we are at an inflection point where innovation is exploding."
Today, the UK government finally released its long-awaited Digital Britain report, which, among other things, confirms the government's intention to provide broadband access at 2Mbps to every household in the UK by 2012. According to the report, about 11% of all households in the UK cannot currently get broadband service at this speed. The British government plans to deliver this 'Universal Service Commitment' through a mix of existing technologies and expects to provide £200 million in public funding for this project.
Gaggle (iTunes URL) is a brand-new web browser designed for the iPhone which lets you share links on the social web while you surf. Thanks to Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, this simple browser makes it easy to tweet a link or post it to your Facebook profile. Only a few days old, Gaggle could have the potential to become a Safari replacement app for serious sharers, but there are quite a few kinks it needs to work out first.
Ever come across a Google search result that has the words 'this site can harm your computer' below a link? What about the Firefox red screen of death? If you're a Web surfer, chances are you've likely avoided clicking on this type of link. If you're the owner of the flagged site, chances are that those six simple words will set off a mental tailspin.
Launching today, Dasient, a San Jose Palo Alto start-up founded by a couple of ex-Googlers, hopes to change all that with its new Web anti-malware service. By monitoring Web sites for infected pages, providing instant diagnostics and giving site owners a two-click quarantining option within moments of a compromise, Dasient's subscription based security service (free and paid, from $50/month) aims to help businesses retain control of their Web site and remain clear of the dreaded blacklist.
