Nevertheless, information travels faster and farther in short bursts. To reach more minds, TED has launched TED Quotes today, which lets fans send hand-picked text excerpts from TED Talks like little valentines. The quotes link back to their source video. "Quotes are ideas - in their most compressed and contagious form," says June Cohen, TED Media's executive producer. You can now send these contagious quotes by Facebook, Twitter or email and help them go viral.

You can browse and search for quotes at TED.com/quotes. They also appear at the top of video pages. Quotes are curated by TED, but you can suggest new ones by emailing quotes {at} ted.com. For the 2.0 version, it would be cool if TED viewers could highlight and share quotes themselves. But there are currently 1293 quotes selected, and that's a lot of wisdom.

It would also be cool if these quotes were embeddable as a whole. For now, here's a quote that resonated with me:

"The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom."
- Misha Glenny

Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!

See also: The 10 best TED Talks of 2011

MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.

If this particular trend line continues to move upward, it would suggest that the site's music-centric gamble was a wise one. It would certainly make sense, given the site's history. When MySpace first came onto the scene in 2003, it was used by independent musicians to share music and connect with fans, who quickly flocked to the site. By 2008, the site attracted nearly 80 million unique visitors per month and was considered the preeminent social networking service.

Specific Media's new strategy aims to capitalize on MySpace's roots while building new features and functionality to help better reposition the site as a music hub. Even as the site's popularity has declined among the general population, it continued to be big among bands and other musicians.

Over the years, the site has amassed a library of music containing over 42 million tracks, which positions it quite competitively with the likes of Rdio and Spotify, even if MySpace's content leans heavily toward unsigned and independent artists.

Is this enough to turn things around for MySpace? The site won't return to being the social behemoth it was before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. By more aggressively carving out this niche, its new owners could at least allow the site to grow and build a viable, more focused business.

Sierra, the latest filter to join the Instagram family, is a white-bordered filter that adds a lightened, low-contrast vintage look to photos. As far as Instagram filters go, it's pretty standard stuff, but it's always nice to have new options. The more substantial addition to the app is a feature called Lux, which lets users automatically increase the brightness of photos and boost the contrast. The option is meant to offer a way to improve underexposed photos and make them more Instagrammable.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed last year that building an Android version of Instagram is "a major priority" for the company, and the company is known to be working on such an app. It's really not a matter of if, but when. Last week, rumors began swirling that Instagram for Android could be imminent. We reached out to Systrom, who declined to give any specifics about a timeline.

For Instagram, Android is the most logical next step for growth. Having stirred early buzz in the tech press and later named Apple's iPhone app of the year for 2011, the service has done quite well, especially considering it only exists on iOS. It now boasts over 15 million users on Apple's mobile operating system alone.

Launching an Android app will expose it to a massive number of potential new users. Android commands more than 46% of the smartphone market, according to Nielsen. If its success on iOS is any indication, the service can expect to see its user base flourish once the Android version drops.

The other top priority at the company's headquarters is building out a Web version of the service. This one is a little less urgent, because they are so many third party Web UIs for Instagram, and probably not as much demand for an official one as there seems to be for an Android app.

As effective as these methods can be, they're not always perfect. With Twitter and Facebook, there's the risk of having your song get lost in a sea of other social noise. With direct-sharing on Spotify, you can get more granular, but the social experience more or less ends once your friend hits the play button. This new song you just discovered is so awesome, though.

This is My Jam has all the basic social features you'd expect: following, liking, commenting and, of course, integration with Facebook and Twitter for sharing songs to a wider audience. When we first played with it, we couldn't help but feel like the experience was akin to Pinterest, in the sense that it allows users to curate stuff they like and share it among friends.

One of the key differences is in the way the content is deliberately limited on This is My Jam. Instead of building out a page-long archive of past jams, the service just shows a gray, unlinked list of them. The focus here is really on one song per user. In a sense, it's kind of like the music-obsessed love child of Twitter and Pinterest.

The music on the site comes from various sources across the Web, including YouTube, SoundCloud, the Hype Machine and the Echo Nest. Between the lot of them, there's a massive library of music to choose from. This approach also largely frees This is My Jam from any messy DMCA legal disputes. The YouTube integration makes the new social service one of the few music sites that includes music from The Beatles and other notoriously digitally-hesitant artists.

The site can also work as a promotional vehicle for new artsits, with some limitations. It lets you upload your own audio files, provided you have the rights to do so, but those tracks don't automatically get added to the library of music that other users can choose from. Any videos a band or artist has on YouTube, however, can be pulled up and shared as jams.

As you amass a network of friends on This is My Jam, the site becomes a sort of social radio station, kind of like Shufflr.fm, but based on what your friends are into, rather than recommendations from music blog tastemakers.

The site's audio player is built so that playback continues as you browse through the site. A big yellow button at the top of each user's homepage allows you play all of the jams of the people you follow. Those tracks can be scrobbled to Last.fm and tracks you like on This is My Jam can be added as favorites on Last.fm as well.

Overall, it's a promising little Web app, but like any service of this nature, how useful it becomes will depend entirely on its ability to attract users. It's brand new, so the growth that user base is just getting started.

"This is just senseless," said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece told Reuters. "We've had murders, but nothing like this."

Jenelle Potter, 30, is one of those types who you just don't mess with. She is a Facebook fanatic who stays home with her parents and is constantly on Facebook.

"Once you've crossed her, you've crossed her father too," Reece said.

Billy Clay Payne Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth were the victims of this Facebook-induced crime, which occurred last month. The murderers spared Hayworth's eight-month-old baby, whom Hayworth was holding when she was killed. According to the Associated Press, Billy Payne Sr., who also lived with the couple, left the house at 5:30am for work, hours before the murderers occurred.

No charges have been filed against Jenelle Potter, the sheriff said.

Facebook "Caused" Domestic Violence in Texas

In October of last year, CNET reported that domestic violence erupted after a woman allegedly failed to "Like" her husband's Facebook update.

Benito Apolinar of Pecos, Texas, stopped by his wife Dolores Apolinar's house to drop off his two children. After 15 years of marriage, the two had recently decided to separate. Dolores would not let Benito into her home because she was on house arrest and did not want to get in trouble. Plus, Benito was drunk. They exchanged a few words, and then Benito came into the house anyway, pulled Dolores' hair and punched her in the cheek.

Benito's version of this story is quite different, and has everything to do with a Facebook status update.

According to Benito, the two had been staying together at the house for a week, and he was upset that Dolores did not click "Like" on a Facebook status update about the anniversary of his mother's death. In his version, Dolores hit herself in the face, and then smacked him in the eyebrow area with her phone.

Benito Apolinar was arrested on battery charges.

Image courtesy Shutterstock.

Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.

To illustrate how this works, Yahoo has created an interactive data visualization that shows visitor traffic data in nearly real time. Using it, one can drill down into specific age groups, genders and story types to see what people's aggregate reading habits look like.

You can view and play with the data visualization here. They even designed the UI in HTML5 rather than Flash so you can check it out on your iPad.

Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. Anything based outside the country that uses a secure connection via HTTPS is blocked, according to news reports and a thread on Hacker News. Secure sites based within Iran are reportedly still accessible.

Meanwhile, developers and members of the Hacker News community are brainstorming ways to help Iranians get around the limitations. Some have suggested setting up Tor bridges for Web users in Iran, although that presents its own logistical issues.

These measures come just as the Iranian government begins to roll out longer-term plans to effectively strangle the Internet to death and create a new, state-sponsored Web for citizens of that country to use. The government is even requiring Internet cafe owners to videotape all patrons so that Web surfers can be more easily identified by authorities.

If news reports are accurate, Iranians could be facing a level of Web censorship that approaches that which exists in North Korea, where public access to the Internet we all know and love is barely existent. Whether or not Iranians, who have already had a taste of what the Web can do, will tolerate such restrictions without a struggle, remains to be seen.

That the Iranian government is clamping down on Internet access is hardly a surprise. In 2009, they saw firsthand the kind of unrest that emerge amidst a well-connected and dissatisfied citizenry. Since then, governments in nearby countries have been overthrown or otherwise challenged in the so-called Arab Spring.

One of the ways that Kodak tried to stay competitive is by manufacturing and selling digital cameras. Today, those efforts come to an end with the news that the company will be getting out of the digital camera business altogether.

This is an organization that has innovation in its DNA. Yet its ability to adapt to later, more fast-paced innovation from others has led the company to where it is today. It would be like if, 50 years from now, Apple went bankrupt, surrounded by more nimble competitors and unable to keep up with whatever super-futuristic space gadgets other companies will be making. Hard to imagine, right?

What Kodak used to specialize in - consumer photography and related goods - is now something that's almost fully democratized by smartphones, photo apps, cheap point-and-shoot cameras and the Web, which enables instant sharing of photographs. Most of the methods and processes for creating and sharing photographs that Kodak invented or perfected are now obsolete.

The company isn't dead yet, though. It's just under bankruptcy protection, and will use this time to fine-tune its business in the hopes of emerging from Chapter 11 status. Part of that involves laying people off, but whittling down its product portfolio is another important aspect of the process. Thus, it's killing off its line of digital cameras and instead focusing elsewhere: maintaining photo kiosks and selling printers, for example.

Kodak may well succeed in emerging from bankruptcy with a leaner, more profitable business. Even if it does, the prospects of the company returning to its heyday don't look especially promising.

Cable is indeed losing subscribers, but it's happening very slowly. According to the latest data from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes with cable subscriptions has declined 4.1% in the last year. Meanwhile, TV service provided by telephone companies like Verizon increased 21.1%.

Nielsen reports considerable growth in the sector of consumers who watch a combination of Web-based and non-cable broadcast television. This is the crowd that Boxee hopes to target with its live TV antennae dongle. They watch half as much TV and stream twice as much online video as the general population.

It's a group that has grown quickly, but still makes up only 5% of consumers. By comparison, nearly 71% of households subscribe to both broadband and cable television. Cable's penetration rate alone is more than 90%. In short, it's not going away anytime soon.

The cable industry faces real, longer-term threats from the likes of Netflix, Hulu and increasingly, Amazon Prime, as well as from set-top boxes and connected TVs. Trends in technology, coupled with the high prices of cable subscriptions, are slowly making cable less attractive to consumers Realizing this, the cable companies have put a renewed focused on innovating for a hyper-connected, multi-screened future.

TV content - wherever it may originate - still takes up an extraordinary amount of our lives. On average, Americans watch 33 hours of television per week. Television has long dominated the media diets of consumers, but what's changing is when and how they access it.

ARM is not a processor, like Intel or AMD; rather, it's a selection of technologies that a manufacturer licenses from an extensive ARM portfolio, that are condensed into a very small system - usually a system-on-a-chip (SoC). In Sinofsky's blog post today, as well as in an accompanying video - a shot of which is shown above - Microsoft showed three examples of ARM-based devices from (left to right, above) Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments, which don't use CPUs the way we know them, but behave enough like a PC to run Windows 8. Or at least, a new form of Windows 8 that resembles the Windows we use today only partly.

"Using WOA [Windows on ARM] 'out of the box' will feel just like using Windows 8 on x86/64," writes Sinofsky. "You will sign in the same way. You will start and launch apps the same way. You will use the new Windows Store the same way. You will have access to the intrinsic capabilities of Windows, from the new Start screen and Metro style apps and Internet Explorer, to peripherals, and if you wish, the Windows desktop with tools like Windows File Explorer and desktop Internet Explorer. It will have the same fast and fluid experience. In other words, we've designed WOA to look and feel just like you would expect. WOA enables creativity in PC design that, in combination with newly architected features of the OS, will bring to customers new, no-compromise experiences."

Another World

Yet while Sinofsky made it very clear - in an abundance of words - that Microsoft will not be compromising on what it has not compromised on, today's blog post does also reveal that those parts of WOA that don't work "the same way" will work a different way. Most different of all will be the Desktop, which is the part of Windows 7 that used to go by the name "Windows." As we noted when the Windows 8 Developer Preview was rolled out last September, the Desktop has become just one of two "worlds" where Windows 8 applications will run. The other is a completely new class of "Metro-style" apps, based on a new runtime called WinRT that is not downwardly-compatible. It's not made for Windows 7, and it's not compatible with Windows Phone 7.

But at least with Windows 8 on PCs running Intel and AMD architectures (x86/x64), most Windows apps since version 3.0 will run on the Desktop. This will not be the case on Windows for ARM for an obvious and unavoidable reason: Applications compiled to run on these processors are not code-compatible with ARM-based platforms. And managed apps made for the .NET Framework - which as late as Spring 2011 was still being touted as the platform of Windows' future - will not run on WOA because the .NET Framework is not code-compatible with ARM, at least not at this time. Sinofsky did not state these facts outright, though he gave plenty of information for an eight-year-old to make the correct deduction.

"WOA does not support running, emulating, or porting existing x86/64 desktop apps," the blog post reads. "Code that uses only system or OS services from WinRT can be used within an app and distributed through the Windows Store for both WOA and x86/64." It also states that if a developer wishes to target WOA as a platform, all he really needs to do is write a Metro-style app using WinRT and regular OS services.

Another Office

So what is the Desktop for in WOA? Why is it there if it can't run a great majority of the Windows apps we've come to know? Sinofsky states that the WOA Desktop will run built-in versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote from the new "Office 15" (probably Office 2013). It will also run a desktop version of Internet Explorer 10 (as indicated by a blue "e" icon on the taskbar in the screenshot), as well as the Windows Explorer file manager.

The division president characterizes this degree of resemblance as "supporting the Windows Desktop experience," adding that applications which can run on the WOA Desktop have been significantly re-architected to support ARM features such as low power consumption and multitouch. At one point, Sinofsky said, the question of how to approach the role of the Desktop for ARM architectures seems ever so faintly like a certain scene from Hamlet:

"To us, giving up something useful that has little cost to customers was a compromise that we didn't want to see in the evolution of PCs. The presence of different models is part of every platform. Whether it is to support a transition to a future programming model (such as including a virtualization or emulation solution if feasible), to support different programming models on one platform (native and web-based applications when both are popular), or to support different ways of working (command shell or GUI for different scenarios), the presence of multiple models represents a flexible solution that provides a true no-compromise experience on any platform."

Which must give us pause, Sinofsky might have added.

Another Form Factor

In a statement to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, IDC program director for applications development software, Al Hilwa, calls WOA "separate but equal... a different OS on its own schedule, but Microsoft is doing its best to deliver it at the same time."

Hilwa believes that the first WOA-based tablets will be released some time following the first Windows 8-based tablets with Intel and AMD processors, which means this class won't be ready for back-to-school until 2013. In the meantime, he points out that AMD and Intel are feverishly working to improve the power consumption and efficiency of their CPUs.

Assuming PC manufacturers - especially including those who produce Intel's Ultrabook form factor - beat ARM producers to market with competitive street prices, and that their Windows 8 PCs run all the existing software (there's no reason to think they won't), then they could retain a distinct advantage. Today, Microsoft's spokesperson told RWW that the work being done by competitors to produce AMD- and Intel-based PCs represents "an equally strong commitment, new designs, and improved architecture for Windows on this hardware. Microsoft could not be more excited or supportive of the new products from Intel and AMD that will be part of Windows 8 across a full spectrum of PC form factors."

Nevertheless, besides the myriad, perhaps countless, ways in which Windows for ARM is completely different from Windows, it's just the same as the product you haven't come to know yet because it hasn't been released. Because many consumers choose Windows because they need to run Office, Microsoft is making sure that four key Office apps are distributed with WOA. They will use different code bases, but because they're pre-installed, that fact won't matter. What will matter is whether consumers feel they're running Windows while they're using the applications that are the very reason they use Windows.

The file is 191 pages (as a PDF) and was requested by Michael Morisy of MuckRock. Morisy says that he became curious about Jobs' "behind-the-scenes" interactions with government after Jobs' death. "He was a famously private man, and almost apolitical in a lot of ways, but regularly courted for his opinion and advice.

"Government documents are also just generally a great way to get a look at public figures' lives: You can get a behind the scenes view that's otherwise not available, whether that's past legal trouble, quietly helping the feds or receiving death threats, and I think all of that is a valuable part of the story."

What the Documents Reveal

According to the memo outlining the investigation (page 160), Jobs would have been in a position to "make decisions concerning policy and personnel matters." The questions about Jobs related to drug use, whether he lived within his means, his trustworthiness and whether there was evidence of prejudice or bias on his part. According to the memo "the last 10 years of appointee's life must be accounted for."

Almost all of the people interviewed by the FBI seemed to give Jobs high marks, though there's at least one individual (name redacted) interviewed on March 11, 1991 who said Jobs was "not totally forthright and honest" and "has a tendency to distort reality in order to achieve his goals." (Perhaps that's where the phrase "Jobs Reality Distortion Field" came from...) Also interesting, the same individual said that Jobs was suitable for a "high level political position" in government because "in his opinion, honestly and integrity are not prerequisites to assume such a position."

The last section of the document details a bomb threat to Apple in February 1985 that turned out to be a hoax. The FBI doesn't seem to have found the caller.

It might sound like 191 pages would contain a wealth of information. However, much of the documents consist of government paperwork and coversheets that convey very little. (They do reveal that being in the FBI does not actually require neat penmanship.) The file also contains records of suits Jobs was involved with when with Apple and NeXT. There's very little in the document that's not already public knowledge.

But it's interesting to comb through and see what kind of information the FBI had on Jobs, and likely has on a number of other public figures. If you want to do your own Freedom of Information Act (FOI) requests, you can use MuckRock as a tool to do so. Morisy says that MuckRock tries to make "a really important, but really tedious, part of journalism and make it fun, social and easy for both journalists and regular users. For the first time, anyone can request almost any government document with just a few clicks and we think that's a really powerful tool for transparency."

For artists, it's another story. The dirty little secret of services like Spotify and others is that they are not particularly lucrative for artists. At all. Each of them has managed to court record labels with attractive enough licensing deals, but that doesn't necessarily trickle down to the artists themselves. As a result, many artists have held back new releases from streaming services, or jumped ship all together.

Initially, independent artists such as bands on small metal labels started to question the value of Spotify and pulled their catalogs. Then bigger artists like The Black Keys and Coldplay declined to release new material on Spotify.

Exact figures range (and are seldom made public), but it's clear that streaming services simply do not pay out much money compared to physical album sales or paid downloads. According to CDBaby, iTunes accounts for 77.4% of digital revenue for indie artists, while sources like Spotify and Rhapsoy bring in about 2% apiece. Now, with iTunes Match, artists get an additional stream of revenue on top of their initial digital album sales.

In theory, the streaming services will grow their user bases and refine their monetization strategies to a point at which things are fair for labels, fans and artists alike. In the meantime, not everybody is willing to stick around and wait for their business model to mature.

Path was uploading iPhone users' address books to its servers without asking. Today's update, version 2.0.6, now prompts users to opt-in to the "Add Friends" feature, which is not mandatory. Path has deleted all the existing contact info from its servers.

There are some additional security measures Path could use with this contact information, as Matt Gemmell suggested in yesterday's thread with Morin. The app could hash the information locally and then upload it. Path hasn't taken that step yet, but it assures users that the connection is encrypted, and the data are stored behind a firewall. And now that it's all opt-in, users are in control again.

So Path recovered as gracefully as possible. Do you accept its apology? Or did yesterday's revelation do too much damage for you to trust the company again? It's important to remember that you pay for free apps with your data. They're going to do what they can to collect it, because that's how they make money.

They should always ask the user for permission first. Apple requires app developers to ask the user for permission before gathering location data, and perhaps it should do the same for contacts. But the bottom line is that responsibility for user data starts with the user.

How much do you care about privacy when it comes to data like this? Is the price of free apps worth it? Share your responses in the comments.

The venue may definitely steal some of the thunder from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's keynote, which remains set for the day before.

For Windows 8 to recapture the mindshare that PC-related software developments have lost over the past five years, Microsoft would have to execute a completely game-changing strategy, redefining the computing category by essentially merging mobile and desktop into the same class. There's only one way to accomplish this: by aligning every consumer-facing product with the Windows brand on a single kernel, with at least one flexible software platform among all form factors. This appears to be exactly the move that Microsoft is making, and the fact that it's declaring Barcelona to be ground-zero for this announcement indicates it will be firing everything in its arsenal.

The completely revised Start Menu for the Windows 8 Developer Preview, released last September. The Consumer Preview, in three weeks if not sooner, should feature a blue background by default, though it may have personalization options.

Granted, the expected changes between the existing Developer Preview and the coming Consumer Preview, as revealed by leaked screenshots of an evidently current build, are worth noting. As many developers noted last year, including myself, the familiar Start Button on the Windows 8 Desktop acted as a kind of trap door into an unfamiliar "Metro" world with which only frequent users of Zune or Windows Media Center might find themselves at home. The leaked screenshots indicate that Microsoft has at least listened to these complaints.

The steps it's taking to address these concerns would appear - at least from the leaked screenshots - to include the complete removal of the Start Button altogether. Some unofficial sources have also said that the functionality of the Taskbar has been extended to compensate, perhaps alleviating the problem of Windows 7's most useful control feature being relegated to a "Desktop" that no longer resides, in the Windows 8 world, on a "Desk" but rather in what in the Developer Preview looked like a sinkhole.

The spokesperson did leave open the possibility that the Consumer Preview may be made available for download prior to February 29. Subscribers to the company's MSDN program may be offered advance downloads, if history with Windows 7 is any indication.

In total, Amazon Prime will have over 15,000 videos available for streaming, including some very popular television shows. Amazon launched its video streaming service about a year ago with 5,000 videos. With today's announcement, that number is now tripled.

Wired's Tim Carmody argued recently that Amazon is particularly well-positioned to emerge as a such a competitor, not only to Netflix but to cable television as well.

Amazon Prime still has some growing to do, and for now the service is tied to Amazon's free shipping service of the same name. GigaOm's Ryan Lawler argues that unbundling the two and launching a stand-alone streaming service could make the service an even stronger contender for Netflix's throne as king of this space.

It's worth keeping in mind that Amazon Prime Instant Video only launched in February of last year. Netflix has been around since 1997 and launched its Watch Instantly streaming feature in 2007. Amazon is rising fast, and its clear that digital content is a growing priority for the company, especially now that its also sells its own media tablet.