Craigslist took down Adult Services in the U.S. four days ago, replacing it with the word "censored" without explanation. Advocates seized on the ambiguous move today, calling on Craigslist to remove the infamous section in cities across the world.
It's hard to say what the effect of shuttering Adult Services will be on the profitability of the sex trade. But it will certainly curtail Craigslist's ability to profit from sex traders.
The powers behind craigslist.org appear to have decided that withdrawal is the best strategy to deal with recent controversy around the "adult services" section of the site.
Last week, Craigslist shut down "adult services," which normally features paid advertisments for sex. "Adult services" was recently the subject of legal threats from 18 states, but it looks like it was media coverage that drove the people behind Craigslist underground. Craigslist has not responded to any media inquiries since the shutdown.
Five months after we first wrote about FashionStake's decision to crowd-source the rag trade, the site is out of beta and wide open. Has it succeeded in its goal to "democratize fashion"? Not yet. That's a tall order in an extremely hierarchical industry. But it is exciting the fashion crew.
And now that it's not so hush-hush, we can mention some of the 30 designers involved. They include Lauren Merkin, Nicholas K, Lewis Cho, Alice Ritter, AIRA and Yotam Solomon. The old screenshot from the site showing Phillip Lim, Alexander Wang, Donna Karan and Jeffrey Montero was clearly no indicator of who would be involved.
Justin.tv is finally breaking into the mobile broadcasting business with today's release of its first Android application and with an iPhone version soon to follow. The company admits that it's not the first to do mobile broadcasting - competitors like UStream and Qik have been around for some time - but it's the first company do it at this quality. According to CEO Michael Seibel, Justin.tv wanted to wait until the hardware on smartphones would be able to support their vision for what a mobile broadcasting experience should be like. And now, thanks to modern smartphones, features like support for hardware encoding, high quality cameras, sufficient CPUs and more, Justin.tv says it has been able to develop the best live streaming mobile application yet.
The Peace Corps, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in October, is commemorating the scope and intensity of the Peace Corps experience with YouTube. The National Peace Corps Association is conducting a contest called "My Piece of the Peace Corps."
Participants are upload short videos, no more than two minutes, on "how the Peace Corps, a Peace Corps Volunteer, or a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer changed their lives" to the contest channel on YouTube.
It's the story that seems to pop up every year or so - the classified ads site craigslist.org is again being accused of facilitating crime in its "adult services" section. But this time, the allegations are even more serious.
Last week, craigslist was the subject of a primetime CNN story that criticized the site for "not doing enough" to prevent child sex trafficking, quoting a youth rights advocate who said craigslist is the primary venue for selling minors for sex. The reporter ambushed craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who appeared to be unable to answer her questions about what the site is doing to prevent exploitation of underage girls.
Quora, the real-time question and answer service started by two former Facebook employees, will start being indexed by search engines tomorrow, a week after Facebook rolled out the first version of the similar service Facebook Questions.
But with Quora, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, the already-publicly searchable Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com and several other Q&A sites, space seems to be getting tight for a business model that requires "tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users before the revenue picture looks interesting," as one Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former eBay (EBAY) and Yahoo! (YHOO) executive who advises the Q&A site Fluther told Businessweek.
Unless it's an elaborate and pointless prank - and come on, how likely is that? - 4chan is hiring. To be more specific, a 4chan spin-off, called Canvas, is hiring for several New York-based technical positions.
Canvas has yet to be publicly defined, but the jobs page on the the White Album-ish placeholder site hints at it in describing the type of people they're looking for.
If you found those "Day in a Life" books fascinating, you may find YouTube's latest experiment, Life in a Day, equally interesting. If on the other hand, you found them disappointingly insipid, this may not be your bag.
Life in a Day is being marketed as a "user-generated feature film shot in a single day." The creators are asking people around the world to upload their quotidian videos to a YouTube channel. The director, Kevin MacDonald ("The Last King of Scotland"), will cut it together.
The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.
The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.
