AOL - ReadWriteWeb

Web Illiteracy: How Much Is Your Fault?

Guest Author — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:10:00 -0800

When hundreds of clueless commenters decided mid-February that ReadWriteWeb was the place to log in to Facebook, alerts went off in my personal network like alarms at a fire station. For the past few years I've been doing research on misunderstandings online; since it's the subject of my doctoral thesis, all my friends know I eat, sleep, and breathe this topic, and was likely to be so buried in it that I'd miss new developments.

It's a good thing they woke me from doctoral sluggishness; with thousands of comments, this is the biggest such thread I've seen. The ReadWriteWeb/Facebook thread looks a lot like previous threads, but it has some interesting new developments.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Guest author Gillian Andrews is finishing her dissertation at Columbia University. She collects other examples of misunderstandings on Gumbaby.com. She channels her Internet literacy energies into the hacker radio show Off The Hook and producing The Media Show on YouTube, an irreverent, puppet-fueled stab at mass education.

As ReadWriteWeb readers have learned, misunderstandings like these never fail to entertain and astound. They've been a repeat topic of interest on community blogs; MetaFilter, for example, has scratched its collective head about this many a time. Accusations always fly: these "strangers" (as I've come to call them) are idiots, illiterates, came from AOL, shouldn't be allowed out on the Internet without someone to hold their hand. Less often, a few voices speak up from the development community and say, Wait a minute, we build the software the Internet runs on - isn't this partly our fault?

The ReadWriteWeb thread lays the blame to some extent on search engines, as ReadWriteWeb writer Mike Melanson has already written. But it also points to the rise of social networking services as a culprit.

Social Networking Software Changed the Landscape

Examples of misunderstandings abound in listservs, blog comment threads, newspaper article comment sections and even Wikipedia. Blogs where people ask to get an account canceled are pretty common. The login fiasco on this website is the first time I've seen a firestorm of misunderstanding sparked specifically by people trying to log on to an unrelated website.

But then, the ability to log into a service from an unrelated website is only a few years old. Is it any surprise that people are thrown by it? These commenters arrived from a search engine, looking for Facebook. At the bottom of the page where they landed, ReadWriteWeb offered them the opportunity to "Sign in with Facebook." They did - many comments link directly to a Facebook profile. What happened when they signed in? They were dropped right back on the ReadWriteWeb page where they started, with no indication of what had happened save for the line "Thanks for signing in, X. Now you can comment."

Text Boxes: They're Confusing

When commenters signed in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, it rewarded them with a text box labeled "Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)." Where do these comments go? It doesn't say. It's down at the bottom of a huge window, which means when you're looking at it, you can't see most of the page's identifying information at the top of the page. (Except for the URL, but I'll get to that in a minute.) Many text boxes around the Web are woefully under-labeled.

When I was beginning my research, a guy who worked at Blogger said to me, "People will put just anything in a text box," and it seems to be true. Evidence abounds that people interpret comment boxes in any number of ways. Some think they are sending private email. Some think they're sending a chat message, and get belligerent when nobody responds right away. A few seem to think it's a word processor, and "Submit" means the same thing as "save."

A comment which really blew my mind was posted to a blog by a woman who appeared to confuse comments on a blog with "online prayer" - an Internet activity which is probably unfamiliar to most denizens of high-tech blogs. Google it, though, and you'll find numerous pages, with Pat Robertson's organization ranking among the top ones.

Online prayer sites provide a form that lets you include your name, contact information, and a comment about what prayers you need - a form which looks startlingly like a blog comment form. The idea is that your message will be sent to Robertson or other church staff, and they will pray for you. Sometimes the form includes a promise that your message will be kept confidential; other times, there is no such promise, but it seems to matter little to those who don't understand where a comment form goes anyway.

Online prayer may be new to you. Logging in to Facebook through another site is new to most of us. It's worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of people alive today were never taught to read a webpage in school, the way they were taught to read the title, author information and pages of a book. This brings us to another theme in the ReadWriteWeb thread which is repeated across most other misunderstandings of this type.

Literacy is Not the Problem - New Kinds of Literacy Are

ReadWriteWeb readers and other "natives" call errant commenters any number of nasty names (and use an upsetting amount of eugenic language, suggesting these "idiot" commenters should be "weeded out of the gene pool.") One favorite insult is "illiterate."

As stated, this is a little unfair when most of these people never had a chance to learn Internet skills in school, where skills might be broken down into simple elements that most of us don't even remember learning. (When you learn to read a book, for example, you learn which way to hold the book, how to turn pages, reading left to right, chunking letters into phonemes and words into sentences.)

But beyond being unfair, it's not wholly correct to call them illiterate. They do read and write. They just don't always do so in ways that are considered appropriate by the technologically skilled (and the code they write).

Literacy has never been a single monolithic skill. It involves both reading and writing, and these two skills are independent of each other. More to the point, literacy involves reading and writing differently in a range of situations. You may consider yourself literate because you have read Shakespeare, or because you can write a coherent quarterly report. But you don't write your quarterly report as a sonnet. Different forms of literacy apply at different times, and people can be good at some kinds of literacy while needing assistance in others.

Basic decoding (reading) and writing are rarely the problem in these misunderstandings. While many comments left by strangers on the threads I have studied are misspelled, use bad grammar, or are written in all-caps (or, even more confusingly, All Initial Caps), plenty can't be distinguished from the comments left by tech-savvy commenters when it comes to writing skill.

In fact, "strangers" are more likely than natives to write their comments in ways we all learned in school. In most of the threads I have studied, they make it clear who they are addressing ("Dear Facebook,") who is writing ("Thanks, Linda") and even how to understand where they are coming from geographically. They do this to the point of redundancy, sometimes entering this information into more than one comment field.

One stranger, trying to reach Maury Povich on a classic thread dug up by MetaFilter, writes a spellchecked-perfect traditional letter, right down to the formatting of the date and greetings. (When was the last time you spellchecked a hastily written comment?) Other errant commenters are published authors, or even have advanced degrees. Again, their problem is not traditional literacy; the problem is that the Internet demands new kinds of literacy, and they haven't had the training yet. Mocking them in a comment thread doesn't improve their skills.

Reading-wise, there are plenty of indications in my data that strangers have read other parts of the page. There seems to be a general trend that they are less likely to directly address a celebrity (for example) when the comments right above their own come from natives who say "ommfg, this is not Maury Povich's website!" My favorite example of a stranger demonstrating her reading skills is a commenter on a thread where a blogger wrote about his joy at learning that all kinds of things - M&Ms, ketchup bottles, soda, etc - could now be customized. The blogger titled his post "Ketchup of the People." The commenter wrote:

I found the order for custom printed m & m's in the coupon section of the providence journal sunday paper. It said nothing about ordering ketchup first or anything about the blog. All I wanted was to surprise my 80 year old aunt who loves m & m's with this special custom order. What is this a scam or something? If it is, it's pretty cruel? Please respond.

Through some referral-log forensics, the blogger and his readers determined that this commenter had, in fact, entered the URL provided by her newspaper. The problem was, the offer had expired, and the only remaining reference to this URL was on the blogger's page, where she landed. So she set about trying to make sense of what she found in the best way she could. Would she have to order ketchup first? Was the blog somehow a gatekeeper to the order? This all sounded fishy - was it a scam?

Presented with apparent nonsense, all of us do our best to make sense of it; that's just what the human brain does. On the Web, people don't always have the information they need to understand what's going on.

Next page: What is a URL?

What is a URL?

One of the most important elements errant commenters aren't using, which the tech-savvy have at their command, is a page's URL. Internet-illiterate commenters generally don't know what "URL" means, or what one does. Check the URLs attached to their names in blog comments; you will often find they have entered an email address, subject line, their name, or something to the effect of "I don't know what this is" in the URL field that went with their comment.The fact that many errant commenters seem to enter "Facebook" into Google's search field to get to the page also suggests that URLs aren't a part of their Internet literacy skills.

Interface designers aren't helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren't just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it.

Obscuring or drawing attention away from URLs keeps people from understanding how to judge the quality of material on the Internet. Considering that most people have not had schooling to help them understand the Internet - and it's unlikely that even kids in school today have formal opportunities to learn about URLs, considering the number of schools which limit Internet access - these steps taken by UI designers simply compound the problem.

Which leads me to my final point:

They're Not Illiterate - You Are

As crazy as it sounds, Melanson makes a certain amount of sense when he lays the blame for the Facebook flap at Google's feet. Google is the best search engine going right now, but it's not perfect. The shift to real-time results and its underlying popularity-contest mechanic make it ineffective in specific settings. ("Specific" being key; the other problem with search engines, and the subject of extensive research in schools of information, is their inability to respond to a given user's context. But that's a topic for another article.)

Facebook - and even ReadWriteWeb - are also somewhat to blame, considering how the cross-site login service is presented to users; as I noted, the messages sent to those signing in are unclear (thanks for signing in to what? Now you can comment where? What does it mean to sign in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, anyway? Is this a scam?)

Literacy is a two-way street. They may be dumb for not reading the pages right, but some of the code, search algorithms, and interfaces involved aren't perfect, either. Not to mention the way "savvy" commenters and other bloggers write. The more people linked to the original ReadWriteWeb thread with the words "Facebook login" in the link, the more the ReadWriteWeb thread appeared to Google to be relevant to Facebook login.

As has been noted, blog posts with "Facebook" in the title were likely to see more unwanted traffic as well. This even spread the problem to other blogs linking to ReadWriteWeb, some of whom also started to see login requests in their comment threads. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has noted bad titling among a number of bloggers' other bad writing habits, including poor-quality About pages which don't explain who is writing.

These are ways of writing which bring about undesired consequences, and yet bloggers and other members of the technological elite use them all the time. Is this part of the new illiteracy?

The funny thing about the patterns in these misunderstandings is that they predate the Web. Newspapers receive misdirected mail for celebrities. Scientists receive email from people who want help registering a patent. Fans have been writing letters to the heroine of Romeo and Juliet at least since the release of the first movie in the 1930s; they arrive by the mailbag in Verona, Italy every year, despite the fact that if you've read through to the end, Juliet clearly isn't in any state to write a letter back. The Internet simply makes this kind of confusion more obvious to the rest of us.

The great thing about watching these train wrecks happen in real time is they leave such great evidence of how they could be fixed. Web designers could be paying more attention to labeling their text boxes. Browser designers could be building ways to help people understand URLs better, like the Firefox Flagfox extension, which shows a page's country of origin and makes it trivial to run a WhoIs lookup. We could all be a little smarter in writing links and titling our blog posts.

Fixing search engines is a much thornier problem. More complicated still is the chicken-and-egg problem of how to make a large population Internet literate, when many teachers don't understand the Internet themselves, and when schools face legal threats if their students have enough Internet access to accidentally stray onto pornographic sites.

But again: calling commenters "illiterate," "stupid," or "sub-literate monotremes" (yeah Miles, we see what you did there) is not the same thing as a solution to the problem.

Photo by Miguel Ugalde

]]>Discuss

Superfeedr Now Adds Location to Feeds Automatically

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:37:10 -0800

Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.

"If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we'll just push that through," he said. "If you don't do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML." In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr's real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API. Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis.

The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he's just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could.

Superfeedr could be described as "FeedBurner 2.0" - for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban. Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more.

]]>Discuss

6 Thoughts About Location Madness

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:00:52 -0800

Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

]]>Sponsor

]]>

That Phrase: "Location, Location, Location"

You're going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: "Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park." Don't you feel more savvy now?

Too Many Startups?

We're under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It's one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That's pretty cool.

You've got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be "the Twitter of SXSW 2010" but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

Location Startups "Not Playing Nice"

There are loads of ways to post your location but it's very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn't work very well, though. SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren't playing very nice together is very true. "And it's a real shame," he told us. It's hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla's Josh Williams says he doesn't know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

Update: Galligan pinged us after publication to clarify: "I mostly meant the problem with venue data was because of how awful the *business listings* market is. There's certainly issues with non-connecting venue data but it's a *very* hard problem to solve, so I don't blame them right now. It can, however, be solved in the future."

We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

If you're thinking of going to a place, or you're there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That's the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

Google's Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for "place" and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

Gowalla Doesn't Get Enough Love

Gowalla's API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can't publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn't helping. AOL's cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That's a real shame. You know what's nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren't friends of yours. That's not something that's easy to do with Foursquare at all. It's also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples' full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla's API just isn't seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoidr.org for example? That's pretty funny stuff and it's built on top of Foursquare.

The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.

Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different

If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter.

Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week.

]]>Discuss

Washington Post Offers Subscription Model App for iPhone

Mike Melanson — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:38:00 -0800

In the continuing effort to stop the bleeding, newspapers continue to try new ways to recover some losses and stop giving away all of their content for free. As online advertising has not proven sufficient to fully cover costs, some publishers, such as the Wall Street Journal, have turned to pay walls.

A new trend, however, seems to have taken hold - charging for a mobile app. The Washington Post has joined The Guardian in charging for its iPhone app, according to an article this morning in Paid Content.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The Washington Post iPhone app will cost $1.99 for 12 months of mobile access to the paper's content, which will include offline reading. The Guardian recently announced that it had sold 101,457 downloads of its iPhone app, which, at $3.99 a pop, means over $400,000 for the British paper.

The interesting distinction to note here is that the Washington Post's app is more like a newspaper subscription of old. You aren't paying a one-time fee for the app, you're paying for a year's use, meaning if you like the content and want continued access, it's going to see another $1.99 from you in a year.

When you compare these sorts of numbers to the 35 subscribers to Newsday, the future might look brighter for newspapers. We're thinking that mobile users are used to paying small fees for quality applications and, while they could use their mobile browser to visit the free website, they'll likely pay the two bucks to see content tailored to the mobile platform instead.

CNN, as Paid Content points out, takes a similar approach, charging for its iPhone application, but its charge is a one-time fee. Offering an app as a timed subscription is a bit of a twist, but mobile may be just the environment to try out this sort of payment model.

The Washington Post iPhone app will be available for purchase today, but was not up by the time of this article.

]]>Discuss

Study: Only 2% of U.S. Adults Rely Exclusively on Internet for Getting News

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:40:24 -0800

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 61% of Americans now get some of their news online, though local TV stations are still the most popular means of finding out about the news. Local print newspapers still reach 50% of Americans and 17% read the print versions of national papers like the New York Times or USA Today.

While 38% of Americans still rely solely on offline sources for their daily news, only 2% of adults in the U.S. get their news exclusively from online sources.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The majority of news consumers in the U.S. (59%) now get their news from a combination of online and offline sources.

News Portals Are the Most Popular Sources - Younger Internet Users also Rely on Social Networks

When online, American Internet users generally rely on 2 to 5 different sites to get their news. Interestingly, 65% of online news users say that they don't have a favorite online news source.

The majority of Internet users (56%) rely on news portals like Google News, AOL or Topix. Younger Internet users under 29 also tend to use social networks to look for interesting stories that their peers share with them (44%) and 13% specifically follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites.

Only 4% of all Internet users follow Twitter updates from journalists and news organizations to stay on top of the news. News podcasts are far more popular than Twitter for getting news updates. About 15% of online news users over 18 listen to news podcasts from organizations like NPR or the New York Times.

What About RSS?

Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users if they used RSS feeds and feed readers to consume news ("RSS" doesn't even appear in the report). While a lot of Internet users probably use RSS to consume news on portal sites and news aggregators without knowing it, it would be interesting to see how many people use services like Google Reader to consume news.

Sharing News

Three-quarters of all adult Internet users in the U.S. say that they get news forwarded to them by email or through posts on social networking sites. A quarter of these Internet users, however, also says that they barely ever read these stories.

Demographics

Marketers and the advertising departments for online news sources will be happy to hear that news users tend to be younger than the average population (68% are under 50 and 29% are under 30) and are likely to be employed full-time (50%) and have at least some college education (67%). Their household income also tends to be higher than the U.S. average. These users are also have faster broadband connections (84%) than the average Internet user.

The heaviest consumers of online news are between 30 and 49 years old and likely to live in a household with an annual income of over $50,000.

What do they look for?

The vast majority of Internet users goes online to find out information about the weather (81%). News about national events (73%), health (66%), business and finance (64%) and news about international events (62%) are also among the top 5 most popular categories among online news consumers . Tech news is the sixth-most popular category.

Get RWW News on Facebook

You can become a fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and get our news and analysis about the changing web delivered directly into your News feed.

]]>Discuss

Microsoft Kills Watchdog Website Due to Leaked Documents

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:54:38 -0800

Due to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed by Microsoft, whistleblower website Cryptome [link to a backup version of the site] has been disabled by its ISP, Network Solutions.

The complaints were due to the fact that Cryptome published a 22-page Microsoft Global Criminal Spy Guide. Microsoft claimed copyright infringement, Cryptome's editor refused to budge, and the site was taken down this afternoon.

Cryptome has previously published similar guides from Facebook, AOL, Yahoo and Skype; the site has been threatened but never before actually disabled.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The Microsoft document was originally published on Feb. 20. Microsoft demanded that Cryptome remove the PDF, and when the editor refused, Cryptome's ISP sent a warning: If the document was not removed by Thursday, the site would be disabled. However, the site was taken down Wednesday afternoon.

The reason Cryptome refused to remove the PDF of Microsoft's so-called "spy guide" was that editor John Young believed its programs, which make it easier for law enforcement to obtain user data, showed "improper use of copyright to conceal [...] violations of trust toward its customers," according to an interview with Geekosystem.

"Copyright law is not intended for confidentiality purposes," he continued.

"We think all lawful spying arrangements should be made public [...] Microsoft should join the others who openly describe [their] procedures." Young named Cisco as one such company.

Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a call today, "We find it troubling that copyright law is being invoked here. Microsoft doesn't sell this manual. There's no market for this work. It's not a copyright issue. John's copying of it is fair use. We don't do this anywhere else in speech law."

For example, in cases involving libel or trade secrets, said Cohn, "You go to court, you make a case and you get an injunction. You don't just file a form. DMCA makes censorship easy."

Cohn also noted she feels the reason Microsoft actually wants the document removed from the Web is because, for a large corporation with millions of users and an aggressive PR agenda, the document raises concerns and sparks conversations the company would rather not confront.

"It's part of a very intense political debate about the role of intermediary companies like Microsoft aiding surveillance for law enforcement. It's embarrassing for Microsoft for their users to see how much the people who carry their email have arrangements with law enforcement.

"All of the people who carry our communications are an easy conduit for our government to spy on us, and a lot of people are unhappy about that. It's a legitimate public debate, and Microsoft doesn't want to be part of that debate."

We hope that Microsoft does, in fact, release their stranglehold on Young and his site and take part in a conversation with their users about how their data can be accessed by others, including law enforcement. We've reached out to them for comment and will update this post if and when we hear back.

In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments.

UPDATE: Still no word from Microsoft, but here's that document they really don't want you (or anyone else) to see. We hope to hear from a Microsoft representative soon to discuss the intentions and implications of this guide.

UPDATE: Microsoft has responded. Read about it here.

Thanks to Glenn Davis of Geekosystem for the tip.

]]>Discuss

ExtensionFM Makes the Web Your Personal Music Library (Invites)

Mike Melanson — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:28:00 -0800

Dan Kantor, the man behind de.licio.us's Playtagger and Firefox extension, has brought us a new toy to play with that literally makes the web your musical oyster. ExtensionFM is a Chrome extension that automatically scrubs the websites you visit, finds embedded music, and adds it to a library of online music.

As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Kantor has done some big things in online music over the years. He created Playtagger, a music player that made mp3 bookmarks in de.licio.us playable right there on the page, and founded Streampad, a social web-scale music application that was acquired by AOL in 2008. If you use the Firefox plug-in for Delicious, Kantor built that too. Until 2009, he was the product director of AOL Music and now he brings us ExtensionFM.

Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can't get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you'd like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose "Buy", which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song.

Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you've discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like.

When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going.

What's even more, ExtensionFM will let you "scrobble" to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account.

We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they're looking into.

Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we've put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page. Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you're so inclined, we'd love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well!

]]>Discuss

Why No Love for the Universal Inbox?

Sarah Perez — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:50:10 -0800

A couple of years ago, the new launch from Webwalks, a universal inbox, news aggregator, password manager and kitchen sink-type application would have caught my eye. I'd rush out to try it, merging my multiple accounts under its one roof then wait to see how well my life improved, how much time I saved. But today, I'm more ambivalent about these sorts of applications. The concept of a universal inbox for tracking everything under the sun now leaves me cold.

That's not to say that merging of social networks with the inbox in and of itself is a bad idea - Google Buzz, Xobni, and Outlook's new social connector all offer innovative ways to augment the inbox experience. But there's a key difference between these apps and those promising a "universal inbox" - they come to you, in the inbox you already know and love.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The Sad State of the Universal Inbox

The idea of a universal inbox is smart. On paper, that is. In our "information overloaded" modern age, messages come at us left and right from multiple email accounts, instant messaging programs, SMS on our mobile phones and from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And yet, none of the "universal inbox" applications have ever really taken off.

We've seen some worthy contenders though. Fuser, NutshellMail and Inbox2, for example, all merge messages from multiple platforms into one unified service. The more clever of these programs provide a way to make Facebook the interface you use to check your mail instead of forcing you into some new web service. However, even that option hasn't attracted a large following.

Inbox2's Facebook app "emailstream" only has 245 active users. NutshellMail's does a little better with just over 5400 users. But when you think of the hundreds of millions of registered users on Facebook (400 million at the last count), these numbers aren't even a drop in a bucket - they're more like a grain of sand on a long stretch of beach.

The sites' web destinations do a little better, but only a service called OtherInbox is doing well, with 67,000+ visitors last month. NutshellMail seems to be hanging in there, too - even growing its traffic a bit lately - and yet it attracted just under 24,000 uniques last month (according to Compete - not always the best source of statistics but good enough for this quick glance). An article on Digg's homepage often get more hits than that! And it's an understatement to say these numbers fall short of the millions who routinely log into online email accounts from Gmail, Hotmail and the like.

So what's wrong? Why aren't these services more popular?

People Want to Use Their Own Inbox, Not Some 3rd-Party Service

The answer to that question has its roots in what people expect from an email application. Email services from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and yes, even AOL, among others are designed from the ground-up to provide that company's vision of the best messaging experience. The applications are feature-rich with advanced options like POP3 and IMAP support, forwarding, filters, labels, auto-replies, vacation responders, spam filters and more.

Third-party aggregation-type applications don't always have the same feature set. Plus, they typically have their own very un-email like interface - the applications tend to treat your email like activity streams on a social network, not critical messages that need to be filed, forwarded, replied to, or turned into tasks and calendar appointments. The exception here seems to be OtherInbox - they offer a real inbox complete with calendar tie-ins, stars for saving messages, spam filters and other typical email features. Not surprisingly, they're the one doing the best out of all the other inbox applications listed here. However, they're not actually a "universal" inbox. They don't claim to merge all your messaging services into one - they simply help you better sort and organize your mail. So, really, they don't count.

Socializing as an Inbox Layer

A better solution to the merging of messaging and social is, interestingly enough, exactly what Google has just launched with Buzz. Sure, that service has gotten off to a rough start with bugs, missing features and of course, the privacy issues, but the concept is solid. In Buzz, social networking becomes an additional layer to your inbox - one click and the display changes to a stream of social activity; click again and you're back to your email. Important "social" messages (those you created, commented on or liked in Buzz) grab your attention by re-appearing in your inbox proper.

Other companies have similar ideas about socializing email. Xobni, for example, offers a plugin for Outlook that extracts social information about your contacts (among many other things). Microsoft, too, is just now launching its social layer for Outlook - the Social Connector which optionally lets you integrate LinkedIn and soon Facebook and MySpace into your inbox.

These programs all have a better shot at unifying the inbox to create a truly universal email application. They provide you with your "real" inbox and all its features while layering it with a social element. You don't have to migrate to a new service entirely. Meanwhile the standalone universal inbox applications available today probably won't last. They would be better off developing their service into a plugin or add-on for the webmail and desktop programs that people use now instead of trying to convince people to start checking their email elsewhere.

]]>Discuss

Will AOL Use Seed to Fuel Its Hyperlocal News Site?

Mike Melanson — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:23:00 -0800

AOL is continuing with its push to create content on a massive local scale, according to a story by the Silicon Valley Insider. The story says that AOL is looking to "expand Patch, its network of local news blogs, from 30 sites to 'hundreds', by the end of 2010."

AOL recently announced a similar 0-to-60 sort of initiative with its attempt to cover every single band at this year's South By Southwest festival with its content distribution project Seed.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The article quotes an internal communication, saying that AOL is looking "to be leaders in one of the most promising 'white spaces' on the Internet" as well as "in sourcing, creating, producing and delivering high quality content".

Patch is a "hyperlocal" website that offers news, photos and videos, discussions and information about local businesses. It is run by "professional editors, writers, photographers and videographers who live in or near the communities [they] serve". As such, Patch seems like a perfect candidate for the type of service offered by another arm of AOL, crowdsourced content provider Seed.

While the article declares the intention to go from 30 sites to hundreds "quite the ambitious goal," we wonder if having a system like Seed already in place wouldn't make an otherwise potentially daunting task a bit easier. Actually, the SXSW coverage seems like a good testing ground for doing the same sort of coverage in hundreds of locations throughout the country.

As Paid Content wrote last month, Saul Hansell left the New York Times' Bits Blog in December to join Seed, with the purpose of "leveraging Seed across all of AOL's platforms".

Looking at the site, it would seem that the only issue in growing from 30 to hundreds would be general scalability, as each location is identical, but with different content. With an army of content providers at your fingertips, it would seem that the expansion is the obvious next step more than anything else.

]]>Discuss

SimpleGeo Now Indexing 1m+ Locations Per Hour

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:57:01 -0800

Location is going to be big, that seems to be the consensus among geeks, but just how big is it going to be? One metric to wrap your brain around came out over Twitter earlier today. According to SimpleGeo founder Joe Stump, the still-unlaunched but much anticipated service is now indexing more than 1 million location-based objects every hour.

That's going to make for a very rich database that other services can tap into. SimpleGeo has taken $1.5m in angel funding from of Silicon Valley's biggest-name investors to try and become the go-to geolocation database resource for the next generation of location-aware applications.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The company was founded by former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and the founder of AOL-acquired Social Thing Matt Galligan. Stump explained his company's model to VentureBeat late last year:

"Location-based devices only provide a latitude and a longitude, sometimes an altitude," he said. "What they don't provide is a ZIP Code, city, state, county, weather data, messages and photos posted near the site. They don't provide business listings, Wikipedia entries, census data (for demographics), articles written or posted near the location," all of which SimpleGeo does. For example, a location-based game set in San Francisco could accurately display its players gleaming in the California sun, or obscured by Golden Gate fog, based on the real-time weather data from around town.

The company told Liz Gannes of Gigaom in November that it received 600 beta applications on its first day after announcing itself publicly. Gannes wrote at the time:

"We're selling shovels at the beginning of a gold rush," is how co-founder Matt Galligan put it on a call today. "You want to add location, just come to us -- it's done." Though four-person SimpleGeo still measures its age in months, it already has a price sheet: free, $399/month for small businesses and $2,499/month for custom implementations.

This sort of business model for this particular market has been forecast for some time. 18 months ago analyst firm ABI Research, for example, made the following prediction:

"Location-based mobile social networking revenues will reach $3.3 billion by 2013, but successful business models may differ from what many observers expect," says ABI Research principal analyst Dominique Bonte. "While location-based advertising integrated with sophisticated algorithms holds a lot of promise, the current reality rather points to licensing and revenue-sharing models as the way forward for social networking start-ups to grow their customer base and reach profitability..."

Twitter acquired oft-compared competitor GeoAPI late in 2009 but uptake of Twitter's location data has been slow. Traditional vendors have also long offered geographic data. Those vendors may fall short of developer expectations if SimpleGeo can deliver things like an effective iPhone SDK, OAuth authentication and dynamic data from sources like Twitter and Flickr.

Can SimpleGeo jump to the head of the new location-based parade and capture what's expected to be a huge market? Adding 1 million location-based objects every hour to its database sounds like a great place to come at that market from.

]]>Discuss

How Google Failed Its Users and Gave Birth to an Internet Meme

Mike Melanson — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:39:00 -0800

It's not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme, but yesterday, I was there at the moment of conception. I didn't give birth to it but I certainly played a completely inadvertent and circumstantial part.

Facebook and AOL had announced their partnership and I decided the news merited more than the two paragraph treatment I saw everywhere else. So I embarked on a diatribe about how Facebook was trying to be our "One True Login" - and unknowingly set in motion what has become the most epic comment thread ReadWriteWeb has ever seen. But how did this happen and why?]]>Sponsor

]]> Within a half an hour of posting, the number of visitors had skyrocketed. It looked like a real winner. An hour later, it had reached the number of visitors an average post might see in an entire day. I figured I'd hit a home run.

But then the comments started rolling in.

"When can we log in?" asked one commenter.

"I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!" complained the next.

At first we wondered if it could be a giant, orchestrated prank. We weren't sure who we might have offended, but obviously it was a premeditated assault. When we looked at our traffic, however, we didn't see any of the usual suspects, just two little words on a very big website: "Facebook login" and Google. The post had become the number two search result.

By the end of the day, the post had several hundred comments and our back-channel chat room was still debating whether or not it could all be real.

It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we'd found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn't that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for "facebook login" yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible - Facebook's login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it. I don't think the first search result for "Facebook login" was actually English, and the one that followed wasn't either, but those two key words are used over and over.

By the next morning, the scale had tipped. News of the epic thread had started making its way around the social web, being retweeted across the Twitterverse, posted by early adopters on Buzz and submitted to sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, HackerNews and Fark.

"No, really," everyone seemed to be saying, "You GOTTA see this one."

Suddenly, the two worlds collided. The tech savvy ran head-on into the tech illiterate and mockery and disbelief started to overtake confusion as the general tone in the comment thread. As the post made its way around the web, other comment threads, like those on Reddit and MetaFilter, began mimicking the now infamous comments. I suddenly realized that we might be standing at that flash point, that moment where it begins - the immaculate conception of an Internet meme. I've always wanted to be there at that moment. I've always wondered about the first person that saw a lobster and said, "You know what? I'm going to eat that."

"I LIKE THE NEW ALL-BLUE FACEBOOK BUT CAN I JUST LOG IN NOW PLEEEEEZE?????!!!11" reads one comment on MetaFilter.

Another comment on Reddit reads, "IS THIS THE ARTICLE!!? ALL I SEE IS COMMENTS!!!!! HOW COME WHEN I TRY TO LOG IN I PEE ON MYSELF AND PASS OUT?!?? I LIKED REDDIT BEFORE THE PEE!!!"

One person has even written a sonnet, detailing the plight of the lost Facebook users.

While we mock those users, the simple fact is they haven't necessarily failed, something failed them. With all of our talk about the semantic Web and search engine optimization and tailoring search results to the individual user, there are thousands upon thousands of users performing the same simple search and following the same wrong road. If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would have been pulled down long ago. There would have been outraged citizens at town meetings and special reports on the five o' clock news.

So, when five years down the road someone, somewhere, in a completely unrelated comment thread says "i need the old facebook this new one is very bad bbbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" I will be happy to say that I was there - I was around for the birth of that Internet meme. But I also hope that, by then, we've addressed the problem at the core. This is the Internet and these are its users.

If this many of them can't login to Facebook by typing that into Google and clicking on the first thing they see, maybe it's not them that are wrong - but Google.

]]>Discuss

Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

Mike Melanson — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:25:00 -0800

Facebook and AOL announced last night a partnership that will integrate a user's Facebook friends into their AOL Instant Messenger. The announcement came on a day when Google announced its new attempt at capturing your social attention with Google Buzz and Yahoo! reminded us from the outskirts that they've been at this game for a year now.

According to Mercury News, about 70% of AOL users also use Facebook and the move is a sign of where AOL is heading, but we wonder if it isn't more a sign of where Facebook is heading and has been all along.]]>Sponsor

]]> The partnership will use Facebook Connect to import a user's Facebook friends into their AIM contacts, enabling chat directly between the two services. This will allow AIM's 17 million users to continue using AIM while being able to keep in touch with their existing friends on AIM.

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type "facebook.com" into your browser address bar or enter "facebook" into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

The Great Migrations

If you think back to 2002, the big news was Friendster. For many of us, it was the first time we'd joined a social network and we went wild adding friends. Then, in 2003, Myspace came along and we slowly started adding these same friends on Myspace until one day the virtual cobwebs became too much and we left Friendster altogether. And then came Facebook and we did it again.

Let's face it - if we can avoid it, we'd rather not do this again and that's precisely what Facebook wants. Facebook has already become the dominant platform for social networking, but as it expands its business in other directions, we will begin to see it pull users away from other businesses too. This partnership is not only about preventing that, but further solidifying Facebook's place as our one, true login.

The more integrated Facebook becomes, the less willing we'll be to recreate that same web of social connections we've reinvented time and again.

While many of us may complain about Facebook's on-site chat breaking down, being slow or crashing our browsers, the fact remains that Facebook is where we've based our online social life and chat is a basic extension of this. AIM used to be one of the industry standards in this realm, but now it looks more like the company is hedging its bets and trying not to fall prey to the same circumstances that caused us to abandon other platforms.

Your One True Login

As we wrote last month, users already prefer to use Facebook Connect by a margin of 2-to-1 and countless sites already let you make connections on their site by comparing their user base with your Facebook friends.

In this case, however, it isn't the connections that are being imported - real-time interaction with an external user base is being imported. Whether or not a particular friend has an account with AOL is irrelevant. The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what's at stake here, it's whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.

While other integrations attempt to replicate our social connections, to port them over to the site we're on, this one makes no such demands. We can continue using AIM while taking advantage of the particular friend set we've likely spent the most time cultivating and grooming - our Facebook friends.

]]>Discuss

Italy Plans to Hold YouTube Accountable for its Users' Uploads (Updated)

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:14:05 -0800

The Italian government is moving ahead with its plans to hold YouTube accountable for its users' copyright infringements. According to new regulations that have recently been proposed by the Italian government, YouTube would have to get a TV license to operate in Italy. Should Italy move ahead with this regulation, YouTube would have to follow the same rules and regulations as traditional broadcast channels. These new rules would eliminate the "safe harbor" rules that currently shield services like YouTube.

]]>Sponsor

]]> According to Nicola D'Angelo, a commissioner in Italy's Communications Authority, these new rules would make Italy "the only Western country in which it is necessary to have prior government permission to operate this kind of service. This aspect reveals a democratic risk, regardless of who happens to be in power."

Update: We just heard back from Google. Here is the company's official statement, courtesy of Marco Pancini, Google's senior policy counsel for Italy:

"When this Directive was debated at length in Brussels, it was clearly decided that user-generated video content should not be regulated in the same way as traditional TV content. If it was then people would find it far more difficult to use video sites to share their videos. So we hope that Italy does not go down a different path and start to regulate videos that people upload to the internet in the same way as they regulate TV."

A "Mere Conduit"

As Nate Anderson notes, the EU passed an electronic commerce directive in 2000 that clearly states that whenever a service only provides a transmission service, "the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted." The EU considers these services "mere conduits," as long as the "do not initiate the transmission, do not select the receiver of the transmission and do not select or modify the information contained in the transmission." The EU directive, however, leaves it up to the EU's member states to require service providers to prevent infringement.

How Will Google React?

Should Italy's deputy minister of communications Paolo Romani decide to forge ahead with these new regulations, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and any other company that offers services similar to YouTube would face substantial legal risks if they continued to operate in Italy.

Google, of course, is already embroiled in a legal conflict with Italy. We asked Google for a statement about the current situation in Italy and will update this post once we hear more.

]]>Discuss

Facebook Status Messages are the New Chain Emails

Sarah Perez — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:25:56 -0800

"This status is being tracked. The owners of Facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for Haiti every time this is cut and paste as a status." Sound familiar? This recent status message hoax has been making its way around the popular social network, duping members into posting the status as their own in the hopes that, by doing so, they've somehow contributed to the Haitian earthquake disaster relief fund without having to actually open their own pocketbook to do so. While that would be nice if it was true, this hoax is just one of many found on Facebook today.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The hoodwinks, urban legends, fairy tales, humorous tall tales, and out-and-out scams that once arrived via our email inboxes have been slowly making their way to the world's largest social network. And as before, people are being fooled into reposting because the message always comes from a trusted friend.

Just like the emails that once promised free money from Bill Gates for participation in a Microsoft email beta test, reposting a Facebook status isn't going to produce money from thin air anymore than forwarding a chain email message would have done in years past. And yet, the same people who are now savvy enough to junk the email forwards and scams into their Deleted Items folder are blindly reposting status messages such as these as if they're the gospel truth.

Folks, urban legends have evolved. Status messages are the new chain email.

Urban legends have filled our inboxes for years on end. Before the days of technology, these same stories were idly passed around via chats at the water cooler and over-the-fencepost gossip sessions with fellow neighbors. It's said that the tales tap into a society's dark underbelly by posing as cautionary tales about the dangerous world we live in (AIDS from a gas pump! A hook-handed murderer!), or they simply tap into our deepest hopes and dreams. (You can get rich quick! You just have to forward an email!). Legends like these may change over the years, but they will always be around in some form or another and they won't be disappearing any time soon.

Watch Out, You're Being Spied On!

Another recent message making the rounds warns of something called "Unnamed app," a vicious little bot that supposedly slowlys down Facebook while also spying on your activities. While there is some truth to the fact that Facebook applications have an unworldly amount of access to your personal data, this particular app is not a rogue spybot secretly tracking your moves, it's just your everyday, run-of-the-mill software bug. And Facebook fixed it. But that probably won't stop thousands from "helpfully" passing this message onto their Facebook friends for days (if not weeks and months) to come.

Your Account Will be Deleted Unless...

These viral status messages, brand-new creations about Internet dangers and free money, aren't the only hoaxes to find their way to the social space. Older urban legends have also been re-crafted to now fit the Facebook era. Take, for example, the warning passed around in the early 2000's regarding the "overload" of people signing up for Hotmail accounts. According to this missive, Hotmail was over capacity and Microsoft needed to dump some people from the system. In order to prove you were still an active user, you were asked to forward the email to every Hotmail contact you had so that your account would not be deleted. Essentially a harmless prank, this warning transformed itself over the years, reappearing in various forms that threatened the accounts of Yahoo, then AOL, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, and MySpace users alike. Today, that message is again being circulated as a Facebook status update. The new lingo? It's not "please forward" anymore - it's "Copy+Paste." Because if you don't, you know, your Facebook account will be deleted. Yikes!

In this case, the fear of losing Facebook access has led many users to repost the warning on their own walls, where it's seen by friends who pick it up and pass it around too. But again, there's no truth to this message either.

An Urban Legend or a Deeper Truth?

While the above hoax speaks greatly to our society's increased reliance on technology, how strong those ties are and how fearful we are of being without them, others play on even deeper emotions. The Facebook story about the $1-at-a-time donations might not be true (side note: the company has set up a Disaster Relief page for those interested in legitimate ways to help), there's a photo of a Haitian cross whose existence is harder to prove or disprove. Circulating via Facebook right now is this photo of a stone crucifix still left standing in the wake of the utter destruction that was the Haitian earthquake. That one's real, right? Well, maybe so, maybe not. Ever since the creation of Photoshop, answering questions like these have gotten much harder. What matters though, is not the photo's veracity (or lack thereof), but the fact that, to some, it seems to hold a deeper meaning about the nature of God - how he's still there even in times like these. For Christians, it's an image of hope in a world of suffering. And by reposting it time and again via Facebook, it's spreading virally around the globe.

It's precisely these emotions - our fears, our hopes, our desires - that urban legends tap into. And while some are more harmless than others, it can be difficult to know the difference between the truth and a false claim, as this above example clearly shows.

Think Before You Post

So what can you do? Although we're no longer deluged by the well-meaning warnings and fables that arrive via our email inboxes, we're still being subjected to their far-out claims. It's just that the medium is different. Once again, it's time to be vigilant. Just because you saw it on Facebook, that doesn't make it true. Just because the message comes via a trusted friend or family member, that doesn't make it worthy of reposting. Take a minute to think about it, use common sense, run a quick Google search if unsure, and then decide if that story is one to pass on.

Now forward this information to all your family and friends using the "share" button below!
]]>Discuss

Haiti Benefit Concert Live on the Internet

Mike Melanson — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:34:00 -0800

As news of more aftershocks hitting the already devastated Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince keep coming in, YouTube and a laundry list of other web sites have announced that tonight's "Hope for Haiti Now" benefit concert will be broadcast live on the Internet.

According to an AFP report, the Google-owned company will be joined by Hulu, MySpace, Fancast, AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Bing.com, BET.com, MTV.com, CNN.com, VH1.com and Rhapsody.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Tonight's benefit concert will help raise money for a number of organizations, including Oxfam America, the Red Cross, UNICEF, the UN World Food Program, Partners in Health, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, and Yele Haiti, a charity foundation set up by the Haitian-born hip-hop star Wyclef Jean. Last week, we outlined a number of other legitimate avenues for helping with the situation in Haiti.

YouTube offered this video on its blog, previewing the benefit:

]]>Discuss