ReadWriteWeb

The Associated Press this afternoon quoted European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding as stating that the E.U. government should not only federalize its approach to granting safe harbor for social networks, but essentially should hold all Internet service providers on the continent, including social networks, responsible for informing Internet users when personal information is being collected from them.

The quote seemed a little fishy, so ReadWriteWeb this morning ran it past Comm. Reding's spokesperson, Matthew Newman. As it turns out, according to Newman's information, the AP quote was indeed taken out of context. Words from the misquote originally appeared in a September 10 interview with the BBC, in response to a speech by Comm. Reding from last March. In its native context, Comm. Reding does not call for a limitation on the European framework for Safe Harbor with respect to social networks - an issue for which Comm. Reding was an outspoken champion.

Despite the fact that social media is hardly still the exclusive purview of the early adopter, it still surprises, grates or inspires laughter sometime to see it crop up outside its native ecosystem. So, when Associated Press, the official arbiter of terminology, text and typography turned to Twitter, it gave us funny feelings. We weren't sure if we were being wooed or abused.

The 2010 AP Stylebook now carries a dark, dirty little section called "Social Media Guidelines." Squeeeeee! Let's look inside, shall we?

Google and the Associated Press haven't exactly been on good terms for the last few months. Due to fundamental disagreements over copyright and payments between the companies, Google stopped hosting AP content on its site in December after the existing contract between the AP and Google expired. Yahoo, however, is a step ahead of Google and just announced a new deal with the AP. The details about the contract between Yahoo and the AP weren't disclosed, but chances are that Yahoo agreed to pay higher licensing fees in return for the right to host AP stories on its properties.

Earlier this year, the Associated Press, together with the Media Standards Trust, introduced hNews, a new microformat for describing news content. HNews allows publishers to easily attach machine-readable news semantics to content on the web. Today, the AP announced the completion of the first draft of hNews. In addition, TownNews, announced that is will support hNews in its BLOX content management system, which is being used by over 1,500 newspapers in the US.

Thomson Reuters, the U.K.-based news service, released News Pro today, a new application for the iPhone, iPod touch, and Blackberry that gives users easy, almost real-time access to Reuters' news wire. We spent some time with the iPhone version of the application today (iTunes link), and while we like the fact that the app gives us easy access to a lot of great content, the application itself could use a lot of polishing, especially when compared to some of its closest competitors from the Associated Press (iTunes link) and Bloomberg (iTunes link).

It's no secret that the Associated Press and Google News aren't exactly getting along right now. According to the AP, Google News and other content aggregators often come too close to violating the principles of fair use. Most people, however, would argue that these aggregators actually bring more traffic to newspaper websites, and according to the latest data from Hitwise, this is exactly the case.