However, a new study from the Pew Internet Project shows that geeks, including IM users and bloggers, are more likely to help neighbors, get out of the house, volunteer, and behave as upstanding members of their IRL communities.

And although the study found that Internet users were less likely to rely on neighbors for help, its findings also tell us that frequent or dedicated Internet users are a mighty friendly and helpful bunch when it comes to giving support to neighbors. Bloggers are almost 80 percent more likely to do small favors for their neighbors than other groups, and they're 84 percent more likely to help a neighbor care for a family member, e.g., offer babysitting help. And while Internet users, including photo-sharing folks and IM fans, are more likely across the board to help and hang out with people in their neighborhood, the study also showed that Internet users are almost 50 less likely to lend neighbors money. Insert a pun about teaching a man to phish here.

Folks who use sites such as BuildingBulletins or NeighborGoods to connect with people who live near them are also more likely to engage with their community, especially in terms of actively discussing community issues, listening to a neighbor's problems, or helping a neighbor with chores or errands.

Bloggers and mobile phone users are also 72 percent more likely to belong to a local group or organization such as a charitable organization, a youth sports league, or a religious group. For example, an average single, white person with no children has a 40 percent chance of belonging to at least one local voluntary group. However, that chance increases to 54 percent if that person users a mobile device and 72 percent if that person is also a blogger and frequent Internet user.

Another fascinating set of findings completely negate the stereotypical image of Internet geeks as agoraphobic recluses. Internet and mobile users are far more likely than non-users to hit up coffee shops, parks, and restaurants in their communities. Internet users in general are around 50 percent more likely to find themselves in public places than non-users, and bloggers specifically are 60 percent more likely than non-bloggers to spend time in a public park.

The study concludes, "As with other local community activities, the relationship between Internet use and participation in public and semi-public spaces is likely a combination of self-selection and an outcome of internet use... The Internet may also enable visits to public spaces through opportunities to coordinate rendezvous and search for new places to visit."

While the FTC will obviously have a hard time enforcing these regulations, there can be no doubt that marketers regularly approach independent bloggers (and especially mommy bloggers) with freebies. When bloggers accept these exchanges, they may not always disclose them in the posts that result. So, while bloggers who are involved in these schemes often tend to say that they would have reviewed the product anyway or that their reviews are often critical, there can be little doubt that payments and freebies influence these stories.

These new rules and rather large fines should bring some bloggers and marketers into line, though others will surely continue to push the ethical boundaries. And blogging Payola is unlikely to go away completely because of these new rules.

This marks the first time the FTC has updated endorsement and testimonial rules since 1980. The new rules also take on celebrity endorsements. If celebrities endorse a product and make false or unsubstantiated claims, or don't disclose 'material connections' between themselves and the advertisers in ads and outside the context of the ads (talk shows, social media, etc.), these celebrities can be held liable under the FTC Act. Judging from this, it would seem that celebrities who tweet about a product they endorse are now risking large fines.

The pair had just wrapped up a panel discussion on social media and the news. Although each provides coverage of overlapping spaces, they both had unique insights on gathering and reporting the news, as well as using social media to reach the public.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

We'll be participating with a post highlighting an inspiring woman in tech tomorrow, but we thought this would also be a good opportunity to share the search engine below, titled Blogs By Women in Tech. It was created using the super simple and very powerful Google Custom Search tool and lets users search just the archives of more than 200 tech blogs written by women. It was seeded by the archived blogroll at Misbehaving.net and has since grown with more people submitting their blogs. I have a link to it saved on my toolbar and use it whenever I can, as a way to make sure to include women's voices in our news coverage.

Feel free to save and use the search engine yourself. If you'd like to suggest your blog or someone else's for inclusion, you can either email links to marshall@readwriteweb.com or volunteer to be a contributor through a link on the site.

So, go sign up to participate in Ada Lovelace Day and let's make sure that the next generation of young women know that there is an important place for them in technology.

No cause of death is yet known, but the Committee says torture of bloggers is common in Iran and they are usually placed in close proximity to the most dangerous criminals in any facility. Misayafi was sentenced in December to 30 months in prison "for insulting Islamic Republic Leaders." The man said he was a cultural blogger, not a political one, and only wrote a few satirical articles that got him into trouble.

We've reported here on a number of bloggers imprisoned in Iran and in Egypt for documenting government abuses or just writing critical words about governments that demand total compliance. In the middle of last year we wrote about Iran's parliament debating legislation that would add the death penalty to the list of possible punishments for using blogs to challenge government authority.

It is a timeless battle all around the world between freedom, art and self expression on one side and authority, expediency and abuse on the other. The rise of the web has made that battle different, though. Blogs give a voice to the previously voiceless, and the historical and moral importance of efforts to save those new voices from arrest, torture and death cannot be overstated.

We would love to see the Obama administration, which has made extensive use of online social media, publicly and explicitly condemn this death at the Iranian government's hands. We'd be surprised if that happened.

Social media is powerful and changing the world; we don't expect that this will be the last person to lose their life over it. Omid Reza Misayafi, brave Iranian blogger, may you rest in peace. May all those imprisoned for blogging in Iran, and around the world, be set free.

For ongoing coverage of this and all-too similar situations around the world, see The Committee to Protect Bloggers and associated organizations linked to on their site.

This affair is also a good example of how much power a vocal minority can have thanks to social media. The controversy has already gone beyond Twitter, and mainstream news outlets will surely pick this story up within the next day or two.

We Feel Your Pain

Motrin, as Seth Godin points out, had a chance here to reconnect with its customers by using social media to reach out to them with its apology, but the company issued a standard press release-style apology on its site instead. That might seem old-fashioned, but for most companies, that's the only way they know how to operate.

Learning from Comcast

More and more users expect companies to reach out to them directly through social media, so just having a social media presence is not enough anymore. When controversies like this one happen (whether deserved or not), smart companies will reach out to consumers directly to stop these fires right where they started. A pioneer of this is obviously Comcast, whose 'Director of Digital Care' Frank Eliason reaches out to any and all Twitter users who tweet about issues with the company's service.

The detentions follow a wave of arrests of Chinese dissidents leading up to the Olympics. The US government pledged as the games began to engage the Chinese government concerning human rights - we wonder what those conversations look like now that China has detained journalists consistently critical of US policy as well.

New online media have opened the doors to people publishing on budgets that would never have supported journalistic efforts in the past. That new generation of publishers has a greater freedom to take risks because they aren't as beholden to the interests of sponsors. That's one way to describe the political impact on journalism of blogging - another way might be that these new media have opened up publishing to activists with less interest in objectivity than traditional journalists have aimed for.

Either way, the impact of blogging and video blogging on the world at large is widely recognized and it's no surprise that the authoritarian Chinese government is taking steps to protect itself. We condemn the detention of any journalists, whether they strive for objectivity or tell stories from a particular perspective.

According to extensive coverage on BoingBoing, the following US journalists and/or activists are all currently missing:
- James Powderly
- Brian Conley
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

We're working on creating a widget displaying video, information and a button to call US Congressional representatives but for now we'll leave you with the following video published by Conley in China last week. Update: Ribbit.com doesn't want to give us an account promptly, so we'll just say - if you want to call the US Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee to register your concern about the 5 people above, they are at +1 202 225 5021 and they are waiting for you. We just called them a few minutes ago.

Apparently, this is within the limits of Apple's license agreements, but of course, final approval of new apps is completely in the hands of Apple.

The lack of copy and paste on the iPhone is definitely holding back a lot of functionality. While it would be easy to write a simple word-processor or blogging tool for the iPhone (and some have done so), they will only really become useful once you can copy a URL from Safari into the Wordpress or Typepad editor or a piece of text from Safari into a notepad application.

What Will Apple Do?

OpenClip is mostly a band-aid right now. Apple will release copy and paste sooner or later and given that Apple's own applications like Safari aren't very likely to support OpenClip very soon, the current solution will remain of limited use, but at least it will show the potential and give application developers an idea for what they will be able to do once this becomes a standard feature (and yes - it really should have been a standard feature of the first iPhone firmware...).

Here is a video of OpenClip in action:

Lifestreaming?

Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information. Bloggers like Julia Allison, whose internet activities and real-world attention-grabbing stunts made her "internet famous," has used the format to rocket herself into stardom. That stardom even made her the subject of a recent Wired magazine article on the subject of self-promotion. Her method of communication? The lifestream, of course. Her blog is no more than a short collection of photos, videos, copy-and-pasted emails, random thoughts, links, and general over-sharing. The site even scrolls horizontally instead of vertically which makes it seem much more like a timeline than just another blog.

Julia Allison's Site

The simplicity of a lifestream is ideal for our information overloaded age. Lifestreams are short and sweet, yet still provide the same insight into a person's life as yesterday's casual personal blog did. A video here, a photo there, and today's web citizens can voyeuristically peer into anyone's life and get a sense of who they are. Long-form bloggers, on the other hand (myself included) require time and attention to read, but with so many publishers out there, people just aren't reading content like they used to - they're just scanning text and moving on. For new bloggers, this means getting readers is harder than ever - your words are getting lost in a sea of noise. So to stand out, several are turning to the lifestream instead in order to get noticed.

The New Blog

But the Julia Allison method is only one option for lifestreaming. Over the weekend, I stumbled across this blog, if you can even call it that. This was no ordinary blog - it was a lifestream based on the social aggregation service, FriendFeed. Take a look:

The New Blog (Click To See It Larger)

What's amazing about this site is that the elements of traditional blogging are mirrored here. Instead of posts, there's a stream. Instead of "Recent Comments," there are the "Recent Discussions." And instead of an "About Me" page, there's a link to the blogger's Facebook profile. Could this be the future of blogging? For active social participants, the above site could certainly be the ideal blog as it highlights their participation instead of their thoughts and opinions.

But even though FriendFeed might be the easiest way to add a lifestream to your site (or turn your blog into a lifestream), it's certainly not the only way. The Lifestream Blog keeps track of the many different ways that web site owners are self-hosting their own lifestreams. You can check out the galleries of these sites both here and here.

How You Can Stream Your Life

So, how are people doing this? There are several ways, but many people today are using custom code on their sites in order to produce the lifestream. However, if you already have a Wordpress blog, you can set up a custom lifestream within Wordpress with relative ease. In fact, there are a couple of options to do so:

• SimpleLife Wordpress Plugin - this plugin lets you either add your lifestream as a widget or as a page.
• RSS Stream Wordpress Plugin - this plugin lets you add a lifestream as a page on your site.

We also told you about the much-anticipated Sweetcron, brand-new automated lifestreaming software for self-hosting your own stream.

SweetCron

Unfortunately, the developer has still yet to release the software, despite having originally promised a June release. These continued delays leave the door wide open for another developer to release their own software and capture the early adopter lifestreaming market. (Do you know of any others in development? Let us know!)

Lifestreaming Is The Always On Blog

There was a time when casual, personal blogging was your way to communicate with your friends on the web. Via posts, commenting, and blogrolls, bloggers formed niche communities on the web to socialize with each other. Today, new tools provide that same level of socialization - perhaps even better than blogging ever could. Via micro-blogging sites like Twitter, every quick thought or link can be shared with your community of followers and you can see theirs, too. You can join and exit the never-ending conversation at your leisure. Plus, other social sites like FriendFeed provide today's new discussion boards where conversation occurs surrounding the items posted and shared, leading to even more of a community feel, and one that's drawing more users every day.

Sites and social tools like these and many others encourage more participation on the social web than ever before. Although the social participants on these sites are often more active in socializing than they are in blogging, there's still that need to stake out your own piece of real estate on the web. But we wonder: does that really need to be a blog anymore? Perhaps not.

Blogging Newspaper image courtesy of Annie Mole]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_blogging_reveale.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_blogging_reveale.php Trends Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez I'm very pleased to announce that Marshall Kirkpatrick has joined ReadWriteWeb in a full-time capacity, as our new Vice President of Content Development. The grand title reflects Marshall's senior position within ReadWriteWeb, where he will be responsible for driving a lot of our upcoming content developments. These include premium content, publishing system enhancements, and more magic things. Marshall will also continue to be ReadWriteWeb's Lead Writer, so don't worry his writing isn't taking a backseat at all. He will be going full-time at RWW sometime over the next couple of weeks.

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]]> Since starting with us as Lead Writer back in September '07, Marshall has helped ReadWriteWeb become the 9th most linked to blog in the world (according to Technorati). With Marshall on board full-time, I'm excited about RWW continuing its strong growth and rocking the tech news world even more!

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