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.

Imeem Taking Off - Before MySpace Music Has Even Launched

Music-based social networking site Imeem is getting a lot of the right kind of press currently, based on strong traffic growth and key deals with record labels. We last wrote about Imeem in March, when they launched a developer platform that enabled read/write access to user information and more. As we explained then, Imeem is a site where users can listen to licensed streaming music, as well as upload music and blog about it - all for free. Now, Imeem is the third-largest social network in the United States after MySpace and Facebook; and it's now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US.

The Fire Eagle Has Landed: Yahoo Opens Its Location Platform to All

Yahoo announced that the close beta period for its location platform Fire Eagle has ended and that the service is now open for everybody. We wrote about Fire Eagle extensively when the beta was first announced. Since then, a number of high-profile services, including Brightkite, Movable Type, Dopplr, and Pownce have implemented Fire Eagle through the numerous APIs Yahoo provides for accessing the service.

Wiki Editing Just Got Easier: Atlassian Confluence Releases Office Connector

Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, announced this week a Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their latest release, Confluence 2.9. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki - they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead. Also, with the addition of the SharePoint connector, Microsoft's well-known collaboration and document sharing platform gets a big dose of Enterprise 2.0 goodness, which is sure to please the end users. However, Confluence makes I.T. happy too, thanks to their inclusion of tools - like LDAP integration and administratively controlled permissions - that are designed just for the needs of the enterprise.

See also: The Semantic Desktop? SDS Brings Semantics To Excel

Google Should Buy eXpresso

Like a lot of people, Bernard Lunn had problems with Google Apps this week. Sure, Google "feels his pain" but they also lost his confidence. And confidence is a delicate thing. What crashed was Spreadsheet. That has always been the weakest component for Google and the strongest for Microsoft. Excel rocks, its just a tad behind the times on collaboration. But in this post we explain how Google could still win the spreadsheet game by buying eXpress Corp.

Livestreaming From Qik and Flixwagon Comes to the iPhone

It's no secret that the iPhone lacks video recording capabilities, which has served as a huge roadblock for companies and services that would like to introduce services that take advantage of video capabilities. For users that love to livestream or lifestream from their iPhones this is also a huge drawback. Well worry no more iPhone heads because Qik and Flixwagon have both introduced their livestreaming apps to jailbroken iPhones!

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Olympics: Only 0.2% of Viewers Exclusively Watch Online

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Olympics are off to a good, but not amazing start on the Internet. Over the first three days, NBC's online coverage drew an average of 4.7 million viewers per day, with the numbers steadily rising over the weekend. So far, Sunday was the most watched day, with 5.1 million total users and 3.42 million streams. According to the same article, only 0.2% of all viewers exclusively used the Internet to watch the Games, while 90% used the traditional TV coverage exclusively and 10% used both the Internet and TV.

Does Good Tech Need PR?

Behind the scenes of many tech blogs these days, there's a rat race for attention, with PR agents struggling to overcome the noise of feeds, news sites and other agents in order to get coverage for their clients. Tiny web tech companies pay $5k, $10k or more per month for PR agents to work the media, old and new, in hopes that it will help them find wider audiences. Big companies spend far, far more on PR. Is that really necessary? Won't great technologies find their own audiences when their undeniable value is discovered by one person and passed on to the world at large?

The App Store: Soon To Be A Billion Dollar Marketplace?

Anyone who has the iPhone or iPod Touch can tell you that one of the best things about owning the device is the ability to add apps from iTunes App Store. Although many of the apps that we talk about here are the free ones like the social networking apps, the instant messaging apps, and the blogging apps, it's the paid apps that are making the store a financial success.

See also: How To Lifestream From Your iPhone

Data Portability Working Group Elects New Leadership

The high profile but heretofore loosely organized Data Portability Working Group announced this week that it has elected its first group of Steering Group officers. The Working Group strives to help user data become freed for secure re-use across different websites and services. The first chair of the Steering Group will be Daniela Barbosa, who is a Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a Dow Jones company. Can the Data Portability Working Group overcome some early shakiness caused by the perception that it's all hype and no substance? The group got big press when Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other companies publicly joined up - but critics allege that press is all that's been accomplished.

Startup, Inc - What You Need to Know Before Starting a Company

Often people start a company without any clear idea of what a company is. Entrepreneurs closet themselves in the garage and start writing code. While the modern tech world could not exist without obsession, artistic inspiration and crazy engineers, there's more to a startup than passion. In this post, we explore the basics behind corporate entities, stock, financing, and the key non-technical infrastructure every company should have.

See also: 12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Live

Future of Blogging

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of 'The Future of Blogging'. It was based on a must-read post that Sarah Perez wrote last week and one I wrote a couple of weeks back. We had two special guests on the show this week: Aaron Brazelle of the Technosailor blog and Muhammed Saleem, an occasional contributor to RWW and a social media consultant.

Select RWW Live Episode 5

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Short Attention Span

There are a number of other interesting bits of information in the data from NBC, including that face that the average time people spent watching video on the NBC site so far is under 15 minutes and was as low as 10 minutes on Friday. This is very much in line with how people use Internet video on other sites like YouTube. NBC did not specify how many viewers watched the live coverage and how many of them just viewed already recorded clips. Judging from this number, it would almost seem as if most viewers wither decided to mostly watch prerecorded clips, or that they did not stick around for the live coverage for very long.

But What About the Experience?

Over the weekend, we had quite some time to play with NBC's video player, and while the overall experience was good and the video quality was actually very good and the streams never stuttered once, the video player itself is a bit of a disappointment. Why, for example, is there no full-screen mode available?

Also, the much touted "Live Video Control Room," where you can watch up to 4 streams at a time, is pretty much useless because of the miniscule size of the videos. Also, as Chris Albrecht points out, the user interface and navigation of the site is often confusing.

Overall, though, it seems these Olympic Games will hopefully change the way TV executives think about online coverage. Clearly, the online coverage is not detracting from TV viewership and if anything, is enhancing the way people relate to the events, especially in a year where the large time difference and the time-delay of the TV coverage become such an important issue. While the overall numbers for online viewership are maybe not as high as some others expected, we will have to see what happens during the week now, where many viewers might start watching the online streams from work.

Build A Custom Search Engine Using Your Social Bookmarks

Last week, Yahoo finally unveiled the long-awaited new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Along with the new URL, simply delicious.com, the site got a revamped UI and added new features like selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. However, amid the delighted oohs and ahhs from the tech community over the new-and-improved site, some people were raising the valid question: "Who bookmarks anymore?" Besides bookmarking for the sake of making sure a site gets seen in your FriendFeed stream, the truth is that many people bookmark, but then turn to Google search when they actually want to find something.

Mainstream Web Watch: The Olympics & Online Video

The Beijing Olympics started this week and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

Mainstreaming RSS: Regator is Now in Public Beta

We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but this week, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.

Microsoft Relaunches Windowslive.com as a Community Site

Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, and Photo Gallery. This week, Microsoft re-launched the site as a community site, where users can exchange information and ideas about how to best use these tools. As Marty Collins, the Windows Live senior marketing manager explained to us in an interview last week, the idea behind this redesign is to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know

Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future. Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

The Future of Blogging Revealed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.

The Olympics & Social Media Marketing

This week we looked at how Web technology is being used in the Beijing Olympics. In this post we check out how some of the world's leading brands are using social media tools in their Olympics campaigns. Our first post discussed how online video will be a big part of this Olympics, which is great for consumers. The Web can also be a boon for brands too, when it comes to major sporting events.

Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.

As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

McDonald's has come out with an "alternate reality game" called The Lost Ring. The aim of the game is to discover a hidden history to the Olympics, which involves adventures in ancient Greece, mysterious packages, heroines, and so on. The Lost Ring apparently has the backing of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). There's an accompanying wiki and a YouTube site that has some very cinematic trailers, the first of which is embedded below:

It's an ambitious social media marketing ploy by McDonald's. While the McDonald's logo and brand aren't immediately apparent, the terms and conditions page indicates that it's a subtle push to associate their brand with the Olympics "spirit". Here's what the T&C state: "McDonald's is proud to sponsor The Lost Ring and bring the spirit of the Olympic Games to people around the world."

Now For the Not-So-Subtle: Lenovo's Athlete Blogs

Another example of social media and the Olympics is from computer manufacturer Lenovo, which has created blogs for about 100 Olympics athletes. Entitled Voices of the Olympic Games, in this case there is an explicit connection between the site and the brand. All the participating athletes were provided with "new Ideapad laptops and video cameras to capture their experiences." Many of these blogs are hosted on Google's Blogger.

Here's an example, from Rachel Dawson of the USA Field Hockey Team, from her latest post Out and About in the Village. . .:

"...the village is thriving as new batches of athletes arrive daily. The chaos in the dining hall is a key indicator of the increase in athlete volume. In order to understand the capacity of the dining hall let me draw you a mental picture . . . combine 6 football fields (3 deep and 2 wide), then line the space with thousands upon thousands of tables, put in buffet style food stands and add one McDonalds café, and there you have the village dining hall. Needless to say, the dining hall is the prime location for socializing, culturizing, and simply people watching. Today, there was extra excitement at meal time as some big time athletes arrived - ehhh, maybe you have heard of Michael Phelps, or perhaps Roger Federer or how about Spanish tennis phenom, Rafael Nadal. Yes indeed, we saw all of them."

Did you spot the McDonald's mention? They are doing a great job already infiltrating the Olympics!

Other Social Media Marketing at the Olympics

Via livemint.com, who got the following information from marketing consultancy R3 Asia Pacific, here are further examples:

• Panasonic's photo contest, where consumers can upload photos within the subject of Olympics and vote for others' photos on the website.
• Samsung Electronics Co. started a video contest based on the torch relay theme.
• China Mobile and video share portal Youku formed a platform called M-Zone, designed for "cheering for Olympics".
• FAW-Volkswagen Automobile Co. Ltd launched the Honk for China campaign. According to livemint, "Netizens who write about the torch relay passing through their town can link their posts with the FAW-VW's official torch map website. They then receive a "honking badge" that allows them to compose a tune which visitors can play (honk). Bloggers who attract the most "honks" win prizes."
• Qingdao Haier Co. Ltd, in association with Baidu.com Inc., sponsored an Olympics online "love torch" relay.
• Nike Inc. had a "creative community" for sharing creative works.
• PepsiCo Inc.'s website celebrates "Everyone can be on the can for China" online activity around the Olympics. Consumers can upload pictures or articles about their love for China on websites such as 5a.com, Xiaonei.com, Taoao.com, Pocn.cn, Ipartment and 163.com.

Conclusion

Any major sporting event these days will attract big sponsors, and the Olympics has always been an event where global giants like Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Kodak, et al can flaunt their wares. With social media, you could say that brands are just using the Internet to find ever more ingenious ways to promote their brand - and that the Olympics is just a prop for that. McDonald's clever alternate reality game is proof of that. Lenovo's 'blog for schwag' promotion for athletes is a more overt example.

Still, we think it's good usage of social media tools and it shows just how far the Web has come that big brands are pumping money into it as part of their Olympics marketing. What do you think of these social media marketing efforts? What others have you come across?

The letters sent to Durbin are not very concrete in their description of the code, though they all stress the following three core components:

Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy that provide direction and guidance to the ICT industry and its stakeholders in protecting and advancing the enjoyment of freedom of expression and privacy globally. The Principles describe key commitments in the following areas: Freedom of Expression; Privacy; Responsible Company Decision Making; Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration; Governance, Accountability, Transparency.

Implementation Guidelines that provide further details on how participating companies will put the Principles into practice. The Implementation Guidelines describe a set of actions which constitute compliance with the Principles and provide companies with guidance on how to implement the Principles.

A Governance, Accountability and Learning Framework founded on the notion that an organizational and multi-stakeholder governance structure is required to support the Principles and that participating companies should be held accountable for their role in the implementation of the Principles through a system of independent assessment.

All three companies also stress that this code could potentially have far-reaching effects on their operations in countries like China and that they have already established internal rules for how to deal with these issues.

During the Olympics, even journalists will not be allowed to access the full and open Internet, thanks to an agreement between the IOC and China, though China eased at least some of these restrictions after the first reports on this.

As Jim Puzzanghera notes in the LA Times, Yahoo especially has been criticized heavily for the way it handled the case of journalist Shi Tao in 2006. At that time, Yahoo revealed his identity as being linked to a Yahoo e-mail address after being pressured by Chinese officials. Shi Tao was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.

One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

Despite the geographical limitations, NBC is promising lots of 'new media' features in its Web coverage. These include:

• Users have the ability to watch whatever sport they want, unlike on TV where you get what the broadcaster dishes up.
• There will be 3,000 hours of "on-demand encores of full events and highlights".
• Users can switch between up to 4 live streams.
• Users will see the standard world feed that is sent to all broadcasters, so there will be no network TV commentators. Instead, the NBC expects to see bloggers "serve as play-by-play voices and analysts" (free talent!).
• Users will have access to statistics, biographies and other information.

As the NYT notes, NBC's coverage of the Olympics online is the culmination of NBC's "multiple-network strategy, which began in 2000 with the addition of CNBC and MSNBC to the mix." The upshot is that coverage of the Olympics becomes an on-demand, 24/7 experience -- although unfortunately not worldwide in NBC's case. This is possible because the "cyber-pipelines" infrastructure is largely in place now, in the US, to support such extensive online video coverage.

NBC's coverage online will be powered by Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Media player. CNET reports that Limelight Networks is being used to route the video streams to Internet service providers. NBC was originally planning to use Adobe's Flash, but CNET noted that NBC "was convinced by Microsoft earlier this year that Silverlight would allow it to stream more high-quality video than would have been possible using Flash."

It seems China's TV networks didn't buy that line, as Adobe has partnered with CCTV.com to bring Olympics online video to mainland China.

CCTV.com and Adobe Partner for Internet Coverage in China

Today, Adobe announced a partnership with CCTV International Networks Co, Ltd. to deliver Web coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games to fans throughout mainland China and Macau. CCTV.com owns the online video rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for mainland China and Macau. CCTVOlympics.com plans to provide 5,000 hours of "on-demand protected streamed video content including full event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages." This is made up of 3,800 hours of worldwide broadcast Olympic Games video and 1,200 hours of CCTV's own video.

Choosing Adobe as a partner, as with NBC and Silverlight, is a hint that Chinese Internet viewers can expect a rich interactive experience. The press release trumpets "an unprecedented Web experience created with Adobe Flex and delivered via Adobe Flash technology".

Unlike NBC though, CCTV is not eschewing commentators and replacing them with bloggers. CCTV promises "expert analysis from CCTV's Olympic media team". However it also will be diving into the social web via "social networking features that will enable fans to share aspects of their Olympic experience with friends."

Conclusion

The 2008 Olympics is set to be the first to have a mammoth online video presence. Up to 5,000 hours of coverage would be enough to satisfy even the most rabid of Olympics fan. What's possibly even more interesting to watch will be the performance of interactive Web technologies such as Silverlight and Flash in this coverage. Which one will end up better? Although I guess if you're in the US, you'll never know about Flash - and vice versa for the Chinese regarding Silverlight.

Further coverage from the RWW Network:

RWW: The Olympics Go Mobile

last100: Roundup: The most digital of all Olympic games is well underway

last100: NBC Olympics on the Go will allow (some) fans to download events to watch on their computers

From Yahoo's main mobile web site, m.yahoo.com, there's a new link that's been added to the top of the list directly underneath Mail and Messenger. The link reads "2008 Olympics Coverage."

From this link, you're taken to Yahoo's newly launched mobile Olympics site. Here, you'll find Beijing time and weather at the top, and a countdown timer to games underneath. The timer counts down the days, hours, and minutes until the start of the games on August 8th. Once the games begin, that timer will likely be replaced with other content.

Underneath the timer, there's a section devoted to news and photos, which deliver the top headlines with links to read the full stories.

Mobile Reporters

On the flip side, Mobile IM and VOIP company, Fring, is looking for mobile Olympics news reporters. They're hoping to take advantage of the demand for Olympics news coverage by using the event to gain traction and exposure for their service.

On a recent blog entry, the company announced that they would provide 3.5G mobile phones, with camera, SIM card, and unlimited data plans to anyone planning to attend the games and interested in micro-blogging the events. "FringCommentators," as they're being called, will then send in quick updates and photos to their blog. The announcement doesn't say, but the likely destination for these micro-blog posts will be this site, a China fring blog, currently only showing one post which reads "under construction."

More Ways To Get Mobile Olympics News

Of course, the official site for news (in the U.S.), NBCOlympics, will be a lot of people's first choice for mobile Olympics news. They're offering a mobilized version of their site and news via text (text OLYMPMICS to 51515).They're also offering mobile alerts, mobile video, and mobile TV news for select mobile devices.

Mobile widget makers are also getting ready for the Games. Plusmo, for example, has a Beijing widget available here which can be added to your phone to deliver the latest headlines.

For video, MobiTV customers can subscribe to a mobilized channel showing NBC Sports coverage, which come August, will be all Olympics news to be sure.

To get the latest headlines, Google Mobile's News feature lets you customize your page of news, so it's very easy to create a personalized page displaying only the news containing the keyword you entered - like "Olympics" or "Beijing," for example.

Then there is Reuters mobile news service which is available at http://mobile.reuters.com or via text (text NEWS to 25669). They even provide mobile RSS feeds, including this one for sports news.

ABC News looks like they might have some good mobile offerings, too, but I couldn't explore them thanks to a web site error:

Will you be watching the Summer Games on your mobile phone? If so, how? Share the services you will use in the comments.

However, on page two, the guidelines specify that posting of sound, moving images, and still pictures is not permitted. This guidelines apply to any Olympic events, including the "sporting actions" themselves, the ceremonies, or any other activities that require an "Olympic identity or ticket."

So, they are basically permitting you to post text only? What is this, 1995? So much for user-gen content, it seems. May we then suggest that 2008 becomes the year of the twittered Olympics instead?