Via LLRX.com - SharePoint Blogging with Permission - Lorette S.J. Weldon continues to share her guides on how librarians in various sectors can effectively leverage SharePoint within the enterprise, in groups, and with individuals outside the organization. She refers to her 2010 survey, "How is SharePoint used in Libraries?" that found 16 out of 54 participants used SharePoint's site features, such as the blog. Lorette provides insights and associated documentation on this application's limitations, features, and operational structure.

"As the result of EPIC v. DHS, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, EPIC has obtained nearly thee hundred pages of documents detailing a Department of Homeland Security's surveillance program. The documents include contracts and statements of work with General Dynamics for 24/7 media and social network monitoring and periodic reports to DHS. The documents reveal that the agency is tracking media stories that "reflect adversely" on DHS or the U.S. government. One tracking report -- "Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI" -- summarizes dissent on blogs and social networking cites, quoting commenters. EPIC sent a request for these documents in April 2004 and filed suit against the agency in December. For more information, see EPIC: EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring."

News release: "Almost one in three U.S. TV households – 35.9 million – owns four or more televisions, according to Nielsen’s State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report. Across the ever-changing U.S. media landscape, TV maintains its stronghold as the most popular device, with 290 million Americans and 114.7 households owning at least one. In contrast, 211 million Americans are online and 116 million (ages 13+) access the mobile Web. For more insights on usage and trends across TV, mobile, online, and social media download Nielsen’s State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report."

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Completely Updated - December 2011: Sabrina I. Pacifici's comprehensive, current awareness guide focuses on leveraging a wide but selected range of reliable, focused, predominantly free websites and resources to effectively track, monitor, analyze, background and review current and historical data, news, reports, and profiles on companies, markets, countries, people, and issues, from a global perspective. Sabrina's guide is a "best of" web resource that encompasses search engines, databases, alerts, publisher specific services and tools, along with links to content targeted sources produced by leading media organizations, governments, academia, NGOs and independent researchers.

Guidance on Live, Text-Based Communications from Court: "This Practice Guidance (the Guidance) applies to court proceedings which are open to the public and to those parts of the proceedings which are not subject to reporting restrictions. It is issued (as Guidance and not a Practice Direction) following a consultation relating to the use of live, text-based communications. Those consulted included the Judiciary, the Secretary of State for Justice, the Attorney General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Bar Council, the Law Society, the Press Complaints Commission, and the Society of Editors in addition to interested members of the public via the Judiciary website.
2) The Guidance clarifies the use which may be made of live text-based communications, such as mobile email, social media (including Twitter) and internet enabled laptops in and from courts throughout England and Wales. For the purposes of this Guidance these means of communication are referred to, compendiously, as live, text-based communications."

The 2011 ABA Journal Blawg 100

"EPIC has filed a Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force disclosure of the details of the agency's social network monitoring program. In news reports and a Federal Register notice, the DHS has stated that it will routinely monitor the public postings of users on Twitter and Facebook. The agency plans to create fictitious user accounts and scan posts of users for key terms. User data will be stored for five years and shared with other government agencies.The legal authority for the DHS program remains unclear. EPIC filed the lawsuit after the DHS failed to reply to an April 2011 FOIA request. For more information, see EPIC: Social Networking Privacy."

Print libraries, book collections, book shops - targets of fiscal austerity, the growing impact and power of e-books, social media, pay walls, e-commerce structures, and changing values about print media itself - are increasing disappearing. Regardless of the application of specific determining factors, the results are increased thresholds to open access to "knowledge." There is also a corresponding assault on the lifespan of websites, blogs, databases, metadata and web enabled content such as documents and emails, as users with no notice discover information simply going offline. There is however a cadre of official and unofficial guardians of the written word, photos, databases and other archival materials. This article by Matt Schwartz, with reporting by Eva Talmadge, in Technology Review, provides insight into the work of some individuals with a mission is to salvage the "intellectual" property of millions of web users whose terabytes of words, work and documents are disappearing despite quick, creative and technologically adroit efforts to save what can be called modern internet "history" on a global scale. This article documents some of the challenges in the struggle to manage massive data loss, the folks who are data defenders, and how truly valuable libraries collections are in serious danger. Variable associated with digitizing collections (copyright, cost, shear volume of the task, and global conflict to name just a few), continue to impact this dynamic problem.

"Vizibility and LexisNexis recently conducted a survey to help shed light on the use of social media in legal services marketing. To illustrate the findings, the results have been released as an infographic, available below. View the announcement here. The research suggests a high degree of reliance on broadly defined social media marketing programs, with 81% of survey participants reporting they already use social media marketing tools and another 10.1% saying they plan to deploy social media marketing elements within six months. Furthermore, reliance on social media tools and how they’re measured differ significantly by firm size. The survey found that a clear majority of participants consider social media an important part of their overall marketing strategy, with nearly half (48.5%) reporting that social media is “somewhat important” while another 31% believe the tools are “extremely important” to their total marketing efforts. Click a preview below to view the infographic at full size. The infographic is available in both black and white versions."

It’s a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed, December 21, 2011

News release: "The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, Ireland 21 December 2011 published the outcome of its audit of Facebook Ireland(FB-I) which was conducted over the last three months including on-site in Facebook Ireland’s Headquarters in Dublin. The report is available in 2 parts: Report of the Audit, including recommendations and the Facebook Technical Analysis Report...It is a comprehensive assessment of Facebook Ireland’s compliance with Irish Data Protection law and by extension EU law in this area...Deputy Commissioner, Gary Davis who led the conduct of the Audit stated that “this Audit was the most comprehensive and detailed ever undertaken by our Office. We set ourselves a very ambitious target for completion and publication as both this Office and Facebook, felt it was important that the outcome be published and opened to public comment and scrutiny...Facebook is constantly evolving and adapting in response to user needs and technical developments. Like any successful technology platform, the service needs to innovate by introducing new products and features in order to adapt to changing circumstances. Indeed the almost Darwinian nature of the site means that there will constantly be an absolute need to have in place robust mechanisms to keep pace with the innovation that is the source of the site’s success."

The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), Feature 1375–1405 1932–8036/2011FEA1375 [via gigaom]

The Protester, by Kurt Andersen: "It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract."

The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America's Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau? Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Justina Andonian - Center for Marketing Research, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Twitter and the Campaign - How the Discussion on Twitter Varies from Blogs and News Coverage And Ron Paul’s Twitter Triumph, December 8, 2011

Via NextGov, a compilation of aggregated government tweet feeds organized by type of organization as well as by most recent postings. Very useful for a comprehensive, one-stop view of agency tweets and updated data.

"Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and "massive intercept" gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country. The documents—the highlights of which are cataloged and searchable here—were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month."

How Mainstream Media Outlets Use Twitter Content Analysis Shows an Evolving Relationship - November 14, 2011

Atlantic Wire - Adam Clark Estes: "When a federal judge ruled that Twitter must reveal the private data of three WikiLeaks associates on Thursday, privacy advocates died a little inside. The two organizations that had defended the three users, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundations (EFF), immediately filed mournful blog posts that respectively raised doubts about the United States government's secretive handling of the case and highlighted grave message the ruling sends about the future of privacy on the internet. But Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Valentine-DeVries sums up the implications of the case best with a leading question: "Should the government be able to collect information related to your Internet use without a warrant?" We now know that the federal court's answer is, "Yes."

The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialize for Fame and Money -
Yazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, Matei Ripeanu -
University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

News release: "Customer experience analytics firm ForeSee today released its report on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Quarterly E-Government Satisfaction Index, including an analysis of the state of social media in the federal government. ForeSee’s audit of social media activity in the federal government identified clear themes and best practices, showing that the public sector is learning to communicate with citizens in ways that are not usually associated with government services. ForeSee conducted an expert usability review of the 15 executive department websites in order to gauge how many participate in social media and how they do it. All are participating in the three most popular social platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—and many are using other new media and communications tools, from Flickr and podcasts to email newsletters and RSS feeds."

The Economist: "The beauty of Twitter, the popular microblogging service, is that users have to keep it short: messages can only be 140 characters long. But companies that mine the stream of tweets for marketing and other purposes (see article in this week's issue of The Economist) get much more information. [Here is a map] of a tweet including all its metadata. The map was published by Raffi Krikorian, a developer at Twitter. It is 18 months old, but it is safe to say that the amount of metadata attached to a tweet has not decreased since."

Federal Reserve Bank of New York - Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution. Request for Proposal (Event-6994)

The Impact of Economics Blogs, David McKenzie and Berk Özler, August 2011

International Bloggers and Internet Control, Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Jillian York, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey. Berkman Center for Internet & Society, August 2011

A Guide to Facebook Security For Young Adults, Parents, and Educators, Linda McCarthy, Keith Watson, and Denise Weldon-Siviy, August 2011. "This online guide explains how you can:

• Protect your Facebook account
  
• Avoid the scammers
  
• Use advanced security settings
  
• Recover a hacked Facebook account
  
• Stop imposters

Federal Computer Week: "Although Google+ has attracted more than 10 million users since its recent debut, many people in government are wondering what it is and how it ought to be used. Thanks to the Navy, now there is an overview of the new site. The Navy recently published a 13-page online guide titled What’s the deal with Google+? on the SlideShare website, providing a basic introduction to the new social networking site and how it could be used by individuals. The Navy’s presentation had been viewed by 606 people as of Aug. 16."

"The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) endorses the secure use of Web-based collaboration and social media tools to enhance communication, stakeholder outreach collaboration, and information exchange; streamline processes; and foster productivity improvements. Use of these tools supports VA and VA’s goal of achieving an interoperable, net-centric environment by improving employee effectiveness through seamless access to information. Web-based collaboration tools enable widely dispersed facilities and VA personnel to more effectively collaborate and share information—which can result in better productivity, higher efficiency, and foster innovation. This Directive establishes policy on the proper use of these tools, consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and policies."

"The Berkman Center is pleased to release Online Security in the Middle East and North Africa: A Survey of Perceptions, Knowledge, and Practice. This report describes the results of a survey of 98 bloggers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) carried out in May 2011 in order to study bloggers’ perceptions of online risk and the actions they take to address digital communications security, including both Internet and cell phone use. Digital communication has become a more perilous activity, particularly for activists, political dissidents, and independent media. The recent surge in digital activism that has helped to shape the Arab spring has been met with stiff resistance by governments in the region intent on reducing the impact of digital organizing and independent media. No longer content with Internet filtering, many governments in the Middle East and around the world are using a variety of technological and offline strategies to go after online media and digital activists. The survey was implemented in the wake of the Arab spring and documents a proliferation of online security problems among the respondents. In the survey, we address the respondents’ perceptions of online risk, their knowledge of digital security practices, and their reported online security practices. The survey results indicate that there is much room for improving online security practices, even among this sample of respondents who are likely to have relatively high technical knowledge and experience."

Social networking sites and our lives How people’s trust, personal relationships, and civic and political involvement are connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies, June 16, 2011

13% of online adults use Twitter Half of Twitter users access the service “on the go” via mobile phone, Aaron Smith, Senior Research Specialist, 6/1/2011

Wired: "In the early days of the Libya war, U.S. commanders were adamant that they didn’t communicate with the Libyan rebels about what targets to bomb. As it turns out, they don’t need to. They’ve got Twitter. NATO officials conducting air strikes on forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi don’t have soldiers on the ground to spot for the warplanes and armed drones overhead. (Well, at least not officially.) But they do have a barrage of tweets about Gadhafi’s troop movements in beleaguered cities like Benghazi and Tripoli, all of which come in handy when picking out targets. “We get information from open sources on the Internet, we get Twitter,” British Wing Commander Mike Bracken told AFP. Another NATO official attested, “Twitter is a great source.” None of which is to say that an errant tweet is enough to launch a Hellfire missile. NATO flies AWACS surveillance planes over Libya, as well as other spy aircraft and satellites, to aid with targeting. NATO officials assure that they don’t just set targeting coordinates based on what someone says over Twitter — just that Twitter has value as a source of tactical intelligence."

Via GSA's Apps.gov: "Social media apps make it easier to create and distribute content and discuss the things we care about and help us get the job done. Social media includes various online technology tools that enable people to communicate easily and share information. Social media includes text, audio, video, images, podcasts, and other multimedia communications." This site lists, and links to, 55 free apps in categories including: Analytics and Search Tools, Blogs and microblogs, Bookmarking/Sharing, Display of Multimedia, Data, Maps, Document Sharing on Websites, Idea Generation/General Discussion, In-depth Discussion Tools, Social Networks, Video, Photo, Audio Hosting/Sharing, and Wikis.

Via TPMMuckraker: "Until last night, Twitter use @ReallyVirtual had fewer than 1,000 followers. Yesterday he was Tweeting about a strange event in his neighborhood in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Turns out he was unknowingly chronicling the undercover raid which killed Osama bin Laden, as it happened. "ReallyVirtual", who identifies himself as Sohaib Athar, says he's an "IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops."

Total Tweeters By Party - 402: "We believe transparent government is better government. Twitter enables real conversation between lawmakers and voters, in real time. Find your representatives in Congress, follow them...* Democrat 167, * Independent 2, * Republican 233"

Welcome to the age of data: Watch your back! by Molly Wood

Best Practices Study of Social Media Records Policies, ACT-IAC Collaboration & Transformation (C&T) Shared Interest Group (SIG), March 2011

Privacy Impact Assessment for the Use of Unidirectional Social Media Applications Communications and Outreach, March 8, 2011. Kathleen McShea
Director of New Media and Web Communications, Office of Public Affairs, Department of Homeland Security

24/7 Wall St.: "Twitter has, by most estimates, 175 million members, which makes it one of the largest social networks in the world. All major media companies are on Twitter and some have more than one million Twitter users. It raises the question of whether there is wisdom in crowds. 24/7 Wall St. will look at the Twitter posts at Reuters Biz, WSJ, Financial Times, CNN Money, MarketWatch, CNBC, and 24/7 Wall St. each day to see which stocks are most frequently mentioned. It is clear that in this area of social media these tweets are a sign of which companies the Twitter universe is interested in. Together, these financial sites are followed by nearly 1,000,000 Twitter users, which makes them a sizeable sample of Wall St.’s interests. In some cases, we will publish the actual tweets from the sites."

Via the London Cyclist, the list includes blogs around the world: "Here is 2011’s top cycling blogs list. Enjoy and make sure you add some more great blogs to your RSS or Twitter feeds. The list is based on factors including page rank, Alexa Rank, Google In-links, Twitter and number of comments."

News release: "The Federal Trade Commission has finalized a proposed settlement that it announced in June 2010 with social networking site Twitter, which resolved charges that Twitter deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information. The FTC alleged that serious lapses in the company’s data security allowed hackers to obtain unauthorized administrative control of Twitter, including both access to non-public user information and tweets that consumers had designated as private, and the ability to send out phony tweets from any account. The privacy policy posted on Twitter’s website stated that “Twitter is very concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information. We employ administrative, physical, and electronic measures designed to protect your information from unauthorized access.” In addition, Twitter offered its users privacy settings that enabled them to designate their tweets as private."

ACLU And EFF Plan To Appeal Ruling In Case Challenging Government Attempt To Obtain Private Data in WikiLeaks Investigation

How Federal Agencies Can Effectively Manage Records Created Using New Social Media Tools, Patricia C. Franks, Associate Professor, School of Library & Information Science, San Jose State University

The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative: Issues for Congress, Wendy R. Ginsberg - Analyst in Government Organization and Management, January 28, 2011

"The role of social media in Congressional leaders’ messaging and outreach has exploded over the past few years, whether it be through tweets about floor schedule updates or on Facebook. But within that trend is a clear — and nonpartisan — divide between the savvy and those still in the dark. House Democratic and Republican leadership aides are eager to tout their bosses’ use of social media." [Link]

An Open Government Implementation Model: Moving to Increased Public Engagement, IBM Center for the Business of Government, January 2011

PewInternet: 22% of online Americans used social networking or Twitter for politics in 2010 campaign, by Aaron Smith, January 27, 2011:

"On Tuesday, January 25, at 9 p.m. EST, President Obama will deliver the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol. We have been working on a number of ways citizens can get involved in the State of the Union and ask their questions of President Obama and senior Administration officials. You can find all the details on our brand new State of the Union page."

• Watch the live stream of the State of the Union Address on WhiteHouse.gov.
  
• Immediately following the State of the Union Address, stay tuned for a live Open For Questions event where Senior White House officials will answer your questions about key issues addressed in the speech live from the White House.
  
• Wednesday: Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will be taking your questions via Twitter before his post-State of the Union briefing on Wednesday, January 26. Follow @PressSec on Twitter to find out when he’ll be taking your questions, then respond to @PressSec using the hashtag #1Q and watch for his video responses.
  
• President Obama will answer your questions during a live YouTube interview at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday January 27. Submit your questions on youtube.com/askobama."

The Social Side of the Internet - Technology use has become deeply embedded in group life and is affecting the way civic and social groups behave and the way they impact their communities, by Lee Rainie, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, Jan 18, 2011

Follow up to previous postings on WikiLeaks, Salon posted a copy of the December 14, 2010 subpoena to Twitter Inc. from DOJ, U.S. Attorney, Northern District of Virginia, for information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.

News release: "As part of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s mission to ensure that small business owners and entrepreneurs have access to accurate, timely and helpful information, SBA Administrator Karen Mills unveiled a newly re-designed SBA website. The new site also features the launch of SBA Direct, a dynamic new web tool with a variety of personalization features that will help small businesses start-up, succeed and grow. “With the launch of the new SBA.gov, we have reached a significant milestone in how the agency has evolved in using interactive web tools, social media and blogs to engage with, and better meet the needs of small business owners,” said SBA Administrator, Karen Mills...While the site features a variety of enhancements including a full re-design, new content, and improved navigation, the centerpiece is a dynamic new web tool called SBA Direct."

Follow up to previous postings on WikiLeaks, see The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog by Greg Mitchell via The Nation. This blog is coded as a daily entry, so readers link to each updated posting either via Greg's Twitter feed, or by selecting the specific date of his posting (for example, this is Day 32).

The 10 Most Powerful Tweets of 2010

Generations 2010, Kathryn Zickuhr, Web Coordinator, 12/16/2010

8% of online Americans use Twitter, Aaron Smith, Senior Research Specialist, Lee Rainie, Director, 12/9/2010: "Eight percent of the American adults who use the internet are Twitter users. It is an online activity that is particularly popular with young adults, minorities, and those who live in cities."

Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere, Jillian C. York, The OpenNet Initiative (ONI), November 2010

News release: "The largest ever global research project into people’s online activities and behaviour - Digital Life - was launched today, ‘digital day’ by TNS, the world’s biggest custom research company. Covering nearly 90 per cent of the world’s online population through 50,000 interviews with consumers in 46 countries, the study reveals major changes in the world’s online behaviour. Core data from the study is being made publicly available via this interactive website...Among the key findings of the study are:

• Globally, people who have on-line access have digital sources as their number one media channel. 61% of online users use the internet daily against 54% for TV, 36% for Radio and 32% for Newspapers.
  
• Online consumers in rapid growth markets have overtaken mature markets in terms of engaging with digital activities. When looking at behaviour online, rapid growth markets such as Egypt (56%) and China (54%) have much higher levels of digital engagement than mature markets such as Japan (20%), Denmark (25%) or Finland (26%). This is despite mature markets usually having a more advanced internet infrastructure.
  
• Activities such as blogging and social networking are gaining momentum at huge speed in rapid growth markets. The research shows four out of five online users in China (88%) and over half of those in Brazil (51%) have written their own blog or forum entry, compared to only 32% in the US. The Internet has also become the default option for photo sharing among online users in rapid growth markets, particularly in Asia."

Impact of War - How nine years of war has changed lives back home: "More than eight years after the attacks of 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reverberate in ways large and small. They have transformed the U.S. Armed Forces, defined a generation of veterans, left thousands dead and wounded. Yet they have also been fought largely out of view, with fewer than one percent of Americans directly involved. And while the wars may be winding down, the after-effects are only just beginning. This blog is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between The Washington Post and the people who live the wars everyday--soldiers, veterans, caregivers, spouses, advocates. Here, experts and everyday people can come together to talk about how the war has changed their lives. Accompanying these conversations is a series of stories by reporter Christian Davenport that, over the course of a year, will explore the impact of the wars in the Washington region, from Walter Reed to Arlington Cemetery to a local high school. Together, these stories and this blog seek to create a conversation and a community that shed some light on what the wars mean to all of us."

The Continued Rise of Blogging: "Social networks and microblogs have in recent years nudged blogging off the social media pedestal. For some consumers, who have more communication tools at their fingertips than they did a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter have supplanted blogging as life-streaming outlets. But blogs continue to be important. eMarketer estimates that this year more than half of internet users will read blogs at least monthly. By 2014, readership will rise to more than 150 million Americans, or 60% of the internet population in the US. One reason for the rise in readership is that blogs have become an accepted part of the online media landscape. “Trends in blog reading are expected to maintain an upward course as blogs continue to gain influence in the mainstream media,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report The Blogosphere: Colliding with Social and Mainstream Media (fee). “But there is a caveat to this forecast: Over time, blogs will continue to become indistinguishable from other media channels."

Older Adults and Social Media - Social networking use among those ages 50 and older nearly doubled over the past year, Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist, August 27, 2010: "While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.

• Between April 2009 and May 2010, social networking use among internet users ages 50-64 grew by 88%--from 25% to 47%.
  
• During the same period, use among those ages 65 and older grew 100%--from 13% to 26%.
  
• By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by 13%—from 76% to 86%."

Official Google Blog: When we first introduced our real-time search features last December, we focused on bringing relevance to the freshest information on the web. Our goal was to provide real-time content from a comprehensive set of sources, integrated right into your usual search results. Today we’re making our most significant enhancements to date, giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools to help you find what you need. Now you can access Google Realtime Search at its own address, www.google.com/realtime
On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify...In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed."

Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity, by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd, Harvard Business Review

The 2010 state CIO survey - Perspectives and trends from state government IT leaders August 2010

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Report on E-Business: Internet Portals & Search Engines, News & Information, and Social Media Websites, July 20, 2010. Commentary by Professor Claes Fornell: Google Dips Sharply but Holds Off Bing; FOXNews.com Leads All E-Business Websites; Facebook and MySpace Fail to Satisfy

Federal Computer Week: "DOD today launched an updated Social Media Hub Web page to provide quick links to service-affiliated Facebook, Twitter and YouTube social media sites as well as policy documents, training manuals and other information and to provide a forum for discussion. The military services have been active participants in social media. For example, as of today, the U.S. Marine Corps’ Facebook page counted more than 435,000 fans; the Army’s, 344,000; the Navy’s, 162,000; Air Force’s, 95,000; Defense Department’s, 38,000; Coast Guard’s, 19,000; and National Guard’s, 10,000."

• Alien Smuggling: DHS Could Better Address Alien Smuggling along the Southwest Border by Leveraging Investigative Resources and Measuring Program Performance, GAO-10-919T, July 22, 2010
• Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Tests: Misleading Test Results Are Further Complicated by Deceptive Marketing and Other Questionable Practices, GAO-10-847T, July 22, 2010
• Information Management: Challenges In Federal Agencies' Use of Web 2.0 Technologies, GAO-10-872T, July 22, 2010
• Oil and Gas Management: Past Work Offers Insights to Consider in Restructuring Interior's Oversight, GAO-10-888T, July 22, 2010
• Life Insurance Settlements: Regulatory Inconsistencies May Pose a Number of Challenges, GAO-10-775, July 09, 2010
• Alien Smuggling: DHS Needs to Better Leverage Investigative Resources and Measure Program Performance along the Southwest Border, GAO-10-328, May 24, 2010

Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit

Twitter Settles Charges that it Failed to Protect Consumers’
Personal Information; Company Will Establish Independently Audited Information Security Program: "Social networking service Twitter has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information, marking the agency’s first such case against a social networking service. The FTC’s complaint against Twitter charges that serious lapses in the company’s data security allowed hackers to obtain unauthorized administrative control of Twitter, including access to non-public user information, tweets that consumers had designated private, and the ability to send out phony tweets from any account including those belonging to then-President-elect Barack Obama and Fox News, among others."

Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy, Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadiy, Fabrıcio Benevenutoz, Krishna P. Gummadi - Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany; Royal Veterinary College, University of London, United Kingdom; CS Dept., Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

"24 Hours: Unplugged - What is is like to go without media? What if you had to give up your cell phone, iPod, television, car radio, magazines, newspapers and computer (i.e. no texting, no Facebook or IM-ing)? Could you do it? Is it even possible? Well, not really, if you are an American college student today. According to a new ICMPA [International Center for Media and the Public Agenda] study, most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world." [See Table of Contents on right side of page to navigate the study]

Hoofnagle, Chris Jay, King, Jennifer, Li, Su and Turow, Joseph, How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies? (April 14, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1589864

Official Google Blog: "Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets. With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period."

News release: "Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions."

News release: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is hosting a month-long online discussion to expand the conversation on acid rain. Acid rain is a serious environmental problem that affects large parts of the United States and is particularly damaging to lakes, streams, and forests and the plants and animals that live in these ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), the pollutants that form acid rain, can cause serious respiratory illnesses and premature death."

PRNewswire — "The ongoing evolution of the media industry continues to place greater demands on journalists' time and responsibilities, but concerns over staff cuts and budget reductions have lessened in the past year as the shift to online reporting creates new opportunities. This, and other findings uncovered in the "2010 PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey," indicate that the merging of traditional journalism with online communications is the primary driver behind how reporters and bloggers view their work today and how public relations professionals pursue coverage for their clients.

Resource page: "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has formed a task force to develop recommendations for making useful and understandable information about FDA activities and decision making more readily available to the public in a timely manner and in a user-friendly format. The Task Force is seeking public opinion on how to make the agency’s information on activities and decision making more transparent, useful, and understandable to the public, while appropriately protecting confidential information."

Cisco 2009 Annual Security Report Highlighting global security threats and trends: "The Cisco® Annual Security Report provides an overview of the combined security intelligence of the entire Cisco organization. The report encompasses threat information and trends collected between January and December 2009. It also provides a snapshot of the state of security for that period, with special attention paid to key security trends expected for 2010."

"Making the Most of Social Media is written for local governments—cities, counties, townships and their affiliates—that are beginning to experiment with social media and would like to get more out of them. Its emphasis is on the use of specific applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, by government managers and communications directors. More than two dozen “early adopters” were interviewed for this report. Their experiences offer some lessons to local governments about what sorts of tools social media offer, how to integrate them into a busy office, and how to use them creatively to be more effective...Social media command a large and fast-increasing audience. Half of American adults have used at least one of these services, up from just 8% four years ago. Social media users still tend to be young but are growing more representative of the general population each year, and the majority of all adult users are now over the age of 35. These users are creating and sharing a tremendous amount of information: 500 million pieces of content on Facebook every day and 200,000 new blog posts on the Wordpress platform alone. In sum, a broad cross-section of Americans have moved to social media sites in the past half decade and this trend is still accelerating. Social media applications are now main stream."

Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism: The State of the News Media 2010 is the seventh edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism. Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments...This year’s report is the most interactive it’s ever been, and contains a number of new features. A Year in the News Interactive, for instance, allows users to explore for themselves our content database of some 68,000 stories from 55 different news outlets. Users can look at what they want, answer their own questions and create their own charts. Who Owns the News Media is a new multi-dimensional directory of the more than 120 companies that own news properties in the United States that allows users to explore and compare companies by sector, revenue, and audience. This year’s study also includes a new survey of the economic attitudes of online news consumers. The report also contains a detailed analysis of the online behavior of visitors to news websites and a study of the most highly regarded community journalism websites in the country. There is also, for the first time, a content analysis of blogs and social media, and explores the extent to which their news agenda relates to, differs from, and draws on traditional media. Coming in April is a survey of news executives on the future of their industry."

Social Networking and Constituent Communications: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Month Period in the 111th Congress, February 03, 2010

LLRX.com - Social media, geolocation and privacy, oh my! - Nicole L. Black highlights how our net activities are carefully monitored and meticulously tracked by some of the biggest players, including Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Our individual online footprints, from the Web sites we visit, the items we purchase, the people with whom we communicate, to the locations where we access the Internet, are extremely valuable commodities that are increasingly sought after.

An investigation by Katie Scott: "A proposal that could give select institutions the power to take snapshots of websites without their owners' permission is being ruminated by our Government. Civil servants at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are now processing opinions on whether we should be archiving websites for future generations. While it is likely that any changes to the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act won't be tackled by the present government, the public consultation has raised some interesting questions -- should we be treating websites as culturally important artefacts; should we be taking regular "snapshots" of websites and saving them in a searchable and accessible archive; whose responsibility is this; and most importantly, should copyright on websites be ignored so that their content can be saved? The British Library, the National Library of Wales and the Wellcome Library are among the institutions that lobbied the government on the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act."

Survey of Academic Librarians: Use of Associations, Blogs, Listservs, Conferences, & Publications about Libraries

Merkle View from the Social Inbox 2010 - Actionable Information for Marketers From the Annual Consumer Email & Digital Media

Directive-Type Memorandum (DTM) 09-026 - Responsible and Effective Use of Internet-based Capabilities, February 25, 2010

Royal Pingdom: "Over the past few months there has been plenty of speculation around the Web that Twitter’s growth has stalled, but if we look at activity on Twitter in terms of the number of tweets, this is far from the truth. According to our research, Twitter is as of December processing more than one billion tweets per month. January passed 1.2 billion, averaging almost 40 million tweets per day. This is significantly more than Twitter was processing just a few months ago." [This posting includes a chart visualizing the growing use of Twitter.]

Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults: "Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application."

Congress Is All Atwitter, Daniel Newhauser, Roll Call: "Since the microblogging Web site Twitter launched in 2006, tens of millions of people have logged on and churned out billions of 140-character messages called tweets. And Congress has certainly embraced the trend. In fact, by early last year, some 20 Members were using the site, according to Tweet Congress, which monitors Members’ Twitter use. The current count, the group says, is 162 (plus 16 committees and seven caucuses). But computer-savvy political junkies already know that. Whether politicians are using Twitter to its full potential is another matter entirely."

Privacy Impact Assessment for the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning Haiti Social Media Disaster Monitoring Initiative, January 21, 2010: "The Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS), National Operations Center (NOC), has launched a Haiti Social Media Disaster Monitoring Initiative (Initiative) to assist the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and its components involved in the response, recovery, and rebuilding effort resulting from the recent earthquake and after-effects in Haiti. The NOC is using this vehicle to fulfill its statutory responsibility to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture for the federal Government, and for those state, local, and tribal governments, as appropriate, assisting with the response, recovery, and rebuilding effort in Haiti. OPS may also share information with international partners and the private sector where necessary and appropriate for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The NOC is only monitoring publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards to collect information used in providing situational awareness and to establish a common operating picture....[a partial list] of the types of sites that the NOC is reviewing in order to improve its situational awareness and common operating picture related to Haiti earthquake [is available on last page of document].

News release: "Astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a special software upgrade this week - personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the ultimate wireless connection. Expedition 22 Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer made first use of the new system Friday, when he posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account, @Astro_TJ, from the space station. Previous tweets from space had to be e-mailed to the ground where support personnel posted them to the astronaut's Twitter account. "Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s" This personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and gives astronauts the ability to browse and use the Web. The system will provide astronauts with direct private communications to enhance their quality of life during long-duration missions by helping to ease the isolation associated with life in a closed environment."

State of the Twittersphere January 2010: "So what’s the State of the Twittersphere today? Twitter’s growth is slower. Growth has fallen from a high of 13% in March of 2009 to 3.5% in October 2009, the most recent month for which we have data...In the more recent period, experienced users makeup a larger portion of the population."

Report: Social Networking in Government: Opportunities & Challenges, Human Capital Institute, January 2010

The New York Review of Books - Who's in Big Brother's Database? By James Bamford - The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the, National Security Agency, by Matthew M. Aid, Bloomsbury.

News release: "The Federal Trade Commission has launched its Web site and blog for National Consumer Protection Week 2010, which will be held March 7-13. Consumer.gov/ncpw, encourages people to learn about their rights as consumers, and promotes free resources to help them protect their privacy, manage money and debt, avoid identity theft, understand credit and mortgages, and steer clear of frauds and scams. The twelfth annual consumer protection week is a partnership between the FTC and other government agencies and consumer groups. This year’s theme, Dollars & Sense: Rated “A” for All Ages, highlights the importance of using good consumer sense at every stage of life – from grade school to retirement. The site for the event features a page for kids and parents, and highlights games, videos, and other Web sites that teach kids practical lessons about the role of business and government in their everyday lives."

News release: "EPIC has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, urging the FTC to open an investigation into Facebook’s revised privacy settings. The EPIC complaint, signed by nine other privacy and consumer organizations, states that the "changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations." EPIC cites widespread opposition from Facebook users, security experts, bloggers, and news organizations. A previous EPIC complaint to the FTC, concerning the data broker industry, produced the largest settlement in the FTC's history. For more information, see EPIC: In re Facebook and EPIC Facebook Privacy."

"Here we go again … our latest list of the 100 best websites sees short attention spans, the rise of Twitter, more browser wars and celebrity gossip sites setting the news agenda."

"The Federal Trade Commission will hold two days of workshops on December 1 and 2, 2009, to explore how the Internet has affected journalism. The workshop will assemble representatives from print, online, broadcast and cable news organizations, academics, consumer advocates, bloggers, and other new media representatives."

• Opening Remarks of Chairman Jon Leibowitz "Creative Destruction” or Just “Destruction”, How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?
  
• Federal Register Notice
  
• Agenda
  
• Panelist Bios
  
• Public Comments

Access to Social Websites in The Legal Environment - Fall 2009 - Part 1: Survey of Law Librarians in Selected Firms, County/State Law Libraries and Law Schools.

The Application Usage and Risk Report - An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise, Fall Edition 2009, Palo Alto Networks: "Social networking, blogging/microblogging, cloud-based productivity and collaborative applications are just a few of the applications that are making the cross over from personal to corporate use as a means of improving productivity. This report shows that the use of these applications is commonplace across a worldwide sample of
more than 200 organizations in a wide range of industries.
Some specific findings from the research include:

• Twitter session use grew more than 250 percent from the Spring 2009 edition of the Application Usage and Risk Report, published in April.
  
• Facebook use increased 192 percent while Facebook Chat (released in April 2008) was the fourth most commonly detected chat application, ahead of Yahoo! IM and AIM.
  
• SharePoint collaboration is ubiquitous – bandwidth consumed by SharePoint, specifically the documents component, increased 17-fold from the previous report in April.
  
• Blogging and wiki editing increased by a factor of 39, while total bandwidth consumed increased by a factor of 48."

2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study "was designed to assess current trends in the use of social media in North American businesses. Based on 2,948 valid responses to our online Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey during August and early September, 2009, the results provide a very useful benchmark for where businesses, and business people, are finding value in social media across different activities and sites. The study was focused on social media utilization – how people and companies are using social media in a work context today – and not on adoption. All study participants currently used social media in their day-to-day jobs as a resource for business-relevant information and/or worked for a company currently managing, developing or planning social media initiatives."

Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies, v1.0 Issued By: ISIMC [Information Security and Identity Management Committee] - Effective Date: 09.17.2009

Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009, by Susannah Fox, Kathryn Zickuhr, Aaron Smith - Oct 21, 2009

Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart's slideshow presentation, The Democratization of Online Social Networks: A look at the change in demographics of social network users over time, given at AoIR 10.0 in Milwaukee, WI on October 8, 2009.

News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act. The notice incorporates several changes to the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers. The Guides were last updated in 1980. Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor."

"The Department of Justice launches Justice.gov today in an effort to increase openness and transparency in government. Utilizing a variety of online tools, we will be able to share news and information, not just on our own web site, but through popular social networks Twitter, YouTube and MySpace and Facebook. The Justice presence on these social networks will allow Americans to interact with the Department in entirely new ways. The new Justice.gov has incorporated more multimedia than ever before. You’ll find a photo gallery and video library that will be regularly updated with new content from across the Department of Justice. And of course, The Justice Blog will be a hub of information for the Department."

• September 21, 2009 - Social Networking and Constituent Communication: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Week Period in the 111th Congress
• September 16, 2009 - FEMA Disaster Housing: From Sheltering to Permanent Housing
• September 16, 2009 - Wildfire Fuels and Fuel Reduction
• September 16, 2009 - F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program: Background and Issues for Congress
• September 16, 2009 - Older Workers: Employment and Retirement Trends
• September 14, 2009 - Climate Change: Costs and Benefits of the Cap-and-Trade Provisions of H.R. 2454
• September 1, 2009 - The Fall and Rise of Household Saving

Terms of Service - "These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the services and Twitter’s websites (the “Services”), and any information, text, graphics, or other materials uploaded, downloaded or appearing on the Services (collectively referred to as “Content”). Your access to and use of the Services is conditioned on your acceptance of and compliance with these Terms. By accessing or using the Services you agree to be bound by these Terms...Your Righst: You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."

CRS Report - Social Networking and Constituent Communication: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Week Period in the 111th Congress

2009 Networks for Counsel Study - A Global Study of the Legal Industry’s Adoption of Online Professional Networking, Preferences, Usage and Future Predictions - Sample Composition: "The survey was administered to 1,474 counsel – 764 private practice lawyers and 710 corporate counsel –in May and June of 2009; 33 countries were represented. Financial Services, Manufacturing and Healthcare were the top three industries represented."

New York Times - A Legal Battle: Online Attitude vs. Rules of the Bar: "And with thousands of blogs and so many lawyers online, legal ethics experts say that collisions between the freewheeling ways of the Internet and the tight boundaries of legal discourse are inevitable — whether they result in damaged careers or simply raise eyebrows."

Newsweek: Who’s Winning the Twitter Wars? How Democratic and Republican politicians use the popular microblogging service.

The Government Domain: Tracking Congress 2.0 - With the 111th Congress of the United States reconvening on September 8th, e-gov expert Peggy Garvin highlights new tools and sources that enhance and expand your ability to track and monitor the action.

Re-Hashing the Hash Tag - Crowd Competition and Community Standards at the #AALL2009 Conference: Roger V. Skalbeck and Meg Kribble describe how the majority of social media activity during the 2009 AALL conference took place on Twitter, and how this technology impacts the profession and the free exchange of information, moving forward.

Via Slate: Seeking How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous, by Emily Yoffe. "...Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting...If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly."

DoD Web 2.0 Guidance Forum - Value of Web 2.0 Capabilities: "In examining how the Department of Defense should take maximal advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities (including social networking services, social media, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.), we are looking at how Web 2.0 capabilities can be used to improve current and future Department operations. Operations in this sense include both broad business and warfighting processes. Specifically, we are looking for insight from various Defense interest groups and think tanks, including Veterans groups, industry groups and individuals who have insights they can share regarding how Web 2.0 capabilities can be used to transform how the Defense Department operates."

"In response to an EPIC Freedom of Information Act Request, the Government Services Administration released several contracts between the federal government and web 2.0 companies, including agreements with Blip.tv, Blist, Google (YouTube), Yahoo (Flickr), and MySpace. EPIC also obtained amendments to agreements with Facebook, Slideshare.net, Vimeo.com, and AddThis.com. The contracts do not address the privacy obligations of social media companies. The GSA letter to EPIC explained that “no specific Web 2.0 guidance currently exists,” but provided EPIC with Training Slides that raise privacy issues. The GSA Agreement with Google actually states that, “to the extent any rules or guidelines exist prohibiting the use of persistent cookies in connection with Provider Content applies to Google, Provider expressly waives those rules or guidelines as they may apply to Google.” Some of the agreements also permit companies to track users of government web sites for advertising purposes."

DMC-PR-05-07-02 dated 5 August 2009, Version 1.0, Online Engagement Guidelines

GovTwit - the Government Twitter Directory is a directory of 2,213 Twitter users 56,716 Tweets and 20,778,287 Followers [Note: these numbers will change quickly]

GNC.com: "The days of a Web presence being an optional component for agencies are long gone. For most citizens, the primary way of interacting with their government is through Web sites. By and large, agencies have responded to that demand by creating richer, more interactive sites. A lot has changed since Government Computer News created its first list of 10 great government Web sites last year. For one thing, social networking has moved into the mainstream, and to maintain a presence in the communities they serve, the smartest agencies have established footholds on Twitter, Facebook and other such sites." Here is the latest: Great .Gov Web Sites 10 sites that take online government to the next level."

Five Things Lawyers Should Know About Social Media: Lawyer, writer and blogger Nicole Black advises fellow professionals about important core techniques and goals to consider before jumping on the “social media” bandwagon.

Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools for the Next Generation of Public Service - Driving high performance through more engaging, accountable and citizen-focused service

UberCEO: Fortune 100 CEOs and Social Media - "...top CEOs in the country appear to be mostly absent from the social media community. That's the result from research we conducted over the past several weeks. We looked at Fortune's 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs to determine how many were using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or had a blog. The results show a miserable level of engagement."

Federal Trade Commission, 16 C.F.R. Part 255 Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising..."In order to limit its potential liability, the advertiser should ensure that the advertising service provides guidance and training to its bloggers concerning the need to ensure that statements they make are truthful and substantiated. The advertiser should also monitor bloggers who are being paid to promote its products and take steps necessary to halt the continued publication of deceptive representations when they are discovered..."

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent - By Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey - Internet & Democracy Case Study Series, June 2009. Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2009-06

Official Google Blog: "...Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas."

Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government: "...this initial public engagement process on open government policy will take place in three phases (brainstorming, discussion, drafting). Following this initial process, we will distill the input received here, from submissions of proposals in From the Inbox, and from government experts and develop a set of draft recommendations for both public and inter-governmental review. These recommendations will, in turn, help to guide the development of government-wide policy on transparency, participation, and collaboration."

On May 6, 2009 the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held the following Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet hearing: The Future of Journalism. Witness statements:

• Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, Google Inc.
  
• Alberto Ibargüen, President and Chief Executive Officer, John S. And James L. Knight Foundation
  
• David Simon, Author, TV Producer and Former Newspaperman
  
• Steve Coll, Former Managing Editor, The Washington Post
  
• James Moroney, Publisher/CEO, The Dallas Morning News
  
• Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post

"Some 74% of internet users--representing 55% of the entire adult population--went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election. This marks the first time that a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey has found that more than half of the voting-age population used the internet to get involved in the political process during an election year. Several online activities rose to prominence in 2008. In particular, Americans were eager to share their views on the race with others and to take part in the online debate on social media sites such as blogs and social networking sites."

"Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started: Visualizations / What Are Your Research Ideas? / Keep Up-To-Date with Media Cloud."

Post-Conference Workshop on Competitive Intelligence, April 2, 2009 - 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM, Sabrina I. Pacifici, Law Librarian, & Founder/Editor/Publisher, LLRX.com and beSpacific.com

The Decoder: "Twitter is a mass text-messaging service that allows you to send short 140-character updates -- or "tweets" -- to a bunch of people at once. They are your "followers." It was designed to be read on a cellphone, though many people read it online, too."

News release: "House Committees on Science and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, and the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming are the first four Congressional Committees to join Twitter. These Committees use Twitter as a new tool to reach their audience and ensure transparency between the government and the public."

• House Committee on Science and Technology
  SciTechCmte (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/SciTechCmte
  
• House Committee on Education and Labor
  edlabordems (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/edlabordems
  
• House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
  HouseTransInf (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/HouseTransInf
  
• House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming
  MarkeyMemo (Twitter) - http://twitter.com/MarkeyMemo

Peter Orszag - Discipline, Efficiency, Prosperity - Peter Orszag, Director: "Welcome to my first blog post at the Office of Management and Budget. In this blog, I want to open up OMB even more to the public and share with you what we’re doing to address the many challenges that we face as a nation. I know that, for many people, blogs are the easiest way of receiving information – so this blog may prove to be useful even if it simply provides a convenient way of keeping up with information from OMB that is already available in other formats. President Obama is committed to ensuring a direct link between citizens and our federal government. Especially in light of our difficult economic times, I am committed to ensuring that OMB’s work is accessible. Although OMB is extensively discussed in the media and elsewhere, the blog will allow me to communicate and explain our work directly. Today, we’re releasing the overview of the President’s Fiscal Year 2010 Budget."

• Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2010
  
• Budget Fact Sheets, Fiscal Year 2010
  
• Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Years 1996 - 2009
  
• Related postings on financial system

Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Overview Document - A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise, Office of Management and Budget, February 26, 2009 [146 pages, PDF], "provides a description of the Obama Administration’s fiscal policies and major budgetary initiatives. This document is an overview of the full Fiscal Year 2010 Budget expected to be released this spring."

"In the past three years, developments in social networking and internet applications have begun providing internet users with more opportunities for sharing short updates about themselves, their lives, and their whereabouts online. Users may post messages about their status, their moods, their location and other tidbits on social networks and blogging sites, or on applications for sending out short messages to networks of friends like Twitter, Yammer and others. As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others."

"The New Media Index is a weekly report that captures the leading commentary of blogs and social media sites focused on news and compares those subjects to that of the mainstream press. PEJ is launching the New Media Index as a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today's news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news-consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ wanted to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press...The Project also tracks the most popular news video on YouTube each week."

Politico 44, dubbed "a living diary of the Obama Presidency," provides readers with an aggregated melange of government documents, issue oriented media coverage in print and video, and well, gossip.

Washington Post site, a work in progess: WhoRunsGov.com offers a unique look at the world of Washington through its key players and personalities. It’s your window into how deals get made and policy is shaped in the new Obama administration that is remaking the nation’s capital."

"Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and his new administration officially came to life. One of the first changes is the White House's new website, which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.

Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement. Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration's online programs will put citizens first. Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

Communication...This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates from the President and his administration so you can be sure to know about major announcements and decisions.

Transparency...The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

Participation...One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it."

A National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation: "...I, Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 20, 2009, a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation, and call upon all of our citizens to serve one another and the common purpose of remaking this Nation for our new century."

Via David Meerman Scott's blog WebInkNow, news about forward thinking and actionable PR and IT business process improvement from the U.S. Air Force: "David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon [in response to a direct message via Twitter], indicated that "the Air Force employs 330,000 communicators! Their mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public. Yes, that’s right, the goal of the program is that every single Airman is an on-line communicator." Note, this post includes a very useful Air Force blog assessment flowchart.

News release: [December 30, 2008] "from 1-3 pm, David Saranga, Consul for Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York will host a LIVE Citizen "Press" Conference on Twitter in order to directly answer the public's questions regarding the current situation in Israel and Gaza. This is the first time that a government is holding such a conference on Twitter. "We are constantly getting questions from the public regarding the situation in Israel and Gaza," David Saranga, Consul for Media and Public Affairs, explains, "so we are answering the public's call and holding a Citizen Press Conference on the social networking site, Twitter, to answer these questions directly." Twitter users can take part in the Citizen "Press" Conference by going to http://www.twitter.com/IsraelConsulate and directing their messages to @israelconsulate and including the tag #AskIsrael. Questions will be answered on Twitter, with a link to IsraelPolitik if the answer exceeds Twitter’s maximum length of 140 characters."

"The transformation of the media world is well underway, facilitated by the spread of digital tools. A myriad of innovative new media organizations have sprung up to take advantage of the opportunities that stem from low-cost distribution networks. Meanwhile the economic base of many of the large media companies continues to erode. Despite the demonstrated success of many new media enterprises, the euphoria over the rise of participatory media has been tempered by concerns over the quality and credibility of online media, the possible fragmentation of audiences, a decline in editorial standards and the persistent challenge of effectively reporting the news. Over the past year, researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society have reached out to a broad range of media experts to help in this assessment of the changes in new media over the past several years and to take a sober look at the successes and ongoing challenges.

“Seat at the Table” Transparency Policy: "As an extension of the unprecedented ethics guidelines already in place for the Obama-Biden Transition Project, we take another significant step towards transparency of our efforts for the American people. Every day, we meet with organizations who present ideas for the Transition and the Administration, both orally and in writing. We want to ensure that we give the American people a “seat at the table” and that we receive the benefit of their feedback. Accordingly, any documents from official meetings with outside organizations will be posted on our website for people to review and comment on. In addition to presenting ideas as individuals at www.change.gov, the American people deserve a “seat at the table” as we receive input from organizations and make decisions. In the interest of protecting the personal privacy of individuals, this policy does not apply to personnel matters and hiring recommendations."

• See also this Pew Internet post, Joining the Discussion at Change.gov: "While [change.gov]...is still a work in progress, the Obama team has clearly opted to err on the side of encouraging debate and interaction and sort out the details as they go along. That much is apparent from the recent online discussion of health care, which has so far garnered more than 4,000 user comments and a video reply from new HHS Secretary Daschle (the administration has since opened a similar discussion for the economy)."
  
• Related postings on the Obama transition

News release: "The HHS Office of HIV/AIDS Policy's AIDS.gov will recognize the 20th annual World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 with a special focus on reducing HIV/AIDS-related stigma and promoting HIV testing through blogs, virtual worlds, and social networks. This World AIDS Day will also mark the second anniversary of AIDS.gov, an online gateway to all federal domestic HIV/AIDS information and resources."

New York Times: "Whether sharing project updates with colleagues or reaching out to customers, workers are communicating in a new medium that keeps messages very short. Commonly called microblogging, it started as a way to share personal information with friends and family. But micromessages are gaining ground at work, becoming popular for both internal and external exchanges."

Don't Have a Cow, Give a Cow Instead

• Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions, Egham, UK, October 23, 2008 — "By 2011, 70 per cent of social computing deployments in government that achieve business benefits will do so in unplanned or unexpected ways, according to Gartner, Inc. Government organisations around the world are showing great interest in social computing, yet deployment so far is relatively limited...Today, the primary role of social networks for governments is to facilitate the exchange of information and to establish novel collaboration patterns, often across organisational boundaries."
• Nielsen Online Media Alert - Fastest Growing Social Networks for September 2008: Twitter.com, Tagged.com and Ning Lead in Year-Over Year Audience Growth
  • U.S. Department of State: Major Programs of the Office of eDiplomacy: "Diplopedia wiki - Launched in September 2006, Diplopedia is the State Department's internal unclassified online encyclopedia. Just as people create and edit articles on public wikis on the Internet, Department personnel are using Diplopedia to create a broad, informative and expanding reference tool for knowledge-sharing about the Department, its programs and offices, and other international affairs subjects."

Official Google Blog: "Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere."

• RollCall.com: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) set up a vote on a Wall Street rescue plan for Wednesday night. The $700 billion package to buy up troubled mortgages will include tax-extender legislation and a $150,000 increase on the amount of deposits the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. insures. Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), sent out an alert saying the measure would be subject to a filibuster-proof, 60-vote threshold."
• New York Times: Senate to Vote Wednesday on Bailout Plan: "The Senate tax bill would cost more than $100 billion and extend and expand many individual and business tax breaks, including tax credits for the production and use of renewable energy sources, like solar energy and wind power. The bill would also extend the business tax credit for research and development, expand the child tax credit, protect millions of families from the alternative minimum tax, and provide tax relief to victims of recent floods, tornadoes and severe storms."
• Related postings on financial system
• And for additional perspective, Economics Blog Directory & Ranking

Johnson, T. J., Kaye, B. K., Bichard, S. L., & Wong, w. J. (2007). Every blog has its day: Politically-interested Internet users' perceptions of blog credibility. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 6.

LLRX Book Review by Heather A. Phillips - We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age - Heather A. Phillips highlights attorney John Gant's contention that one's title, income, and employer are at best side issues in determining who is a journalist in the day-to-day realities of issuing press passes as well as in larger policies such as the extension of shield laws.

"Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report...will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially."

The Official Google Blog: "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome [September 2, 2008] in more than 100 countries."

Surveillance made easy, NewScientist.com news service, Laura Margottini: "This data allows investigators to identify suspects, examine their contacts, establish relationships between conspirators and place them in a specific location at a certain time."

So said the UK Home Office last week as it announced plans to give law-enforcement agencies, local councils and other public bodies access to the details of people's text messages, emails and internet activity. The move followed its announcement in May that it was considering creating a massive central database to store all this data, as a tool to help the security services tackle crime and terrorism."

Related links:
• UK House of Commons, Communications Data Bill: "The purpose of the Bill is to: allow communications data capabilities for the prevention and detection of crime and protection of national security to keep up with changing technology through providing for the collection and retention of such data, including data not required for the business purposes of communications service providers; and to ensure strict safeguards continue to strike the proper balance between privacy and protecting the public.
• Siemens - Lawful Interception (Monitoring Center, Intelligence Platform) - "Authorized groups need to have direct access to communications between suspects, whether it is individuals, groups or organizations. Only then can they take appropriate action, detect, prevent and anticipate crimes and guarantee peace and security."

News release: "The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Social Software in Libraries, SPEC Kit 304, which provides an overview of ARL libraries’ implementation of software that people use to connect with one another online...In the last few years, the use of social software has grown enormously. While a growing number of libraries have adopted social software as a way to further interact with library patrons and library staff, many things are unclear about the use of social software in ARL member libraries. This SPEC survey was designed to discover how many libraries and library staff are using social software and for what purposes, how those activities are organized and managed, and the benefits and challenges of using social software, among other questions.

For this study, social software was broadly defined as software that enables people to connect with one another online. The survey asked about 10 types of applications: (1) social-networking sites; (2) media-sharing sites; (3) social-bookmarking or tagging sites; (4) wikis; (5) blogs; (6) sites that use RSS to syndicate and broadcast content; (7) chat or instant messaging services; (8) VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) services; (9) virtual worlds; and (10) widgets."

The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec304web.pdf.

Criminal Justice Degree Guides: "The Top 100 Law and Lawyer Blogs Law blogs, also known as blawgs, are plentiful these days. In fact, there are probably thousands to choose from and more appear each week. For that reason, it may be difficult for you to narrow down which ones are worth a regular read. Whether you are a lawyer, law student or merely interested in the subject, we’ve attempted to cut through the chaff and provide you with what we regard as the top 100 law and lawyer blogs listed below. It was very difficult to choose only 100 blogs from the myriad of successful law blogs. In an effort to remain fair, you will find a variety of subjects covered with the following blogs. Not only are high-profile general law blogs included, niche blawgs are also offered for your consideration. Since it would be impossible to rank them according to importance, they are categorized according to subject and then alphabetized."

"The World Information Access 2008 Report presents important trends in the distribution of information and communication technologies around the world. The 2008 WIA Report explores information access by looking at trends in the blogger arrests worldwide, diversity in the ownership of media assets in the 15 largest media markets in the Muslim world, and the ideological diversity of political content online in 74 countries with large Muslim populations." Howard, Philip N, and World Information Access Project. World Information Access Report - 2008. 3. Seattle: University of Washington, 2008.

Proofpoint’s Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention in Today’s Enterprise, 2008 report - ["the survey was fielded in the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia to explore global concerns.]

"Email remains the most important medium for communications both inside and outside the enterprise. But the convenience and ubiquity of email as a business communications tool has exposed enterprises to a wide variety of legal, financial and regulatory risks associated with outbound email. Enterprises continue to express a high level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound messaging policies (for email and other communication protocols) that ensure that messages leaving the organization comply with both internal rules, best practices for data protection and external regulations. In addition, organizations remain very concerned about ensuring that email (and other electronic message streams) cannot be used to disseminate confidential or proprietary information...The results show that data protection concerns are not confined to the US and that globally, email, webmail, FTP, blogs message boards, media sharing sites and social networking sites are a source of concern as well as real-world risk for IT professionals working in large enterprises."

Keeping Up with Class Actions: Reports, Legal Sites and Blogs of Note - "Staying current on the latest cases and news in the area of class actions can be challenging, but Scott Russell's guide to reliable subscription based publications, free legal sites and blogs that offer timely news, analysis and selected copies of court filings, is a valuable resource. — Published May 19, 2008"

The BlogHer/Compass Partners 2008 Social Media Study - Women and Social Media.

"Blogging has become a mainstream method of communication

• 36.2 Million women participate in the blogosphere weekly
  
• 15.1 Million women are publishing at least one post weekly
  
• 21.1 Million women are reading and/or posting comments to blogs
  weekly"

Science 2.0 - Is Open Access Science the Future? Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk? By M. Mitchell Waldrop: "Science 2.0 generally refers to new practices of scientists who post raw experimental results, nascent theories, claims of discovery and draft papers on the Web for others to see and comment on. Proponents say these "open access" practices make scientific progress more collaborative and therefore more productive. Critics say scientists who put preliminary findings online risk having others copy or exploit the work to gain credit or even patents. Despite pros and cons, Science 2.0 sites are beginning to proliferate; one notable example is the OpenWetWare project started by biological engi­neers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

• Public Library of Science On-Line Edition
  
• 3 Quarks Daily, "where a group of bloggers write about science and culture"
  
• OpenWetWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  
• UsefulChem - "This is an open source science project wiki in chemistry led by the Bradley Laboratory at Drexel University."

"This project is an ongoing commitment by Universal McCann to measure consumer usage, attitudes and interests in adopting social media platforms and is the largest exploration of its kind. It aims to provide the facts behind the hype...This report (Wave 3) surveyed 17,000 internet users in 29 countries and was completed in March 2008.

Power to the people, Social Media Tracker, Wave 3.0, March 2008 - Wave 3 Highlights:

Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development. If you are online you are using social media

• Asian markets are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
  
• All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves
  
  Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3
  
  • 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content
    
  • 55% of users have uploaded photos
    
  • 22% of users have uploaded videos
  
  
• Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and as a collective rival any traditional media
  
• 73% have read a blog
  
• The blogsphere is becoming increasingly participatory, now 184m bloggers world-wide
  
• China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers, more than the US and Western Europe combined."

News release: "...we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. (You can see this...announcement on the Google blog and on the YouTube blog...) This tool will help anyone who uploads videos to YouTube better understand and serve their audiences. For example, users might use Insight to tailor upload strategies to increase their videos' view counts and improve their popularity on the site. And partners who increase their videos' popularity also increase the number of monetizable views their videos get, and as a result, generate more revenue."

Workshop 8 – Monitoring & Current Awareness: Mining Blogs & RSS for Research, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM, Sunday April 6, 2008 - Sabrina I. Pacifici, Law Librarian, Founder/Editor/Publisher, LLRX.com and Author, beSpacific.com.

"The new AIDS.gov home page provides easier access to site information and offers new features." Prominently displayed at the top right side of the page are links to: a well designed and organized Blog, Podcasts to which users may listen and for which transcripts are provided, RSS Feeds to the podcasts, resource announcements and alerts. Also included are AIDS/HIV related feeds from other e-gov sites. All around, this is a tremendous step forward in e-gov design, with improved site navigation, useful and accessible content and thoughtful implementation of current applications.

"Reporters Without Borders calls on Internet users to come and protest in virtual versions of countries that are Internet enemies...There are 15 countries in this year’s Reporters Without Borders list of “Internet Enemies” - Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. There were only 13 in 2007. The two new additions to the traditional censors are both to be found in sub-Saharan Africa: Zimbabwe and Ethiopia...There is also a supplementary list of 11 “countries under watch.” They are Bahrain, Eritrea, Gambia, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Yemen."

"Tail Report has launched with the goal to map out how money is made in the blogosphere. Tail Report works by asking users to anonymously submit information about their site's traffic, rank and monthly revenue. In return, the user receives a custom report detailing what other websites are making and how their revenue compares based a number of factors, such as traffic, rank, number of RSS subscribers, age, number of employees, content, and ad networks."

US Air Force shoots down blogs, airmen frustrated, by Ryan Paul: "The United States Air Force has stirred up controversy with a new Internet filtering policy that aims to prevent Air Force personnel from reading blogs while on the job. The ban has been implemented by the Air Force Network Operations Center (AFNOC), which houses the Air Force Cyber Command. The block is said to extend to virtually every web site that contains the word "blog" in the address, but doesn't impede access to sites that are deemed by AFNOC to be "reputable media outlet[s]".

"This blog is sponsored by the Transportation Security Administration to facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process."

"Environmental Capital provides daily news and analysis of the business of the environment. It tracks how growing green concern, particularly over climate change, is roiling established industries and spurring new ones – and how that shift is affecting investors, consumers and the planet." [Note: does not require a subscription]

Top 60 Little-Known Technology Web Sites, By Charles Babcock, Thomas Claburn, John Foley, W. David Gardner, Antone Gonsalves, Nicholas J. Hoover, K.C. Jones, Elena Malykhina, Richard Martin, Paul McDougall, Marianne McGee, Chris Murphy, Cora Nucci, Art Wittman, and Serdar Yegulalp, InformationWeek, January 26, 2008

Press release: "W3C...published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web. The HTML Working Group is creating HTML 5 to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich Web content and Web applications. The group operates entirely in public with nearly five hundred participants, including representatives from W3C Members ACCESS, AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera."

"Citizens can now track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates with free widgets for blogs, social networking pages, and personal web sites. MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group, released today customizable widgets – portable chunks of code that allow content to be displayed on any web page – that make political fundraising more transparent. Bloggers and reporters will be able to easily share the campaign finance data for any number of congressional races with their audiences." [Peggy Garvin]

"A survey of U.S. journalists by Brodeur, a unit of Omnicom Group suggests that blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability of news, but also influence the tone and editorial direction of reporting. The survey is part of an ongoing research project by Brodeur in conjunction with Marketwire to dissect and understand the impact that social media and blogs are having on traditional news delivery. The online survey was conducted among a random sample of North American reporters and editors, and was focused on understanding how social media and blogs influence their work."

Scientific American: Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not. By M. Mitchell Waldrop: "The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business. Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive."

"TechPresident presents our 2007 Campaign Web Index, a year-end study of which campaigns are best at using the various elements of the web. For the survey we've tapped the very brightest minds working in tech and politics, who happen to be our own bloggers and other friends (some respondents have asked to remain anonymous). Check out their votes and opinions for who's best at online video, advertising, social networking, rapid response, and much more. Some of their responses may surprise you, and some may be entirely predictable."

Editor and Publisher: "Yet it remains something newspapers are embracing as the 2008 presidential campaign hits its stride and the primaries loom. Campaign blogs were once left to partisans and non-journalists; now, along with the L.A. Times, at least five other daily papers have assigned to political blogs full-time reporters who post and edit items almost daily. Dozens of other newspapers have reporters posting regularly, on a part-time basis."

Via Wired: Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger: "Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom coined the term "weblog" Dec. 17, 1997 -- 10 years ago Monday -- to describe the daily list of links that "logged" his travels across the web. In the decade hence, Barger feels that he's gained some wisdom of his own about blogging. Here's Barger's top 10 tips for novice bloggers..."

Acceptance Speech, Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize in Literature 2007, December 7, 2007: "...We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers. What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc."

The University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab Dark Web project: "Based on our actual spidering experience over the past 5 years, we believe there are about 50,000 sites of extremist and terrorist content as of 2007, including: web sites, forums, blogs, social networking sites, video sites, and virtual world sites (e.g., Second Life). The largest increase in 2006-2007 is in various new Web 2.0 sites (forums, videos, blogs, virtual world, etc.) in different languages (i.e., for home-grown groups, particularly in Europe). We have found significant terrorism content in more than 15 languages...We believe our Dark Web collection is the largest open-source extremist and terrorist collection in the academic world."

"The Internet is becoming increasingly embedded in everyday life. Drawing on an expanding array of intelligent web services and applications, a growing number of people are creating, distributing and exploiting user-created content (UCC) and being part of the wider participative web. This study describes the rapid growth of UCC and its increasing role in worldwide communication, and draws out implications for policy. Questions addressed include: What is user-created content? What are its key drivers, its scope and different forms? What are the new value chains and business models? What are the extent and form of social, cultural and economic opportunities and impacts? What are the associated challenges? Is there a government role, and what form could it take?"

Press release: "Eritrea has replaced North Korea in last place in an index measuring the level of press freedom in 169 countries throughout the world that is published today by Reporters Without Borders for the sixth year running...Outside Europe - in which the top 14 countries are located - no region of the world has been spared censorship or violence towards journalists. Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the index, seven are Asian (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam, China, Burma, and North Korea), five are African (Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Somalia and Eritrea), four are in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Palestinian Territories and Iran), three are former Soviet republics (Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) and one is in the Americas (Cuba)."

"On Tuesday, the Center for Media and Democracy and the Sunlight Foundation launched a new collaborative, citizen-driven project on Congresspedia to build profiles on the hundreds of challengers for congressional seats, which will compliment the existing profiles on every member of Congress. The project is non-partisan and, in true open-source fashion, is free for anyone to participate - even the candidates themselves...We've started with nearly 300 basic profiles of candidates that 2008RaceTracker has identified as definitely running. We've also created a series of state-based portals that list all the candidates from each state and all the local blogs we could find that cover Congress at least occasionally - while Congresspedia is limited to confirmed facts, we're a big believer in the blogosphere and want to direct as many citizens as possible to the blogs written by the folks that know the candidates best - the locals."

"Welcome to the State Department's first-ever blog, Dipnote...With the launch of Dipnote, we are hoping to start a dialogue with the public. More than ever, world events affect our daily lives--what we see and hear, what we do, and how we work. I hope Dipnote will provide you with a window into the work of the people responsible for our foreign policy, and will give you a chance to be active participants in a community focused on some of the great issues of our world today." [Posted by Sean McCormack]

Related news:

Congress and the Internet: Highlights, August 29, 2007 (24 pages, PDF), by Walter J. Oleszek. "Today, every lawmaker is an "electronic legislator" to one degree or another because the major functions of Congress - representation, lawmaking, and oversight - are all affected by technology..." [via OpentheGovernment.org]

Press release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today publication of two important tools to organize and synchronize national efforts to strengthen preparedness: (1) the National Preparedness Guidelines, which establish a vision for national preparedness and provide a systematic approach for prioritizing preparedness efforts across the Nation; and (2) the Target Capabilities List, which describes the collective national capabilities required to prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks, major disasters and other emergencies."

Press release: "The Federal Election Commission announced today that it has unanimously resolved two complaints alleging that Internet blog activity is subject to Commission regulation, finding that the activity is exempt from regulation under the media or volunteer exemption. In Matter Under Review (MUR) 5928, the Commission determined that Kos Media, L.L.C., which operates the website DailyKos, did not violate the Federal Election Campaign Act. The Commission rejected allegations that the site should be regulated as a political committee because it charges a fee to place advertising on its website and it provides “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services” by posting blog entries that support candidates. The Commission determined that the website falls squarely within the media exemption and is therefore not subject to federal regulation under the Act...In MUR 5853, the Commission rejected allegations that Michael L. Grace made unreported expenditures when he leased space on a computer server to create a “blog” which advocated the defeat of Representative Mary Bono in the November 2006 election. The Commission also rejected allegations that Grace coordinated these expenditures with Bono’s opponent in the race, David Roth, and found that no in-kind contributions to Roth’s campaign resulted from Grace’s blogging activity. The Commission also found that the respondent did not fraudulently misrepresent himself in violation of 2 U.S.C. § 441h."

"LibWorm Beta is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries. LibWorm collects updates from about 1400 RSS feeds (and growing). The contents of these feeds are then available for searching, and search results can themselves be output as an RSS feed that the user can subscribe to either in his/her favourite aggregator or in LibWorm's built-in aggregator...Each feed searched by LibWorm has been assigned a category, so when you browse by Feed Category, you're seeing all the content from the feeds that have been assigned to that category. Subjects are pre-built searches, usually of greater complexity than the user interface currently supports, for common subjects of interest to libraryfolk." This site is free.

"MedWorm is a medical RSS feed provider as well as a search engine built on data collected from RSS feeds...MedWorm collects updates from over 4000 authoritative data sources (growing each day) via RSS feeds. From the data collected, MedWorm provides new outgoing RSS feeds on various medical categories that you can subscribe to, via the free MedWorm online service, or another RSS reader of your choice, such as Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader or FeedDemon." Users may construct free text key word searches, or search for an exact phrase, and may further specify inclusion of content from the following areas: news, consumer, journals, organizations, info and blogs. This service is free.

Press release: "One of the latest reports from Javelin Strategy & Research shows why financial institutions must engage in blogging now, and provides specific steps for assessing this powerful new brand-building and customer-connection capability into 2008-10 strategic plans. According to the study of over 3,500 consumers, one in five online consumers read blogs, yet blogs are offered by less than 1% of financial institutions. Result: banks are largely losing control of discussion about themselves in the ‘blogosphere’. Old-line bankers will find that none of the long-standing customer interaction rules apply to blogging, yet the new capability offers crucial, low-cost marketing benefits available through no other method."

The Guardian: "Thousands of rare books and manuscripts in Iraq's national library and archive, one of the country's most important cultural institutions, are in peril after the occupation of the building by Iraqi security forces, the library's director said yesterday."

"I would like to announce the launch of the Texas Digital Library's (TDL) blog, The Scholar's Space, featuring a team of four contributors (including me), with more to come over the next few months. The Scholar's Space joins scholarly communications blogs sponsored by friends at other colleges and universities, and national and international organizations. We'll be providing commentary on newsworthy items related to TDL participants' local and global interests in academic processes and systems of research -- from providing access to data and information, to online collaboration and new approaches to reporting out results and public archiving of papers and data." [Georgia Harper, Scholarly Communications Advisor, University of Texas at Austin Libraries]

TechnoLawyer BlawgWorld 2007: "BlawgWorld 2007 is the best way to explore and discover legal blogs (blawgs). It features 77 remarkable essays from 77 of the most influential blawgs. Each blogger handpicked their best essay of the year for inclusion in the eBook. The 2007 TechnoLawyer Problem/Solution Guide is a revolutionary new way to find Solutions to Problems your law firm is experiencing. Specifically, it contains 185 Problems and corresponding Solutions. Each Problem is written in the form of a question from the point of view of a law firm and organized by topic. Topics include case management, depositions, discovery, document management, legal research, time-billing, and many more — 58 topics in all." (366 pages, PDF)

Posted on July 19, 2007, By Erin Teeling in Newspaper Study, Bivings, Research (TBG): "We have recently completed the 2007 study of America’s top 100 newspaper websites, entitled American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity? As the newspaper industry continues to suffer declines in readership and circulation, using the Internet to expand a newspaper’s reach is becoming more and more important. While many industry experts fear that the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them, our team here at TBG feels that the Internet presents newspapers with a unique opportunity to make up for lost circulation and readership. This study explores these concepts, as well as the difficulties facing newspapers regarding online advertising, shrinking staffs, and reaching out to consumers...research data is available in Excel format here."

"Open-source politics is the idea that social networking and participatory technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns. Forget party bosses in smoky backrooms—netroots evangelists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do oppo research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold miniconventions in Second Life..." [Table of Contents for this issue]

The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0, David C. Wyld, Associate Professor Southeastern Louisiana University (99 pages, PDF)

WashingtonPost.com: "Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. This...four-part series...explores his methods and impact, drawing on interviews with more than 200 men and women who worked for, with or in opposition to Cheney's office. Many of those interviewed recounted events that have not been made public until now, sharing notes,e-mails, personal calendars and other records of their interaction with Cheney and his senior staff. The vice president declined to be interviewed."

Donald Tapscott's White Paper: Winning With The Enterprise 2.0, "addresses the advantages and challenges of implementing E2 technologies." (62 pages, PDF)

Via USA.gov, find active and archived blogs from U.S. federal agencies. Currently linking to 10 active sites, including Library of Congress Blog, Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog, and Health Marketing Musings.

Source: "Privacy International (PI) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. PI is based in London, and has an office in Washington, D.C. Together with members in 40 countries, PI has conducted campaigns throughout the world on issues ranging from wiretapping and national security activities, to ID cards, video surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and medical privacy, and works with a wide range of parliamentary and inter-governmental organisations such as the European Parliament, the House of Lords and UNESCO."

PandemicFlu.gov: "On June 13, Secretary Michael O. Leavitt, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is convening a Leadership Forum in Washington, DC on pandemic preparedness. This interactive forum will bring together highly influential leaders from the business, faith, civic and health care sectors to participate in dynamic discussions to help Americans become more prepared for a possible influenza pandemic. In order to extend the value of this one-day conference, the Department of Health and Human Services is also hosting a blog summit on preparing for a pandemic. This five-week online event, beginning on May 22, is part of an ongoing effort by the Department to help Americans become more prepared for a pandemic. The blog summit provides an opportunity to have an open conversation and shape the thinking about how to communicate the critical need for preparedness at home and within workplaces and communities."

Press release: "LexisNexis, a leading provider of information and services solutions, today announced the results of a nationwide survey to provide insights into how Information Professionals (IPs) are adding value to their organizations through technology and knowledge management...The survey revealed an interesting breakdown and frequency of information sources accessed...nearly four in ten access Weblogs at least weekly (39%), and more than a third access wikis (34%)...More than nine in ten surveyed access news Web sites (92%), and company Web sites (93%) at least weekly (or more often). Video or audio podcasts were rarely accessed. Less than two in ten access video podcasts (16%), or audio podcasts (15%)."

WSJ free feature, At Some Schools, Facebook Evolves From Time Waster to Academic Study: "After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing. The moves, like other academic expansions into fields like videogame design, are part of an effort to keep technology studies relevant to students' lives – and to tap subjects with entrepreneurial momentum. Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are among the tech companies that have invested in schools' social computing programs."

Technorati Blog: "We've streamlined a blogsearch-only homepage at search.technorati.com (an easy shortcut is s.technorati.com ...With this launch, we also provide you with more context around more stuff like videos, music, and blogs. Over time, these pages will become richer and more comprehensive as we add more information about the thing itself, like where it was published, who links to it, what other things are similarly tagged, and more...We currently track over 250 million videos, blogs, photos, podcasts, events, and other social media objects in addition to more than 80 million blogs..."

Social Isolation and American Workers: Employee Blogging and Legal Reform, by Rafael Gely and Leonard Bierman, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (JOLT), Volume 20, Number 2, Spring 2007.

After 5 uninterrupted years of writing this blog each day, I will be taking a brief vacation - no web, no email, no phone. Returning May 22.

A new world unfolding - Posted by John Hanke, Director, Google Earth & Maps

I created and launched LLRX.com in 1996 and have always strived to maintain a site dedicated to sharing best practices on a range of research and technology related issues relevant to legal professionals. Keeping these goals in mind, launching the newly designed LLRX.com, which premiered with the April 2007 issue, was an endeavor over one year in the making, involving alot of discussion, review, design, redesign, testing, and tweaking...some of which is still underway. To my friends who indulged repeated refrains of, "but does this look better than this," thank you. And a very special thanks to Darlene Fichter, whose genius has been an inspiration which helped me bring my site to where it is today.

The other part of this journey is thanks to the terrific team at Justia - Tim and Stacy, Danilo, Nick, et al. - who provided the programming expertise to compliment my research, publishing and usability experience. Converting a decade of content coded by 'yours truly' was a challenge in and of itself, but we also crafted a new site design, navigation structure and search features.

We preserved the best of the old site, such as the Court Rules Forms and Dockets database, while grounding the new site in an open source content management system, Drupal, providing enhanced layout, navigation and usability, and offering more options to access the depth of source materials that are hallmarks of the site. This is accomplished via drop down menus that appear on the top navigation bar, topical navigation choices that consistently appear on the far right hand side of each page, and by employing the new Google Custom Search so that readers may query for content on LLRX, LLRX and beSpacific [my blog on law and technology news, updated daily], or for results from the legal web. Also, a "printer friendly" option has been added to make it easier to read articles once you have printed them.

Authors may submit an article directly to me any time, so I will take the opportunity now to invite authors, new and returning, to contribute their expertise, via presentations, guides, articles, and columns, to the LLRX global community numbering over 120,000 readers each month. Thank you for participating in this community, and I look forward to hearing from you. Best --- Sabrina.

Press release: "The bill provides a privilege in federal court proceedings for reporters to refrain from revealing their confidential sources of information. The privilege is similar in nature to that currently offered by 32 states and the District of Columbia. The ability to assure confidentiality to people who provide information is essential to effective news gathering and reporting on highly sensitive and important issues. Typically, the best information about corruption in government or misdeeds in a private organization will come from someone on the inside who feels a responsibility to bring the information to light. But that person has a lot to lose if his or her identity becomes known. In many cases, the person responsible for the corruption or the misdeeds can punish the source through dismissal or more subtle forms of punitive action if the source’s identity becomes known. And so it is only by assuring anonymity to the source that a reporter can gain access to the information in order to bring it to public scrutiny."

Wired reports the "U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer...The new rules (PDF) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update."

Press release: "Three-fourths of the nation's largest newspapers now offer blogs on business-related topics, according to a study released today by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University. These popular online Web journals written by reporters get breaking news to readers more quickly, according to 60 percent of the business bloggers who responded to the study. However, more than half of respondents also said this also takes away from their regular reporting time."

New national study from Tufts University's Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service: Civic Engagement Among Young Men and Women. "The new fact sheet shows how young men and women perform on the 19 measures of civic engagement. Utilizing data from the 2006 Civic and Political Health of the Nation Survey, and several other sources, we provide new information on the civic engagement of youth, confidence in government, and following public affairs and the news, by gender. Generally we find that young men are among the most engaged in a wide range of political activities despite lower voter turnout rates, and young women are among the most engaged in civic activities such as volunteering, and also the most likely to vote."

David Sifry's annual State of the Blogosphere report: "Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day." Archive of reports dating back to October 2004 are linked here.

Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design:

"This is the online participation website for the meeting [Lisbon meeting for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number (ICANN) is being held between 26-30 March 2007]. Available here will be: a rundown of each meeting complete with full details, including panellists; topics for discussions; links to resources and presentations; and links to webcasts and audiocasts where available. At the same time, blogs, chatrooms, polls and forums will help people both at the meeting and dotted around the globe to share information and interact with one another."

"The fourth edition of the Project's Annual State of the News Media report released March 12. This year, the report includes a unique topographical analysis of journalism Web sites. The report also reveals changes ahead for the blogosphere, cable news, and in the ambitions of news organizations generally."

Who's a Journalist These Days? "Journalists with the "Big Ego disease" often point at bloggers and other people without press passes and accuse them of not being "real journalists." But bloggers who provide analysis about newsworthy events are journalists." By Mark A. Phillips

From the transcript of the President's Radio Address, released March 2, 2007: "As we work to improve conditions at Walter Reed, we're also taking steps to find out whether similar problems have occurred at other military and veterans hospitals. So I'm announcing that my Administration is creating a bipartisan Presidential Commission to conduct a comprehensive review of the care America is providing our wounded servicemen and women. This review will examine their treatment from the time they leave the battlefield through their return to civilian life as veterans, so we can ensure that we are meeting their physical and mental health needs. In the coming days, I will announce the members of this commission, and set a firm deadline for them to report back to me with their recommendations."

Related news and upcoming hearings:

"OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress. Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress. Now, everyone can be an insider. OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation."

"The Tyndall Report monitors the weekday nightly newscasts of the three American broadcast television networks: ABC World News with Charles Gibson, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams...The Tyndall Blog monitors and comments on each night's newscasts and links to the stories that the networks aired."

Legal Times - free article - You Read It Here First? What's new about blogs covering trials is also old. What's daring is often dicey. by James McGrath Morris, Legal Times, February 26, 2007.

WSJ free feature today: Candidates Find A New Stump In the Blogosphere: "Candidates of both parties are already buying space on search engines, blogs and other Internet sites popular with political junkies and potential donors. With 18 candidates vying for the most open race for the White House in 80 years and front-runners on both sides announcing plans to forgo public financing, the 2008 election promises to be a huge revenue opportunity, not just for TV broadcasters."

Pew Internet & American Life Project press release: "A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content."

Understanding the Political Influence of Blogs: A Study of the Growing Importance of the Blogosphere in the U.S. Congress, April 2006, by T. Neil Sroka.

"Today OJR welcomes Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota and Laura Ruel of the University of North Carolina as contributing writers on the site. Each month, Nora and Laura will examine current research on news website user interfaces and storytelling techniques. Their articles will help news site producers and editors pick the best ways to package their information to increase their site's traffic and influence."

Maryland Courts Watcher Blog "posts the synopses of all published opinions issued by the Court of Appeals and Court of Special Appeals of Maryland and synopses of all opinions that are openly available on the Internet from other courts in Maryland."

The majority of the site remains subscription only, but today's launch, which is accompanied by an free online Reader's Guide (8 pages, PDF) detailing all the changes, includes the following free access additions: a new, highly interactive and content rich Market Data Center, a new blog, The Wealth Report ("Robert Frank looks at the lives and culture of the wealthy"), and continued access to the currently established daily Free Features.

Hoover's blog, Bizmology, was launched back in late July 2006, and has occasional but interesting business news postings.

Hitwise reports that Google Blog Search "the market share of visits to Google Blog Search surpassed visits to Technorati for the week ending 12/23/06."

The December 2006 issue of ABA's Law Practice Magazine features a profile of Sabrina I. Pacifici, founder, editor, publisher of LLRX.com and author of beSpacific. After a decade of publishing the free webzine on law and technology resources, and with more than four years and 11,000 postings on beSpacific.com, I am delighted to continue my active participation in such a expert profession, both here and abroad, which values innovation, creativity, contribution and community. Thank you for all your support, and I look forward to publishing your articles in 2007.

WSJ free feature: Blogs for Shoppers, From Fashion to Food, Sites, Track Deals and Offer Ideas For Stumped Gift Givers

"...for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." [Link]

Press release: "The Federal Election Commission announced today that it has reached settlements with three 527 organizations accused of violating the federal campaign finance laws during the 2004 presidential election. The League of Conservation Voters 527 and 527II, MoveOn.org Voter Fund, and Swiftboat Veterans and POWs for Truth have collectively paid almost $630,000 to settle charges that they failed to register and file disclosure reports as federal political committees, and accepted contributions in violation of federal limits and source prohibitions. The Commission approved all three conciliation agreements by a vote of 6-0."

Press release: Among the predicitions, is the following - "Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007."

With a wide range of content formats, from podcasts to RSS and searchable databases, the OYEZ blog is a unique and content richs online resource to locate cases, information on the justices, Listen to or download the official version of recent oral arguments, and read court related news.

Election Night 2006 An Evening in the Life of the American Media, November 27, 2006 - by the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "For the blogosphere, a fairly smooth election night made things something of a disappointment. For top newspaper Web sites, finding the balance between speed and offering a rich narrative still has to be reconciled. For television, slow results and a lack of prepared material tilted coverage toward chatter, especially for the cable networks. Perhaps the destinations best suited to Election Night 2006 were the Web sites of TV news operations, plus one aggregator. They offered a combination of quick access to results plus the ability of users—largely through access to exit poll data or Associated Press material—to plumb a wealth of statistical information on their own. These conclusions—plus five lessons about the media—are among the findings of a widespread review of media outlets on Election Night 2006." [Note that this report profiles only 6 blogs - not a balanced or comprehensive approach in the context of the vast resources available to the broadcast news sites as well as newspaper sites.]

The complete November 2006 issue is available at www.llrx.com

There are 15 new articles in total, so please visit the homepage for links to and abstracts of all this month's content. Many thanks to all the authors, and have a safe and happy holiday.

Chicago Tribune: Lawyers face right to blog - "Online journals that contain legal discussions and background information are challenging traditional practices on attorney advertising."

U.S. News reports on a range of new programs sponsored by DHS that leverage innovative technology applications (wikis and blogs) and educational programs to expand and improve the effectiveness of homeland security goals and objectives.

Via Official Google Blog: "...the new Blog Alert, which notifies you about new blog search results. We've also added a Comprehensive Alert, which can show results from multiple sources (including Google News, the web, and blogs) so you get fuller information whenever your favorite topics appear online."

Press release: "Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released tips for bloggers who want the inside story on government agencies. The Bloggers' FAQ on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) outlines how to use open government laws to get access to records kept by federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA)...The guide walks bloggers through making a FOIA request -- addressing what to ask for, which government offices must
comply, and what you can and cannot obtain through FOIA. It also explains how to put requests on the fast track and get processing fees waived."

"One Day in History is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a 'blog' diary which will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life. You can enter your diary of the 17 October until 31 October." The Times Online reported that as of October 22, 2006 there were more than 35,000 blog diary received, with a goal of 50,000. According to Ivo Dawnay, Communications Director, The National Trust, this project is envisioned "as a vast digital collage of a dynamic society in an age of great uncertainty and change: an invaluable resource for historians one hundred, even three hundred years hence."

The Boston Herald reported on new policies that have been implemented to monitor and limit the content of military blogs published by personnel in Iraq, in the interests of operational security.

Business Week: Europe's Politicians Embrace Web 2.0 - "Seeking new ways to engage with voters, European politicians have taken to blogging and podcasting to get their messages out."

Institute for Policy, Democracy and the Internet: The Audience for Political Blogs: New Research on Blog Readership, by Joseph Graf, October 20, 2006. (14 pages, PDF)

Press Release, October 18, 2006: "Microsoft Corp. today released to the public Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 for Windows XP, the latest version of the world’s most popular Web browser. Customers can upgrade and browse the Web with confidence knowing that the new browser provides a greater level of security, makes everyday tasks easier, and works well with the Web sites they visit."

Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation, Public DRAFT September 21, 2006, R. David Lankes, Joanne Silverstein. Produced for the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy. Information Institute of Syracuse. Syracuse University’s school of Information Studies.

Press release: "The Federal Trade Commission is hosting a blog to provide information and a forum for feedback about its public hearings on "Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade," to be held November 6-8, 2006, in Washington, DC. The public hearings will examine how evolving technology will shape and change the habits, opportunities and challenges of consumers and businesses in the coming decade, and will feature experts from the business, government and technology sectors, consumer advocates, academicians, and law enforcement officials."

Excerpt of letter sent by Sun Microystems, Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, on October 2, 2006:

"This is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products." [Simone Yu]

"Nine Legislative Efforts that Must Be Stopped in 2006 - As Congress mounts its final push before the midterm elections, a number of bills that threaten the bedrock of Internet privacy and civil liberties could either come up for votes or worm their way into larger legislative packages that end up being rushed into law. The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) compiled the Internet Watch List so that lawmakers, journalists and Internet activists can keep close tabs on the dangerous legislative efforts that cannot be allowed to succeed in the so-called "silly season" at the end of the 109th Congress."

Jack M. Balkin, Online Legal Scholarship: The Medium and the Message, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 20 (2006). "...blogging by legal experts has intervened in the debate in a new way, helping to inform not only the public but also the mainstream media and key players about complicated issues."

3 Must-Use Online Tools for Journalists, Amy Gahran's handout [HTML and PDF] from the annual conference of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). [via Center for Media and Democracy]

Mary Whisner, A Blog's Life, 98 Law Libr. J. 559 (2006).

Google Webmaster Central: "Welcome to your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites. You can learn here how to ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed and access tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in our index, and tell us how you'd like your site to be crawled and indexed."

See also:

"Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, has received a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lead a consortium researching advanced information analysis and computational technologies to protect the nation. The university's Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) will head a consortium that will focus on finding patterns and relationships in data, such as news stories, open-source Web logs, and other accessible information, to quickly identify emerging indicators of possible terrorist activity, and rate the consistency and reliability of the sources. Such information could give officials more lead time to investigate and potentially thwart terrorist plans. DIMACS director Fred Roberts stated, "We will develop real-time streaming algorithms to find patterns and relationships in communications, such as among writers who may be hiding their identities, and to rate information sources for their reliability and trustworthiness." Rutgers will undertake nine research projects in its first year and will also create educational programs around the technology it develops." [fact sheet on the project]

As reported by Reuter's [via this ABCnews.com link], Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a blog on this website, which English speaking users may read by clicking the second icon located under the photo of the president, located on the far right hand side of the home page.

Press release: "In the 149-page report, "Race to the Bottom: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship, Human Rights Watch documents how extensive corporate and private sector cooperation – including by some of the world's major Internet companies – enables...China's system of Internet censorship and surveillance."

State of the Blogosphere, August 2006, by David Sifry. "50 Million Blogs and Counting."

Blawg: Marketing Your Practice with a Weblog, by Jim Calloway and Tom Mighell.

"CDT today urged lawmakers to reject legislation that would force Internet speakers to place government-sanctioned warning labels on a broad range of online content. "Mandatory labeling of legal online content under threat of criminal sanction is ineffective, unwise, and unconstitutional," CDT wrote in a pair of letters sent to the leaders of the Senate Commerce and Appropriations Committees. The language has been attached to a major telecommunications bill and more recently to an appropriations package. As written, the provision would apply to a broad range of Internet content, and could force online publishers to tag legal, and often socially valuable, material with a "digital scarlet letter." CDT supports voluntary labeling efforts and has long endorsed the use of voluntary parental control tools such as filters."

Joining more than a dozen product blogs, Yahoo launched a corporate blog on August 1: "We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users..."

France's mysterious embrace of blogs, by Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune: "Already famed for angry labor strikes and philosophical debates in smoke-filled cafés, the French have now brought these passions online to become some of the world's most intensive bloggers."

"CDT launched PolicyBeta, a new blog dedicated to expanding the dialogue about technology policy, civil liberties and preserving democratic values in the digital age. PolicyBeta will feature regular posts on issues ranging from domestic surveillance to spyware, and will provide CDT experts an opportunity to discuss in detail the latest trends and developments affecting the technology policy debate. CDT is encouraging journalists, technologists, academics and interested individuals to visit the blog regularly and participate in the discussion."

Collaborative Reference Work in the Blogosphere, by Jeffrey Pomerantz (16 pages, PDF): "This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lycemum, and open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose."

Washington Post: Top-Secret World Loses Blogger - CIA Contractor Is Fired When Internal Post Crosses the Line

"Rudd Sound Bites, the weblog of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, aims to encourage global discussion of front burner news and the most critical issues regarding food policy and obesity. Rudd Sound Bites has eleven regular contributors who are faculty members and affiliates of the Rudd Center...The Rudd Center's mission is to change the world's diet through policy, science, and dialogue."

Press release: "A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family."

Press release: "JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, reveals that 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006. According to a new report, Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement, currently 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate Weblogs."

Press release: "E-mail mismanagement continues to take a hefty toll on U.S. employers, with costly lawsuits--and employee terminations--topping the list of electronic risks. As recent court cases demonstrate, e-mail can sink businesses--legally and financially. Last year, the inability to produce subpoenaed e-mail resulted in million dollar--even billion dollar--lawsuits against U.S. companies. In fact, 24% of organizations have had employee e-mail subpoenaed, and 15% of companies have gone to court to battle lawsuits triggered by employee e-mail. That's according to the 2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging & Blog Survey from American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute."

Putting the White Back in Strunk and White, by Christina Wodtke. "Style and appropriateness may seem like an odd duo, but they are not. Style is the natural result of the over-abundance of energy and unique perspective a designer—creative person—is gifted and cursed with. Appropriateness is what helps them guide it in its application."

"The Knight Science Journalism Tracker is a new Web-based service for journalists who cover science, environment and health... It's a service of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships. Our goal is to provide a broad sampling of the past day's stories in these areas and, where possible, of press releases or other news tips related to generation of news in the general circulation news media. Our goal is to have a new batch of posts up each day by 1 pm Eastern time."
[Note: the archives date back to April 27, 2006]

"The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has begun funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism. Drs. Brian Ulicny, senior scientist, and Mieczyslaw Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the three-year project titled, Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information." [Link]

Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

American Journalism Review: Style Wars in Cyberspace - Copy editors take to the blogosphere. "The undisputed king of copy bloggers is Bill Walsh of the Washington Post, whose cantankerous posts on language, usage and style (theslot.blogspot.com) have won him a devoted following."

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.

"Ask.com today introduced Blog and Feed Search, a new service designed specifically for searching posts, feeds and news published to the "blogosphere."

"The Library of Congress preserves the nation's cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library's traditional functions of acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship extend to digital materials, including Web sites...In 2004, the Library’s Office of Strategic Initiatives created a Web Capture team to support the goal of managing and sustaining at-risk digital content. The team is charged with building a Library-wide understanding and technical infrastructure for capturing Web content. The team, in collaboration with a variety of Library staff, and national and international partners, is identifying policy issues, establishing best practices and building tools to collect and preserve Web content."

BBC Poll, Trust in Media press release: "More people trust the media than their governments, especially in developing countries, according to a ten-country opinion poll for the BBC, Reuters, and The Media Center." [thanks to D.C.]

Eight Reasons Solo Lawyers Should Use Law Libraries, by Mary Whisner.

AP: More Web Sites Feature Outside Blogs: "The Web sites of dozens of newspapers are starting to feature outside blog postings on travel, health and other topics in a further blurring of the line separating traditional and new media."

Podcasting Legal Guide - Rules for the Revolution (38 pages, PDF), by Colette Vogel and Mia Garlick. Published under a Creative Commons license, with an accompanying wiki.

HealthNex blog, sponsored by IBM, is a joint effort by industry and consumer groups, focused on sharing resources pertaining to e-health records and other IT related issues (such as RFID technology and patient privacy).

FCW reports that the CIA network is hosting more than "1,000 internal blogs and an internal wiki with about 10,000 pages..."

Washington Times: "The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin."

Blogging Libraries Wiki includes: Academic Libraries - Public Libraries - School Libraries - Special Libraries - Internal Blogs.

"Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas. Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer. Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members. Access restricted resources include subscription services or premium peer-reviewed journals. You may be able to access restricted content through your library or institution."

As reported by AP today, newspapers including the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Austin American-Statesman will carry topical blog content from over 600 sites, provided through a syndication agreement with BlogBurst.

The Public Editor - The Times's New Blogs: More Information, Fewer Filters, by Byron Calame.

"Welcome to the new home for all of the BBC's weblogs. Although we have had blogs for a number of years, most notably our Scottish community site; Island Blogging and the excellent Ouch, this is the first attempt at bringing you a complete list, some news of new launches by journalists, DJs, and radio shows, as well as links and tips to help you find your way around."

A Taxonomy of Legal Blogs

Journalist David Kline discussed the growing influence of blogs on politics and the news media during a March 20-24 rolling webchat.

Global Voices: A country-by-country aggregation of world blogs: Translations of and links to selected postings from blogs around the world.

Following up on several related postings on bloggers and campaign speech, today the FEC issued a 96 page document (PDF) promulgating its final rules that impact the publication of campaign related information. Declan McCullagh has more details and commentary.

The March 15, 2006 issue of Library Journal included a special supplement, Movers & Shakers 2006 - The People Shaping the Future of Libraries. I am honored and delighted to be included in this diverse group of professionals, all of whose work I respect and admire. I was recognized in the Innovators category, for my two sites, LLRX.com and beSpacific. Thank you to all my readers and contributors for your unflagging support, and for sharing your ideas, experiences and expertise, over these past ten years. May the next 10 be just as fulfilling and productive. With my regards - sp.

USNews.com: "The CIA's Publications Review Board is sending out terse reminders to agency veterans reminding them of the rules requiring that any writings--even blogs--must first get agency approval."

Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them, by Donna Maurer.

Steve Matthews, Michael Lines and Connie Crosby have launched a first ever blog for the CALL conference. [thanks Connie]

Op-Ed in Roll Call by CDT Officials Supports Protecting Bloggers without Opening Soft Money Loopholes in the Campaign Finance Laws: "H.R. 4900 protects bloggers and small speakers far better than does H.R 1606, and by design, it does not create other loopholes in the campaign finance laws. Those who truly want to protect bloggers and ordinary citizens should support H.R. 4900. Those whose real goal is to undermine campaign finance laws should support H.R. 1606, which provides only limited protection to online speakers."

Project for Excellence in Journalism: "The State of the News Media 2006 is the third in our annual effort to provide a comprehensive look each year at the state of American journalism. Our goal is to put in one place as much original and aggregated data as possible about each of the major journalism sectors (Newspaper, Online, Blogs, Network TV, Cable TV, Local TV, Magazines, Radio, Ethnic)."

H.R. 1606, To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to exclude communications over the Internet from the definition of public communication, was passed by the House Administration Committee today, by voice vote.

According to surveys conducted by NYU Prof. Jay Rosen and members of his blogging 101 class, the list of Best Blogging Newspapers in the U.S. is topped by the Houston Chronicle.

"CDT today offered a legislative proposal that would exempt the vast majority of individual speakers on the Internet from campaign finance laws, without creating loopholes that could be easily exploited by state political parties and large donors. CDT drafted the proposal in response to mounting efforts in the House of Representatives to pass a measure (HR 1606) that doesn't go far enough to protect the rights of political speakers on the Internet. That bill was offered in response to a proposal by the Federal Elections Commission to apply campaign finance laws to Internet communications."

New York Times: That Which We Call a Blog...

Blogs to Riches - The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom, by Clive Thomson, New York Magazine.

Related references, all from the 2/20/2006 issue of New York Magazine:

The Brad Blog posted the text of an e-mail message to House Judiciary Committee members and staff alerting them to an "Unclassified briefing by DOJ on NSA surveillance program" to "be held at 3 pm on Monday, Feb 13th." Escalating bipartisan congressional demands to be provided with more extensive documentation on the domestic surveillance program has apparently resulted in heightened awareness that that this issue is not fading from interest.

The Christian Science Monitor: US plans massive data sweep - Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?

Follow-up to posting yesterday, Gallup Internet Poll Reports E-mail Remains Dominant With Blogs Making Decent Showing, related news and statistics on the State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth.

Press release: Mail and News Are Main Internet Attractions Some e-commerce picking up; blogs still marginal, by Lydia Saad: "A recent Gallup Poll examining Americans' online habits finds e-mail use almost universal among the three-quarters of U.S. adults who use the Internet. Checking the news and weather ranks second on the list of 13 Internet activities measured, although not as many Americans surf for news frequently as e-mail frequently."

Press release: Microsoft Outlines Policy Framework for Dealing with Government Restrictions on Blog Content

Congress catching on to the value of blogs

Pew Internet & American Life Project press release, January 22, 2006: "Internet access is the norm for most Americans, up to age 70, and all age cohorts of internet users (ages 12 and older) are equally likely to use email; about 90% of all internet users send or receive email. Given the many other variations in internet use among different age groups, it is notable that this basic communications tool is almost universally used. Internet users ages 12 to 28 years old have embraced the online applications that enable communicative, creative, and social uses. Teens and Generation Y (age 18-28) are significantly more likely than older users to send and receive instant messages, play online games, create blogs, download music, and search for school information."

Following up on the news this week, Google Fights DOJ Order to Produce Records of Database Searches, this related posting Privacy and MSN Search states the the facts as follows:

I am delighted to announce the addition of three new columns on LLRX.com, authored by leading professionals from different spheres of our community.

Spirit of America sponsors The Anoniblogging Wiki: "This wiki contains our five initial guides on how to blog more safely [targeted to citizens in Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Malaysia and Zimbabwe]. Across the globe, countries that discourage free speech have followed their citizens into the blogosphere. According to one count, in the last two years at least 30 bloggers (and there are no doubt more) have been interrogated, arrested, tortured and sentenced to long prison terms for the "crime" of speaking critically about their governments. Regardless of your culture, your country, your politics or religion, we believe you deserve to speak your mind without falling afoul of state power. Unfortunately, what you deserve and what you get are not always the same thing. So, for those of you who wish to speak out on your blogs, but who do not wish to risk imprisonment or worse for doing so, we have prepared guides that will help you to blog more safely by blogging more anonymously."

Malware - Future Trends, by Dancho Danchev,10/01/06 (26 pages, PDF).

Corporate responsibility: Reporters Without Borders urges Internet users and bloggers to support its recommendations on freedom of expression.

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki: "This is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products." Currently there are 19 listings that include links to the respective blogs.

The Law Page is a new, centralized webpage from which readers may link to a range of information and commentary on law and business related issues that the Journal is aggregating from current content as well as additional sources. This includes news links from Mealey's.com, and a new column, The FLaw, on law firm management (note: most of this content is available by subscription only, but there are also links to WSJ free features). The cornerstone of the content is the new Law Blog.

Sydney Morning Herald: US military finds soldiers' blogs too close for comfort: "In a development that is worrying US military commanders in Iraq, a growing number of US soldiers - 200 at the last count - have set up their own blogs, or internet diaries, and are updating them from the battlefield."

Thanks to Kevin Heller, Mike Cernovich, and Evan Schaeffer, whose Blawg Review Awards 2005 recognized beSpacific as best Legal Support Blog. Take a look at the terrific blogs that were recognized in 43 categories. Thanks also for recognizing beSpacific in Dennis Kennedy's 2005 Best of Legal Blogging Awards, in the Best Legal Blog Category - Law Librarian Blogs. Kudos to the terrific bloggers mentioned: The Law Librarian Blog, Out of the Jungle, Law Dawg Blawg, WisBlawg, Vancouver Law Library Blog, Stark County Library Blog, Library Boy, LawLibTech, Connie Crosby, BarclayBlog, and Slaw.ca

As reported by ClickZ News, the Washington Post.com will now provide access to articles for a 60 day period following publication, according to James M. Brady, Executive Editor. Prior to this, articles were archived after 14 days. Extending access to readers, via blogs and RSS, is credited as a key reason for the change.

WSJ free feature: Tech Blogs Produce New Elite to Help Track The Industry's Issues

Windows OneCare Team Blog: "WOC is devoted to helping users' get their machines in a secure and healthy state."

The Blogosphere Beckons: Should Your Company Jump In? Harvard Management Communication Letter, Vol. 2, No. 4, November 2005.

Press release: "In the aftermath of the Gulf Coast Hurricanes, 13 million Americans made donations to relief efforts online and 7 million set up their own hurricane relief efforts using the internet. In addition to using the internet to respond directly to the crisis, 50% of online users sought out news and information online, with most (73%) of their newsgathering happening at Web sites of the mainstream media. Sources such as blogs and international news sites served as important news supplements, with one quarter of those who got Katrina news online turning to one of these sources."

PC World: Microsoft Makes RSS a Two-Way Street - Proposed 'extensions' to specification allow multidirectional synchronization.

Draft Advisory Opinion 2005-16, Fired Up! LLC, by counsel, Marc E. Elias and Brian G. Svoboda, Agenda Document No. 05-55. Circulated November 14, 2005 for Open Meeting on November 17, 2005, at which time it was unanimously adopted.

Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed, by Vinnie Garcia.

Burson-Marsteller press release: "The results of the fifth annual 2005 PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey reveal that while blogs are increasingly making headlines, only seven percent of CEOs are actually blogging and many are skeptical about starting a blog themselves. Despite the low numbers, 59 percent of CEOs said blogs are useful for internal communications, and 47 percent said blogs are effective for external audiences."

IBM press release: "IBM today introduced a new software solution that enables businesses to make sense of the explosion of information from emerging social networks on the Web to deliver new insight into brand reputation and customer, competitor and public opinion about their company. The proliferation of blogs, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups and articles published daily on the Web has created a phenomenon where public opinion about an organization spreads worldwide, faster than ever before. These sources are filled with insight from consumers, experts and competitors that can be analyzed and used by businesses to make better decisions on products, services and business strategies. This creates a tremendous opportunity for organizations to carefully monitor their image and more quickly address business opportunities, threats, quality concerns or changing public perception."

'Blawg' use in law firms is on the rise

Rolling Stone: The New Web Slingers - Politcal bloggers scoop the mainstream media on Plamegate.

Bloggers Say Blah to White House Briefings

The newest additions to the Google product blogs, now numbering ten, are:

Forbes targets what is calls "attack bloggers" with a very broad brush, in a trio of articles as follows:

If you are interested in a community based learning experience on legal blogging, whether you are a librarian, attorney, marketing, CI or IT expert, take a look at the agenda for the upcoming BlawgThink 2005. Veteran blogger or novice, this forum offers a creative, interactive agenda, with presentations by, and conversations with, a range of experts who will look at all facets of the ever expanding and knowledge rich realm of blogging.

"As arguably the most important war crimes proceedings since Nurem­berg, the trials of Saddam Hussein are likely to constitute a "Grotian Moment" — defined as a legal develop­ment that is so signi­fi­cant that it can create new customary inter­national law or radically transform the inter­preta­tion of treaty-based law. This Website features key documents related to the Iraqi High Tribunal, answers to frequently asked questions, and expert debate and public commentary on the major issues and develop­ments related to the trials of Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders."

Andrus, D. Calvin, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Studies in Intelligence, September 2005.

Live Blog Coverage of Presentations and Events at IL from the Info Today Blogging Crew

Executive Summary from the Guidewire Group Market Cycle Survey, October 2005: Blogging in the Enterprise (8 pages, PDF)

Key findings (140 individual survey respondents):

From the Wall Street Journal free content today: 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 17, 2005: "Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author...The more focused your content, the more focused your readers. That, again, makes you more influential within your niche. Specialized sites rule the Web, so aim tightly."

"Google.org will include the work of the Google Foundation, some of Google’s own projects using Google talent, technology and other resources, as well as partnerships and contributions to for-profit and non-profit entities. While we continue to define the goals, priorities and approach for Google.org, we will focus on several areas including global poverty alleviation, energy and the environment."

From WSJ free features today, Photo Agencies Scour the Web For Copyright Violations.

From the October 10, 2005 Yahoo! Search Blog: "Today we've begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. [Note: search results from blogs are displayed in a box labeled Blogs Beta, that appears at the far right hand side of the search engine result screen.] The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story."

Google launched a beta version of Google Reader, a service that requires users to have a gmail account.

Key Ruling Backs Blog and Web Rights

Doing Legal, Political, and Historical Research on the Internet Using Blog Forums, Open Source Dictionaries, and More, by John Dean, October 2005.

A new service from SurfWax: Scan Top RSS Feeds by Title: (updated hourly; covers past seven days; sorted by date)

MIT Online Forum: The Real ID Act of 2005: "This is a facilitated discussion of the problems and prospects related to the Real ID Act of 2005, enacted by Congress and signed by the President. For purposes of this online discussion, we are focused on the driver license and identity management aspects of the legislation, and not on the immigration and other aspects of the law."

From AP: Hurricane Rita Pushes Blogs, Podcasts and Rich Maps to Forefront of Media's Efforts

Related links:

Joining the recently launched national security affairs blog at the Washington Post is another new blog, the World Opinion Roundup. The author, journalist Jefferson Morely, mines web sources from around the world, providing perspective, commentary, and documentation of U.S. and international policies on critical issues. [thanks Margot]

From Reporters Without Borders, a new resource: Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents (46 pages, PDF):

From BusinessWeek.com, Editor's Picks for Best of the Web, with a discrete number of choices in categories ranging from research, to blogs, tech news, politics, shopping and music.

The September 14 launch of William M. Arkin's blog, "Early Warning", with its focus on "national and homeland security," was noted by Secrecy News for establishing what promises to be a significant and useful online archive of government documents not readily available otherwise.

As a follow-up to my July 12, 2005 posting, CBSNews.com Morphs Into 24/7 On Demand Broadband Service, see
the organization's new blog, Public Eye, launched today.

UK digital rights group sets up - "The main aims of the Open Rights Group are: to foster a grassroots community of campaigning volunteers; to connect journalists and the press with digital rights experts and activists."

WSJ free feature: New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs

The members of the Depository Library Council (DLC) are pleased to announce that our vision discussion paper entitled The Federal Government Information Environment of the 21st Century: Towards a Vision Statement and Plan of Action for Federal Depository Libraries.

FirstGov has posted a new website that includes the following topical areas which in turn include numerous useful links: What To Do If You Are A Victim; How To Help Victims; and Disaster Cleanup and Agency Resources.

WSJ free feature: Blogger Faces Lawsuit Over Comments Posted by Readers.

"Gartner...released its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, assessing the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44 technologies and trends over the coming decade." [press release]

Modernizing the Newspaper Editorial Page is an expansive, informative article that discusses how the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has embraced technology applications and new mechanisms for interacting with readers that have resulted in innovative changes to its publication style, its impact on the community, and the subject matter of its content.

How journalists use blogs.

Microsoft exec defends RSS rebranding - Renaming to 'Web feeds' spurs debate among bloggers

From BBC News, Berners-Lee on the read/write web: "In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web."

Press Release: "50 Million Americans Visited Blogs During the First Quarter 2005, According to New comScore Study."

"With over 50 M audio files available, Yahoo! Audio Search is the most comprehensive audio search product on the Web. Now you can find, learn about and listen to a diverse selection of audio spanning popular and hard to find music, interviews, speeches, newscasts, podcasts, and even sound effects." [FAQ]

State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 1: Blog Growth, Posted by Dave Sifry on August 02, 2005. "As of the end of July 2005, Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links."

From Inc.com, The Top 10 Things You Should Know Before You Blog offers practical and sound tips to assist small businesses in the effective and successful creation and maintenance of blogs to communicate with consumers.

"Slaw is a co-operative weblog about Canadian legal research and the impact of technology on it. Our audience includes practicing lawyers, legal librarians, legal academics and students — anyone, in short, who uses IT in researching the law. The aim is to share information, offer advice and instruction, and occasionally provoke." [Connie Crosby]

Forbes Best of The Web Directory includes recommendations on more than 3,000 websites and blogs, on topics that include investing, health, e-commerce, management, travel and careers.

"What is Podscope? Podscope is the first search engine that actually allows you to search for spoken words within any audio or video file. We're starting with podcasts and will be adding all types of multimedia in coming months."

"Case Western Reserve University School of Law is proud to announce the launch of the Institute for Global Security, Law and Policy’s website. The site features a blog providing analysis of critical global security issues as well as links to legal and policy commentary, other blogs, and news summaries across the Internet...The site reflects Case School of Law's commitment that the recently created Institute become the leading resource and research center for issues of global security."

Public Awareness of Internet Terms, 7/20/2005: "The average American internet user is not sure what podcasting is, what an RSS feed does, or what the term phishing means." The data memo is 7 pages, PDF.

Driven to distraction by technology: "The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state."

RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, Compared: "People who generate syndication feeds have a choice of feed formats. As of mid-2005, the two most likely candidates will be RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0. The purpose of this page is to summarize, as clearly and simply as possible, the differences between the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 syndication languages."

The 3 page press release (PDF), CBS Unveils Changes, Web Strategy. "CBS News will move from a primarily television and radio news-based operation to a 24-hour, on-demand news service, available across many platforms, drawing on the experienced, worldwide, award-winning resources of the Division. The new CBSNews.com will include: an on-demand, 24-hour news network in the digital broadband space; a blog to be called "Public Eye" designed to provide greater openness and transparency into the newsgathering process; a newly-configured homepage including The EyeBox, an on-page video player showcasing the free broadband video of CBSNews.com including over 25,000 clips -- and video yet to be broadcast on the network..."

A free feature from today's WSJ: Should Newspapers Sponsor Blogs Written by Reporters?

Selected PowerPoint presentations of sessions from the Business & Finance Division, Information Technology Division, Military Librarians Division, and Science-Technology Division, from the SLA 2005 Conference, Toronto, Ontario CANADA, June 5-8, 2005 are available free at via this Link.

From WSJ free content today: Bloggers and Photographers Chronicle Chaos in London

As a follow-up to my June 5 posting, Advocacy Group Publishes Legal Guide for Blogger, today EFF announced the addition of a labor law section to its guide.

The pros and cons of e-tailers using blogs are reviewed in this New York Time article today.

Prepared Remarks to the FEC June 28, 2005, by kos:"...It isn't my position that the government should never regulate any Internet communications. It is my position that the Internet is so different than television, radio, and print media, that the current campaign finance regime doesn't fit and different techniques must be employed.."

The Microsoft Development Center has extensive and detailed documentation on RSS implementation in Longhorn: "This paper describes RSS in the context of a vision for how web content is and will be consumed, explores opportunities enabled by incorporating RSS functionality into applications and outlines the Windows platform services that make this easy."

WSJ Free Content today, Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights

Thanks to all the readers whose support resulted in a Finalist award for beSpacific in the category of Favorite Practice Area Blog.

"Welcome to the media blog for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of Missouri. Consider this an online press briefing, sort of a virtual courthouse steps, where reporters and editors can find more information they need to make coverage decisions. This site doesn't replace our existing "official" Web site, where we will continue to post news releases and other information."

From Dave Pollard's blog, how to save the world, this chart documents the "blog process."

Recent suggested reading on enterprise blogs, and corporate blogs for public consumption:

MIT Weblog Survey: "This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere." [Andy Baio's links]

Press release: EFF Announces its New Legal Guide for Bloggers - "The Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF) is pleased to release a document that informs bloggers of their legal rights. EFF's Legal Guide for
Bloggers is a collection of frequently asked questions (FAQs)designed to educate bloggers about their legal rights in a number of areas, including libel law, copyright law, and political advocacy."

Many thanks to all the readers whose support has made beSpacific a 'contender' in the Favorite Practice Area Blog category of the 8th Annual Technolawyer @ Awards. For those who would like to vote and have not done so (there are 3 days remaining), here is the Official Ballot for the 2005 Technolawyer @ Awards.

Follow-up to several postings on the FEC and bloggers (here, here, and here), news today from the Center for Democracy and Policy:

Law Library Blogs and Blogs by Law Librarians or Law Library Associations - Compiled by Bonnie Shucha - Updated 6/2/05.

Comments on the guidelines and a link to the PDF version, posted by Jeremy Zawodny.

From Wall Street Journal free features, Blogging Becomes A Corporate Job provides a general overview of how several companies, including Microsoft and Stonefield Stonyfield Farm Inc., are diversifying their marketing and corporate communications with the addition of talented bloggers to their workforce.

Never done this before, but...first time for everything (lyric by Roger Miller), please visit http://www.technolawyer.com/tlballot2005.htm and cast your ballot for beSpacific, and for LLRX too! Thanks.

WSJ free content today: Measuring the Impact of Blogs Requires More Than Counting

From the New York Times, Are Bloggers Setting the Agenda? It Depends on the Scandal. Refers to the Pew Internet and American Life Project report issued last week, "Buzz, Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004."

Yesterday I posted a link to the New York Times announcement of a new fee-based service to access a selected range of current and archival content, effective September 2005. Bloggers, journalists, newspaper execs and financial analysts offer their responses: Business People Like 'NYT' Plan to Charge on Web; Bloggers Don't.

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Buzz, Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004 (32 pages, PDF), "PIP and BuzzMetrics examined the interplay of blogs, online citizen chatter in newsgroups, the mainstream news media and official political spin from the Democrat and Republican election camps. They also conducted a case study of the "Rathergate" scandal involving CBS News and unauthenticated memos about George W. Bush’s record in the National Guard." [Link]

From this posting by James Snell, a member of the IBM's Software Standards Strategy Group: "...IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of "blogging"...So with IBMers blogging both inside and outside our Intranet environment, recognizing full well that it was time to formalize their support for what many of us had been doing for quite some time, the corporate communications and legal teams worked collaboratively with the IBM Blogging Community to draft the Corporate Blogging Guidelines copied below. The core principles -- written by IBM bloggers over a period of ten days using an internal wiki -- are designed to guide IBMers as they figure out what they're going to blog about so they don't end up like certain notable ex-employees of certain notable other companies."

EFF recently published a white paper on blogging anonymously, and today posted additional information in response to reader feedback, and encouraged an ongoing dialogue on the issue.

Editor and Publisher reports on the recommendations of an 19 member internal audit committee whose 16 pages report includes the following: "Consider creating a Times blog that promotes interaction with readers." Also of note, the report states, "...we must strengthen and better define the boundary between news and opinion."

Computerworld reports on how a North Carolina hospital system has launched blogs authored by patients that communicate their experiences with specific medical procedures and treatment regimes.

Doc Searls' closing keynote at Les Blogs, Paris, 25 April 2005

According to new stats by BlogPulse, Yahoo News ranks at the top of the list of sources to which bloggers most frequently link, with the New York Times a close second. Interesting, as Yahoo News is an aggregator and the Times is a primary publisher, although it too aggregates stories, from AP.

"Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind." [Link]

BusinessWeekOnline embraces blogs in a big way -

The Harris Poll® #27, April 13, 2005 - "Two-fifths of U.S. Adults Who Are Online Have Read Political Blogs - But less than one in 10 have ever posted a comment on a blog."

Blogs, Wikis, RSS: Walking the enterprise tightrope

From your lips to millions of ears via podcasting - Think of it as audio blogging -- technology makes it easy to have your own radio show [thanks Connie]

From EFF, Bloggers Speak Up in Apple Case: "Groups working to protect journalists' press freedoms, the creator of a blog-search tool, weblog publishers, and more than a dozen individual online journalist/bloggers filed a friend-of-the-court brief (PDF) [April 11] in Apple v. Does -- the case in which Apple Computer is seeking to unmask online journalists' confidential sources for articles about forthcoming Apple products."

Webl