Shapiro pulled no punches in his criticism of the act and its backers. He called SOPA a “threat to innovation,” that was supported primarily by “politicians who are proudly unfamiliar with how the internet works, but who are well familiar with favors from well-heeled copyright extremists.” These extremists, he says, “seek to inhibit free thought and speech.” Conversely, Shapiro praised the OPEN act (PDF), which has been proposed as an alternative to SOPA/PIPA.

This is not the first time that Shapiro has been in the news for his opposition to SOPA. Just last week he offered similarly sharp criticism of the bill in an interview with VentureBeat. He said that SOPA is a distraction from what Congress should really be working on. He lamented that “in Washington, the urgent replaces the important,” and noted that opponents of SOPA “are being outspent 10 to 1 by the copyright extremists.” He went on to say that “[t]here are two types of members of Congress: those who understand the internet and those who will vote for SOPA because they have made commitments to the copyright extremists.”

Shapiro’s comments at CES came on the same day as an announcement by Reddit that they would be blacking out the site for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18th to show opposition to the SOPA. The popular link sharing site surpassed 2 billion pageviews in the month of December alone.

[Source: DailyTech; International Business Times]

Apple doesn’t like them to the tune of having their lawyers contact Microsoft, telling them stop running the ads.

Below is the section from Kevin Turner’s keynote talking about how Apple isn’t a fan of the new ads:

"And so we’ve been running these PC value ads. Just giving people saying, hey, what are you looking to spend? "Oh, I’m looking to spend less than $1,000." Well we’ll give you $1,000. Go in and look and see what you can buy. And they come out and they just show them. Those are completely unscripted commercials.

I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, "Is this a joke? Who are you?" Not understanding what an opportunity. And so we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them."

So does Microsoft finally have this advertising thing figured out? Looks like they might be on the right track… finally!

Along with the Laptop Hunter ads, Microsoft is having some viral success with their new Internet Explorer 8 commercials featuring Dean Cain.

How do you like Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter ads? Tell us what you think.

(WebProNews will be spending the weekend in Vegas. Bummer, right? But we will be working, reporting from the BlogWorld Expo and chatting up the brightest minds in the blogging business. Stay tuned to WebProNews and WebProNews Video for updates.)

The point is, says Taylor from the BlogWorld Expo opening keynote, entitled “How We Got Here: The State of Blogging and Where It’s Heading*, “nothing is objective.” There may be some objective record—how it really happened—written somewhere in the cosmos, but it must not be a human story.

Indeed it may become the story of our time that there will be no final version of anything—for every blog there is a counter blog, for every Britannica a continuously evolving wiki—endless viewpoints swirling around infinity, the collection of which forms a version of the truth. Blogs are our contribution of order to that madness, which is to say madness is the order.

Taylor may not go quite that far, I don’t think. He says it more this way: “Diaries are historical records.” That’s more succinct obviously, and maybe I’m inserting my viewpoint as to what that means, but that is what we do, all of us, record what we see and retell it (reframe it) in a way that’s understandable. There are many “diaries” detailing events, but not one of them by itself is truth; look at them collectively, though, and you’ll be closer.

For example, what is the state of blogging, the real state of it? Taylor provides a list of adjectives that have been used to describe it:

Amazing
Informative
Lame
Idiotic
Stupid
Infuriating
Drowning in spam
Overall—wonderfully healthy

So, which is it? It’s all of them.

“Everyone’s a media channel,” says Taylor. The Internet has made that possible, even has highlighted how important having a voice is to people. For those willing, even in the face of oppression, it has been their passion that has pushed the success of blogging, that has propelled it to the point that all voices have the potential to be heard.

That’s the dreamy version. The other, dirty-metal-slide-on-a-hot-summer-day-while-wearing-shorts version is that, with so many voices, there’s less control in general and more senseless noise. Messages get out of control. Rumors, libels, misinformation. Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, isn’t so happy about that and wants to develop a kind of accreditation system. It’s not far off from the proposed Bloggers’ Code of Conduct nobody wanted to follow. At least he’s not suggesting higher energy taxes to make it too expensive to blog. (Filed under elitist noise reduction.)

Both versions are true, the Pollyanna and the pessimist version. “The future isn’t one way anymore,” Taylor says. Though there are many paths leading there, Taylor has advice for joining that future:

Stay relevant
Communicate
Participate
Have a voice and use it

If we can do that, though we may talk all at once, we might arrive at the future with a collective understanding of how we got there. Or at least a vague idea enough people agree with to satisfy us.

_{*Taylor very nearly wins the longest presentation title award, runner up to yours truly’s upcoming lecture, Anything Anybody Ever Told You Was a Lie, Including What I Just Said: Capturing Reality, If It Exists, In Fiction, Which Is All There Is Anyway.}  

WebProNews anchor Abby Prince Johnston contributed to this article.
 

Nadella spoke on how Microsoft approaches search and how the company intends to shape trends in search development and how they intend to exploit them.

Comments

SES New York is here again, and WebProNews is there to bring you reports and videos from the Big Apple. Enjoy our coverage this week.

Calacanis’ presentation was less about snake-oil this time, and more about legitimizing white-hat SEO while promoting a new social graph he is adding to Mahalo. Calacanis assured the crowd that he meant no offense to the SEO industry in his last presentation, and admitted that his impression was more in line with black-hat SEO or, as he put it, "black magic" SEO, which is more about gaming search engines than legitimate site architecture.

"In some ways," he said, "I am an SEO. I’m a white hat SEO," so long as that means building clean sites.

Calacanis said Mahalo was built on a similar concept as DMOZ or Yahoo Directory, both of which he says failed in terms of search because the directories were "neglected." Calacanis believes Mahalo will not suffer the same fate because the Mahalo Greenhouse Most Wanted page, which distributes the work of building search results among 400 at-home workers.

He said Most Wanted trails only Wikipedia and About.com.

The problem remaining, he said, was keeping the content up-to-date, a problem he addresses by launching Mahalo Social, a social graph that allows users to recommend links and updates in order to build a trust score.

Then there’s the problem of user bias. Calacanis claims that, unlike Google or Yahoo, ranking in the results is up for discussion and review in public view.

The system is based upon machines, experts, social influences like friends, and the fabled wisdom of crowds. A search for Macbook Air, for example would bring up blogs, reviews, and sites like Stumble Upon, all of which are integrated into the social graph, which includes also Del.icio.us, blog comments, Wikipedia, and Digg.

Apparently not Netscape, though.

Using My Mahalo, a user can see at the top of search what friends are recommending in terms of movies, books, services, or products. No friends? No problem. The most "trusted" sources will be posted first with user-ratings posted along the right and bottom.

The idea behind this is that social information is more valuable in search than it is in the original destination like at MySpace or Facebook. The concept is more closely related to the semantic web, which relies more on human categorization, but Calacanis says an algorithm, which has yet to be developed, is important to the further development of the concept.

Part of this semantic integration would include the incorporation of information outside of Mahalo. For example, social information from GoodReads, a site for book lovers, or Netflix for movies, would appear in a networked search result. This of course, in light of recent Facebook privacy fiascos, would be on an opt-in basis.

Day 2 of SMX West 2008 was kicked off with a keynote by Louis Monier, formerly with Google, eBay and Alta Vista and currently Vice President of Products for Cuill, an up and coming search property.

Monier made it clear that his address would be on search history and future aspects and not on Cuill.

He started out with a history of search. As is often the case with something new, he said that the first phase of the Internet was rejection. The web was only as good as its index, which was limited at the time to human edited directories. Full text search was needed but the early engines were slow with limited indexing. Alta VIsta came along with a huge 16 million page index and something new, a way to check backlinks to a site (link:www.mysite.com), possibly the beginning of search marketing.

Alta Vista dominated for a while, but around 1998 index spam became a problem with top results filled largely with garbage. Around this time Google started out with link analysis, giving much better results, as well as the beginning of discrete, targeted ads.

Today, we have a huge front runner, Google, with a couple of out of breath competitors and a number of also-rans, he said.

Currently queries can appease most searchers most of the time and these can even be cached. Really long queries (black leather jacket with green stripe and fur collar) are another matter. The search engines don’t handle those really precise queries, so results are few.

What is the right query?

"Search is about one-shot queries," he said. "From a certain point, we’re still in 1995."

Search engines could take a clue from ecommerce sites, which slice and dice info to narrow down consumer choices, he said.

And, do search engines cover enough? Clearly size does matter. Search engines have a responsibility to find out of the way gems as well as popular sites, so they need insight. Currently, human powered directories, personalized, social and vertical search can only take us so far.

Ten years from now, he doesn’t see us typing two words into a box and hitting the search key. Among the possibilities are a sort of search assistant that will compile results for us based on our specifications.

At any rate, search is still in its infancy, he said, with great things to come.

Comments

Danny Sullivan giving his keynote address at SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. He discussed the evolution of search from strictly web page results to the current blended results that he refers to as Search 3.0 and the coming Search 4.o, personalized search.

He also gave his views on the current attempt by Microsoft to take over Yahoo (Danny really likes having three big players in search). He also touched on the idea of standards for the SEO industry and how it might be time to revisit the idea.

Sorry the photo is a bit blurry. That’s the best I could do with my iPhone in a dark room.

More sessions to come. I’ll try to post quickies like this as I can with more in depth articles to come after the conference.

Comments

Visitors to Yahoo who turn to the search box to find what they need have the added benefit of Search Assist. The technology suggests likely choices to auto-complete the search box as the searcher types.

The feature may be doing for Yahoo what its management has yet to achieve: inroads against Google and its search industry dominance. The Yahoo Search blog touted findings by The Keynote Benchmark, indicating Search Assist helped Yahoo edge Google in one study category.

Though it’s a small step in one category, it could mean more in the long run. Keynote put forth the suggestion that Google may not be invincible after all:

With nearly three times the market share of its nearest competitor, Google is seemingly invincible. But companies that overbearingly dominate their category, particularly when it

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-search-assists-with-satisfaction-2008-02/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/itunes-movie-rentals-waifish-macbook-in-the-air-2008-01 http://www.webpronews.com/itunes-movie-rentals-waifish-macbook-in-the-air-2008-01#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:49:28 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=43395 Well, it's not going to cause quite the media-wide paroxysm the Jesus phone (iPhone, for the uninitiated or unacquainted with light-hearted sacrilege) caused last year at Macworld, but there'll probably be sufficient tremulous giddiness about the world's thinnest notebook computer, the MacBook Air.

]]> Well, it’s not going to cause quite the media-wide paroxysm the Jesus phone (iPhone, for the uninitiated or unacquainted with light-hearted sacrilege) caused last year at Macworld, but there’ll probably be sufficient tremulous giddiness about the world’s thinnest notebook computer, the MacBook Air.

So thin, 0.16 to 0.76 inch, they couldn’t fit an optical drive in it. Luckily, your credit card’s just the right size to add several hundred dollars worth of peripheral equipment to your already $1,800 techno-hipster applephilic geek machine.

You could even open it up to show how the 5-hour battery takes up more than half the space inside – you know, where your optical drive should be. Otherwise, it is pretty sweet.

Since I know it’s killing you, let’s get to the specs Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented in his keynote:

13.3-inch display
Full size keyboard
1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo
1.8 inch 80 GB hard drive (64 GB SSD option)
2GB RAM
802.11n standard Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
iPhone-like muti-touch gesture support so you can move stuff with your fingers
MagSafe 45w power adapter
USB 2.0 port
Micro-DVI
Headphone jack

All that coolness for $1799 plus $99 for a USB-connected optical drive, ready to ship in two weeks.

Jobs had lots of size references: fits in a manila envelope; the size of a pencil; width of a dime; thick as a nickel. It’ll definitely be fun for those who have to have the latest gadget, but again the Mac isn’t going to break the PC’s hold on the general public, who’ll look at the price tag, compare it to a notebook PC at a third of the price and has a way to burn discs.

But Apple seems to betting on the notion that the consumer is moving away from hard discs – even if not completely – and will have more than enough ways to play media on the computer. Jobs recommends an iPod of course, or this year’s reincarnation of Apple TV.

That incarnation is dubbed Apple TV Take 2. Jobs acknowledged that no company last year succeeded in capturing the public mindshare when it came to devices that transfer movies and digital content from the computer to the television.

So another large announcement was that Apple was taking on the world of Netflix and Blockbuster by transforming Apple TV into a movie-rental machine via the introduction of iTunes Movie Rentals.

Jobs says Apple has worked out deals with the major movie companies out there (Touchstone, MGM, Miramax, Lions Gate, Fox, WB, Walt Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony) to rent DVD- and HD-quality movies with Dolby 5.1 surround sound via Apple TV for between $2.99 and $4.99 a piece, depending on whether they are new releases or high definition.

It will also work for YouTube videos, Flickr, and .mac. In addition, Apple lowered the price of the unit from $299 to $229. Viewers who rent a streaming iTunes movie have 30 days to start it and after that 24 hours to finish it before the movie disappears back into the vault. 

In a side announcement, the CEO of Fox announced that all DVDs from this point forward will come with a free digital copy.

Stop yawning.

Other announcements that are less exciting:

• Introduction of Time Capsule, which allows wireless backup of Mac computers. 500 GB for $299; 1 TB for $499.
• iPhone SDK for application developers will release in late February.
• iPhone gets maps with GPS location; ability to SMS multiple people at once; lyrics, chapters, and languages
• All those additions to the iPhone will be available for the iPod Touch and existing iPod Touch owners can add them for $20.

Today’s announcements also mean that the supposedly leaked keynote that appeared at Wikipedia yesterday was bogus, as nothing listed there appeared in Jobs’ presentation. Better luck convincing us next year.

 

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/itunes-movie-rentals-waifish-macbook-in-the-air-2008-01/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/the-macworld-keynote-is-leaking-2008-01 http://www.webpronews.com/the-macworld-keynote-is-leaking-2008-01#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:35:04 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=43351 Fake Steve Jobs says that something in the air is the Woz's SBDs. Ha, ha. Everybody loves a good fart joke. But depending on whether the supposed Macworld keynote leak on Wikipedia was the real deal, a promotional buzzworthy plant, or a fake, the Real Steve Jobs might not find it all that amusing.

]]> Fake Steve Jobs says that something in the air is the Woz’s SBDs. Ha, ha. Everybody loves a good fart joke. But depending on whether the supposed Macworld keynote leak on Wikipedia was the real deal, a promotional buzzworthy plant, or a fake, the Real Steve Jobs might not find it all that amusing.

The list of announcements is plausible enough: a new Macbook less than an inch thick; YouTube on iTunes; SDK for iPhone; Twitter for iPhone. Could happen, and Pocket-Lint reported that Jobs’ always-hotly-anticipated Macworld keynote address, scheduled for Tuesday, January 15, was leaked on Wikipedia.

On a talk page, which is weird, and which isn’t really there anymore except for moderators critical of somebody posting speculation and not fact\.

As if nothing ever breached the crystalline border of truth there before. As if.

Regardless, the blogosphere’s getting pretty excited about what the so-called leaked keynote revealed, meaning if Jobs’ actual keynote doesn’t measure up, we could see the first-history geek riots.

Maybe it’s par for the course. It seems there’s a leak every year. Maybe it’s an Apple PR plant. What better way to build some buzz? Then again, Apple sometimes sues people for leaks, and it’s reported that project managers of forthcoming Apple releases don’t even know what Jobs will present at the Stevenote.

Some are convinced it’s a fake. Other’s are pretty sure it’s real, especially noting some Twitter folks’ recent tweets. That includes a pre-Christmas tweet from Evan Williams (the blogger, Twitter developer, and co-founder of Obvious, which owns Twitter, not the bourbon) which reads:

"Meeting with stevej"

Ooh, you might be busted Mr. Twitterman. Or you could have meant Steve Johansson, or Jackson, or Jones or somebody. Guess we’ll find out tomorrow.   
 

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