But should Twitter be used as a source for mainstream media outlets? That’s the question being raised today after a reporter for BNO News found evidence that CNN has recycled tweets from PersianKiwi, a popular Iranian Twitter user. As BNO’s Michael van Poppel discovered, in a June 24 article CNN appears to have repeated several words and phrases from PersianKiwi’s feed – and attributed those comments to various “sources.” (more…)

That short clause, printed yesterday in the book review section of The Boston Sunday Globe, has today sparked a swirling debate over the relationship between writers and critics in the digital age. The author in question is Alice Hoffman, whose latest novel, “The Story Sisters,” was recently released to mild reviews.

Writing in The Washington Post, Wendy Smith called the book “excessive and over-determined but ultimately so moving that it overwhelms these faults.” In the Times, Chelsea Cain said that the novel’s “last act grows a bit histrionic and narrative strands are over-tangled, then too neatly tied up, but Hoffman’s writing is so lovely and her female characters so appealing that it almost doesn’t matter.”

And in The Boston Globe, Roberta Silman said “this new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” Each of these three reviews – Globe, Post, and Times – arrived at a similar conclusion: “The Story Sisters” is a solid book from a writer Smith identified as “maddeningly uneven.” A solid book, but not without flaws. “Lovely” to read, but not particularly groundbreaking.

Still, it’s Silman’s critique that seems to have really agitated Hoffman. (more…)

Apple today joined the European fellowship for a snarl free future – a coalition of major device makers that agreed on a single kind of cord that will power all of their smart phones. Earlier this year, the list included AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and Vodafone.

But Apple held out. The company has had a curious relationship with technology standards. It evangelized FireWire as a speedy connection for gadgets and computers, but recently stopped including the jacks in many of its new laptops. It embraces AAC for audio and H.264 for video – but concocted many proprietary standards over the years.

Now, it’s joined the micro-USB bandwagon. The effort evolved out of a European Union request to cut down of the obsolescence, e-waste, and energy consumption that plagued the old system. New phones often come with completely different cords, sometimes making the originals useless within a year. Also, the EU wants engineers to focus on a single format so that they can cooperate on reducing “vampire power” – the energy drawn when a gizmo is plugged in but the battery is already full.

It’s no doubt a noble effort, but as the Monitor wondered in February:

What about all the chargers in use now? Doesn’t an industry shift to one standard create a mass charger dump that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred? At this point, micro-USB seems like an obscure choice; many cameras and some phones, notably the Motorola Razr, use mini-USB.

And what about the hardship that devoted “legacy” handset users will face if their charger conks out and they can’t get a replacement because, well, “You’re supposed to use this kind now. It’s new. Everyone else is doing it.”  Instead of just a new charger, that person is now faced with buying a whole new phone. So much for lessening the impact on landfills. Admittedly that argument has a certain curmudgeonly slant to it.

But the question is particularly interesting for Apple. Looking at the current iPhone, where are they going to stick a mini-USB socket? The top is crammed with a headphone hookup, SIM card slot, and the wake-up button; the bottom holds the microphone and current connector. That incumbent Apple jack has been an iPod tradition since the beginning. There have been small changes along the way – the new iPhone won’t work with all iPod accessories – but there is a whole industry built around providing devices for iPods and iPhones. Has Apple just abandoned them?

The company has until 2012 to figure that out. That’s when the EU agreement comes into effect. Macworld says that “a dock-connector to mini-USB adapter would fit within the letter, if not the spirit, of the law. And, while this arrangement only covers Europe, given Apple’s history of creating one model of iPhone for the entire world, this decision could very well affect iPhones in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

A new system, developed by a collaboration of scientists working with Toyota, allows a person to control a wheelchair using nothing but his brain. Wearing a cap that monitors brain activity, a user can advance and turn the chair. (more…)

According to Richard Pérez-Peña, a media reporter for the Times, the broadsheet’s top brass “believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival.” Over a several month period, with Wales leading the charge, Wikipedia editors were asked to scrub Rohde’s page of any evidence of the kidnapping, which had been reported by a handful of smaller outlets and blogs.

Wales is quoted as saying he agreed to the Times’ requests because no major newspaper had yet reported the capture of Rohde, a former reporter at The Christian Science Monitor. “We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” Wales told Pérez-Peña. “I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”

Blackout

As Dan Murphy wrote in these pages earlier this month, the idea of a media blackout is always controversial. In 2006, for instance, when Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was kidnapped in Iraq, the Monitor was criticized for requesting that the case stay temporarily out of the spotlight. “That effort ended after about two days,” Murphy wrote, “with major news outlets saying they could not continue to sit on a significant story.”

But the Wikipedia blackout has struck many as especially egregious. Wikipedia, these analysts say, was created as a collaborative project, where a large group of volunteers can share writing and editing privileges. (more…)

Flip Video wants to tip that balance.

Over the past two years, this line of tiny video cameras has tried to change the way millions think about camcorders and remind the bigger-faster-louder crowd about the virtues of simplicity.

Flips aim to be the point-and-shoots of video cameras. Designed for pockets and purses, all four of the Flip models fit the dimensions of a bar of soap. And their prices match their frames – ranging from $150 to $230.

Recording is a breeze: Hit the red button once to start. Hit it again to stop. When you’re ready to share, a USB connector pops out of the side. Flip’s software lets you organize, lightly edit, and easily post your clips to YouTube. Or, if YouTube is too public for you, Flip last week unveiled invite-only “channels.” Friends and family can log on to these private websites, and you decide who’s on the list.

This spring brought the newest member of the Flip family, the Ultra HD. Its bigger (but still pretty tiny) body crams in enough memory for two hours of high-definition video, room for a rechargeable battery or disposable AAs, and an HDMI jack to hook up the camera directly to a big-screen TV.

If you’re looking for a Flip with a little more flavor, both the Flip Mino and Mino HD allow for custom designs. TheFlip.com lets you upload an image that the company will print onto the face of the camera at no extra charge. (Perhaps your baby will look at the camera more often if a cartoon face is smiling back at her.)

Of course, every simple, tiny, cheap camera needs to make some compromises. Flip’s image quality is decent, but the HD footage in particular can look a little washed-out and amateurish. There are no image settings, barely any zoom capability, and no ability to snap still images. Flip’s maker shows no interest in adding these features. Its cameras are supposed to be simple.

According to sales, simple has worked. Last year, Flip grabbed one-quarter of the US camcorder market. It trails Sony, but nonetheless made major strides in a market that’s seen little movement in recent years.

In May, the hungry tech titan Cisco gobbled up Flip’s parent company as part of its push into personal technology. Cisco CEO John Chambers reportedly carries a Flip in his suit pocket for quick updates posted on his company’s internal video blog. After the $590 million sale, he told several news outlets that Flip cameras are “the future of the way people will communicate.”

His evidence: Despite the 95-5 divide, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And online video, as a whole, made up one-third of all Web traffic in 2008, according to an annual Cisco report released this month. By 2013, it is projected to become more than 60 percent of Web traffic.

With such a potential boom on the horizon, Flip faces plenty of competition. In April, Kodak
released the $150 Zx1, a cellphone-shaped HD camera with improved video in dim lighting and room for extra memory cards. The Canon PowerShot SD780 IS is marketed as a digital camera, but also takes high-quality HD video. This twofer comes in a similarly small shell, but costs $280.

On July 1, 1979, the Walkman hit stores creating a cultural touchstone and the rise of lightweight headphones.

Though the Walkman had many different names at its launch (it was called Soundabout in the US and Stowaway in England, for example), the name “Walkman” stuck after tourists traveling to Japan returned home to the US with the players dubbing them Walkmans rather than Soundabouts. Further proof that Walkman became a household name was when the word Walkman was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1986.

(more…)

But Apple appears to be holding the line on decency for now, although this brief appearance of the first application to feature nude photos raises questions about whether Apple will stick with its early pledge to not distribute X-rated content for its iPhone and iPod touch devices, which have combined sales of more than 40 million units.

On Thursday morning “The Hottest Girls” application showed up for sale via the iTunes App Store and then quickly vanished. At first, the application’s developer said it was no longer available due to its overwhelming popularity — he said it was “sold out.”

Apple didn’t quite see it that way. The company later said that the app had been removed because it doesn’t “distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography.”

“The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content…. The application in no longer available on the App Store,” the company said in a statement to CNN.

While “Hottest Girls” appears to have been the first app to contain nudity, to be sure it’s not the first adult-themed application for sale on the App Store. In fact, the store is full of programs that feature scantly clad women and that come bearing warning labels that they aren’t appropriate for children under the age of 17.

When Apple released its latest version of the iPhone operating system earlier this month it came with parental controls. Many tech watchers thought this was an unstated green light for producers of adult content to begin developing pornography apps for the iPhone — or iPorn as some have dubbed it. Already pornographers have designed websites specifically for viewing on the iPhone’s browser.

“Why has Apple, a company which banned an e-book application from the same store because it could be used to download the “Kama Sutra,” suddenly started selling smut? Because the 3.0 iPhone software update now allows age restrictions for applications,” wrote Charlie Sorrel on Wired Magazine’s Gadget Lab blog.

Gadget Lab later clarified the story about the short-lived porn app, saying that the developer gave a “false explanation” about why it had been removed.

“It’s not surprising that Apple chose to deny the app, and it’s unlikely we’ll see a porn app again in the App Store — lest developers wish to be banned,” according to the magazine’s blog.

But, it also pointed out that there “are currently more than 50,000 apps in the App Store, according to Apple, and the role of gatekeeper will get more difficult as the App Store continues to expand. Hottest Girls is another example of a developer who tricked the gatekeeper — but only temporarily.”

Apple was recently in hot water over an application called “Baby Shaker” that found its way past the censors and onto the App Store. The company later apologized for approving the offensive app (it vets everything available on its App store) and said allowing “Baby Shaker” onto the store was a mistake.

But that mistake drew attention to the curious — and secretive — approval process that Apple uses to let applications onto the store. And the case over “Hottest Girls” has many developers scratching their heads because Apple’s own rating system apparently allows for nudity.

This is how TechCrunch sees it: “Is it possible that Apple approved some of the nudity but then the developer was trying to push something like hardcore pornography into the app? Maybe, but I haven’t heard any reports of that — just that it featured pictures of topless women. And from its statement, it would seem that Apple doesn’t want any nudity, period.”

While it’s still unknown exactly how “Hottest Girls” made its way onto the App Store, there is no doubt an appetite for porn on the iPhone. A group that tracks Internet search terms recently found that “iPhone porn” is typed into Google about 3,000 times daily.

“Did Apple do the right thing?” asks CNN’s ScitechBlog. “Is the fuss over this episode just silly? And, given how lucrative the pornography industry is, is it just a matter of time before nudie pics become available through the App Store?”

One malware campaign, documented extensively by researchers at Websense, sends out emails with a link to an apparent YouTube clip of Michael Jackson. But when readers click on the link, they are brought to a heavily compromised site hosted in Australia.

Meanwhile, Sophos, an IT security firm, is warning against a wave of emails purporting to have inside information on Jackson’s death. Although the body of these emails does not contain a link, Sophos experts say, the spammers behind the emails can easily harvest personal information if recipients reply to the original message. (more…)

The company unveiled an advertisement today that targets a very specific demographic: those who bought an iPhone in June 2007. The ad, posted on Facebook this morning, seems to hearken back to the ’80s Sega commercial “Genesis does what Nintendon’t.”

The Palm Pre does things the iPhone can’t. Run multiple applications at the same time with real-time updates and even save $1200 over two years. It’s the perfect time to join the Now Network, America’s most trusted 3G network, bringing you the first and only 4G network from a national carrier.

The ad lands just as the original crop of iPhone owners reach the end of their two-year contracts. What better time to ditch AT&T, argued Roger McNamee, whose investment firm reinvigorated Palm several years back.

June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later. Think about it — if you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.

To be fair, a week after that March interview with Bloomberg, Palm said that McNamee’s statement was an “exaggerated prediction of consumer behavior pattern and is withdrawn.” Recantation or no, the tactic is back. (more…)