Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).

Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the page or menu you were looking at. This also keeps you from losing anything you hadn’t saved if you’re interrupted–even if you were in the middle of a writing a sentence when your phone rang. This should change the beginning of such a conversation from “I am so mad at you right now” to a simple “hello.”

In addition to remembering what you were doing, the app does a much better job at letting you manage user comments. The approval screen itself looks almost identical, but the app now lets you quickly switch between the ones that have been approved and the ones that still need to be looked at. It also displays each users’ Gravatar (user icon) next to their username and URL, which ends up taking up a little more space than it did in the previous iteration of the app but adds a sense of familiarity with its desktop sibling.

Other small changes include the app remembering which order you uploaded the photos in so that they display in that same order in your post. Although the app still hasn’t been updated to include videos, which means 3GS owners will have to add whatever video they shot through WordPress’ Web interface instead. The app also now stores passwords in a user’s keychain, which means those credentials could be accessed by other applications you may want to give access to later on down the line–like, say an app that lets you post videos to a WordPress blog.

Oddly enough, the new WordPress app is completely different from the original, which still exists but will no longer be updated. The company attributes this to having switched between having an outside contractor make the first version, whereas this new one was built in-house.

The new look makes it simply to hop between comments, posts and pages. User Gravatars are now visible too.

(Credit:
WordPress)

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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iPhones may be all the rage in tech-crazy Silicon Valley, but if a new political app is any indication, RIM’s BlackBerry is at the heart of government.

This time the RIM love comes not from President Obama, who made headlines for trying to hold onto his BlackBerry after being sworn into office, but from across the aisle.

From the office of Republican Whip Eric Cantor comes WhipCast for BlackBerry, a free GOP-focused aggregator for text, pictures, and videos from the House floor. WhipCast monitors such activities as discussions, polling information, and floor schedule updates (which you can also follow on Twitter). Installing WhipCast on a memory card gives users offline access to stories that show up in the feed.

It’s not immediately clear who developed WhipCast for Cantor’s office, but the app is certainly one indication that the Republican Party is doing its part to embrace social media.

When WhipCast comes out for Android, and begins integrating Facebook and Twitter feeds, we’ll know they succeeded.

(Via Talking Points Memo (TPM))

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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A few months back, we wrote about how ad agency Denizen wasn’t just claiming to have patented product placement (check it out: patent 6,859,936) but was suing another ad agency, WPP, for violating the patent. Perhaps Denizen’s next patents will be on claiming ownership of obvious ideas and suing your competitors, because it’s still at it. The latest is that it’s suing media agency Mindshare for incorporating the brand Vaseline into the TV show Maneater.

What’s really odd here, though, is that Denizen isn’t actually asserting that patent in this particular lawsuit — even though it mentions that it has it. Instead, it’s claiming a trade secret violation, noting that it met with Mindshare way back in 2004 and shared this groundbreaking concept of integrating products into show, and worked out an agreement that “Mindshare wouldn’t use, publish, disclose, communicate, or divulge information shared on Denizen’s proprietary method of product integration.” Specifically:

“During the meeting, Denizen disclosed to MindShare certain techniques…that could be used to implement program integrated advertisements, such as, but without limitation, ways to shoot the advertisements, strategies for obtaining Screen Actors Guild contracts, methods to gain access or rights to television program content, and how and when an advertising agency could work with a production house or network.”

I’m at a loss to think of how any of that can be “proprietary,” but perhaps Denizen has a creative lawyering department in addition to its regular creative advertising/marketing people.

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Earlier this week, I bashed Google’s visual voice mail service for its inability to transcribe my voice messages into understandable English. (OK, most of the article really focuses on a new flexibility in Google Voice, which I do like.) To be fair, poor transcription isn’t all Google’s fault. They’re offering a free service based on a computer-aided technology that improves each year. The real problem is that machine transcription just isn’t good enough.

Up until yesterday, I hadn’t received more than a handful of visual voice mail message translations imbued with any meaning in my native tongue. In fact, I turned off SMS forwarding because I couldn’t handle the streams of nonsensical texts that would pour in for each voice mail left. Thankfully, I won’t miss the yucks stemming from mismatched voice-to-text at all, not when I can still read the messages in my online Google Voice in-box over and over again.

Do you have any favorite mistranslations produced by free computer-aided transcription engines? Share yours in the comments–or better yet, e-mail me if you’d like to take place in our anonymous gallery–and I’ll share three errata from my in-box below.

The longer the message, the more creative the transcription.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Despite its brevity, the only accurate word in this transcription is "hello."

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

That's right! You go and procure the message, people!

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Originally posted at Crave

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SteelWolf writes in to let us know about a blog post rehashing the idea of setting up a “music tax” to support musicians through a flat fee charged to everyone’s ISP account:

Music is important. It is ubiquitous today with good reason: we just can’t get enough of it, and its life-enhancing effect is ever-changing and ongoing.

If it had been possible for the past ten years to download nails, most of us would long ago have acquired all the nails we could possibly need, nail factories would have closed down, their workers and bosses found new jobs for themselves, and it would be a dead issue. But music-making is such an important act that millions do it even though they receive nothing for it. They always have done, even back in the heyday of the recorded music industry, when students bankrupted themselves to get it (I know I did) and bands scrambled to play gigs for next to nothing (guilty, again). So in the scheme of things music is at least as worthy of state subsidy than, say, the automobile industry. Music isn’t any less precious than it used to be, it’s just that its commodity status has eroded: unlike car workers the customary method of getting (some) artists paid is failing.

I am in favour of a flat fee on each internet connection, collected by ISPs, to encourage musicians to keep producing new work.

Now, I’ve gone into great detail on why a music tax is a terrible idea in the past — but that was addressing ideas like Jim Griffin’s Choruss plan (which, by the way, we’re still waiting to find out who the tens of thousands of students who are supposedly already using it are, but we’ll leave that aside for now). This idea, from Chris Ovenden, is slightly different. It is not a “download license” or a “download tax” as it’s really a fund to pay for the creation of new music:

I would use such a fund to commission new works directly from up-and-coming and established artists. I certainly wouldn’t try to monitor all downloads or anything hyper-impossible like that. If the problem of trying to monetize or prevent private copying goes away, so does the threat of monitoring all communications which is being suggested as a “solution” to the “problem” of filesharing… Keep the amount each person has to pay low, and spread the collected funds widely and evenly among as many working artists as is feasible. The more successful acts will most likely have other income streams and won’t need a massive top-up; smaller artists will be grateful to have their next recording project funded. And everyone will benefit from an influx of lots of new work (released under CC license or similar).

This is, obviously a bit different than the usual suggestions for a music tax, but that doesn’t make it much better. First as is noted in the comments on his post, if you open the door (even slightly) for this to happen in music, then you have to do it in pretty much every other content industry as well: movies will want their own tax, as will software, photography, newspapers, quilt making, painting, blogging and so forth. Where do you draw the line?

Second, this will still leave people who file share open to lawsuits. While he claims that the “threat” goes away, there’s no way that the record labels say that they’ll allow all past infringement in hopes of getting a few dimes sent its way from some bureaucracy.

Which, of course, brings up the third problem: you still have a bureaucracy, and how does it determine who to distribute the funds to? How is it possibly fair for someone — rather than the fans themselves — to determine who gets the money.

And that brings up the biggest point of all: this isn’t needed. At all. There are plenty of ways for artists to set up a smart business model that allows fans to support them directly and to fund their future works. Why make it more inefficient by adding unnecessary and market-distorting middlemen? The only situation where this makes some sense is if there weren’t ways for artists to go direct to fans with their own models. But there are — and it’s getting easier every day. So, instead of a “tax” give fans a “reason to buy” and it becomes a better situation for everyone involved.

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Trillain 4.1 beta for Windows amps Twitter and Facebook power.

(Credit:
Cerulean Studios)

Makers of the multinetwork chat application Trillian threw open doors to the company’s latest beta, previously available onto to private beta testers, allowing any Windows user to test
Trillian 4.1 beta before the code becomes final.

Chief among the changes in the beta are new social networking features and tight integration with Windows 7 for users of Microsoft’s most recent operating system. Trillian 4.1 beta supports story links and avatar pictures in more locations on the interface, as well as Twitter hash tags and direct (@) replies. You can now also tweet from the contact list, follow and unfollow users, and edit a message before you retweet. Here’s the full list of changes for Twitter and Facebook users.

Although the current stable version, Trillian Astra 4.0, works fine in Windows 7, the beta brings on optimizations, like support for jump lists, and an animated progress bar that displays during file transfers (see all new features).

Trillian 4.1 beta for Windows also gets an overhaul in the e-mail notifications department, with six additional features that span new views in which to organize your messages, to new things you can do with notification messages, like toggling through alerts and shoving them into any corner of the screen. The ability to manage incoming messages from the right-click context menu looks especially convenient.

Read more about Trillian 4.1 beta’s e-mail enhancements, and a few extra tweaks to status control. Beta users should be forewarned that since 4.1 is still in the development process, you may run across some bugs and instability.

Trillian faces heavy competition from all-in-one chat clients like Digsby, which also incorporates Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail notifications into its communications application. Giving Trillian greater social networking capabilities will help keep Cerulean Studios’ instant messenger competitive.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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A bunch of folks have been pointing to a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, discussing the speed and style with which some “mainstream” media sources and some “new media” sources corrected a particular story. Apparently a newspaper in Arizona misreported some comments by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and the misquote was picked up by numerous blogs and online news sites. However, once it became clear what had happened, the new media sites were much faster to issue corrections, while making it clear what was corrected (often leaving the original up and noting the correction). The mainstream paper — who originated the story — was much slower about fixing things, and when it did, simply deleted the mistaken part at first, before later putting up a vague note about the change.

To some extent, I believe this shows the different mindsets of some of these newer publications. I’ve talked in the past about how I view this blog as a conversation, not a reporting venue. And, as such, I don’t delete stuff, even when it turns out that I made a mistake. Instead, I’ll do a strikethrough or cross out, along with an update explaining what happened. I don’t think it’s right to simply “disappear” the original — though I’ve had some traditional journalists (and one Hollywood lawyer) act as if I had done something horrible in using a strikethrough on mistaken content.

And yet, personally, I’ve found that, while I hate it when a story is wrong, the fact that I correct such stories fully and openly has built up greater trust. The few times we’ve needed to correct such a story, the response has almost always been universally positive rather than negative. As mentioned above, it’s like the difference between a conversation and old-school reporting. Old school reporting sought to be “the source of record.” A conversation is more about learning as you go. In a conversation, I might say something — and the person/people I’m talking to may correct me, and from that we all learn. But for traditional reporters, such an error is seen as a huge black mark that requires rewriting history and “disappearing” the mistake — rather than leaving it there, with a clear update, so that everyone can learn.

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Facebook head of communications Elliot Schrage posted a company blog entry on Thursday inviting members to review proposed updates to the social network’s privacy policy, and much of it deals with what happens to the content of accounts that members have opted to delete.

“Specifically, we’ve included sections that further explain the privacy setting you can choose to make your content viewable by everyone, the difference between deactivating and deleting your account,” and the process of memorializing an account once we’ve received a report that the account holder is deceased,” Schrage wrote. Earlier this week, Facebook detailed the process of “memorializing” an account, which leaves the profile intact to current friends but hides potentially sensitive information.

Now, in the proposed new policy, which members are invited to review and comment on until November 5, Facebook explains to users that they can “deactivate” their account, which hides it but keeps information stored for potential reactivation, or alternately choose to delete it for good.

“Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users,” the new wording explains. It’s referring to content like posts and comments on other members’ profile ‘walls.’ “However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Facebook.”

It’s been a long and twisted road for Facebook’s privacy regulations. The new policy was put into place after a complaint from the Canadian Privacy Commission called into question what would happen to member profile data if a user deactivated an account.

That fiasco followed outrage over changes to Facebook’s terms of service that implied Facebook claimed an “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license” to member content even if the account had been deleted. One privacy advocacy group readied a federal complaint, and Facebook backed off and returned to its old terms of service.

In July, Facebook cleaned up its user privacy controls as it prepared to open up more of its profile content to public access and search engines.

But the Canadian Privacy Commission had also taken issue with how much Facebook profile information could potentially be shared with third-party developers or advertisers. Facebook made additional modifications to its user privacy controls in August in response to concerns about the developer platform, and in Thursday’s post about the new privacy policy Schrage highlighted that the social network does not intend to share personal data with advertisers.

“The information we provide to advertisers is ‘anonymized,’ meaning that it can’t be traced back to you as an individual in any way,” Schrage’s post explained.

Originally posted at The Social

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You can’t say the entertainment industry isn’t persistent in their attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay (though, a portion of the site’s popularity can be attributed to their neverending campaign against the site). While the industry won its lawsuit against four of The Pirate Bay’s founders earlier this year, the ongoing appeals process is taking too long for the industry — and the court had not issued an injunction against the site, so it’s still running (though, plenty of users have since bailed out due to concern about the failed attempt to sell the site). Still, the entertainment industry has been trying a bunch of different ways to shut down the site in the meantime. Initially it got an ISP serving the site to stop, which caused a brief downtime. However, the latest, as pointed out by brokep, is that the industry appears to have convinced the court to bar two of the defendants — Gottfried Svartholm-Warg and Fredrik Neij — from doing any work on the site (Google translation from the original, so would appreciate any detail corrections if the translation isn’t accurate).

It’s difficult to see what this accomplishes. Brokep points out that the two aren’t involved with the site in the first place, and don’t live in Sweden any more as well, so it’s not clear what this does. On top of that, even if they were involved, it’s not like others wouldn’t quickly take their place anyway. The whole crusade continues to be a massive waste of time and resources by the entertainment industry for no clear gain.

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