Take action here, here and here. The Washington Post has a great article. D-Day will effectively crush Internet radio as we know it on July 15th — unless we act.
WOOZradio Goes Silent for Net Radio D-Day Protest
Union Reveals Snails Pace of U.S. Broadband
Thank the Communications Workers of America for lobbying for high-speed Internet access via the SpeedMatters Web site. After months of collecting data from thousands of visitors to their Speed Test tool, the CWA today published an interactive (also PDF) state by state and even county by country analysis of average speed test results based on their (moderately small) data samples.
Bottom line — the InterTubes are molasses-slow. The below is a screenshot of the SF county data…
You Can Hide, but You Can’t Run
Today Google responded to scrutiny regarding its privacy policies by decreasing the length of time that a user’s search records will be connected to their IP to 18 months (before it becomes “anonymous”). Privacy International’s study is neither surprising, nor especially revealing. But as difficult as it may be to define “privacy” in the open information age, the term “anonymous” may be even more cloudy, because it seems that on the Internet, everything leaves a fingerprint. 24 months, 18 months… I’m not buying it.
Speaking of fingerprinting, Google’s YouTube is partnering with Time-Warner and Disney to test video recognition software that essentially will automatically remove uploaded content that is detected as copyrighted, according to an “accurate enough and scalable enough” tool, said YouTube Partner Development Director Chris Maxcy.
Using Google to it’s fullest requires a definite privacy trade off, but one that is worth it. I expect to be identifiable. But if “anonymizing” data is to lead to greater privacy, I’d hate for it to come at the expense of personalization and as part of deal-making to satisfy only corporate partners.
Google to Buy Feedburner for $100M
Feedburner, one of the most useful and valuable free Web services in my experience, is now part of the big Goog, where, one can only hope they dedicate at least as much energy to the service side of this product as they naturally would to innovating it.
Feedburner launched in Chicago in 2004 and quickly became the premier RSS feed-burner for blogs and even newspaper Web sites. I’ve published dozens of feeds for a variety of projects using their tool and have also used Feedburner to publish media-rich RSS podcast feeds.
This deal is all-but officially announced, and is rumored to be an all-cash acquisition.
Google may be able to boost Feedburner’s struggling publisher’s ad network, but my main concern again here is Google’s imperfect track record in keeping these ma & pa startups alive (of course, Dodgeball wasn’t nearly as established as Feedburner is when it was purchased).