FISA fight, la france dirige la cnil européenne, grève sur ebay, etc.

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VIE PRIVEE :  Aux USA en ce moment, ce n'est pas que la campagne des primaires, c'est aussi le FISA fight pendant lequel des parlementaires et des activisites essaient d'empêcher le gouvernement d'accorder une immunité aux compagnies téléphoniques qui auraient collaborées et qui collaboreraient avec le gouvernement pour réaliser des écoutes téléphoniques illégales. L'affaire est reprise par tous, y compris ici par le génial Tatsuya Ishida : "Collar" - Mon, 18 Feb 2008 Comment convaincre des gens qui ne maitrisent pas les nouvelles technologies que la protection de la vie privée est importante ? Comment échapper au "si vous n'avez rien à vous reprocher alors..." : How to Convince Non-IT Friends that Privacy Matters? Un site de scoops, de fact-checking et de whistleblowing bloqué par un juge US et c'est le mini-scandale : WikiLeaks Under Fire La France prend la tête des Cnil européennes INTERNET Que signifie l'utilisation du mot grève par les vendeurs de ebay ? Sont-ils vraiment devenus des employés dans un modèle nouveau mais finalement classique ? Faut-il commencer à réfléchir à une réglementation qui les protégerait ? eBay sellers to strike 35% des chinois utilisent leur téléphone pour écouter de la musique : How the Chinese use their cell phones Stardoll: A Virtual Consumer Experiment Turned Financial Megahit Est ce que les blogs deviennent respectables et légitimes ? Oui, mais... : Are Blogs Becoming Respectable And Legitimate? Une réaction intéressante sur le projet iCNN (site d'information participative de CNN) : Is This the Future of News? DIGITAL LIFE Si vous devez faire des powerpoint ou des présentations, à lire absolument : visualizing information for advocacy Pour Negroponte, l'électronique d'aujourd'hui est devenue obèse : Negroponte Keynote: Electronics Are 'Obese' Le nouveau rssblog de Guy Kawasaki : Tim Berry: Guy Kawasaki's Alltop: RSS Zen Sexisme geek : How it Works Courts May Revisit Software Patents CULTURE Classique mais chou : This would NEVER have happened on a Caturday. In Graphics We Trust | Update Habitrail-Style Office Tower to Dominate Beijing Skyline Later This Year [Architecture] Multi-play Mario game video as Many Worlds quantum tutorial Crammer MP3 Player is Cute, Orange, Simple Brigitte Fontaine - Comme A La Radio (1970) "Collar" - Mon, 18 Feb 2008 visualizing information for advocacy a booklet that aims to introduce advocacy & non-governmental organizations to basic principles & techniques of information design. clearly, "information aesthetic", "casual", "expressive", or "primitive" visualizations are playing a big part in the communication of data-rich information in more subjective ways, such as the highlighting of concepts 'about' the data, instead of focusing on patterns 'within' the data.  so it comes to no surprise that many of its examples have already been blogged here, including Exxon Secrets & Iraq Casualties & Gapminder & Worldmapper. the booklet also contains tips, excercises, & recommendations of Free Software packages to help polish up information graphics. putting such works together as guidelines for others is a courageous initiative. people interested in the subject should also look at govcom, which is unfortunately not included in the booklet. [link: backspace.com|thnkx John] • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Habitrail-Style Office Tower to Dominate Beijing Skyline Later This Year [Architecture] As part of Beijing's efforts tolook good for the summer Olympics, its central TV station, CCTV, is getting brand new headquarters. It'll be the first of 300 buildings to be completed in the city's new Central Business District. The 5.9 million square foot building is actually a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical sections, making the building into a giant square tube instead of a traditional tower. Its designers--Rem Koolhaus, Ole Scheeren, and a team of international hot shots from OMA--made the facade an irregular grid to portray the crazy amount of TV work that goes down inside. Image by CCTV CCTV New Site main page    • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • WikiLeaks Under Fire kan0r writes "The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands. The WikiLeaks whistle blower, allegedly former vice president of the Cayman Islands branch of swiss bank Julius Baer, states in the WikiLeaks documents that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering by its clients from around the world. WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome. Details of the court documents have also been made available." Read more of this story at Slashdot. • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Multi-play Mario game video as Many Worlds quantum tutorial The Mechanically Separated Meat blog has created a merged video of hundreds of games played against "Kaizo Mario World" (an insanely difficult homebrew Mario level) and used the resulting video as the jumping-off point for an extremely stimulating and enlightening discussion of the Many Worlds hypothesis in quantum physics. If I had to explain Many Worlds to an eight-year-old (something I expect to have to do in, oh, about eight years), this is where I'd start. I'm especially enamored of the choice of Mario for this, since it's just the right blend of puzzler and jumper to make youwant to explore all possible choices (I've recently become brutally addicted to Paper Mario, which now occupies about 10 percent of my brain on a more-or-less permanent basis as a kind of low-grade background process).   This said, tiny quantum events can create ripples that have big effects on non-quantum systems. One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide “experiment” that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment on yourself– you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there’s a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 1018 chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom’s 50% chance of decay turned up “no” sixty times in a row. Now, given, in order to do this, you had to create about 1018 universes where the Quantum Suicide machine did kill you, or copies of you, and your one surviving consciousness doesn’t have any way of telling the people in the other 1018 universes that you survived and MWI is true. This is, of course, roughly as silly as the thing about there being a universe where all the atoms in your heart randomly decided to tunnel out of your body. But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator’s save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists. Link (via Kottke)    • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Courts May Revisit Software Patents An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the courts may finally be gearing up to overturn the ruling that opened the floodgates for both software and business model patents. It's been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable — and we've all seen what's happened since then. With all the efforts to fix the patent system lately, it appears that the court that originally made that decision may be regretting it, and has agreed to hear a new case that could overturn that ruling and restore some sanity to the patent system." Read more of this story at Slashdot. • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Crammer MP3 Player is Cute, Orange, Simple Leapfrog's petite, student-aimed portable music player takes the complexity out of entertainment. With a monochrome screen, study aids and simple kinetic UI, it'll never get iPod-killer headlines. But it does at least share one thing with Apple's wonderproduct that many MP3 players lack: it's easy to use. Joel Johnson at BoingBoing Gadgets has a hands-on review up, and he reports that it does have some idiosyncrasies. It's only available with 1GB of storage, which isn't a lot, and it also transcodes tunes to Ogg Vorbis format for playback. For $60, though, that's a good way to convince your parents that you can use a consumer entertainment product to help you with your education. It's like asking for a computer on which to "do your homework," only a lot cheaper.  Exclusive: Leapfrog Crammer, an MP3 Player for Students [BBG]       • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Brigitte Fontaine - Comme A La Radio (1970)   Of all the strange records this French vanguard pop chanteuse ever recorded, this 1971 collaboration between the teams of Brigitte Fontaine and her songwriting partner Areski and the Art Ensemble of Chicago -- who were beginning to think about returning to the United States after a two-year stay -- is the strangest and easily most satisfying. While Fontaine's records could be beguiling with their innovation, they occasionally faltered by erring on the side of gimmickry and cuteness. Here, the Art Ensemble provide the perfect mysterious and ethereal backdrop for her vocal explorations. Featuring the entire Art Ensemble of that time period and including fellow Chicago AACM member Leo Smith on second trumpet, Fontaine and Areski stretched the very notion of what pop had been and could be. With strangely charted arrangements and mixing (percussion was in the foreground and horns were muted in the background, squeezed until they sounded like snake-charming flutes), the ten tracks here defy any and all conventions and result in the most provocative popular recording of 1971 -- and that's saying something. For their part, the Art Ensemble hadn't played music this straight since before leaving Chicago, with long, drooping ballad lines contrasted with sharp Eastern figures and North African rhythmic figures built in. The finest example of how well this works, and how seductively weird it all is, is on the two-part "Tanka." Here, Malachi Favors' bass and Areski's percussion meet everything from bouzoukis to clarinets to muted trumpets to sopranino saxophones, courtesy of Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Smith, and Lester Bowie, who play in tandem, using striated harmonies and modal intervals in order to stretch the notion of time and space under Fontaine's vocals. The effect is eerie, chilling, and hauntingly beguiling, and sets the tone for an entire album that runs all over the stylistic map while not adhering to anything but its own strange muse. This is remarkable stuff from a very adventurous time when virtually anything was possible.  Thom Jurek, All Music Guide  1. Comme à la Radio  2. Tanka II  3. Le Brouillard  4. J'ai 26 ans  5. L'Été L'Été  6. Encore  7. Leo  8. Les Petits Chevaux  9. Tanka I  10. Lettre à Monsieur le Chef de Gare de la Tour Carol  Bonus tracks:  11. Le Goudron  12. Le Noir c'est mieux choisi  http://rapidshare.com/files/91213329/BFCALR.rar • Email to a friend • Related • La France prend la tête des Cnil européennes  Le président de la Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés, Alex Türk, devrait être élu le 19 février président du groupe de travail « G29 », qui regroupe les autorités européennes en charge de la protection des données privées. • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Are Blogs Becoming Respectable And Legitimate? Here's a personal perspective on the topic. The short answer is yes, of course... blogs have been respectable for a few years now, ever since a few early adapters in traditional media decided to emulate the free-form practice of the innovators and become (their version of) bloggers themselves (Ana Marie Cox is a natural blogger, Joe Klein not so much. Of course, as with TIME, the fastest way to learn how to blog is to hire a blogger (or buy one). There are some well-established blogs now (both theNY Times and the WaPo have blog index pages. On the NY Times page, you can see blogs ranging well beyond politics, and at WaPo there's both familiar names and awkward formats. Dan Froomkin's excellent White House Watch is listed in blogs (it has comments) but reads more like a column, and the comments are hard to find. Andrew Cohen's Bench Conference will be missed, by the way (without Gonzo to kick around it couldn't have been as much fun to write). Speaking off the record with more than a few journalist friends, the strong impression one gets is a generational one, with younger reporters embracing the format and older management (and reporters) keeping it at arm's length (I suppose one can generalize the same about readers, based on Pew data). Moreover, the internet has now become a leading source of campaign news for young people and the role of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook is a notable part of the story. Fully 42% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly learn about the campaign from the internet, the highest percentage for any news source. In January 2004, just 20% of young people said they routinely got campaign news from the internet. But what's more interesting to me is the way blogs and internet culture have seeped into non-political arenas. One of the more entertaining experiences about setting up the Flu Wiki and accompanying Forum was the reaction from academia, particularly Library Science. In the early days c.2005, there was quite a kerfuffle over the legitimacy of online sourcing (see this archived piece called More mistakes with authority... to get a flavor). We took pains to try and explain the difference between anonymous and pseudonymous (which even today, people have trouble with). The argument and distinction between content as validation vs. credentials is one that will never cease (linked content can be sourced and checked... Judith Miller and Jayson Blair had credentials from a prominent media entity, but not all bloggers, and/or their material, are quality). Three years later, the on line community approach represented by Flu Wiki and others has been validated in multiple ways... invited presentations to CDC and HHS audiences, peer reviewed academic poster presentations, participation on the site by library science folks (who helped organize our links page),links by local government health departments and international media sites, and participation in a government sponsored blog. Government sponsored blog? Huh. As it turns out, there's a number of them. I knew about the HHS Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog (now archived) because of my participation, and saw Secretaries Leavitt and Chertoff get bitten by the blogging bug (Leavitt's is a far better read, and at times reads as a travelogue). And recently, I was interviewed by the aids.gov blog, which is an interesting communication experiment, and more open than traditional heavy-handed one-way communication. Here's my favorite government blog, though, chronicling the Stephen Colbert portrait tour. Washington... Lincoln... Kennedy... and now Colbert. Just in case a writers' strike and a presidential campaign in full swing weren't enough to keep him busy, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert was determined to have his portrait hang in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). I was looking at some portraits by American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing at SAAM when I got the call on my cell. I hurried down the hall to NPG to see for myself. From my point of view, the timing was perfect. I needed a drink of water and the framed Colbert was hanging above the water fountains, perilously close to the restrooms. Colbert's portrait, actually three images in one so it's kind of like a condensed triptych, will hang mere steps away from the exhibition of presidential portraits (as close as he will ever get to an official Washington nod). But only for six weeks. That's when the portrait's expiration date is up, and Colbert may go in search of another home for his likeness. D.C. Museums: you have been warned! In any case, at a recent emergency preparedness conference I attended, the conversation drifted to new media and its uses. Whereas most of the audience had its doubts about whether blogs and wikis could be depended upon to convey accurate information, the journalist on the panel (along with the bloggers in the audience) had no such doubts. Interestingly, it was citing the government blogs and their existence that was more convincing to the skeptics in the audience (and on the panel). The observation that people say they are more likely to go to non-government sources, along with the obvious point that (even sans approval) people will go to the internet for information didn't hurt the argument that non-government bloggers are part of the conversation, with or without permission.  ;-) At the same time, similar to how library sciences folks read and contributed to Flu Wiki while others were questioning the validity and legitimacy of the medium, the preparedness posts here at Daily Kos are read by (and sometimes commented on) by emergency managers and health professionals, regardless of skepticism from other quarters. That's certainly true of the flu blogs, which include readers from public health and medicine as well asacademia. So, in a similar vein to Jay Rosen's essay from 2005, I think the issue of legitimacy is over. When the Library of Congress has its own blog, it's time to move on to look at content and not form. It's all about content and links - blogging, (plus or minus bloggers) is now mainstream. Update [2008-2-17 10:41:25 by DemFromCT]: An example of the rapid response blogs offer in real-time, commenters note to add this: In particular, DarkSyde's Hurricane Katrina diaries were widely read during the storm and in the immediate aftermath. I would also add: This post is a word of thanks to all bloggers for their posts — now more than 200 — helping to keep up attention in this crucial phase of the Tripoli Six trial before the court’s last sitting on 31 October. Here are just two good examples among the many: today The Daily Kos, the world’s largest political blog, and Effect Measure, a progressive science blog, both published updates — see here and here. In both cases, lives were saved. • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Is This the Future of News? WirePosted points us to a story discussing the future of news reporting. For over a year, CNN has been accepting user-generated news stories and posting the best of them for all to see. Earlier this week, CNN handed over the reins of iReport.com, allowing unfiltered and unedited content from anyone who cares to participate, provided it adheres to "established community guidelines". Analysts point to the amateur footage from the Virginia Tech shootings and the Minnesota bridge collapse as an example of the capabilities of distributed reporting. Will this form of user-driven reporting (with which we are well acquainted) come to challenge or supplant traditional new broadcasting? Read more of this story at Slashdot. • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • In Graphics We Trust | Update After a long time I've updated my portfolio site with some fresh new projects. In Graphics We Trust Source: onufszak Negroponte Keynote: Electronics Are 'Obese' Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of both the MIT Media Lab and the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, delivers the last keynote at the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting, focusing on the groundbreaking work of the OLPC, which has delivered thousands of laptops to children in the developing world. Alexis Madrigal reports from Boston.            • Email to a friend • Related • Tim Berry: Guy Kawasaki's Alltop: RSS Zen If you were in on the web back in the middle 1990s, you'll remember the simple power of the early Yahoo that became everybody's (well, almost everybody's) start page. If you weren't, it doesn't matter, you can get something like that today, focused on the a few key views of the blog world (oh please, do I have to say blogosphere?), at Guy Kawasaki's new alltop.com. It's been something like 14 years since Yahoo! first guided me into the Internet, and it's a completely different world now, but what this site is doing is offering some of that same simple entry path into a few carefully selected top RSS feeds (i.e. blogs) in several key categories. Specifically, that's categories including politics, celebrities, fashion, ego, small business, green, moms, and, well, like that pivotal early Yahoo, carefully selected categories. One thing radically different, however, is that Alltop is putting up a selection of blogs. It isn't the whole Internet, it is a listing of top blogs. Why Zen? I picked that up from the blog Valley Zen, the work of a Silicon Valley VC pioneer partnered with a sumi-e artist, which last week posted two inaugural interviews with alltop founder Guy Kawasaki introducing the new alltop, Valley Zen says: The concept of the site is deceptively simple. Therein lies its Zen power. What does Alltop do? It is a one-stop aggregation of the most recent stories from 35 top websites in popular categories such as celebrities, sports, fashion, Mac, and the controversial category egos. More About Alltop here. The interface is influenced by "Apple Aesthetics:" light on graphics, no clutter, open white space. Presentation supports functionality. Simple & brilliant. That same Valley Zen post notes the Yahoo! parallel as well: Alltop reminds me of the very early Yahoo when it was just a collection of links called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The Old Yahoo's traffic actually grew very, very fast (unlike the much more complex Yahoo of today). One can argue that the times were different, but I believe that part of the momentum of the early Yahoo was because of its simplicity. True, anybody could copy it (and many did), but the first-mover advantage ensured its survival & sustained growth. Meanwhile the subplot is Guy himself. Successful author (his book The Art of the Start is my favorite of the genre), one of everybody's top 10 blogs in small business, venture capitalist and former Apple Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki is one of the more successful personal brands around. Last year, however, when he launched www.truemors.com and held it up as an example of a successful low-cost startup (something around $10,000 total cost), reviews were mixed. Some of the detractors didn't like truemors, others pointed out that Guy himself, whose How to Change the World is listed at #46 on Technorati's top 100 by authority and $18 by number of fans, gave it a huge head start, just by being its founder and blogging about it, that made the comparison to any other $10,000 launch unrealistic. So now Guy gives us another new site. The Alltop launch -- the small business section is brand new today -- has come out in pieces, without a lot of fanfare or expense, hoping on that simple power and easy uncluttered view to make it work.    • Email to a friend • Related • How it Works • Email to a friend • Related • Tim Berry: Guy Kawasaki's Alltop: RSS Zen If you were in on the web back in the middle 1990s, you'll remember the simple power of the early Yahoo that became everybody's (well, almost everybody's) start page. If you weren't, it doesn't matter, you can get something like that today, focused on the a few key views of the blog world (oh please, do I have to say blogosphere?), at Guy Kawasaki's new alltop.com. It's been something like 14 years since Yahoo! first guided me into the Internet, and it's a completely different world now, but what this site is doing is offering some of that same simple entry path into a few carefully selected top RSS feeds (i.e. blogs) in several key categories. Specifically, that's categories including politics, celebrities, fashion, ego, small business, green, moms, and, well, like that pivotal early Yahoo, carefully selected categories. One thing radically different, however, is that Alltop is putting up a selection of blogs. It isn't the whole Internet, it is a listing of top blogs. Why Zen? I picked that up from the blog Valley Zen, the work of a Silicon Valley VC pioneer partnered with a sumi-e artist, which last week posted two inaugural interviews with alltop founder Guy Kawasaki introducing the new alltop, Valley Zen says: The concept of the site is deceptively simple. Therein lies its Zen power. What does Alltop do? It is a one-stop aggregation of the most recent stories from 35 top websites in popular categories such as celebrities, sports, fashion, Mac, and the controversial category egos. More About Alltop here. The interface is influenced by "Apple Aesthetics:" light on graphics, no clutter, open white space. Presentation supports functionality. Simple & brilliant. That same Valley Zen post notes the Yahoo! parallel as well: Alltop reminds me of the very early Yahoo when it was just a collection of links called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The Old Yahoo's traffic actually grew very, very fast (unlike the much more complex Yahoo of today). One can argue that the times were different, but I believe that part of the momentum of the early Yahoo was because of its simplicity. True, anybody could copy it (and many did), but the first-mover advantage ensured its survival & sustained growth. Meanwhile the subplot is Guy himself. Successful author (his book The Art of the Start is my favorite of the genre), one of everybody's top 10 blogs in small business, venture capitalist and former Apple Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki is one of the more successful personal brands around. Last year, however, when he launched www.truemors.com and held it up as an example of a successful low-cost startup (something around $10,000 total cost), reviews were mixed. Some of the detractors didn't like truemors, others pointed out that Guy himself, whose How to Change the World is listed at #46 on Technorati's top 100 by authority and $18 by number of fans, gave it a huge head start, just by being its founder and blogging about it, that made the comparison to any other $10,000 launch unrealistic. So now Guy gives us another new site. The Alltop launch -- the small business section is brand new today -- has come out in pieces, without a lot of fanfare or expense, hoping on that simple power and easy uncluttered view to make it work.    • Email to a friend • Related • This would NEVER have happened on a Caturday. This kind of shizzle NEVER happens on a Caturday—Sunday, yes, but Caturday, NYERHE. No, I am not your Brandy Snifter, Fools, now GET ME OUT OF HERE Ye shall perish, L.J.! Most certainly! • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • eBay sellers to strike Last summer, I wrote that the labor movement should begin organizing online workers.  It appears that a group of eBay sellers are about to start striking, without any help from labor unions.  At issue is the sudden imposition of policies by eBay which sellers deem harmful to their business.  The policies will be imposed starting Feb. 20, and the strike will go from Feb. 18 - 25.  There are a couple of issues at play.  One is that fees will increase by as much as 66% for some sellers.  Another, apparently far more explosive, issue is that eBay will soon turn off negative and neutral comments, requiring sellers to go through eBay's Security & Resolution Center to report bad behavior.  This move will almost certainly tie up sellers in needless bureaucracy, in place of today's simple system for resolving disputes.  CNN and Mashable have more.  Follow me across the flip for some thoughts on how the labor movement should respond to this development...  While eBay boycotts aren't new, this one appears to be much larger than previous ones, and sellers appear to be genuinely furious.  The boycott is related to the resignation of eBay CEO Meg Whitman, expected in March 2008.  (Whitman, incidentally, seems to be a staunch Republican; she was on Romney's campaign and has been considered a cereandidate for CA-Gov in 2010.)  Her replacement, John Donahue, initiated the new fee structure and policies earlier this year.  So far eBay doesn't appear worried about the strike, and it's hard to tell whether the company will budge an inch in light of the boycott campaign.  More upsetting is the fact that - as far as I can tell by browing around labor blogs - labor unions seem to be entirely unaware of this grassroots strike.  That's a real shame, because this could be an opening into a segment of the economy which is not heavily unionized.  There are a variety of interesting challenges in this strike.  First, what is the standing of eBay sellers to organize a strike?  What legal  reforms or litigational victories would be necessary for the striking sellers to force recognition and collective bargaining?  Moreover, given that the sellers are, for the most part, individuals working independently, how can they be reached and organized effectively?  I'd like to see the labor movement take a crack at some of these challenges, because I think they are the key to organizing a new class of workers which is only going to get larger and the economy becomes increasingly digitized.  These are not easy questions to answer, by a long shot, but I think there is a group of workers who are yearning to organize and be recognized, and I think the labor movement should stand in solidarity with them.    Tags: eBay, labor movement, online workers (all tags)      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • How the Chinese use their cell phones According to a recent M:Metrics report, Chinese folks like to use their cell phones to listen to music. “Some 34.8 percent reported they listened to mobile music every month compared with 20 percent in Spain, 18.9 percent in Britain and 5.7 percent in the United States” The report also noted some other interesting differences in other use rates between Chinese and Western mobile users: “Compared with users in the United States and Europe, Chinese consumers use their phones much less to check on their email or to send photos and videos…Over 30 percent in Italy, Spain and Britain use their phones to send or receive photos and videos, and only half as many do so in China. Users in the United States lead the poll in email usage with 11.6 percent compared with nine percent in Spain and Britain, but only 2.5 percent in China.” • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • How to Convince Non-IT Friends that Privacy Matters? mmtux writes: "As technology becomes more advanced, I am increasingly worried about privacy in all aspects of my life. Unfortunately, whenever I attempt to discuss the matter with my friends, they show little understanding and write me off as a hyper-neurotic IT student. They say they simply don't care that the data they share on social networks may be accessible by others, that some laws passed by governments today might be privacy-infringing and dangerous, or that they shouldn't use on-line banking without a virus scanner and a firewall. Have you ever attempted to discuss data security and privacy concerns with a friend who isn't tech-savvy? How do you convince the average modern user that they should think about their privacy and the privacy of others when turning on their computer?" Read more of this story at Slashdot. • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • Stardoll: A Virtual Consumer Experiment Turned Financial Megahit Some Internet successes baffle me. I’m sure a few have crossed your sights and caused you to raise a brow in disbelief as well. Here’s one example. Does the name Stardoll mean anything to you? I wager it doesn’t ring a bell for a good supply of Mashable readers, despite the fact that the site has been spotlighted in our feed in the past. Three times, in fact. First in late June 2006, and twice in early and late August 2007. If you haven’t been fortunate to familiarize yourself yet with Stardoll, I’ll give you brief tour: Virtual dolls plus virtual brand-name attire. Yep, that’s pretty much the extent of it. Oh, and there’s some kind of social element to it. Something about club chats. Why do I mention this “Barbie-2.0” invention? It’s been profiled today in the latest New York Times Magazine “Consumed” column, authored by Rob Walker. The reason he’s pinned up the site for all (who have no paid it heed already) to see: it’s grown a lot since it first broke onto the scene. (To disclose fully here, our own Kristen Nicole was already aware of the site’s phenomenal success many months ago. Kristen has spoken rather optimistically of the site.) What intrigued me enough to read Walker’s piece today and, in turn, offer a personal musing on the company myself, is what the business has managed to create without creating much at all. (more…) ShareThis        • Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • More Recent Articles The Problem Called Web Ads Poor People More Likely Use Yahoo, Those Better Off To Use Google Google Gets Sued For Stealing The Sky Hail to the (Lich) King, baby Click here to safely unsubscribe now from ""daily" via soufron in Google Reader" or change subscription settings    Unsubscribe from all current and future newsletters powered by FeedBlitz Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498