Aug 1st, 2009 - Convention and visitors bureaus -- perhaps more than 300 of them -- are increasingly using Twitter to help market their locations, and a recent study examined how they do that. Development Counsellors International, a New York-based tourism firm, said it looked at the convention and visitors... (Read More)

Jul 26th, 2009 - A recent panel sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) discussed the issue of gay characters in online games, some of which forbid them. Games produced by Bay Area-based Electronic Arts Inc., such as the Sims properties and Spore have no restrictions about revealing... (Read More)

Jul 9th, 2009 - It's said about writers that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. But United Airlines has learned not to get into fights with musicians who have videocameras. As Dave Carroll, of the folk-rock group Sons of Maxwell, reports on his blog, it all started on... (Read More)

Jul 1st, 2009 - It's been known for a while that current and potential future employers look at people's profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook. And it's also been known that people are using social networking sites to announce the status of their relationship -- or lack of one. Now the two... (Read More)

Jun 29th, 2009 - If Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, gets his way, blog postings like this one could be illegal. On his blog, Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded. "Expanding copyright law to bar online access... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 1993. In the same way that people in Mumbai used Twitter last fall to publicize news of terrorist attacks in that Indian city, Iranians are using Twitter to let the... (Read More)

Jun 7th, 2009 - Given that some courts have found that people can be charged for violating the terms of service of a particular site, it's important to keep track of what the terms of service are so you don't inadvertently violate them. (Incidentally, some other courts are finding that violating... (Read More)

May 31st, 2009 - In what may be a first, a company has bought rights to a Facebook page -- in a bidding war, even. OraBrush, a company that makes tongue cleaners, has outbid Hershey's for the rights to the "Kisses" public profile, according to the Inside Facebook blog. Pricing was not disclosed. The Kisses... (Read More)

May 28th, 2009 - As expected, Representative Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, has introduced legislation that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress. The legislation would allow the Treasury Department to license and regulate online gambling companies that serve American... (Read More)

May 19th, 2009 - The continuing saga of Craigslist vs. the state attorneys general took another turn, with South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster contending that the continued presence of ads for "erotic services" on the site constituted a criminal violation for which Craigslist management was personally... (Read More)

May 13th, 2009 - Following the lead of Facebook users whose uproar over a change in terms led the social media company to change them back, Twitter users are now clamoring about a change in what Twitter shows. Twitter users "follow" other users, meaning they see their posts. People can either create new posts or... (Read More)

May 11th, 2009 - People are continuing to find new and interesting things to do with Twitter. One is Stweet, a combination of Twitter and Google Map's Streetview that uses georeferencing. Select a city from the picklist (or enter another city at the bottom of the screen) and it'll show you the most recent... (Read More)

May 1st, 2009 - Along with a number of other changes brought forth by President Barack Obama’s administration, another one might be the re-legalization of online gambling -- particularly poker -- in the United States. Online gambling in the U.S. was made much more difficult, though not technically illegal, in... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2009 - A mainstay of situation comedies is when one of the characters plays hooky at work to go do something else -- bowling, watching a ball game, going to the movies -- and gets caught. Never fails. Now there's a new wrinkle for them to try. Reuters is reporting that a Swiss insurance worker for... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2009 - Craig Newmark, the San Francisco-based founder of the Craigslist want-ad site, is reportedly refusing pressure to shut down his site's Erotic Services section in light of an alleged murder where the victim advertised there, according to a story in the Huffington Post. Philip Markoff, a Boston... (Read More)

Apr 27th, 2009 - Though the swine flu just began hitting the news media on Friday or so, there's already a number of sites and ways to help you keep track of developments (and give you nightmares, frankly, but forewarned is forearmed). 1. A Google Map of reported swine flu cases. It's not perfect -- it looks... (Read More)

Apr 24th, 2009 - Taser International, which makes electric stun guns, is suing Linden Research Inc., the owner of the Second Life virtual environment, for selling unauthorized virtual versions of its product. The trademark infringement case claims that the online sales of virtual products are damaging the... (Read More)

Apr 1st, 2009 - Despite a study earlier this year that the fears of Internet predation against kids were overblown, the U.S. Department of Justice is offering $50 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as the stimulus program, for Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC)... (Read More)

Mar 30th, 2009 - The non-technical world is starting to understand the concept of Twitter -- which means that they're starting to try to control it. Courtrooms have already begun dealing with jurors Googling, Facebooking, and Twittering their way through the case. Now, some courtrooms are starting to set... (Read More)

Jul 31st, 2009 - How transparent is too transparent? In an attempt to make it easier for ordinary people to see what their governments are spending their money on, more entities -- from city to federal -- are putting this information online, noting that it's a public record. But some government workers are... (Read More)

Mar 31st, 2009 - Remember the teenagers getting charged with child pornography for taking revealing pictures of themselves with cell phones? They're fighting back. According to an article in the New York Times by Sean Hamill, 17 students -- 13 girls and 4 boys -- accepted a plea bargain requiring them to... (Read More)

Jul 29th, 2009 - A company has been awarded a patent for providing episodic media downloads, which essentially gives it a patent on all forms of podcasting. The company, VoloMedia, calls itself the "leading provider of advertising and reporting solutions for portable media, extending the reach of video and audio... (Read More)

Jul 28th, 2009 - A group of University of Washington students and professors has developed an application called Vanish that automatically makes data used with it disappear after eight to nine hours. The open-source software is downloadable now, as well as information about how to use it and a research paper... (Read More)

Jul 18th, 2009 - Some users discovered last week that Amazon has the capability to remove books from their Kindle electronic reading devices, even though they were bought, paid for, downloaded, and in the users' possession. Ironically, among the books with which this was discovered was George Orwell's 1984,... (Read More)

Jul 2nd, 2009 - Yahoo! announced this week that it would build what it said what would be the greenest, most energy-efficient data center in the world, powered by Niagara Falls. Data centers are some of the heaviest users of electrical power there are, both to run the servers themselves and to cool them. In... (Read More)

Jun 18th, 2009 - Raising privacy and civil liberties issues, job applicants to the city of Bozeman are not only required to list all their social media accounts, but their passwords as well. “Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat... (Read More)

Jun 1st, 2009 - Remember the 14 million missing email messages from the White House under President George W. Bush? Remember the (albeit flawed) court order (issued days before President Barack Obama's inauguration) directing the Bush White House to figure out what happened to them? Never mind. A federal... (Read More)

Jun 30th, 2009 - President Barack Obama's administration made two announcements Monday about improved transparency in government: one about IT projects in general, and one about improving broadband access. The announcements were made at the Personal Democracy Forum, in New York. Tuesday, White House Chief... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2009 - It's said that the Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. Maybe, but it barely survived the death of Michael Jackson. A series of web sites fell like dominoes as Boomers and GenXers raced to verify the truth of the Jackson death rumors yesterday. Twitter, Wikipedia, tmz.com,... (Read More)

Apr 18th, 2009 - The Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General has issued a report finding that the Rural Utilities Service continues to grant loans to areas that already have broadband service and to communities near major cities. For example, 77 percent of loans were said to have been made... (Read More)

Jun 17th, 2009 - Following the lead of John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, President Barack Obama had mentioned in his campaign platform a "Craigslist for Service" (which met with the full approval of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark). It has now come to fruition with what Obama is calling "the summer of service."... (Read More)

May 27th, 2009 - "Universal service" should encompass broadband Internet access in the same way that it originally encompassed telephone access, according to a new report from the Federal Communications Commission to Congress. The report, Bringing Broadband to Rural America: Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy,... (Read More)

May 25th, 2009 - A study conducted by American Airlines and Hewlett-Packard has found that frequent flyers would rather geek than eat, with more than 47 percent saying that airport wireless access was an important amenity, compared to about 18 percent who said food was. The purpose of the study was to help... (Read More)

Apr 25th, 2009 - The embattled WiMAX communications standard is taking another hit as WiMAX vendor Clearwire Communications is the recipient of a class-action lawsuit by users contending that its service is slow and unreliable. While the lawsuit is not about Clearwire's WiMAX service specifically, Clearwire is... (Read More)

Apr 13th, 2009 - Amazon users this weekend noticed that a wide variety of books with gay and lesbian themes -- including Heather Has Two Mommies and books on how to come out -- were reclassified as "adult" and consequently no longer given sales ranks, nor would they come up on search requests, even though what... (Read More)

Jun 4th, 2009 - Some people are complaining that the company hoping to map the availability of broadband Internet is too closely tied to the same major telecommunications and cable companies that stand to benefit from the more than $7 billion in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also... (Read More)

May 29th, 2009 - Busy this weekend? President Barack Obama and his IT staff are asking for ideas through June 3 to help make government more open. The call for ideas first went out on May 21. So far, there's 1171. People can vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the ideas. "Then on June 3rd, the most compelling... (Read More)

Apr 30th, 2009 - The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department is opening an antitrust investigation of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service. In 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed suit against Google, claiming that... (Read More)

Mar 23rd, 2009 - Google Earth now supports the use of historical imagery -- back to 1945 in some areas -- that lets users see how certain areas have changed over time. As described by Wikipedia, Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographic information program that was originally called Earth Viewer, and... (Read More)

Mar 19th, 2009 - The digital generation brought up Googling, Wikipediaing, and Twittering their way through their lives is starting to have problems when it turns out they don’t see why they can’t do the same thing when they’re in a courtroom, according to the New York Times. In a recent case, it was found that... (Read More)