The BBC Trust, the corporation’s governing body, has given a provisional go-ahead for a project which could kick-start demand for internet TV.

Project Canvas is a partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4 and TalkTalk to develop a so-called Internet Protocol Television standard.

The Trust ruled that Canvas would have a series of positive impacts, including furthering the growth of on-demand TV and increasing the opportunities for internet service providers to develop so called triple play – phone/TV/broadband – services.

WITSA’s 17th World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT): the role of ICT in Challenges of Change. Amsterdam, May 2010.

Meta Collab is an open research, meta collaboration (a collaboration on collaboration) with the aim to explore the similarities and differences in the nature, methods and motivations of collaboration across any and every field of human endeavour.

We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below. The site was offline for a while.

The message read:

Iranian Cyber Army
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones.

Twitter back channel kills danah’s Web 2.0 Expo speech

The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

The Crowd is not displaying much Wisdom. In fact it is displaying adolescent abandonment of basic human courtesies.

Let it never again be said that old-media firms are slow to deal with new technology. On December 8th Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc invested in an as-yet-unnamed venture that will create and sell digital magazines and newspapers for the new generation of e-readers that is likely to succeed Amazon’s monochrome Kindle in the next year or so. It was as if a group of explorers had announced plans to settle a country that had not yet been discovered.

On the very day the publishers agreed to set up their venture, record companies launched a Hulu of sorts for music videos in America. Vevo is partly owned by Universal and Sony and licenses other content from EMI. Although it is run in conjunction with YouTube, it is intended to be a separate, cleaner world. Such is the evolving wisdom for traditional media firms that want to engage with digital technology: put some distance between your content and the dross, and make sure you have a stake in any new outfit that appears.

Here’s the shocker… I LOVE it! I can’t even believe how much I love my Kindle. A friend of mine wrote a detailed critique of the first Kindle, and I have to say that the new design is a vast improvement. Aside from being slimmer and sleeker, there are plenty of places to hold the device comfortably without activating any functions. The screen is easy to read off of, and I honestly believe that I can read faster on a Kindle than I do with a traditional book. I’m not sure why. Faster page turns? What I can tell you is that it’s exceedingly comfortable and easy to read off the Kindle anywhere, but especially when you have limited space–like on public transportation. You can easily hold the Kindle and turn pages with a single hand.

The Kindle has several features that could best be described as… cool. My eyesight is fine, but I can choose the font size that suits me best. Likewise, I love the text-to-speech feature. A big frustration in my life is that I can’t work on my embroidery (I’m a dinosaur, remember?) and read at the same time. Now, I can have the Kindle read to me while I stitch. Yes, it’s sort of tinny and mechanical, but it’s still a really nice option to use occasionally. In addition to reading published books, I read a lot of unpublished manuscripts. It’s not uncommon to see me schlepping around 600 pages of loosely bound paper. The other day I had the amazing experience of forwarding an email with a manuscript attached to my dedicated Kindle address. Within seconds, the entire MS was in my Kindle, formatted and ready to go. Amazing! I can even make notes on the MS in the machine.

However, possibly the best thing about the Kindle is the fact that I can get internet access for free, almost anywhere. I use it to check my email all the time now. I wouldn’t want to write a novel on the keyboard, but it’s sufficient for brief communications. Now when I go away for the weekend, I can leave my laptop at home! It also works fine for basic internet surfing.

One last thing I was unaware of is how much free or nominally-priced content there is for the Kindle. I’ve got plenty to read, and I haven’t purchased one $9.99 book yet. My first Kindle “purchases” were all free public domain titles. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle–how can you do better than that? I also read the Kindle Daily Post in the Kindle store religiously. You never know when you’ll be offered free content like a back-listed Lee Child novel or some contemporary fantasy. Other authors such as Boyd Morrison and J.A. Konrath are offering novels at prices ranging from $1 to $2 dollars, as a way to find new readers. One more favorite is the free Amazon Daily blog, which is like a fun, timely magazine with short articles that update constantly. The perfect entertainment for brief snatches of time.

No, I never would have bought a Kindle. And “real” books will still be a big part of my life, but I will never be without a Kindle again. This dinosaur is evolving.

Beware Social Media Snake Oil
Hordes of marketing “experts” are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools.