In Britain, Rupert Murdoch’s empire has paid $1.5 million to silence three public figures whose telephones were illegally tapped. In addition, private investigators hired by Murdoch’s newspapers “[unlawfully accessed] confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills.”

In California, Michael Arrington published confidential documents stolen from Twitter. The worst-case scenario under state law appears to be be one year in jail with a $10,000 fine. For the thief, not TechCrunch.

If ever there was an example of law not keeping up with the times, this may be it.

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Using four iPhone apps, CameraBag ($1.99) Melodica ($0.99) Brushes ($4.99) and Banner ($0.99), Richard Koci Hernandez produced a 3:25 “movie” that uses 54 photos to document 54 days of riding Bus 54 in Oakland, CA. Content produced entirely on the iPhone. I’m unclear on how he turned the content into the video. (I’ve asked.)

Hernandez is an Emmy award-winning video and multimedia producer; for 15 years, he worked as a photographer at the San Jose Mercury News. Also viewable as Facebook VIdeo.

You know Twitter is a Hot Topic when the opinion of one 15-year-old British teen is presented by a U.S. bank as “fact” — and the MSM jumps all over it. Without caveats. Shame on you, Bloomberg, because as a wire service, you helped this story go viral.

Matthew Robson, I believe that the execs at Morgan Stanley used you as PR fodder. (Which succeeded, probably beyond the wildest dreams of their marketing/PR folks.) Enjoy your 15-minutes of fame!

In the “I can’t believe that they really said this” category (it may explain the sorry state of banking in the U.S.), Morgan Stanley execs reveal their total disconnect with reality: Read more…

Update: KING-5 interview on social media and the job hunt.

I advise about-to-be-graduating students, people thinking about political office, and folks in the job hunt to double-check privacy settings on their social networks. I suggest that they restrict their photos to “intimate friends” (my language) and not “the world.”

However, I don’t do a good enough job of advising them to double-check their significant other’s privacy settings.

Sir John Sawers, newly appointed MI6 chief, has learned that lesson the hard way.
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MCDM’s Kathy Gill talks with Tim Reha at the Seattle Wine Awards in early June. The UWMCDM new media team working the event — Annie, Filiz, Meg, Rubi — helped Washington wineries get started with their Twitter accounts and live-tweeted the event (with text and photos). Ladies, we could not have done it without you!

I feel like I’m living on the cusp of the world Orson Scott Card created with Ender’s Game, a world where anonymous internet posters Locke and Demosthenes shaped global public opinion. Today, public opinion is increasingly shaped by discourse on the Internet, although we don’t have two clear antagonists in the online public sphere. Case in point: Iran and Twitter.

But what, exactly, do we know about Twitter and the Iranian election?

We know that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters have used Twitter as a platform to claim that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole last week’s election. We do not know if these claims are accurate, although the Guardian Council is investigating 646 poll complaints.

We know that Twitter has helped spread false information: that 3 million people protested Monday in Tehran (rather tens or hundreds of thousands, according to newspaper reports); that Mousavi was put under house arrest (he appeared at the protests); and that, last Saturday, the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid (not reported by any news organization although the committee is investigating hundreds of claims). Read more…

OK, folks, today is the last day to pre-register for PresentationCamp Seattle for the low-low-low price of $10!

It’s going to be a fun day exploring the good (and the ugly) of presentations, with the ultimate goal of never again having to sit through (or, worse yet, deliver) a “death by Powerpoint” presentation.

Ticket prices jump to $15.99 on April Fool’s Day! Details at the PresentationCamp Seattle wiki. We have more than 70 folks registered!

After reading my “No More Free Content” post, a colleague observed (in an email) that information consumers “pay” for content with both attention (”monetized and sold to advertisers”) and “direct payment to content producers.” [Note: there is no direct payment for broadcast TV, radio and alternative papers like The Seattle Weekly or The Stranger.]

This colleague believes that the challenge facing newspapers is not a “paid vs. free” issue. Instead, the challenge is the ratio of “monetized” attention to direct reader payment.

Attention (monetized or otherwise) is finite, limited. For example,  if I only have 40 minutes or so for “TV,” if I choose to watch DoctorWho, then I can’t watch Lost. (I know it’s an hour-long show; we have a DVR and skip commercials. Also, see opportunity cost.)

Read the remainder of this post on WiredPen.