NowPublic Blog

The social graph is eclipsing all other institutions as a force of influence.  First it challenged the news media, now it’s advertising:

Facebook wants to turn every member into a spokesman for its advertisers. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of the superhot social network, today announced what the company calls “social ads.”

Source: nytimes.com

…soon it will be the schools.

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Yahoo management has been publicly humiliated in Washington recently for disclosing information to the Chinese government about a dissident journalist in China.  House Foreign Affairs Committee Charman called Jerry Yang a ‘moral pygmy’ among other things.  Now it turns out, Yahoo may have broken the rules of it’s parent company in order to appease the Chinese government. 

Once again, it seems, the complex structure of Yahoo’s East Asian operations is confusing people and diverting attention from an important issue. Forget about the debatable issue of how much information the search warrant really provided. What the CFA’s press release does not notice, and what the Yahoo spokesman does not deny, is that the documents (again, if genuine) appear to refute conclusively Yahoo’s explicit contention, made elsewhere in general counsel Callahan’s testimony, that the Yahoo entity named Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong), Ltd. (Yahoo HK) had nothing to do with any of this, and that the information demand was made to (and the information supplied by) Yahoo’s Chinese-incorporated entity. The documents show that the demands were addressed in one case to Yahoo HK’s Beijing representative office, and in another case simply to Yahoo HK generally. They also show that in at least one case, information was supplied by Yahoo HK (or at least the document has a Yahoo HK stamp on it).

This is more than just a technical issue. If Yahoo HK released the information, it may have violated Hong Kong privacy laws. And as I argued in my post yesterday, Yahoo HK is really in no different position vis-a-vis the PRC authorities than the US parent, where many people (including me) have e-mail accounts.

Source: lawprofessors.typepad.com

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NowPublic’s Leonard Brody will be representing in Monaco this week. I just spoke to him and he said it’s shaping up to be an interesting few days:

Now in its 2nd year, the Monaco Media Forum is organized by Prince Albert II of Monaco and is an invite-only global executive forum on the future of media. This year’s program includes a bevy of fantastic speakers and highly relevant topics. A full list of attendees and topics is here.

Source: socialmedian.com via mtippett

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Everyone who laughs at me when I say that Facebook is the future of news will use this against me but what the hell, it is brilliant:

A Mashable reader sent us a link to the above video for the new “Facebook News Network,” which takes the form of a real broadcast news show analyzing the updates in your news feed. The show is produced by Train of Thought Sketch Comedy, who of course, has a Facebook group you can join to keep up with their latest happenings.

Source: mashable.com via mtippett

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Tags: facebook | Facebook News Network | Journalism | Life | MUNDANE | parodies | Sketch Comedy | updates | video

Hello NowPublic Friends,

We just wanted to let you know about some feature changes we’re rolling out today that will help improve site speed, navigation and overall appearance. Not to worry–everything’s still in the same place; it’s just going to work and look better. During this process, you might notice some site hiccups (if you speak techese: there may be some local caching issues). Refreshing once or twice should resolve these, and allow you to see the changes in real time. Neato!

Here’s a rundown of the new features:

- More changes to our new masthead

- A new style for the right side of the page (more soon on the left)

- A new page border

We’re really excited about these new features, and we hope you are too. We’re hoping the changes won’t cause more than fifteen minutes of disruption. If, however, you encounter further problems, just hang in there. We’ll be fixing them ASAP.

Questions? Concerns? That’s what the Newsroom Forums are for, so go for it. We’ll be sure to answer your questions as quickly and thoroughly as we can.