Although it’s probably the worst mistake you can make as a journalist, it periodically happens to big media publications. Earlier today, Bloomberg sent a 17-page obituary of Steve Jobs over the wire, quickly retracting it with the following message: “An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m. New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted.”

There’s nothing much to be said about the gaffe itself: it’s awful but it happens. However, knowing that Steve Jobs has been battling pancreatic cancer for some time, one has to wonder if the obituary was a complete mistake or was it perhaps based on some facts about Apple’s CEO? Gawker read the whole thing (you can, too, it’s over there), and they claim that it’s just a generalized text about Jobs’ life and achievements, containing no specifics about deterioration of his health, which is good news. We’ll all probably know more if Apple comes forward with an official statement.

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Android Mobile Platform team member Eric Chu wants you to know that its content distribution system - an Apple App Store think-a-like by the name of Android Market - is going to be user-driven. All thanks to “Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers.”

As one might expect for a developer-targeted message, this notice, plus screen grabs, is perhaps similar to the ones Apple delivers to its own third-party coders. But it just goes to show that Google’s efforts are very much in conceptual emulation of the iPhone/iPod touch. It would be unjust to point out the subjective visual inferiority that one might view Android Market with. It may well prove more voluminous than Apple’s own storefront when all is said and done. But that is something of relative interest to developers and users alike. What precisely does this mean?

Chu writes that Google will regard Android Market with a similar perspective as that given to YouTube. The service will run on a three-step publishing process: merchant registration, software uploads (with any necessary information to describe to potential users the utility of their solutions), and, finally, publication. Google also intends to “provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.”

Unlike the iPhone’s initial 2007 rollout, Android Market will arrive in tandem with the first handsets to launch with the Android platform installed. Whether this debut will be one marked by a full-fledged marketplace (with a payment structure in place, for instance) is not certain. Chu has only confirmed that developers “can expect support for free (unpaid) applications,” with an update allowing for financial transactions to be issued “soon after launch.”

This is in fact not so terrible a release plan, as it enables Google to trial this beta-to-be without fear of encountering disruptions to the system and loss of users’ interest to ultimately invest in paid downloads. But the company’s point about a YouTube-like software download experience could prove disabling. If Google offers any less of a vetting process than that given by Apple to its App Store, faulty designs could crop up in even greater number. It is imperative that Google ensure a solid quality-assurance experience as a mediator that exhibits both partial and impartial behavior as doorman to the palace.

As to the planned Android Market update, it will be September at the very earliest that US-based consumers will have a chance at Android. And if/when T-Mobile, the first carrier purportedly committed to releasing the first Android-based handset, does indeed celebrate the debut in the fall, Google may well deliver an update “on first startup.”

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How’s this for science trivia. SciVee, a science video upload site that’s been steadily growing itself for about a year now, has just this week unveiled a new option for users to upload feature material in the form of “postercasts” that enable users to complement their traditional video presentations with an interactive documentation component. The synchronous delivery of these is remarkably user-friendly.

SciVee offers quite a few viewing options to users not including the postercast dimension. Many are quite useful, too. If, say, you click a typical link on SciVee, you’ll generally see a normal-sized video, or a miniaturized video with a text-based column in the main column of the page. These layouts are sensible, particularly when the subject matter warrants prioritization of one component over another. Yet, what a postercast upload does is give viewers a large-size graphic that triggers a full-screen experience. I don’t think it’s too much to say that this is something which will pique the interest of quite a few site members and prospective registrants.

Now, SciVee isn’t likely to be out-and-out mauled by hits because of this addition to its toolset. Though Web video viewers are no strangers to scientific experiments, they’re normally more transfixed by YouTube-bound delights. The Mentos-plus-Coke mix, for one, which brought many millions of people to YouTube’s archive. Chemistry gone viral, so to speak. But some would likely prefer a more exclusive venue to observe science-related activities, particularly those with educational and serious academic connotations. So they’ll go to SciVee. Or JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), a site that recently grabbed the interest of the National Library of Medicine and commissioned to index the repositories of MEDLINE and PubMed.

It’s been proven in a number of cases that online efforts in the networking and media worlds to address niche interests is effective in building devoted communities. It is the classic outlook that the value of the long tail is high. And SciVee, as well as JoVE, seem to exploit the sector well, in focus and in delivery. SciVee, it should be said, makes for a remarkably stronger impact insofar as user experience, and a good bit more with Postercasts involved. But both are thorough in addressing their core pursuits.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:SciVee to Launch Video Site for Scientists

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Selling management on the value of investing time and resources into building an online community using social media is a challenge, and you need all of the support you can get. One way to convey the value of corporate social media participation is to leverage published statistics about who’s using social media platforms and how they are using it. There have been a host of new studies published recently that you can use to help make the case for your own company’s involvement:

The Society for New Communications Research recently published their report titled, “New Media, New Influencers & Implications for Public Relations” that provides several case studies illustrating how social media has benefited organizations like the American Red Cross, the Mayo Clinic and Quicken Loans. Among their findings, “Social media is rapidly becoming a core channel for disseminating information. Fifty-seven percent of this group of early social media adopters reported that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities, while 27% reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.”

One of the most popular studies is the Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3 research report, which looked at 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries. According to this study, social media can have a dramatic impact on your brand’s reputation. “34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog and 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs.”

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.”

If you’re especially interested in stats about Facebook or other social networking sites, Comscore released some statistics earlier this month announcing the growth of social networking worldwide. Included is the statistic that social networking use grew 25% year over year worldwide, with notable increases in Europe and the Middle East.

Rapleaf released the results of their study examining the gender and age of social network users. Note that these two studies were conducted independent of each other, so don’t confuse the results between them.

As part of the promotion for their book Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff created the Social Technographics profile tool where users can plug in some basic information and then see how participation varies among demographics. The resulting graphs are useful in illustrating the social media habits of your target audience. You can also use Trendpedia or BlogPulse to create interesting visuals examining keyword statistics about topics in your industry.

If you’ve seen some other relevant statistics that aren’t referenced here, please share the links in the comments section below.

Aaron Uhrmacher is a social media consultant. In addition to his posts on Mashable, he blogs about social media and communications at Disruptology.

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So there are two items to do with YouTube that are making their way around the tech news world. One to do with big billboards that would take up a good portion of the site’s front page real estate - if only briefly upon visitors’ initial arrival; and another to do with captioning, for the hard of hearing and those who don’t happen to speak all the languages of the world.

It goes without saying that the tale behind door number one is naturally bound for bigger headlines than the other, but both may actually prove quite important and potentially very beneficial to the video site. One will presumably make more money for the company, while the other helps bridge quite a few divides. A win-win?

We’ll have to wait and see. SAI’s Michael Learmonth says YouTube is teasing names in the entertainment industry to stand as test cases for the effort, whom it plans to charge the general going rate for the square banner unit now in place: $200,000. If all goes well, a bump in rates can be expected to occur sometime next season. As per convention, YouTube isn’t entertaining the hearsay, valid or not.

Logically the new ad push would be what the bean counters would probably regard as “better to do than not do.” Considering YouTube’s gradual migration to a more officially-sanctioned, premium-content-rich archive, the project would more or less be a boon. But as with anything this “big,” there are tradeoffs. Some would accuse YouTube of losing itself, and the user-generated stuff manufactured by Average Joe and Jane would presumably decline. Or at least waver on a more stagnant plane, because of all the corporate whatever that’s impinging on users’ experience.

At this junction, though, YouTube has no choice. The sacrifice must be made in order to better that bottom line, and now is as good a time as any. If it were to have made the change years ago, it wouldn’t have been managing the sort of traffic it is today. Which wouldn’t have convinced premium content producers — be they from Hollywood or the virally-blessed indie set — to come aboard at the rate some have in the last 12 months or so. Which wouldn’t have given YouTube the potential monetary value and influence it is often claimed to have.

As for that captioning system you might well have forgotten in light of the ad talk, it is something which simply evolves the video service further along and gives it one more tool to add to its publicly-available arsenal. For those looking to broaden their audience and add an extra bit of attention and care to their material, this is one more thing. Put this feature together with the ability to upload and present better-than-usual video resolution, and you’ve got something that seems, well, like TV. Further still, that enhancement coupled with all the moneymaker stuff mentioned above has YouTube looking ever more useful to the mainstream. Just think about it. YouTube’s audience is international. That fact in and of itself makes the site outstanding. And now it can boast this new feature to its users, breaching a good number of linguistic barriers. Intriguing news altogether? Yes, very.

YouTube company profile provided by TradeVibes

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While Bloomberg News takes a good amount of flack for yapping about a stone-cold Steve Jobs when it’s well known that the man’s blood is still rich and warm, another bigwig of the tech realm, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked with the publication’s reporters Peter Cook and Crayton Harrison about his company’s fascination with Yahoo and the movements the two will make in the next 60 days. As Schmidt explains, Google “will proceed with the agreement by early October.”

The company’s reasoning is stated equally simply. In reference to the U.S. Justice Department’s interest in peering into the proposed Google-Yahoo search advertisement deal, which the two tested to the DOJ’s very vocal irritation, Schmidt said, “We are in the process of talking to the government. They’ve not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.” Indeed, the logic is very elementary. “Hey DOJ, while you’re there giving what we see as your silent treatment, we’re going to go ahead and start making more money, m’kay? Kay.”

Naturally, Schmidt isn’t totally gung-ho with an eye on its October non-surprise. “We always worry a little bit, but we think our arguments are pretty strong,” is his response to  judicial qualms over what some consider possibly imperialist tendencies by the “Mad Men” of Mountain View.

My take on this refresh of the dispute? Business is business, and if Google manages to pass go, well, who’s to say no. Chances are DOJ won’t remain silent ‘til the autumn push, though. If anything, this is a straight reminder sent the way of regulators to recall that the matter has yet to be resolved completely. In a manner of speaking: Get to it, guv’nors.

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Updated: If you’re at all a fan of simple, minimalist publishing services like Tumblr, Streem or Posterous, the last one being a relatively new launch, Placefav is something you may well enjoy. Its utility is very specific, mind you. Can’t quite toss out anything you’d like for the wide world of friends and strangers to see. Information posted to Placefav is restricted to particular locations you’re fond of. Just as its name suggests. But that’s the fun of it. To serve one purpose and do it well.

Aesthetically, Placefav is something that follows in lockstep behind the likes of Flickr, Delicious, and countless other sparsely-laid, Helvetica-crazy Web designs. Except this one carries the see-no-mess mantra further than most. It’s like some kind of secret zen room in Ikea. The maxim of less is more, taken to the nth degree.

Function-wise, it’s something of a toss-up. If you’re looking for a utility such as this, to catalog your favorite dots on the map, it’s very nifty. On the other hand, its focus might not appeal to you. You get a bunch of blank spaces - a total of 12 spots per person, it seems - and you plot out some choice positions. An example could be your childhood home, say, or that place you go virtually every day for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Maybe some memory that you grow ever more nostalgic for. Whatever highlights you deem important, really. And after you’ve designated an address, you and anyone who visits your page can then take a look at some photos culled from another service called Panoramio. If you wish, you can upload images you yourself have produced. Also, users and visitors can click a link to Google Maps to visually pinpoint that favorite locale.

Yes, it’s true, Placefav is rather “Googley” in that sense. Panoramio, for the unaware, is a Google property. It recently received some accolades for a feature called “look around,” even. But these ties give Placefav some partial uniformity so far as its connections to the outside go. Of course, it would be quite nice if its creator, Kyle Bragger, would convenience users further by enabling expandable and collapsible maps, much like he’s done with the photography side of the operation. But overall, Placefav hardly lacks for elegance. Take a look at Kyle’s sample page. I think you’ll agree that it does the trick. And sign-up is a cinch.

Update: As Kyle mentions in the comments, Placefav now displays maps in precisely the same way photos are shown. Kudos for the quick change.

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Continuing our Authors@Mashable series after a great start with Ori Brafman of the New York Times Bestseller Sway and Frank Warren of the award winning blog PostSecret and PostSecret book series, Mashable would like to introduce to you Marion Freijsen and Adrie Reinders’ The N Factor: How Efficient Networking Can Change the Dynamics of Your Business.

In 2004, Adrie Reinders, Roeland Reinders and Marion Freijsen started a company called OHM Inc.  OHM focuses on doing business development for technology companies mainly all over the world, leveraging contacts in the Fortune 1500 companies the founders had created over the course of their individual careers. It was with OHM, that Adrie and Marion realized connecting people was their core business rather than one of many tools they used.

“It inspired us to write the N.Factor, and share our experiences with networking and how to apply the principles learnt with other entrepreneurs and high potentials in the business world. It is very much a hands-on book, with lots of anecdotes from the authors’ careers rather than an academic book. The N.Factor looks at many different aspects of networking, including the use of technology to maintain and enhance your network as well as networking in many different cultures, with contributions from diverse countries.”

Marion and Adrie will kick off the series next week followed by a Live Q&A. To celebrate our third installment of Authors@Mashable we are giving away 30 autographed copies of the book.

*Update: All 30 books are spoken for.

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Swarrm

20-word Description: Swarrm is a social news site that gives users content from around the Web based upon their interests.

CEO’s Pitch: Swarrm is based on the idea that rather than sifting through thousands of stories submitted by strangers to find something you like, Swarrm users could have news presented to them aesthetically and efficiently as it’s published based upon interest.

What Pandora did for music discovery, we hope Swarrm will do for news and blog content. Swarrm has several pieces of intelligence running behind the scenes. The system looks at things like user preference and behavior in addition to interaction with friends and ascertains what a particular user may like to see. Swarrm also extracts stories from several thousand sources and serves them up based upon keywords of interest designated by the user. The same methodology works inversely to diminish content frequency if it seems there is no interest.

Other features include the ability to see all current content from a specific site rather than cherry picked stories. Users can submit articles to 3rd party sites including Digg, Reddit, Newsvine. Features like auto-tagging, micro-blogging and more, create a unique experience news junkies are sure to like.

Mashable’s Take: How many of you read multiple blogs on a given day? How do you choose which ones to read? A bunch of services have set out to answer this question, and have created products that address the recommendation system a number of different ways, from personalized feed readers to curated memes to group interaction with a given set of search results.

Swarrm, currently in private beta, is the latest to take on this particular feat in a way that may not be the most useful right away, but has caught enough of my attention to point out its system. What Swarrm does is ask you your news topic preferences and presents an activity feed of sorts with news items listed according to their time stamp and date.

You can see where items come from based on the icons that appear for each, along with the article’s title (meaning there is no summary paragraph or two-sentence snippets, Google-news style). From there, you can choose to view the whole article, share the item with your Swarrm friends, submit it to a flurry of other social and bookmarking networks, or save it to your Swarrm account. The sharing option obviously presents itself as an internal “trusted” recommendation system allowing for direct suggestions amongst users.

What’s missing, however, is an ongoing direct feedback system in Swarrm for indicating what type of content you’d rather not see. This limits the amount of true filtering and recommending Swarrm can offer its end users. What I find interesting about Swarrm is its news delivery format, which looks a lot like a FriendFeed activity stream. (To that end, it wouldn’t hurt Swarrm to offer an RSS export capability for its recommendations and search results.)

So while on one hand Swarrm appears to be very similar to services like FriendFeed, there is the ever-growing problem of content overload coming from activity feeds like FriendFeed that don’t readily offer the most practical filtering and recommendations. Whether this is re-hashing of content in a filtered way or a useful tactic for finding good content will depend on Swarrm’s execution.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

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There are a variety of time tracking tools available today. The first type are the ones targeted at businesses and professionals for tracking amount of time spent on a particular project so they can bill their clients accordingly. The second variety are for net junkies with a need to track time spent on a particular activity online, say emailing, blogging, micro-blogging, reading RSS feeds, browsing, or just plain social networking. We searched the Web for the second variety and present below six very helpful tools to track your time spent online that are free and simple to use.

Which one is your favorite? Do you use any other time tracking tools? Let us know in the comments.

8aWeek

8aWeek is a neat Firefox toolbar that tracks your online browsing habits. If you feel that your social media participation is becoming excessive and want to restrict yourself, you can get this toolbar, see which sites you spend most of your time on, and set the restriction timings for each. You can also use the toolbar to save sites that you can check out later. This time tracking tool does the work automatically so you don’t need to add tasks manually. That spells a lot of convenience.

Wakoopa

Wakoopa is a desktop application that tracks the time you spend using various applications like your browser, RSS reader, email client, games, and more. It also doubles up as a social networking site. Setting up Wakoopa is hassle free and once installed, it runs quietly on your system tray and collects information automatically.

You have an online profile page where you can view your tracked activitiy records, upload your pictures, add contacts and form teams, and write reviews.  There are various widgets you can take advantage of such as ‘My top 10 software’ badge, ‘My recently used software’ badge, a Facebook application, etc. You can also view the most used software by Waakoopa users and check out other users’ stats. Wakoopa also displays interesting items such as ‘Software you might like,’ ‘People like you,’ ‘Reviews of your software,’ and ‘New versions of your software’ on your dashboard that you might find useful. When you go to a particular software’s individual page, you can see the software manufacturer’s details, versions, download url, usage stats by Waakoopa users, popularity chart, and reviews.

Rescue Time

Rescue Time is another feature loaded desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that tracks your activities. What differentiate this from Waakoopa is that it helps you track not only applications but websites as well. You can set the number of hours you want to spend in a day on a particular site and Rescue Time will alert you on your email, RSS reader, or by SMS when you run out of time. You can create groups and compare your online stats with other users. There are Rescue Time widgets for blogs, iGoogle, and Netvibes. You can also create a white-list of sites that you want Rescue Time to pay attention to.

TimeTracker

TimeTracker is a simple Firefox addon that tracks the time you spend online browsing by running quietly on your Firefox status bar. You can see the time tracked by the day, since installation, or since your last reset. There are idle timeout, filter, and pause features as well. This addon basically shows your online browser time and doesn’t go beyond that, meaning you cannot track time spent on an individual site. However, for those seeking something simple, it might just be fine.

MeeTimer

MeeTimer is another cool Firefox addon like TimeTracker, but it also shows how much time you have spent on each individual website, in addition to showing your overall time spent online. You can also place site urls into various groups and configure MeeTimer to show you a warning message when you visit a particular group or site.

Online Stopwatch

Online Stopwatch is basically a neat tool that provides a timer and a stopwatch. The stopwatch creates an alarm bell after the countdown finishes. You can use Online Stopwatch on its site or as a Google gadget, Live.com gadget, or a Vista sidebar gadget. While it is as simple as any online timer can get and comes without any usage trends, the beauty is that you can use it in any manner you want, like setting a timer for your online browsing or monitoring how long it takes to draft a blog post.

[Image credit: Michel Filion (attribution)]

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In what seems to be the worst idea in the history of television, West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin has his sight set on Facebook, claiming he’s interested in making a movie about the popular social networking site. He doesn’t understand Facebook, he says to BBC, but he’s ready to learn, thus creating his own Facebook account.

It’s not entirely clear whether he wants to create a movie about the creators of Facebook (boring) or the actual users of the service (more boring), but neither sound like a good idea. Well, unless you want to watch developers do their thing for an hour and a half. Or people choosing who they’re going to vampire bite next.

Sorkin himself sounds really enthusiastic and full of ideas about the project. “I honestly don’t know how this works, which is why I’m here,” he said. And if you did, Aaron, you wouldn’t be making a movie about it.

In other, more interesting news, Facebook’s All Stories feed is now called Live Feed, at least in my account (I’ve switched to the new design a while ago and I love it). Other than the name change, I don’t see any differences between the old and the new version, except for the fact that Facebook altogether has been very shaky in the last couple of days, with chat and various feeds going on and off all the time.

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As Paul noted this weekend, Jaiku was completely down for scheduled maintenance over the weekend, with very little explanation other than it was a good time to go speak with a loved one. A lot was made of this by the few left in the blogosphere who use the service to fill their status microblogging needs, particularly how interesting it was that a Twitter-ish bird was doing the downtime notice, and how insulting it was to be told by Jaiku that they perhaps don’t spend enough time functioning in meatspace.

They’re back now, and they’re purporting to be offering unlimited invites to the private beta service. I’m still skeptical this is the case, since I’ve been on the “waiting list” to join Jaiku since the months before they were acquired by Google. I even re-submitted my application for an invite the moment I saw their blog post on the re-opening hit my feed this afternoon. Clearly the process hasn’t been fully automated yet, as I haven’t received a confirmation email.

Regardless of the true status of the open-ness, they say they’re ready to handle any volume. The purpose of the downtime was to move the service “to a Google data center,” something “that [they]’d planned to do anyway, as part of the future transition to Google App Engine.”

If indeed Jaiku throws wide open the doors to the service for the masses, this will be an interesting real-world stress test for not only Google’s version of Twitter but the Google App Engine itself.  So far, very little in the way of high profile, high traffic stuff has proclaimed itself to be running on Google’s cloud computing option. Those looking to evaluate it as a solution for their company would do well to watch how Jaiku performs in their “new nest.”

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Do you want to get your business in on Twitter, but you’re not sure where to start?  Perhaps you’re in public relations and marketing, but don’t have the resources on staff to really learn all the nuance and detail that’s involved with the community and development concerns with utilizing Twitter to its fullest. If you answered yes, then perhaps you’re in need of the services offered at Cherp, a self described “Twitter Creative Agency.”

Is this something that’s really necessary, or even a viable business idea? That’s the question Chris Brogan asks with full sincerity in his post about the company. I certainly don’t blame him. To me, the idea that a firm has completely built itself around the idea of operating in the Twittersphere almost seems like a prank website. It isn’t that it’s impossible, it’s simply a very bleeding edge idea to base a company around.

That’s something I know quite a bit about. Contrary to the loud protestations of some, I’ve been an early adopter for a long time, and in the very first days of podcasting tried to build a growth-based business around the idea of podcast hosting. The time had not yet come, and would not come, for podcasting to be widely adopted enough by not just listeners and broadcasters but advertisers to build a growth-based business around the concept.

Similarly, it’s obvious that there’s something there with Twitter. There are very real ways to use the tool for a wide variety of professions in ways that can increase their bottom line in terms of marketing or simply increasing efficiency and access to information.

The problem is reliability. The system is continually in a state of flux and development, even by the company’s own admission. Until things stabilize not just in terms of uptime but in terms of permanence of features, it’s foolish to build any sort of long term company strategy that relies on the system’s longevity. The landscape is already becoming littered by the carcasses of companies that have been rendered obsolete or non-functional by changes in the API at Twitter.

Granted, a creative agency won’t be subject to the whims of arbitrary changes in API limitations, but while I don’t expect Twitter to go away any time soon, it has far from reached critical mass. Basing a company solely around Twitter is a still risky move.

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In a lot of ways I am really glad that my children have grown and left home. When they were growing up all we as parents had to worry about was sex, drugs and rock n‘ roll. Now parents have to worry about sex, drugs and the Internet – or at least the bad and evil Internet as propagated by the mainstream media.

Where once the evils of IRC (internet relay chat for you young ‘uns out there) and ICQ are now replaced by MySpace stalking, Bebo suicides, and Second Life drugs and porn. Next, it will be the dangers of Twitter and the hidden terrors of Facebook. It is all about using scare tactics to drive up rating but in the end parents are left scared and not knowing what to do.

The fact is that with our constant push forward with social media and the increasing move to live our lives openly on the web the truths behind some of these big media scare tactics will happen more and more. Michael Masnick points to a recent study bemoaning the fact that the parents aren’t living up to their responsibilities by monitoring their kids.

As Michael says though

Of course, the simple fact is that parents are never going to be able to fully monitor what their kids do online (at least without seriously pissing off their kids). If kids want to chat online, they’re going to find a way to be able to do so. Perhaps rather than focusing so much on spying on everything that kids do, the focus should be more on educating them to the dangers that are out there, the laws that they should be aware of and the risks of not obeying them.

As easy and intellectual as that might be to say it is an entirely different matter if you are single mother raising your children who are constantly texting who knows who or chatting online with people who the mother has no idea of who they are. Half the time the kids themselves may not even really know who it is on the other end of that high speed connection.

It does no good though to scare the parents or to blame them for the conditions under which their children are growing up because they have no control of their own in many cases. Parents in fear will react in so many different ways and not all of them good or even beneficial for helping their children learn the right and wrong way to deal with an online life. Parents need to understand as hard as it maybe that just as there were bad things when they were growing up their children are facing the same things.

Just as our parents were terrified by the changes they thought rock ‘n roll and long hair were evil and would be the death of us we feel the same way about the technology that our children deal with everyday.

There are no hard and fast rules here for parents and don’t let anyone kid you otherwise. Like our parents we’ll be struggling through on a wing and a prayer trying on one hand to make sense of this technology ourselves; and other the other hand teach our children how to use it responsibly. The only thing one can really do is try your best to learn along with your kids but gently add your life experience to those lessons. Learn to trust your kids because spying on them won’t do any family any good in the long run.

Most of all though don’t succumb to the fear that people who profit from making you afraid will be trying to shove down your throats. And remember like Allen Stern said on his post about the Second Life scare story by NBC:

Again, while I don’t use Second Life, my guess is that you can find these things anywhere online even outside this “dark side” virtual world.

That, my friends, is a given. Just as you can find them on any street in any city in any country on this planet.

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I am sure that the folks in Cupertino thought the whole idea of the App Store for the iPhone would be a great idea and in fact has proven to be a great money maker. At the same time though it has also turned out to be one of their biggest headaches that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. While some developers have been making money hand over fist others have been dealing with long approval wait periods or just having their applications pulled. Often those being pulled are being left in limbo as to why and what needs to be done to get back on the marketplace.

The most recent incident of an application being pulled though is raising the specter of Apple censorship; or at least applying their own moral judgement of whether an application can be listed. Such is the case of Infurious Comics and their Comic Reader that was meant for easier distribution and reading of web comics on the iPhone. Where they got in hot water with Apple though is that the application comes with a free issue of Infurious’ web comic Murderdrome an admittedly dark and bloody comic.

The big problem I have with this whole thing is that I am torn on how to re-act to this kerfuffle because on one hand Apple is totally within their legal right to have pulled the application. As it states right in the iPhone SDK

Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

Where Apple is going to have a really hard time with this is because of the ambiguity of the statement. Who is going to decide what is obscene or offensive? Does Apple in its role as a hardware and software provider have the right to dictate what a 3rd party creates for sale with their software to be played back through their hardware which they have sold. I am sure that one could say that as the provider of the store by which these applications are sold they have the right to set the conditions of any sale.

That said though the only reason that the Comic Reader application was pulled was because of the free comic that came with it. so in all reality Infurious Comics could put the application back for sale but without the comic and it should be acceptable. However this is where come to the second part of the problem – the distribution of the comics produced by Infurious of which I imagine Murderdrome would be one of many. From what I have gathered once the Comic Reader is installed then the user would be able to buy more comics from the iTunes stores but this would then raise the possibility of the comic begin banned from there as well.

During all this Apple is also having to deal with people who are not happy about the idea that the company has built in a kill switch into the iPhone software that would allow them to remotely remove software on the iPhone for whatever reason they deem fit. Now you tie in this possibility of becoming a censor of material available via iTunes and Apple could be facing some serious backlash from its customers. Especially considering as pointed out by Philip Elmer-DeWitt in his post Apple 2.0 on Fortune that iTunes already carries movies that would technically run hit this censorship wall the same way that Infurious has

By Wednesday morning, the post had drawn dozens of responses — all sharply critical of Apple — and PJ Holden’s cause had been picked up by half-dozen sympathetic bloggers (see Techmeme).

Murderdrome’s most energetic defense was posted by blogger Mike Cane, who rattled off (with live links) several equally violent works of fiction published without fuss or warning on the iTunes store, including South Park, Reservoir Dogs and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

I can understand why Infurious ran afoul of Apple this way and why in some ways Apple is totally within its right to do what they have done consider the language of their SDK but are they really ready for the reaction? On top of that if they do stand by this action without finding a workable solution to the problem are they setting themselves up to become an Internet censorship board? Al I know is that this isn’t a position that I would want to find myself in.

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