Just when I’d thought most ill conceived internet censorship laws, New Zealand tops them with this one.

Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act forces the removal of material from websites following any accusation of breach of copyright, even if it was not proven. However, it is up to the ISPs to play proxy policeman.

It is a growing trend of governments worldwide to force ISPs to do their dirty work in censoring online discussion and to pay lip service to large corporations. Something I predicted over a year ago.

But the question that remains to be answered, is whose side will the ISPs take?

Our politians (law makers, a good joke) are lacking any real understanding or education when it comes digital society which shows in the headline grabbing polices they tout and hair brained legislation they are ever so quick to ram through their assemblies without any informed community consultation.

Much of these numb skull ideas seem to be pushed by the major media outles. I have increasingly seen “journalists” complaining on their media websites about the blogsphere appropriating their content. I agree it is only fair that original source be cited. However, these same whining journos say nothing of the fact that modern journalism is increasingly turning to and drawing from the same digital pool that bleat about their content disappearing into.

“Airline passenger tweets about jet crash landing“, “Facebook community protests change in TOS”, all make it into the mainstream media these days.

More on the situation and community action can be read in this article… if it hasn’t been removed in breach of copyright that is.

NZ blogs in copyright law blackout demo

Mozilla Labs revealed a new open-source project called Bespin, a Web-based programming environment they hope will combine the speed and power of desktop-based development with the collaborative benefits of cloud computing.

Bespin proposes an open extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards

They appear to have build their own extensible GUI using the HTML 5 canvas element and JavaScript. It looks exciting and promising. Programming development where ever you are.

Then again, it means there’s never any excuses about not being able to access your computer and your projects when you are wanting to be unavailable.

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

I’m currently working on Alan Moore’s SMLXL engagement marketing and mobile blog and adding podcast features as part of our internet marketing campaign.

I chose the PodPress plugin to manage and deliver his podcasts.

The online documentation for the plugin seemed unailable from the wiki that the author’s website directed me to. So I then did some searches and came up with a number of video tutorials. These are very nice because you can also see the exact options that they are talking about. There appears to be an explosion of video tutorials on the web as many are attempting to add value added service to their web sites.

Here is one of the best I found for PodPress.

From time to time I visit Reuters.com to look at the latest news events in video. How sorely was disappointed and quickly annoyed with the advertising that they’ve appended to EACH news item video. It makes it an absolute horror to watch. It is even worse than prime time television news broadcasting. At least they only hit you once every 10 minutes or so.

So greedy have they become, the same adverts that run in the video are also displayed as static image adverts along the side of the page. The adverts aren’t even contextual. So you could be watching a story about the latest horrific bombing of civilians after your happy family chocolates advert. Hardly the sort of product placement I’d want for my brand or product.

Many of the large corporations seem to be at a loss as what to do with online video. The bandwidth and storage it consumes is costly. And so they are left scratching their heads as to how they can possibly turn a profit from it.

The must be long deafening silences in corporate think tanks until some bright spark comes up with the idea of let’s do it the old way because we don’t dare try anything new. Just ram it down people’s throats. Why we’re so big, the audience doesn’t have a choice.

Or do they? The coporations seem to be longing for the silver bullet fix to this nasty new media technology, that gives the consumer, god forbid, a choice. As I wrote in my previous post about Facebook overtaking MySpace, the quickening pace of innovation is threatening the very foundations of the business models that have dominated our modern media.

New upstart startups can quickly rocket ahead of lumbering Jurassic giants leaving them scrambling in the dust to catch up. This can be seen the make overs, widgets and other functionality features that MySpace quickly sticky taped on to their website.

And now there’s a new can of worms called mobile media. With expensive data transfer rates and limited screen space on hand held mobile devices, there will be even less tolerance from audiences for advertising bully boy tactics.

A growing thorn in the sides of these media moguls is the fact that the audience is no longer a dumb mute consumer. They have a voice and are willing to share their opinions and experiences amongst their social networks. Enabled by the immediacy of networked digital technology they can quickly inform each other of where better opportunities or offers are.

Oft of late have I read the of the media complaining of this citizen journalism, complaining how they are leeches that take their hard work and regurgitate it. These same voices fail to  then acknowledge the two way street where the “professional” journalists are now trawling social media networks for the latest events as they are proving more immediate than the standard news networks, as evidenced recently with the Twitter and Gaza and plane crashes.

Think it impossible for the status quo to be challenged? Ponder this. Neither Google or Facebook have been sold into established media hands. They both rose from backyard obscurity to being two of the most powerful companies on the internet. They could challenge establishment because of their willingness to innovate. Both have been shrewd enough not to opt for the easy path and attempt to force advertising on their users.

But the question often asked in the media circles today, is how and when will they turn a profit from their huge user bases? The answer to that lies with how innovative and useful they choose to be for the people who use their services and paying close attention to how they are used and giving people what they want or need.

Brett Brewer, one of the co-founders of MySpace’s parent company InterMix Media, which News Corp. bought in 2005, believes that Facebook has won in the battle for Social Networking supremacy… for now. He goes on to warn that Facebook could be usurped in the next few years by a social networking startup that offers better functionality for mobile phones.

In his white paper “The Black Gold of the 21st Century – Social Data Flows & Analytics”, Alan Moore states that it is expected by 2015, five billion people will be connected to the internet via a mobile device.

This won’t please Mr. Murdoch one bit after all of the money that his News Corp paid out for MySpace as it seems destined to slip in relevance. It appears to be typical old school media thinking, buy and dominate. The part of the story that the old dinosaurs seem to fail to understand is that given the pace of technology developments these days, innovation is the key to the game.

Why did Facebook rise to become so popular and overtake MySpace? Because it offered new and easier ways to connect with people, and manage those connections. The same will happen again as mobile media comes to the forefront of the consumer market.

Peoples needs and expectations continue to change as the technology they use changes, which at this point, is only quickening.

Several iPhone emulators and simulators are put to the test. While working on an Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) project for one of our clients Alan Moore, SMLXL, we were exploring options for testing how the site appeared on an iPhone. Here’s some that we looked at:

• Firefox Iphone Emulator – forget it, it is only a an iFrame wrapped with an iPhone image. You won’t get any “real” results as Firefox is being used to render the pages instead of Safari the native iPhone browser.
• TestiPhone.com – iPhone Simulator – Being web based, I could actually run this simulator in the Safari browser. (Yes I am actually running Safari under Linux.) It looked promising to start with, but when I gave it the home page, it displayed no scroll bars. They appeared on the subsequent pages, but not on subsequent pages they did. Strangely enough the they did appear under Firefox on the home page. It has a landscape mode for viewing.
• iphonetester.com – starts of better, immediately detecting if you are visting the site with Safari, and if not, helpfully suggests that you do for a more accurate rendition. I found this one to be the best of the pick.

Everybody wants to be on Twitter, spammers included. There is now software available to assist and manage a spam campaign. The biggest security failing of Twitter which allows this abuse is that the registered email is not validated. So unless Twitter acts quick, its days of big time celebrity media fueled fame will come to a screeching halt.

WordPress by default is set up with only one ping service. But you can add more to increase your chances of extra traffic. In my convoluted internet wanderings while searching on various WordPress plugins I came across the WordPress Ping Blogging List from Breeze Media. The list and the instructions on how to use it can be found on their website. It is a good tip that will help a lot with SEO.

As a footnote, I’ve now found an more extensive XML-RPC list of sites on OptimizeYourWeb.net.

Having recently migrated to Linux from Windows XP, I needed all of my development tools to continue my work as web developer. Part of my kit of tools is an assortment of web browsers. Firefox, no problem (of course), Opera (of course), Chrome (a bit of searching and not perfect) and Safari which required some tricks. "Internet Explorer?" you ask, well let me get back to you on that one.

Safari of course has only been released for OS X and Windows. So Wine comes to the rescue and allows me to run many Windows applications within Linux and without any virtualization or emulation.

OK, it kind of worked first go and then crashed. After some googling I discovered that you have to install Safari without Bonjour for Windows and Apple Software Update. Some extra Windows XP fonts are also required. Detailed instructions for installing Safari under Wine are available at WineHQ.

Safari appears to perform well, tabbed browsing works, HTML and CSS rendering is in order.

What doesn't work is HTTPS connections, and book marks.

So for normal everyday use it is a bit handicapped, but as a web developer's testing tool its just fine.