Thanks to the Internet, media (news, entertainment, advertising) is undergoing a Darwinian change. It's evolving a Long Tail.

That's the mental model that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine and Wired.com, evokes as he explains the new opportunities the Web offers to people who want to inform or entertain others, sell them things, or all of the above.

Actually, Anderson used a chart, not a picture of a beastie with a tail, to illustrate his point. At the pinnacle, on the left, are major media outlets – newspapers, magazines, TV networks – who have large online audiences. The trend line then plummets like a steep ski slope, but doesn't zero out. The "long tail" extends on and on, with lots of smaller media sites, sometimes one-person operations, who are getting considerable audiences out of scale with the kind of fiscal and physical investment that "old media" has needed.

Case in point: Kent Nichols, a digital storyteller whose comic AskaNinja.com video website is bringing in 300,000 to 500,000 viewers per episode, as many as some cable TV shows. Nichols and his partner started the site by investing $6 in a black ski mask (to create the Ninja costume), some paint to create a "green screen" backdrop in his apartment, and an old laptop computer and video camera they already had.

The cost of entry is low, low, low. Abundance, not scarcity, is the model on the Web, Anderson says, and that makes all the difference for media there. For example, Wal-Mart, as huge as it is, represents scarcity. Customers must buy what it decides to put on the shelves. Amazon.com offers many, many more choices online. Tower Records can put only a limited number of CDs on its racks (and recently went bankrupt); iTunes and other online music sellers can offer a much broader selection and are booming. And so on. You get the idea.

"The audience is flocking to choice," Anderson says. "There's latent demand for niche products out there." Old video, like 1950s TV shows, and music, that Rosemary Clooney album, can be rediscovered; new artists and their work can find audiences more easily than ever before.

Scarcity of choice is oh-so-20th century. This century is about abundance of consumer choices.

The Long Tail is also changing the way Anderson edits his publication. For the print magazine, he makes decisions about what readers will see. The number of pages is limited and distribution of copies costs money. "I control the horizontal, I control the vertical," he jokes (referencing the old "Outer Limits" TV show). "I have to be careful about what I have in our pages."

But the Web is about abundant shelf space, abundant pages of content. If his magazine is a beautiful jewel, a Faberge egg, the website a scrambled egg. On the magazine, his job is to say "no" to crazy ideas. On the website, it's to say "yes."

That can work, he says, because the cost of trying new ideas has become so low. The "scarcity model" at the magazine is based on "we know best." The "abundance model" at the website is "the audience knows best."

This all sounds great, but Anderson did allow that he doesn't plan to turn his highly popular website wholly over to its visitors. Some stories on the entry page may be chosen by reader vote, but others are likely to remain the editors' choices. Or perhaps each reader may set up an entry page that combines editor input with his or her own tastes and interests.

Much has been said about the Wisdom of Crowds, exemplified by Digg.com, whose readers vote for what stories are seen. But others worry about the Tyranny of the Crowd and want some filters other than sheer popularity. (Digg has been plagued by contributors who learn how to manipulate the site to reflect their selections.)

Is anything legitimately scarce on the Web? People's attention, maybe, Anderson says. There's only so much of that to grab. But it's also being expanded as we consume media more hours per day and simultaneously (think of the teen watching TV, doing homework, and text messaging with friends at the same time).

"It's not about the technology anymore," Ninja Nichols says. Do you have an idea? Put it out there. If you can stand the pain of hearing the answer the market might give you, you can learn and adapt until you find your winning concept.

It happens all the time: A person loses a cell phone, and someone else finds it and keeps it; a person wants to buy something online, but is worried that he'll be cheated out of his money; a woman walking down the street is whistled at and feels helpless.

It used to be, the only way you'd hear these stories was if you knew the person. Not anymore. People are using the Web to try and make public – in a big way – what might once have been just private matters.

Take the recent case of the missing Sidekick. When a woman left hers in a cab, instead of returning it, the people who found it decided to use it. To take pictures with it. To sign on to an instant messaging client with it. That turned out to have very unexpected consequences.

You see, all of a user's information on a Sidekick is backed up on T-Mobile's central servers (which is how Paris Hilton's information was hacked).

When messages asking for the device's return went unanswered, the original owner created a website, with the help of a friend, showcasing pictures and personal information uploaded onto the device by the new owners. The ensuing exchange of email and threats – posted on the site for all to see – is still escalating, and news of the story has spread like wildfire after being posted on Digg and numerous blogs.

In 2004, a man trying to sell his Apple Powerbook on eBay was contacted by a potential buyer, but right away the seller noticed something fishy when reading through the  buyer's proposed terms of sale. They involved signing up for an obscure escrow site and channeling the funds through it – a well known escrow scam. But rather than turning the buyer in to the authorities or eBay, the seller decided on a more public response.

He played along as if he suspected nothing, all the while posting updates of his interactions with the buyer to a Web message board. When it came time to ship the laptop to the buyer in London, the seller instead sent an old three-ring binder with ports and a screen drawn on, an ancient keyboard taped to the inside, and "P-P-P-Powerbook!" scrawled on the front cover. The seller also declared the value of the package as $2200, or the value of a real laptop, which meant the buyer had to pay almost $600 in import taxes.

That alone would have been the stuff of Internet legend, but thanks to the global reach of the Web, readers of the message board staked out the buyer's address, and were on hand when the package was delivered, reporting back to the board with pictures and posts.

More recently, an eBay seller in a similar situation used Google Maps and Windows Live Local to pinpoint his buyer's address. Seeing a parking lot and some rusty cars where the buyer said a warehouse should be, the seller got suspicious. He posted his dilemma to a Web forum, and  after further investigation found he was dealing with someone who apparently was using someone else's PayPal account to try and buy the computer. In that case, the police got involved, but the person "caught" was merely an underling - someone hired to receive and forward packages for an unknown third party.

It's easy to see the power of the Web to investigate and call attention to misdeeds. But it's much harder to remember that, too often, there's no way to tell whether something really happened, or whether a person is telling the truth online.

Take, for instance, HollabackNYC.com. It's a site that posts photos and stories sent in by readers who say they have been the victims of sexual harassment because they are women. As a concept, the site hopes to provide a kind of community service: to embarrass or shame men into treating women with more respect. But there's no way to prove the stories, and that might not be the point. Maybe the posters just want to share their anger, and feel less like a victim.

The Web is all about empowerment. These sites and stories involve people who made innovative use of technological tools and the Web's powerful ability to broadcast information, to change their status, get the word out, or stand up for themselves. As these tools – cameraphones, satellite imagery websites, and word-of-mouth sites like Digg – gain prominence, we can expect to see even more stories like them. The unanswered question, then, is whether these types of stories will be posted just to get the word out and to do the right thing, or as Web-based form of vigilante justice.

The announcement this week that a partnership between Earthlink and Google has won a bid to offer free wireless Internet access to all of San Francisco is raising eyebrows – for a number of reasons.

Chief among them are the privacy issues that often surround the rollout of a new Google service. The search giant plans to offer free wireless access to users, provided they submit to Google's familiar targeted text advertisements. The relevant ads already appear on Google's search results pages, but in this case, they would be targeted geographically – to an accuracy of 100 to 200 feet.

As website Ars Technica explains it:

Privacy advocates as well as potential customers have indicated concerns, not merely because Google will be able to track users as mobile phone companies do, but because of the accuracy of the information combined with the ability to gather knowledge of everything a user is doing online. All of that data in the hands of a private company is unsettling, but experience suggests that the goverment is likely to seek the information as well, and this has set off alarm bells in many sectors.

Information Week is reporting that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), based in San Francisco, has submitted their own recommendation for wireless privacy to the city. It wants people to be able to surf anonymously, and wants Google prevented from storing user data on its computers for any longer than necessary.

Some don't see what all the fuss is about. Technology blog Techdirt points out that "if people are really worried about this, it seems like there are much more worrisome location tracking services." It points to a report that shows tracking by mobile phone is much more likely to yield useful information. Also, to avoid all of this, citizens can pay a $20 monthly fee and get ad-free access – at speeds up to three times faster than the free service – city-wide.

Another wrinkle in all of this comes from a San Francisco Chronicle report on a rash of laptop thefts at wireless hotspots across the city. The article tells the story of one man who had his $2,500 Apple Powerbook stolen from him as he used it in a coffee shop that offered wireless access. As the man stood up to protest, one of the thieves stabbed him in the chest. While such violent attacks may be relatively unheard of, police data shows a rise in laptop thefts. From the Chronicle article:

San Francisco police statistics show a disturbing trend. Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year.

Of course the obvious question arises: When San Francisco's city-wide wireless network goes live and more users log on from their favorite park bench (or cable car), will a corresponding crime wave ensue? The common laptop locks from Targus and Kensington that interface with the near universal security ports on many computers are one solution, as are beefier offerings from Compucage, but even they have proven to be no obstacle for determined thieves.

Missouri-based software writer Randy Green has an innovative answer – at least for users of Apple's new Mac Book Pro. "iAlertU" works like a car alarm for your computer. As this video shows, users can "arm" their MacBook Pro by pushing a button on its included infrared remote - just like using a car's key fob. When the computer is moved (triggering the sudden motion sensor initially intended to safeguard the hard drive if the computer is dropped) the screen flashes, and an all-too-familiar siren blares through the computer's speakers. Now, this won't stop bold thieves like the ones from the San Francisco coffee shop, but it could prove useful for deterring office snoops or airplane seatmates during trips to the restroom. Just please, don't be the person who lets their siren go off for 20 minutes at three in the morning.

Admit it: When you sign on to the Internet, there's probably an easily definable list of sites you visit and things you do. Whether it's a trip first thing to the e-mail in-box, a glance at the latest sports scores, or a pause at the online auction site to check to see if you've been outbid on this week's hideous (but salvageable!) lamp, we all have routines. Readers of online news are no exception.

If you're anything like me, you start at the same place everyday – perhaps a local newspaper's site – and continue on to a news aggregator like Google or Yahoo News. The result is a news-reading experience that can provide good scope and depth. But what if users want more from their news?

A site launched this month thinks it has the answer. As its creators describe it, Newsvine offers readers the same wire stories they'll find on many other large sites, but it also gives them a chance to interact with the news. After reading a story, visitors can rate it, submit comments, or even enter a live chat about it with other users. The ratings a story receives help determine the prominince it has on the site's homepage.

But who wants to read just wire stories? One of the benefits of the Internet is its vast array of content. Newsvine harnesses this by allowing users to "tag" stories they find elsewhere on the Web and submit them to the site. Newsvine calls this "seeding." The theory is that while the volume of information on the web is daunting, individual users can point out stories they come across on their favorite sites – a local newspaper, for instance – thus broadening and enriching the experience for everyone.

In theory it sounds great. In practice, it may need some tweaking. In my tests of the site over the past few days, I found its myriad features slightly overwhelming to navigate. Besides the ones I've already mentioned, Newsvine offers features like the ability to create custom pages, track topics and regions of interest, and write pieces for distribution on the site. I wanted to get a good overall feel for what the site offers, but I wasn't sure which features to focus on – there are so many. That may turn some people off, but it could also be a testament to the site's flexibility and mass appeal. If users find one or two features that they like and that work for them, that may be enough to keep them coming back. A good place to begin is the site's welcome or where to start page.

One thing I really liked was how easy it was to send in stories of interest. Dragging a button to my Firefox bookmark toolbar let me mark stories for submission to Newsvine as I read them on other sites. But, contrary to any notions I may have had about my superb news judgment, it's highly unlikely that any of my posts ever made it to the front page. New users are placed in a sort of trial mode, where their "seeds" (submitted stories) can't make it to the "vine" (main page) until they've proved they're not a "bot" or spammer. Veteran users can troll the "greenhouse" for content submitted by new members. If enough veterans endorse your posts, your stories are eligible for inclusion on the main page.

As much fun as this concept sounds, in practice, I found Newsvine to be more useful for tracking specific issues than keeping abreast of the broad range of news. Searching for and monitoring topics on the site is easy (just add the tag you want to search to the end of the Newsvine.com URL). But I felt I was missing something if I used Newsvine's main page as my home base for news. Google News offers many more stories from many more trusted sources than Newsvine does.

But that isn't necessarily a setback for Newsvine. I don't think it's intended to be a one-stop shop for news. Rather, it works best as a companion to users as they make their way through the news each day. See something you like that might be flying under the radar? A click of a button and a few subject-related tags will pass it along to others who might be interested. On the flip side, if surfers find a story on a subject of interest as they're going through the news elsewhere, but they want to read more, a search of Newsvine can lead them to other quality stories hand-picked by readers who share the same interests, but may troll a different part of the Net.

The result is a reciprocally enriching online news experience. You get the safety of your trusted news routine, you provide other readers with your unique view of the news and what's important, and you get the same right back in return.

I have a problem. I can't remember the last time I went to bed before 1:00 in the morning. I'm not an insomniac; in fact, I'm usually very tired by the time 1:00 rolls around, but I still can't make myself go to sleep before then. Why? The easy answer is just one word long: woot.

Woot.com is a website that sells just one item per day. Well, they sell many of the item - usually a gadget, gizmo, or other piece of deeply discounted techie paraphernalia - but they only sell one product a day, and they sell that product until their stock of that item is exhausted, or until 12:59 the next night, whichever comes first. That's where my late night dilemma arises. At 1:00 a.m. Eastern Time, the product day rolls over, revealing a new toaster, two-way radio watch, or blender with LCD. Oh, and shipping, whether the item sold is a watch or a wide-screen TV, is $5 (in the continental US).

Along with the great deals, Wooters get painfully witty product descriptions, a spirited forum for discussing the latest woot ("I stayed up for this?" is a favorite early morning posting), and a customer service policy that can be described as irreverent at best. My favorite, from their FAQ:

Will I recieve customer support like I'm used to?
No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don't end up liking or you have what marketing people call "buyer's remorse," sell it on eBay. It's likely you'll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle. If the item doesn't work, find out what you're doing wrong. Yes, we know you think the item is bad, but it's probably your fault. Google your problem, or come back to that product discussion in our community and ask other people if they know. Try to call the manufacturer and ask if they know. If you give up and must return it to us, then follow on to the next FAQ entry.

In addition, the site puts out a daily podcast (they call it a wootcast) that serves little purpose other than to entertain. The result is a buying experience that is relaxed, impulsive by nature, and even ... fun. But it's also addictive.

Now no one's holding a gun to my head, making me stay up to see the newest woot (as they're referred to) right at 1:00 a.m., but that's not to say I don't have a reason to do so. You see, if I wait to check the site until, say, 8:00 the next morning, I run the risk of missing a spectacular deal.

Even more daunting is the prospect of missing one of Woot's most beloved features, a brusquely named grab bag. Why would anyone want that? At Woot, the purchaser of a grab bag is guaranteed two things: a bag of some sort, and three items that would otherwise be taking up space in Woot's warehouse.  Sometimes the items are working, sometimes not, but there's always the possibility (perceived or actual) of getting something really great. Oh, and Woot sells its special grab bags for $1, plus the standard $5 shipping. Needless to say, when Woot offers one, it usually stays around for only a matter of minutes before selling out. That means that any truly devoted Wooters have to be burning the midnight oil (or 10:00 p.m. oil on the West Coast) if they want a shot at the hot ticket item.

But even on regular Woot nights, the site's popularity can catch up to it. A small operation when it was launched in July 2004, Woot is now a poorly kept secret that boasts nearly 300,000 registered users. It's not uncommon for an item to sell out in the early morning hours, which can be frustrating, especially when the deal is really great. Of course, from a business perspective this is no problem at all. Woot's model allows it to run very efficiently, keeping costs down by stocking one item instead of thousands like Amazon, streamlining shipping, and passing the savings on to buyers.

Besides the "One Day, One Deal" model that is the site's tagline, Woot offers a few occasional variations. A "Woot-off" is Woot's way of accomplishing spring cleaning. On Woot-off days, the site converts to selling one item until it sells out, moving on to another item, selling it until it's gone, and so on, until they decide to stop. A Woot-off in February went on for 44 hours, through a range of 63 sales. Additionally, a Woot Launch happens when a product manufacturer teams up with Woot to offer a gadget for the first time, giving customers a break from the steady stream of oft-lamented refurbished items.

If there can be any downfall to Woot, it's found in something Yogi Berra once said: "No one goes there anymore - it's too crowded." As the site's popularity grows, its challenge will be finding wholesale lots of products in quantities that can satisfy its growing user base without selling out in less than an hour. Like a hot restaurant, Woot runs the risk of becoming a victim of its own success. It won't have lines stretching out the door and onto the sidewalk, but if it continues to grow, it may have thousands of sleepy users frustratingly clicking away while overloaded servers struggle to keep up.

This may be a stretch, but it really feels as if Google just added its googol-th feature. It's an instant messaging add-in to the wildly popular Gmail e-mail service, and it blurs the line between the two popular Web communication mediums. I was an early adopter of Gmail, and in the past few days have experimented with the chat feature, trading instant messages with friends. It's pretty slick, but using it, I can't help wondering: Have we grown too complacent trusting Google with so much of our lives?

Now, I want to make clear off the bat, there's nothing about Gmail's IM feature that makes it particularly alarming. One difference between it and other popular messaging services like AIM and MSN Messenger is that they run in a standalone program, and it launches right in a Web browser, which is convenient. But the main thing that sets Google's apart is that it is by default set to save a record of IM conversations in users' e-mail inboxes. That may sound helpful, but it sends up a red flag to a privacy expert.

To understand the privacy issues, it's important to grasp how Gmail works. It's like pretty much every other free Web e-mail program, except that Gmail scans users' in-box messages and cross-checks the data collected with a database of paid advertisements. When a content match is found, text ads are inserted to the right of messages. They aren't invasive – most of the time I don't even see them – and occasionally I find one of interest and even (gasp) click on it. For example, if your friend has written to you about her new car, you're likely to see a listing for buying used cars, displayed to the right of her e-mail. It's no big deal – even helpful, maybe – to have contextual ads, but things start to sour when you think about the methods used to implement them.

Where does that data go?

When e-mails are scanned (which Google insists is done only by machine), are they stored? Nowadays it's not just e-mails (which people tend to write with a measure more discretion), but instant messages that are being scanned – and stored – by Google. How long does that data stick around? That question becomes even more important when one takes into account the recent efforts of the US government to subpoena queries from Google's bread-and-butter search engine. Though the company declined to cooperate in that case (and those were only searches), what's to say they'll continue this tack in the future?

Now, many out there will say that Google has prided itself in protecting its users' privacy - just look at its refusal to bow to the government's request for data. One of the company's lauded and oft-quoted "Ten things Google has found to be true" is that it's possible to make money without doing evil. That may seem comforting - and to be fair, the company treats its users very well – but the honest truth is that Google is a business, plain and simple. However great their services are, the company is still out to turn a profit, data you submit is being collected, and your definition of evil may not match theirs.

This is not meant to be a Google bashing session. "Free" has become the dictum of the Internet. From e-mail to blogs, photo storage to newspapers, Web users expect increasingly more handouts when surfing. Whether you're using search, e-mail, instant messaging, social networking, blog publishing, photo hosting, news aggregating, direction finding, video sharing, or using other gratis Web services, know that the companies that offer them are collecting data. Now, personally, I won't be dropping my Gmail account anytime soon, but it's important to realize that, as with lunches, there's no such thing as a free Web service.

Like a housing development that loses funding after nothing but a flashy sign has been erected, video on the Web has for years been a disappointment masquerading as a grand attraction. Not anymore. MTV’s latest foray into the lives of young people, mtvU Über (catchy name, isn’t it?), does, for the first time, what so many others have tried but failed to do: offer seamless video content that gets out of its own way enough for the user to actually enjoy it.

Über packages video that viewers can pause, rewind, scale, and reorder, in a slick, usable format. Gone are the clunky interfaces and external player windows common to so many other sites’ video offerings. With Über, which is still in "beta" development, users can watch content “live” (in the order selected by the site’s authors), or set up their own progression of shows – what the site calls creating a setlist.  Programs load quickly, and for the most part run seamlessly together – with little downtime between them.  It’s an experience akin to watching TV, only this TV doesn’t have commercials, can be paused, and (sadly) has only one channel. No, the content – ranging from funky music videos to amateur interviews with celebs, and “here’s the latest trend” shows – isn’t anything to write home about, but the implementation of the entire system signals a big change for video on the Web.

To this point, Internet video has been presented one of two ways. The first has users download video to their hard drive, creating a file that can be played back once it has downloaded. The drawbacks here are the large file size, long download time, and viewing format – the user has to open an external program to view the file, then close it and (assuming she doesn’t want to keep it for perpetuity) delete the file. The second option is streaming video. In this system, video trickles into a user’s Web browser (streaming in) little by little, allowing her to watch it as it arrives. This does away with the large file size and even the external program (in some cases) but suffers greatly when run off a dial-up or another less-than-blazing Internet connection. The content often bottlenecks, leaving the user with a choppy, impossible-to-watch mess. And even when connection speed isn't an issue, the clips are so short they're rarely worth watching.

Über streams its content, but it does so at a time when broadband access is becoming common enough for sites to assume that most users – especially in mtvU’s college campus demographic – have access to a fast connection. Besides that, rather than offer clips one at a time, Über emphasizes a seamless, diverse experience – it’s easy to watch 15 or 20 minutes of content because the segments run in such smooth succession that you don’t realize you’re at a computer. It's this packaging that is most revolutionary. Other sites, like CNN's Pipeline, take a similar approach to Internet video, but they charge for access. Über is completely free.

But that’s not to say that the site isn’t without fault. For one thing, functionality is limited to Windows XP computers running Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Though it is the leading Web browser, Explorer is frowned upon in many circles for its susceptibility to "malware" and virus attacks. The lack of compatibility with Mozilla’s Firefox browser notwithstanding, at least Über works on all Windows XP PCs. Mac users are locked out completely. When users of Apple computers (the popularity of which is growing due to the iPod's success, especially with college students) try to access Über, they’re shown a message saying that the site uses Microsoft Digital Rights Management (DRM) to guard against unauthorized redistribution, and at present the plug-in is not available for Macintosh computers.

DRM has grabbed more than a few headlines lately for the implications of its implementation in electronic intellectual property, but its use here isn't too alarming. Since MTV is giving away Über's content, it only makes sense that they'd want to secure it, keeping users coming back to their site (and their advertising) to get to it. But what kind of message does this send to Mac and Firefox users? Let's hope the next generation of video sites like Über takes all Web users – not just the ones using the most mainstream software – into account.

Complaints with its beta edition aside, never before has Internet video been more of a destination than it is with Über – even if that destination isn't a place most viewers would normally choose to go.

I don't 'do' the online community thing, but when my immensely cooler younger brother urged me to check out Facebook, I reluctantly agreed to give it a shot.  As a recent graduate, I had heard of the popular social networking site for college students, and had friends from other schools who raved about it, but I'd never tried it.

Much like the chintzy notebooks handed out at new student orientations, Facebook, founded in 2004, offers a directory of people at your school.  But rather than just giving names and grainy (sometimes goofy) pictures, the site is a gateway where students from the same college can exchange messages, band together with those with shared interests, and post pictures. The site is similar to more general social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace, but focuses more on building close-knit friend networks.

It all starts when you create a profile, a veritable online autobiography with blurbs (all voluntary, of course) on your interests, favorite books, music and movies, relationship status, employment history, class schedule, and anything else you'd care to disclose.  Once that's established (and for many users, profiles are never finished – they're updated daily), it's time to make friends.
The process is a bit like election season canvassing. You send out scores of "friend requests," hoping that recipients will pull through for you on election day. When they agree to add you as a friend you know you've been successful. 

The friend accumulation starts with the obvious people: your roommate, hallmates, people from class, and your significant other.  From there it can go a number of directions. That cute girl or guy from Biology or French? Look him or her up. Want to keep in touch with your old friends from high school (or earlier)? Put their names through the "global search." More likely than not they've already got a profile. If you're running out of friends to add, search within your "social network" for friends of friends to discover new people.  Before you realize it, you've got a double-digit list of "friends" (and sometimes have spent double-digit hours surfing their profiles instead of researching that paper or studying for that test – or writing that blog about Facebook.) There are different views as to whether one actually needs to be offline friends to befriend someone on Facebook; both schools of thought have strong support.

Recently, Facebook added a feature found most prominently on the photo-sharing site Flickr. It allows you to "tag" people in photos you post with their name and a link to their Facebook profile, if they're registered.  This way, you can search for pictures of both yourself and your friends.  It's fun to see pictures from desk drawers and photo albums resurrected for all the world to see. Best of all, the whole service is free.

But picture-happy posters should watch their step, for their actions online are not as anonymous as they may assume. One of the big questions about Facebook is 'who gets to join?' Facebook registration is open to everyone at more than 2,500 supported colleges, universities (and now high schools) with a valid .edu e-mail address. That last part is important: anyone with a valid .edu email address can join up. That means professors, administrators, residence officials, and even alumni can join Facebook, browsing their organization's user pages with ease.  Suddenly those pictures of you at that party don't seem like such a great thing to be parading around.

The false sense of security created by the small, tightly networked community has led many students to openly advertise their extracurricular exploits (sometimes with pictures) in circles they wouldn't dream of offline (picture walking up to your college president and telling him about that really wild party the other night.)  A Boston-area student leader learned the hard way that what he said online wasn't as private or anonymous as he thought.  When he posted comments about a campus police officer to a Facebook group, the school's administration found out and he was expelled. That case and others like it – where students have faced disciplinary action based on information they posted - haven't had much effect on the community's popularity so far, but that could change as more Facebookers get wind that their profiles and pictures (when posted online) aren't just the property of their inner circle.

An interesting battle is brewing on two fronts in the effort to digitize the world of printed text as technology companies move to web-ify all books that existed before "bytes."

The Google Print Library Program, initially announced last year, is at the center of both a legal dispute with publishers and a competitive battle against a growing alliance of tech companies, search engines, and archivists.

The Google project aims to make "offline information searchable," with the goal of making every word in every book ever printed digitized, indexed, and available for searching online. That includes both public domain works and printed materials under copyright, although it would handle and display these two differently. Major publishers, upon seeing that their books were going to be digitized without their consent or oversight, raised a red flag and filed a lawsuit to stop Google from scanning and archiving copyright works.

Google argues that the way it handles the display of copyright material constitutes "fair use" because even though it will scan and index the text of such works, it will not display more than a few "snippets," allowing the user to then search for physical copies of the work at libraries or book stores. The publishers disagree with Google, saying such a project is done with the intent of increasing its search capabilities, and in turn increasing revenue, making its use of copyright material outside the realm of "fair use." Both sides have strong and interesting arguments in the case, and neither party looks likely to back down anytime soon.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) is taking a different approach — one that makes the scope of its efforts slightly less ambitious than Google's, but still a huge undertaking. The OCA will seek to digitize all public domain works, but only copyright material for which they gain explicit consent from the publisher. Made up of Google competitors Yahoo! and the Microsoft Network (MSN), which recently joined, the OCA's insistence on cooperating with publishers seems like both a slap at Google and a goodwill move that will make it easier to get publishers' consent.

The driving force behind the OCA is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to build an "Internet library" for the noble purposes of preserving history by "offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format." Born in 1996, the Internet Archive now hosts around 25,000 digitized versions of printed material, as well as other media such as movies, audio clips, and software programs, all of which are either in the public domain or "open source." A visitor can get sucked in and lost for months in the Internet Archive (especially the Prelinger archives, which contains many amusing and disturbing propaganda films, instructional videos and commercials dating back to 1927).

So why have such commercial such as MSN and Yahoo! pledged so much money, technology, and equipment to a project spearheaded by a nonprofit, one whose moneymaking capabilities remain unclear?

One main goal of the OCA is to standardize the format of digitized works using the web-friendly XML standard to index text and PDFs for reproduction of book pages. As David Mandelbrot of Yahoo! recently told The Technology Review, "One of the things we've seen with other [digitization] programs is they tend to use proprietary technologies to host the content, so it's impossible for third-party search engines to crawl it."

Read "other [digitization] programs" as Google and "third-party search engines" as Yahoo and MSN, and it becomes clear why these companies have formed this alliance – to keep a monopoly of digitized print content out of Google's ever-expanding virtual hands.

As the OCA continues to gain members, it is disclosing the operational details, costs, and logistics of its digitization project, something that Google hasn't done. In effect, and somewhat ironically because of Microsoft's participation, the OCA has become a combination of an Open Source Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, while Google seems to be trying to become the Microsoft Windows of online content. Where it all ends up is anybody's guess, but the resolution of the lawsuits between publishers and Google will go a long way toward answering that question. In the meantime, we can soon look forward to full access to the myriad public domain works in the world, easily accessible and searchable with the click of a mouse.

Search? Google.com. Directions? Maps.google.com. Desktop search? Desktop.google.com. E-mail? Gmail.com. The past year or so has seen the introduction of so many Web services from online giant Google that one begins to wonder whether anything is safe from Googlization (a term that could have been vetted in a recent Verbal Energy column.)

Various competitors have arisen to try to steal back the spotlight from the Mountain View, Calif., behemoth, but to no avail. Other Webland entrants, most notably giants Microsoft and Yahoo!, come close to doing some of the same things as well as Google, but both fall short of really competing with its online empire.

This week, though, a little-known challenger to Google's supremacy (at least in the online news arena) has arisen, and for once it offers more than just an entry into the game of stats-driven one-upmanship as seen in the Hotmail-Yahoo Mail-Gmail gigabyte wars. At first glance Inform.com, aimed squarely at the loyal droves of Google News readers, looks like a shot across the bow of the colorful company.

The site presents an interface that loosely resembles Google News, but when a visitor clicks a news story, rather than sending readers away from its site, Inform opens the link in the same window, surrounding it with useful tools. Users can (after a little time spent with the tutorial) find related content, track stories or people, and create their own "discovery paths" to delve into subjects of interest. Visitors can even create an account that saves their preferences and keeps them up to date on their favorite segments of the news.  Perhaps the most attractive element of the site is its all-in-one feel; it's as if someone has endowed all online news sources with the features of the best news websites.

But don't go changing your homepage just yet.  Despite offering several intriguing features, Inform.com will be hard for some users to swallow from the start.  Full site functionality requires the use of version 6.0 or later of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser due to the site's heavy use of Javascript and what the company calls "the very latest coding techniques."  Support for rising open source browser Mozilla Firefox is available, but the feature set suffers. With Firefox the unique all-in-one feel is gone, and Inform feels more like a confusing prison than a jumping-off point for frequent news journeys. The site's designers designed it to use Internet Explorer-only technology because the browser is standard equipment on the vast majority of computers sold today. What they need to understand is that its proprietary bells and whistles, while impressive, often aren't enough of a draw to get many users to ignore its considerable drawbacks. But that's fodder enough for a blog entry (or site) of its own.

Even with IE 6.0, the browsing experience leaves something to be desired. Inform.com requires disabling popup blockers such as the one included in Firefox (or the Google Toolbar, getting back to that battle) if users want to avoid having to see a "splash" screen each time they visit the site. That seems like a small hassle, but could over time be enough of a turn-off to deter some users. Even though the URL bar disappears as one uses this site (which some consider an annoyance in and of itself,) Inform.com displays the exact content of the news sites to which users navigate, which means they see sites' full content, including pop-up ads. To use Inform.com, visitors must choose between unchecked ads and a frustrating start-up screen.

Though these criticisms may sound like the whining of a popped-out Firefox fan, Inform.com suffers on a more fundamental level that's made glaringly clear to anyone who's ever used Google News: it's too complicated. When I first happened upon Inform.com, it took longer than it should have (and separate trips to the FAQ and Tutorial pages) to figure the site out.

In fairness, it should be noted that Inform.com declares itself to be in true "beta" mode for now. Beta or not, it offers some innovative and useful features once available only through costly (and complicated) research services.  When it works out the kinks, Inform.com will be a formidable player in the online news-reading game.

[Editor's note: Contributor J. Johnson is our manager of Web technology.]

The newest piece of malware on the 'net to make headlines is the obscurely-coined Zotob MS05-039 worm. MS05-039 refers to the Microsoft Security Bulletin issued on August 9, 2005 that announced a vulnerability in the Windows "Plug and Play" code that "could allow remote code execution and elevation of privilege". In other words, the wily attacker could write a program to make an administrator account on a machine without the latest Microsoft security patch, and proceed to turn said machine into a virus-spawning malware drone which then spends all of its energy trying to infect other unpatched machines.

If this B-movie scenario is pretty ho-hum these days to the virus-watching literati, at least the names are becoming more entertaining. For instance,last year's blockbuster virus called itself "Sasser", a perky, in-your-face, taunting name for a bug with lots of personality. Before Sasser, we were treated to the video game-inspired "Blaster" - not an original title, but worthy of the thumbmasters who created it. And who could forget "Mydoom"?

And now, here comes Zotob – a moniker straight from a late ‘50s Ed Wood film. That seems pretty appropriate, given the zombie nature of this beastie. If Zotob could speak, I can just hear its monotone: "I am Zotob. I come from Planet Dnomder. All your plug-and-play are belong to us."

But the sad truth is that all of these viruses are pretty unoriginal. They come, they take over, they infect, they reproduce, they send e-mail, they clog bandwidth. We assume we've been here before, and we know what to do about it. Apply the security patch and get on with life. Or at least is seems like it should be that easy. Of course, there's the little gotcha about laptops, which bounce around between home and corporate networks and are an easy target for infection. By the time they get back on the corporate LAN, it's too late to apply the patch - they've become.... one of THEM.

And apparently, THEY are here to stay. Sure, I know that I may be somewhat less vulnerable to attack if I use a Mac or a Linux computer, but it's not necessarily because those machines have better security. There's also the point of view that most most malware authors target Windows machines in order to grind their particular axe against Microsoft. But think about it: no matter how insanely great Steve Jobs may have made his computers, if Steve dominated the market instead of Bill Gates, he'd be the bigger target. Which means we'd all be patching Tiger this week instead of XP. Maybe.

We really should have seen this one coming. It was alarming to some how quickly Zotob came to life - it's like the attackers had all the body parts stitched together and were just waiting for the lightning strike to bring the monster to life. And that lightning strike came in the form of MS05-039. It's alive....

So here we are, using typewriters to get the news out and mopping up after Zotob, which is Botoz spelled backwards, in case you were wondering. For now, I'm not too worried. Let's hope it's a long time until the malware 'script kiddies' come up with a more devastating scenario. Until then, I'll be happy watching reruns of "Ressas" (which is Sasser spelled backwards, by the way.)

Over the past few years, while Microsoft Internet Explorer has come to dominate the Web browser audience (with former champ Netscape staggering behind), there has been a third browser that has quietly gone about its business, often without fanfare, slowly winning over more and more fans: it's called Opera.

Hardcore netjunkies know lots about Opera, created by a Norwegian company in 1994. When it first appeared, it looked more like an interesting experiment, rather than a viable alternative to the big guys. Opera has always had a "small footprint" on a computer - a very small file size. Downloading and installing Internet Explorer takes A LOT of space if you go for all its bells and whistles.

The newest version of Opera (7.5) is only 3.5 megabytes.

Let me repeat that: 3.5 megabytes. It is the Gettysburg Address of Web browsers. Not a line of code is wasted or in the wrong place. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is the speech then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton gave at the Democratic Convention in 1988 that went on so long he was booed off the stage.

Opera is also different in another way: its comes in two flavors. You can download Opera for free. But then you have to accept ads, and reduced capabilities. But for $39 US you can buy a version of Opera that is ad free, and ready to kick some IE butt. (And in a rather cool twist, as The Washington Times notes, you can actually make your Opera browser look like IE ... or Netscape or Safari, or whatever you like. These "skins" are free and can be downloaded from the Opera site.)

The newest Opera version includes a cool new feature: an RSS aggregator built into the browser. RSS stands for (at least among some people) Real Simple Syndication. If you really like a column or blog, say, like this blog, you can sign up for its RSS feed. (It's just above here in the right hand column, labeled XML ... see it?) Before Opera, you needed to select an RSS aggregator to collect all these RSS feeds. As the Associated Press noted last week, "Support for RSS had been available primarily through standalone applications and as plug-ins for Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. RSS also comes with smaller browsers like OmniWeb for Macintosh computers."

The aggregator allows you to create, in a way, your own online newspaper or magazine - only it's all your choices. In the new Opera, those RSS feeds will go into the browser's e-mail client, which is cool because you're far more likely to see them in your e-mail.

If you haven't tried browser, give it a spin. Kick the tires. If you like it, you can get rid of that huge copy of Internet Explorer - oh, excuse me, it's part of the operating system, how could I forget? Well, you can just let that copy of IE sit there like a wedding present from your great-aunt that has to be kept around just in case she shows up for dinner some night.

by Sheera Frenkel

Google and Microsoft may soon face off in a War of the Search Engines.

The battle lines were drawn at the World Economic Forum last week in Switzerland. Microsoft, the industry heavyweight, announced it was ready to challenge Google, which has cornered the search engine market over the past five years.

While Microsoft founder Bill Gates praised Google's "high level of IQ," he assured the crowd that Microsoft, "will catch them," reports the New York Times.

Apparently, Microsoft began the pursuit last June, by quietly launching its new search program, MSNbot. The program scours the Web to build an index of HTML links and documents. At the time, there was speculation that MSNbot could be the cornerstone of a new Microsoft structure that would bridge home and business programs, documents, and Web sites into an absolute Windows operating system.

The creation of such an operating system has led many to question whether Microsoft is evolving into a big brother figure. Industry insiders have carefully watched the evolution of WinFS, a program to index documents on the web and monitor an individual's activity online. Alongside WinFS, Windows has also developed a variety of interface systems that further track individuals online and use the information collected to tailor searches to the personal history of the user.

This face-off takes many back to the mid-1990’s, in Round One of Microsoft vs. Silicon Valley. At that time a proud Netscape Communications boasted that it would relegate Microsoft to a "slightly buggy set of device drivers."

In response, according to the Times, Mr.Gates reduced Netscape to a 'shadow of its former self,' banished to the bowels of Time Warner. Now, as Round Two approaches, many are questioning whether Google will meet the same fate as Netscape.

However, Google does approach the battle with a few advantages. According to Digital Journal.com 55% of search referrals come from Google, which serves an average of 200 million search requests per day. Nancy Blachman, author of Google Guide, told the NYTimes that, “Microsoft faces a tremendous challenge because Google fine-tunes its system by watching how users adjust their queries.”

As Round Two approaches, industry experts and Silicon Valley insiders are surging against the ropes, wondering if Gates can flatten Google.