Stephen Wildstrom’s weekly pod­cast series launched today at Busi­ness­Week Online. He writes the “Tech­nol­ogy & You” col­umn for the mag­a­zine and the Web site. First sub­ject: Vinyl in, music files out.

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For those who haven’t heard about this, Nick Lezin passes along word of an impor­tant online cause called Live 8 (that’s Shakira, above):

On July 2, 2005, Live 8 will become the largest inter­ac­tive event the world has ever seen. World­wide con­certs fea­tur­ing the biggest names in music-U2, Destiny’s Child, Cold­play, Dave Matthews Band, Tim McGraw, Madonna, Sting and more-along with one mil­lion spec­ta­tors and mil­lions of view­ers. All com­ing together with one purpose-to make poverty his­tory. You can check out all of your favorite per­for­mances, on-demand through­out the summer-available to every­one, only at:AOLMusic.com

Make sure to check it out and add your name to the live 8 peti­tion. If you would like to help spread the word about this great cause, go here for a vari­ety of Live 8 con­tent that you can host on your blog or web­site. We have ban­ners, blurbs about Live 8, and the offi­cial press release available.

Unlike 1985’s Live Aid, this isn’t a fund-raiser, just a con­cert to raise polit­i­cal aware­ness about global poverty. Here’s the Merc’s story on Live8. More on the Merc’s Music page.

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I started a con­ver­sa­tion going, as the direc­tor of the Media Blog­gers Asso­ci­a­tion respon­si­ble for for­mu­lat­ing a set of guide­lines for ethics and stan­dards, on the MBA’s dis­cus­sion list. Sev­eral dozen peo­ple have joined in over the past two days, and we have a thriv­ing con­ver­sa­tion going, which is car­ry­ing over into the blogosphere.

Dana Blanken­horn posted an ini­tial vol­ley on Corante, and Jeff Jarvis has posted a rejoin­der here, sug­gest­ing that codes and stan­dards are for “old media institutions.”

Fas­ci­nat­ing, no? I’m not look­ing for­ward to sort­ing out the oppos­ing sides over the next month.

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There’s some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion in the blo­gos­phere about Time Inc.‘s deci­sion today to hand over its reporter’s notes in the Valerie Plame spy-outing case.

Tom Wat­son at the Huff­in­g­ton Post: If jour­nal­ists blogged

Staci D. Kramer: Time Inc. Folds In First Amend­ment Case

Chris Gei­d­ner: Advanc­ing the wrong principles

Jeff Jarvis: Money, meet mouth

I firmly believe that any­one and every­one can do jour­nal­ism; I am a blog tri­umphal­ist, a pro­po­nent of cit­i­zens’ media. So there should not be a spe­cial priv­i­lege for peo­ple who are some­how offi­cially accred­ited as jour­nal­ists — not only because that excludes cit­i­zens who do jour­nal­ism but also because it puts those cre­den­tialed at risk of hav­ing their cre­den­tials pulled by author­i­ties. We do not want to find our­selves in that position. …

Frankly, I’m not sure where I come down. …

I do believe in the neces­sity of priv­i­lege to enable the watch­dog­ging of the powerful.

At the same time, I think we have grossly abused con­fi­den­tial sources in media and per­haps ruined priv­i­lege in the process.

I do think that if jour­nal­ists have priv­i­lege then all cit­i­zens have priv­i­lege when they prac­tice jour­nal­ism, which now any­one can do: Any­one can publish.

I also believe there need to be lim­its — for exam­ple, regard­ing crim­i­nal activ­ity. But then that, too, defangs privilege.

As a jour­nal­ist and a blog­ger, I come down here: Time had an oblig­a­tion to pro­tect its source — even though that source seems to have used the reporter’s priv­i­lege for polit­i­cal moti­va­tions and broke the law in the process. Once it appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and lost, its oblig­a­tion to its source ends. The source has no expec­ta­tion that the reporter will go to jail for him — espe­cially given the cir­cum­stances of this par­tic­u­lar case. If you’re going to break the law, don’t use a reporter to do it for you.

I agree with Time’s deci­sion to turn over its notes to the court. The New York Times should fol­low suit.

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Blog Her­ald: Another cash for com­ment scam has emerged on Craiglist, this time offer­ing exactly 73 blog­gers $300 USD each per month to “help cre­ate buzz around new prod­ucts and services.”

Drew Olanoff of the Media Blog­gers Asso­ci­a­tion reports in a post titled “Blog Whores”:

The Blog Her­ald reported today that the Boston Globe uncov­ered and reported on an arrange­ment that a mar­ket­ing firm called USWeb had with some blog­gers. The arrange­ment was basi­cally “We pay you, you write reviews”. Sounds good, right? Only one prob­lem, the blog­gers were writ­ing reviews for things that they’ve never seen, or used.

When con­fronted about it, one blog­ger (whom I refuse to name, because he just wants atten­tion at this point) brashly admit­ted doing it, and made no apolo­gies for the unsa­vory prac­tice. He also said that most peo­ple who spend a lot of their time online are doing it for the money. Maybe in some fash­ion, but not in the way he was doing it. …

I’m with Drew — with­out dis­clo­sure, this is flat-out wrong. I wrote about influ­ence ped­dling in the blo­gos­phere in Feb­ru­ary. Looks like the accepted guide­lines that most blog­gers apply to this prac­tice — trans­parency, trans­parency, trans­parency — hasn’t yet taken hold. Too bad. Oth­er­wise, you’ve just shot your credibility.

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The Boston Globe reports that New Eng­land Cable News will soon broad­cast and host on their web­site user-submitted videos.

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I finally had a few spare moments and uploaded 17 pho­tos from last week’s Super­nova con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco. (That’s the charm­ing and very wise Cate­rina Fake, above, co-founder of Flickr.)

Tech­no­rati tags: Super­nova, Supernova2005

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John Markoff in today’s NY Times:

On Tues­day, Yahoo intro­duced My Web 2.0, a new ver­sion of the company’s search engine that will har­ness the col­lec­tive power of small groups of Web surfers to improve the qual­ity of search results.

The ser­vice, which the company’s exec­u­tives refer to as a “social search engine,” is based on a new page-ranking tech­nol­ogy that Yahoo has named MyRank. Rather than rely­ing on which pages are linked to most fre­quently on the Web — the so-called Page Rank tech­nol­ogy pio­neered by Google — MyRank orga­nizes pages based on how closely search users are related to one another in their social net­work and on their rep­u­ta­tion for turn­ing up help­ful information. …

The Yahoo My Web soft­ware makes it pos­si­ble for users to cat­e­go­rize or “tag” Web pages they have found, as well as anno­tate them. Tag­ging makes it pos­si­ble for groups of inde­pen­dently act­ing com­puter users to cre­ate impro­vised clas­si­fi­ca­tion systems.

The My Yahoo sys­tem makes it pos­si­ble to use tags to find cat­e­gories of infor­ma­tion as well as experts on par­tic­u­lar sub­jects. The sys­tem has a fea­ture mak­ing it pos­si­ble to see whether an asso­ciate who has found and saved a doc­u­ment is online and avail­able to be con­tacted through Yahoo’s instant-messaging system.

Yahoo is orga­niz­ing the col­lec­tions of tags on a cen­tral server, and they cre­ate what is being called a “folk­son­omy,” to dis­tin­guish the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem from a tra­di­tional taxonomy.

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KRON-TV Chan­nel 4 — the largest inde­pen­dent tele­vi­sion sta­tion in the U.S., I believe — today soft-launched The Bay Area Is Talk­ing, an aggre­ga­tion blog with 320 local blogs. Nashville blog­ger and TV con­sul­tant Terry Heaton helped launch the site along with KRON online news man­ager Brian Shields. (This blog is one of the 320.) Stay tuned.

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Chris Jablon­ski at ZDNet: O’Reilly: Web 2.0 to be built on the backs of hackers.

Tim O’Reilly spoke today at Where 2.0 about the mer­its of hold­ing a con­fab focused on map­ping and loca­tion based tech­nolo­gies and framed it in the con­text of the emer­gence of a new plat­form, Web 2.0. O’Reilly said that the map­ping indus­try is at an inflec­tion point as evi­denced by the flurry of recent com­pany announce­ments and, more impor­tantly, from watch­ing increased activ­ity among the “alpha geek” community.

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