The art student?s iPad: iPutty Stop Motion Edition

About the Author

Courtney Boyd Myers is the East Coast editor of TNW, based in NYC. She began her career writing about robots @ Forbes and has also written for PCMag, PSFK, IEEE Spectrum, the Huffington Post + Pocket-Lint. She loves magnets + reading on her Kindle. You can follow her on Twitter or e-mail her at Courtney@TheNextWeb.com.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/04/03/the-art-students-ipad-iputty-stop-motion-edition/

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Social Search, without a Social Network

Google may be built on an algorithm for taming the Web, but yesterday the company added social features that will let your friends help determine what ranks high in the search results you see. The approach requires Google to know the social connections of its users?something that so far is not a core feature of the company's products or uppermost in the minds of people using them.

Google's new social tool is the +1 button, which it wants you to click to signal which search results and Web pages you appreciate. The button will appear alongside every page listed in search results, and later on sites across the Web (enable +1 on your account now here). Your +1 clicks will be used to boost the ranking of that page in the results friends see. To Google, "friends" means people you are connected to by the company's e-mail or instant-messaging service or its Twitter clone Buzz. The new +1 service will eventually appear on other Google products like Maps and YouTube, says Google.

In design and intention, the +1 button is a close imitation of Facebook's Like button, which appears both on Facebook's site and on pages across the Web as a way for users to share content with friends with a single click. Facebook says that every week more 250 million people engage with Facebook's tool for external sites?most often via the Like button.

Google's plans to shape search with +1 have a precedent, too. Microsoft's Bing search engine has since late 2010 used Like-button data in a partnership with Facebook, in which Microsoft owns a stake. The results of some types of searches?for example, for restaurants?promote or highlight pages that have been Liked by a person's friends. To use this feature, the person must be logged in to Facebook.

"I think +1 is a big step forward," says Vivek Wadwha, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, who last month organized an event examining the problem of search spam. However, it is unclear whether Google has enough information about its users' social connections for the strategy to be very powerful, says Wadwha. "It is clear that Google is on the defensive and is trying its best to give consumers what they need," he says. "But it is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have a social graph in the same way Facebook does." Microsoft's close relationship with Facebook gives it access to more powerful and comprehensive data, says Wadwha.

Not only does Facebook have more users enrolled in its Web-wide scheme, but its users have more incentive to click Like buttons than Google users do to click +1. Clicking Like shares a link to that page with Facebook friends, or even adds something?say, a movie?to your Facebook profile. Clicking +1 only adds a link to your Google profile page, a widely ignored feature that Google wants to encourage more of its users to embrace. It is possible to view what Google considers your "social circle" at a dedicated page, but there is no way to edit that list of friends without deleting e-mail, chat, or Buzz contacts.

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An Iowa Stop in a Broad Effort to Revitalize the Religious Right

Nearly 400 Iowa ministers and many of their spouses accepted, filling a ballroom here on March 24 and 25. Through an evening banquet and long sessions, they heard speakers deplore a secular assault on evangelical Christian verities like the sanctity of male-female marriage, the humanity of the unborn and the divine right to limited government.

The program, sponsored by a temporary entity called the Iowa Renewal Project, featured several superstars of the Christian right as well as four possible Republican contenders for president. It was the latest of dozens of free, two-day conventions in at least 14 states over the past several years, usually with Mr. Huckabee listed as a co-sponsor, that have been attended by nearly 10,000 pastors who have spread the word in their churches and communities.

These meetings are part of a largely quiet drive to revitalize the religious right by drawing evangelical pastors and their flocks more deeply into politics ? an effort given new energy by what conservative church leaders see as the ominous creep of laws allowing same-sex marriage and their sense that America is, literally, heading toward hell.

The Iowa pastors heard David Barton, a Christian historian, argue that the country was founded as explicitly Christian and lament that too few evangelicals get out and vote. They heard Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and like Mr. Huckabee a possible 2012 presidential candidate, say that constitutional liberties like the right to bear arms were ordained by God. They heard how to promote ?biblically informed? political advocacy by churchgoers within the confines of federal tax law.

The other possible candidates who spoke were Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

Support from many of the pastors in the audience here helped Mr. Huckabee, an evangelical minister, win the Iowa Republican caucuses in 2008. He had been the only candidate to appear at a pastors? meeting before the Republican caucuses and went on to gain a surprise victory, with 60 percent of the caucus voters describing themselves in exit polls as evangelicals.

This year, many more would-be contenders are making plays for support.

Mr. Huckabee, of course, was warmly welcomed back at the event here as he declared: ?We face a spiritual war in this country. Let this weekend be a time when you say, ?We will not fail, and America will not fall.? ?

He and the other Republican speakers were careful not to sound too much like candidates in this officially nonpartisan forum, instead emphasizing the threats to conservative Christian values and the need for churches to be engaged. Mr. Gingrich, for one, described the ?Rediscovering God in America? films he has made with his wife, Callista, and said America is exceptional because its founding documents enshrine rights  ?endowed by our creator.?  

He told the crowd that it was their Christian duty to fight for the ?truth,? exposing threats like overreaching by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama health care law that may put the country ?on the road to dictatorship.?

Mr. Barbour pledged relentless opposition to abortion and accused liberals of trying to remove religion from politics. Ms. Bachmann challenged the pastors to ?be the voice of freedom.?

The organizer and, to many, the unsung hero of this effort to mobilize pastors is David Lane, a 56-year-old born-again Christian from California.

?What we?re doing with the pastor meetings is spiritual, but the end result is political,? Mr. Lane said in a rare interview, outside the doors of the Iowa meeting. ?From my perspective, our country is going to hell because pastors won?t lead from the pulpits.?

Mr. Lane shuns publicity as he crosses the country forming local coalitions under names like Renewal Project and securing outside financing to put on the pastor conferences. Something of a stealth weapon for the right, he has also stepped in to assist in special-issue campaigns, like the successful effort in Iowa last year to unseat three State Supreme Court justices who had voted to allow same-sex marriage.

Mr. Lane first started arranging pastor conferences in Texas and California in the 1990s, but the effort has grown in the last five years. The meetings, which cost many tens of thousands of dollars, have been largely paid for by the Mississippi-based American Family Association, he said.

The association, founded by the Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, is known for its strident condemnation of same-sex marriage and considers homosexuality to be ?immoral, unnatural and unhealthy,? said Bryan Fischer, its director of issue analysis. Mr. Fischer said the association was a co-sponsor of the pastor meetings and maintained e-mail contact with 40,000 to 60,000 pastors nationwide, a list that is expanding.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=29b2b7e5c500893f968435229ff4388e

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Eric Whitacre conducts a virtual choir of 2,000 voices on YouTube

At this year?s TED conference, Eric Whitacre, one of the world?s most performed composers gave a moving speech detailing the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube to produce the viral ?virtual choir? that he conducted last year as a crowdsourced project via YouTube.

Whitacre has just closed submissions for his latest project ?Sleep? on January 10th with 2,051 videos from participants in 58 different countries like Malta, Madagascar, Thailand and from Alaska to New Zealand. The full piece premieres April 7th on YouTube. In this TED Talk, he unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work, ?Sleep,? and discusses what its like to be so connected to a worldwide community of people you?ve never met before.

Whitacre has 44 published concert pieces and has sold over a million copies. His album Cloudburst and Other Choral Works earned him a Grammy nomination in 2007.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/04/03/eric-whitacre-conducts-a-virtual-choir-of-2000-voices-on-youtube/

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TiVo customer email addresses stolen in Epsilon database breach

Customers signed up to receive email updates and newsletter from popular television video recorder provider TiVo may have to keep a close look on their email accounts after it emerged TiVo customer data held by a third-party marketing company Epsilon was exposed by an unauthorized entry to its database.

The compromise, acknowledged in press releases by both companies, resulted in at least the first name and email address of many TiVo customers being stolen, potentially opening up accounts to deluge of phishing attacks and spam messages as the attackers seek to profit from their work.

Attacks on customer email databases have increased in the past few months, with TiVo the most recent in a long list of companies including McDonalds and online art community DeviantArt to have had email addresses stolen. It seems that not only was TiVo affected in the Epsilon breach, other companies including JP Morgan Chase and Kroger were also impacted by the breach.

TiVo has reiterated that customer credit card data and service information remains secure due to the fact that Epsilon is only used for marketing services and does not have access to the any personally identifiable information.

If you are a TiVo customer and are worried you may receive unwanted emails, make sure to scan all attachments with a virus scanner before opening, do not open emails from senders that you might not trust and never give out any personal information.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/us/2011/04/03/tivo-customer-email-addresses-stolen-in-epsilon-database-breach/

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Leaked: Windows 8's logon screen

There have been rumors for quite a while that Windows 8 will have a second, tile-based shell for tablets. More recently, Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott have revealed the logon screen for this shell, over at Within Windows.

They posted it on April 1, 2011. Given their history and level of credibility, however, I'm inclined to believe it when they say that it is not an April Fools' day prank, especially given that Microsoft has started pushing Windows 8 builds on Microsoft Connect.

The screenshot clearly shows a Metro-inspired logon screen. For those not in the loop, Metro refers to the design style used on Zune and Windows Phone. The screen shows the time, day of the week, the date, icons for power management, and an ease of access icon. The logon screen will be of course at least partially configurable, including being able to change the background image (this is probably pulled from the current Windows theme).

Microsoft will reportedly build on this logon screen, allowing for a "pattern unlock" for tablet users (you've probably seen this on Android devices), as well as audio controls for music so you can easily control music playback even while your tablet device is locked.

We'll be sure to keep an eye on what else Rivera and Thurrott reveal in the coming months. The Windows 8 leaks are coming, we promise.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43107-leaked-windows-8s-logon-screen.html

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Budget Battle to Be Followed by an Even Bigger Fight

Even as the two parties struggled over the weekend to reach a deal on federal spending for the next six months and avert a government shutdown at the end of the week, House Republicans were completing a budget proposal for next year and beyond. It is likely to spur an ideological showdown over the size of government and the role of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

The plan, which is scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday, will be the most ambitious Republican effort since the November elections to put a conservative stamp on economic and domestic policy. It involves far greater stakes for Congress and for President Obama ? substantively and politically ? than the current fight over spending cuts.

The outcome of that fight was still uncertain on Saturday as Congressional staff members assembled new proposals and the White House said that Mr. Obama had called House Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, to urge them to find an acceptable compromise. He reminded them that time ?is running short.?

The longer-term budget proposal has been led by Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who is the party?s leading voice on budget matters, and will go beyond numbers to provide policy prescriptions.

It will call for deep spending cuts again in 2012, chart a path to reducing the deficit and slowing the growth of the accumulating national debt, and grapple with the politically volatile issue of reining in the cost of entitlement programs, starting with Medicaid, which provides health coverage for the poor.

?We want to get spending and debt under control, and we want to get the economy growing, and we want to address the big drivers of our debt, and that is the entitlement programs,? Mr. Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, said in an interview. ?We have a moral obligation to the country to do this.?

The efforts of Mr. Ryan, backed by Mr. Boehner and other Republican leaders, are certain to meet serious resistance from the Democratic-led Senate and from Mr. Obama. In many respects, the nasty fight over financing the government for the next six months has been a warm-up for the longer-term budget battle, which could be further inflamed by a debate over raising the federal debt limit.

House Democrats, who are preparing an alternative budget, say the Republican approach would cut off aid to some of the neediest Americans and shortchange education programs vital to staying economically competitive.

?It seems to be the same old, same old,? said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee. ?It is going to be continued big tax breaks for millionaires and big corporate special interests like oil companies and deep cuts in education for kids and health care for seniors.?

?How you get your deficit reduction is important,? Mr. Van Hollen added.

Republicans have been urging Mr. Obama to seize the opportunity provided by a divided government and lead a legislative push to rein in spending on programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Emboldened by their election wins and a sense that the public is ready for a new approach, House Republicans say they will push forward on their own and try to draw the president and Senate Democrats into a broader discussion about long-term deficit reduction and the soaring costs of the entitlement programs.

Details of the House budget are being tightly held. But lawmakers and other officials predict serious proposals to change Medicaid and Medicare, with talks continuing about how hard to push for adjustments in Social Security.

?You are going to see major reforms in Medicare and Medicaid; you are going to see a change in the deficit trajectory that is pretty dramatic,? said Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who is on the Budget Committee.

?Ryan isn?t touching the third rail,? Mr. Cole said, employing the expression used to suggest that messing with Social Security and Medicare can be politically fatal. ?He is wrapping both hands around it.?

The budget for 2012 and beyond could heighten the partisan tensions surrounding the financing debate for the current year. If Congress cannot settle that issue by Friday, authorization for some government spending will expire and parts of the federal government will be shut down.

Some Republicans had wanted to delay putting forward Mr. Ryan?s plan until this year?s negotiations were completed. They were worried that introducing another set of proposals might confuse the debate and give Democrats two targets to exploit in their effort to persuade voters that Republicans were going too far in slashing programs.

Others argued that the Ryan proposal could help Mr. Boehner gather the Republican votes he needs to get a compromise on 2011 spending through the House. Any deal for the current fiscal year is likely to fall short of what the Tea Party movement and some other fiscal conservatives are demanding, but Republican leaders are already signaling that the big prize is a deep spending cut for next year and a start on reining in the entitlement programs ? steps that could involve trillions of dollars over coming decades, as opposed to the tens of billions of dollars on the table in the budget battle for this year.

While Mr. Ryan and top Republican aides would not discuss specifics, there are strong indications that the proposal will draw on deficit reduction plans that Mr. Ryan laid out in his 2010 ?roadmap plan? and a second proposal he wrote with Alice M. Rivlin, a director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration.

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Should you give your work away for free online?

Last week, Andrew Dubber ? an influential writer about the music industry ? announced that he was giving away all the content on his New Music Strategies website.

?I hereby declare that every piece of content written by me for New Music Strategies up to the end of 2010? is totally without copyright restriction,? he wrote.

?You can do anything you like with it, and you don?t have to ask. You can sell stuff based on it, copy and paste it into magazines, make new and derivative stuff out of it, translate it, create products ? whatever. You don?t have to ask me, pay me or even let me know. Because it?s not mine anymore.

?I?ll leave it up here so you can find it when you need it, and because there?s plenty of stuff that links to it out there on the internet ? but I?m just looking after it. It belongs to everyone now.?

Dubber has released the content completely into the public domain with no restrictions whatsoever because, he says, it?s ?a good thing to do, it?s an interesting thing to do.?

So, should you consider giving your work away for free? What?s in it for the person setting all their hard work free for others to potentially profit from? In Dubber?s case, he?s moving on to new projects and new ideas and so clearly sees no user in ?owning?the content. ?I suspect that making it part of shared culture, rather than a piece of intellectual property has the potential to open up new ideas, new conversations and new uses for the stuff I wrote and am no longer using,? he writes.

Profiting from giving it all away

That?s all well and good, but what if you want to make money from your work? Author and blogger Cory Doctorow has long given away his writing while continuing to make money from it. In a 2006 article for Forbes, he wrote:

?When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published? I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide? A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book?those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They?re gained sales.

?There?s no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books?but I?ve done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I?ll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher?s expectations.?

Increased sales aren?t the only factor to consider. Throw in all the paid speaking engagements and the new opportunities and experiences that Doctorow has probably gained through the raised profile of having so many readers out there, and it?s clear that he?s benefitted greatly from the strategy.

Setting your hobby free

If you don?t class yourself as a ?professional?, you may well have even more reason to allow others to use your work. While it would be brave for a photographer with the profile of David Bailey to give away his work online, if you?re further down the food chain, opening up your work in this way can be beneficial.

The default setting for photos on Flickr is that you retain full copyright. While it?s understandable that people would want to maintain control of their images, they may have a lot more to gain from opening them up for wider use.

See that photo at the top of this article? Like most of the images that accompany my posts, I found it by searching Flickr for images published under a Creative Commons license that allows commercial use. It?s a striking image of a woman photocopying her face and hands. Would you pay for it? Probably not, but if you scroll to the bottom of the text here, you?ll find a link to the photographer?s other images. You may like them, you may not ? but you?ve discovered them ? you can comment on them, engaging with the photographer. You could even potentially share them with others bringing an even wider audience their way. If the image hadn?t have been used here, you?d have never paid for it, but you?d never have discovered it in the first place either.

In many cases, hobbyists are never going to make a living from their work, but allowing others to use it can be a good way of gaining a larger audience and more attention. Who knows where that could lead? Maybe not to money, but if you were never seeking payment in the first place, you?ve lost nothing and could potentially gain a lot.

So, whether, like Andrew Dubber, you have no good reason to restrict your old work?s use, or like Cory Doctorow you think that free work can increase sales, or like the photographer of the image at the top of this page, you have work that?s cool but unlikely to ever actually make money, the benefits of freedom shouldn?t be ignored.

If you want to open up your work to others, a Creative Commons license is a good way of easily letting others know how they can use it. You can find out about the different licenses, and how to apply them, here.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/04/03/should-you-give-your-work-away-for-free-online/

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Weekend Open Forum: Your favorite bookmarking service?

Leaked: Windows 8's logon screen

There have been rumors for quite a while that Windows 8 will have a second, tile-based shell for tablets. More recently, Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott have revealed the logon screen for this shell, over at Within Windows.

They posted it on April 1, 2011. Given their history and level of credibility, however, I'm inclined to believe it when they say that it is not an April Fools' day prank, especially given that Microsoft has started pushing Windows 8 builds on Microsoft Connect.

The screenshot clearly shows a Metro-inspired logon screen. For those not in the loop, Metro refers to the design style used on Zune and Windows Phone. The screen shows the time, day of the week, the date, icons for power management, and an ease of access icon. The logon screen will be of course at least partially configurable, including being able to change the background image (this is probably pulled from the current Windows theme).

Microsoft will reportedly build on this logon screen, allowing for a "pattern unlock" for tablet users (you've probably seen this on Android devices), as well as audio controls for music so you can easily control music playback even while your tablet device is locked.

We'll be sure to keep an eye on what else Rivera and Thurrott reveal in the coming months. The Windows 8 leaks are coming, we promise.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43107-leaked-windows-8s-logon-screen.html

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