As reported all over the net this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other Facebook execs have been awarded US Patent #7,699,123: Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a
social network, yet another highly vague, general software patent.  The abstract:

A little story i’ve been following for about a year now, regarding Yelp and their “advertising sales tactics” seems to have grown some teeth.  According to numerous sources, a class action lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Yelp, the massive directory / review website, alleging:

The lawsuit alleges that Yelp runs an extortion scheme in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments, in the guise of “advertising contracts,” in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews appearing on the website.

I can’t say this comes as much of a surprise.

Recently I found out about the Brushes app for the iPhone  (well “recently” meaning back in december of last year), which is not only a fantastic time-waster, but also an actual tool that you can use to make actual art.  On your iPhone.  Wherever you go.  Talk about great for a busride!

The Brushes app is a painting tool with a variety of features, including transparency, a decent color picker, import and export from your iPhone photos, and a bunch of preset brushes that really make this a fun little app.  The new version (which i have yet to download) supports four art layers, not just one, which promises to be entirely TOO MUCH fun… and a serious tool for art-on-the-go.

Recently, my good friend Aanarav Sareen over in NYC finished his book, Digital Media for Business, a great primer on the new wave of social and web technologies.  Him and Mike Raffensperger worked their tails off to get this thing done in record time, and i was lucky enough to be asked to edit it.

So as CNN is reporting today (yeah, a bit late), that evidently you CAN get sued for libel for a tweet. Sounds ridiculous? Yeah to me too. But really, it’s not so much ridiculous as it is yet another sad disjunction between the 1st Amendment, various traditional libel / slander laws, and all this new-fangled technolowhatsis that has been coming down the pike for the last few decade.

CNN Article: “Can the law keep up with technology?”

This is the same sort of thing that has been going on for ages; I’m sure that the first wheel maker was roundly condemned by the Porter’s Guild for stealing their livelihood.  But that’s really just something that happens whenever someone invents a better widget.

Welcome to the new site… still a bunch of things to do around here, but trying to get a blog going (again). Had way too many people bothering me to do so, and yes, you KNOW who you are!

Check back for more fun later! Same bat time, same bat channel