unmediated

Last week's P2P child pornography crackdown is helping Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) to search support for his bill that restricts P2P software distribution. The bill, called Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography (P4) Act would require the Federal Trade Commission to regulate peer-to-peer networks and take steps to ensure that children aren't accidentally coming across porn. Pitt praised the action but he thinks the Feds are just being reactive:

Friday's announcement is a disturbing confirmation that Peer-to-Peer programs are being manipulated. They are becoming an ever more dangerous platform used by child predators -- some convicted child molesters to attack kids.

His bill calls on the FTC to require P2P companies to get parental permission before minors use their networks. It also would require P2P clients to be subjected to settings of parents that put a "do not install" beacon in their computers, indicating that they don't want P2P software on their machines.

Veronis and Suhler Stevenson (VSS) sees a day fast approaching when we will be over-saturated in media, according to this TelevisionWeek report. I believe it. If there's one thing problematic with the Information Age it is that there's just too much to take in!

Currently I subscribe to about 350 "real" news and blog feeds using FeedDemon and Bloglines. Many of these, particularly the blogs, are filled with thousands of pearls of wisdom. Despite these powerful aggregation tools, I find it impossible to read all these feeds and end up scanning probably about half (at most) on a daily basis. The problem is going to only escalate as online publishing becomes cheaper and easier. I find new blogs to read almost every day.

Thankfully, despite the gloomy VSS predictions, Google will again free us from information clutter, just as they have done time and again. They will eventually merge their Orkut social networking site and Blogger Web publishing system to establish communities of "trusted bloggers." A unified Blogger/Orkut platform will make it easier for us to identify the most credible/valuable bloggers who write about the subjects that matter to us. The system will be even better than the tools we use now to measure influence, such as Technorati. Some are already experimenting with such a model, but Google will prevail.

You can already see the early beginnings of this in Blogger's recent relaunch. Google is grouping bloggers into discrete communities. Orkut has an eerily similar community system. I can easily envision a day when Google will realize the tremendous power of merging these platforms into a single entity that facilitates information publishing/sharing and retrieval -- if they haven't already.

IMHO, this will all make our job - reaching online influencers - just a little bit easier.

make your own ringtones from MP3s with Xingtone, user/pass

Xingtone's desktop software is easy-to-use, legal, and allows you to create mobile phone ringtones using digital audio files on your computer - music clips, sound effects, your child's laugh, your dogís bark, or any sound you like!

Pixagogo, an online photo site, now offers Creative Commons licenses to its contributing photographers. Pixagogo allows you to upload and share photos via its web site. They also let you purchase prints. Check out their toolbar, that includes an option to choose Creative Commons.

In The Hollywood Reporter today, an item about t-shirts that display movie trailers -- as seen at both E3 and NextFest last week.

Coming soon to a T-shirt near you: trailers for "I, Robot," starring Will Smith. In the never-ending search to capture the attention of consumers bombarded by commercials, billboards and a massive array of other advertisements, 20th Century Fox debuted an innovative new guerilla marketing tactic at E3 last week -- T-shirts embedded with video screens that played "I, Robot" trailers.

The two women who wore the video T-shirts as they walked around E3 drew crowds and TV news crews on hand to cover the gaming conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. 20th Century Fox is the first studio -- or business of any kind -- to use the video T-shirt marketing tactic developed by San Francisco-based Brand Marketers.

(At first I thought "interesting tactical media tool" but now i'm thinking "Teletubbie." Either way we all win. -kc.)

Broadcast Engineering is carrying the story:
Digital video and still images came of age last week, dominating global news distribution and profoundly impacting world events. Revelations of U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners, followed by the globally broadcast execution of an American citizen in Iraq, demonstrated that the rules have changed for newsgathering in a wired world.