While it's possible to go it alone and be a single-person founder of a startup, many people need - and prefer - to have a co-founder. As Graphic.ly CEO Micah Baldwin describes it, you want "a hacker and a hustler."

But finding someone who has the right skills, the right personality, the right work style, the right vision isn't easy. In fact, judging from the number of times you see people posting "looking for co-founder" on Hacker News, it's quite a challenge.

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On Monday, the Cofounder Network launched, aiming to help solve this problem by matching entrepreneurs from around the world. "By connecting superior entrepreneurs to start up new ventures," reads the blog post announcing the network, "we will boost the startup ecosystem and help solve world problems along the way."

The Cofounder Network is an initiative of techVenture, which already works to bring together entrepreneurs and investors. The Cofounder Network will function in a similar way, addressing both the screening and the matching of applicants.

You can either apply directly to the network or be referred by a partner. Currently, these partners include Startup School, Indiegogo, Linden Ventures, Palomar5, and others.

The application asks for entrepreneurs to describe "your personal mission in life," to give links to your digital identity, and to describe past experiences and achievements. Applicants are also asked to describe what they're looking for in an ideal co-founder.

The first step will be to look for a match locally, and if one can't be found to then look globally. The Cofounder Network has partners worldwide, and argues that "matching cofounders coming from different cultural hemispheres can bring another significant advantage."

Meeting people at local networking events, conferences, and (the most common place, perhaps) college may be the most well-known routes to finding a co-founder. But clearly that's not always an option, and so the Cofounder Network hopes to be another avenue for folks to explore.

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On September 14, 2009 New York Times readers were automatically redirected to a site hosting malmare thanks to an ad containing malicious code. On July 15 2010, TweetMeme was the victim of a similar attack and began sending its users to a "scareware" site. These are just two examples of "malverstiing," one of the fastest growing security threats on the web. It's particularly scary because potentially any site with advertising could be a target, and users don't even have to click the ads to trigger malware. Use a Mac? You could still fall victim to phishing scams perpetuated by malvertisers. Scary stuff. So what do you need to know?

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Malware Isn't Just on "Sketchy" Sites Anymore

In the past, users who didn't frequent adult, gambling or other "sketchy" sites were relatively safe from harm. Now any site that contains third party content - even your own company's web site - is at risk. Earlier this year, Dasient released a report identifying the top three security vulnerabilities enterprise web sites contain: advertising was one of the three, along with other third party content.

According to ClickFacts CEO Michael Caruso, malware scammers are increasingly moving away from e-mail and buying advertising instead. An ad on a popular site can reach millions, and automated ad purchasing makes it easy to criminals to buy ads. According to Caruso, malvertisers will sometimes walk into offices impersonating legitimate buyers when automated systems aren't available, and often pay for ads with fake or stolen credit cards.

Malicous advertisements in Google Adwords and even organic search results is an increasing problem as well. Here's an example of a sponsored search result found on Google by StopMalvertising.com:

Users who click the above ad are taken to a fake Adobe Flash web site where they are encouraged to download a malicious app.

Curaso also notes that it's become extremely easy for criminals with little technical proficiency to conduct malware campaigns as exploit kits are sold on the open market from servers in places like eastern Europe and China.

Users Don't Even Have to Click the Ads to Get Infected

According to Chris Larsen, head of Blue Coat's research lab, you don't even need to actually click on the ads. Blue Coat documented one way this is done: a site can use JavaScript to call hidden iFrames which load PDFs containing code that exploits Adobe Reader vulnerabilities.

Non-Windows Users Can Also be Affected

Non-Widows users can also be targeted by malvertising via phishing scams, though they will generally have to click on the ads served. Caruso told us about an instance of malvertising in which scammers bought ads that appeared to be from a major bank. Once users clicked through to the landing page, they collected bank account information from victims.

Malware has Graduated from Nuisance to Serious Threat

Larsen says that in the past there were two type of IT threats. First, mass non-targeted attacks that force or trick users into downloading malware. These have traditionally been mere nuisances for IT to deal with, as the symptoms (fake AV notifications, pop-ups, etc.) become rapidly apparent. Second, highly targeted attacks which perpetrators may spend months researching. These are more dangerous because the perpetrators are looking for specific, valuable company information.

The emergence of botnets has made malware into a serious threat. Compromised machines may not show any signs of infection, leaving backdoors wide open for exploitation. Larsen says it's been suggested that since botnet operators sell their services on the black market, those attempting to target a specific company could approach botnets with a list of IP ranges and offer to purchase control of specific machines in order to get a foothold in a specific network.

Patching will Protect You

Here's the good news: according to Larsen, most malvertising targets well known exploits. Keeping your operating systems and software patched is the best way to prevent damage from attacks.

Patch management is a notoriously labor intensive and thankless process, but as NSS Labs recently noted in a report it's one of the most important steps IT can take to protect its users.

Who's Trying to Help?

ClickFacts and Dasient both offer services to scan ad networks for malicious advertising. Dasient recently landed the ad network AdOn as a client, and ClickFacts counts News Corp as a customer. Last year, Google launched anti-malvertising.com (not to be confused with StopMalvertising.com) to help ad networks identify malvertisers.

One stumbling block security companies face, according to Larsen, is that ad networks tend to be secretive about how they serve ads in order to circumvent ad blockers. When ad networks aren't forth coming, it can be difficult to determine how malware is being served up and how to block it.

Caruso points out that companies shouldn't be placing blame - instead ad networks, publishers and security companies need to work together to solve the problem.

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Across the board, all major browser developers are currently working very hard to speed up their software's performance. While a lot of the focus has currently shifted to hardware acceleration, there are still some speed gains to be made by optimizing most browsers' JavaScript engines. Earlier this year, the Mozilla JavaScript team launched the J�germonkey project in order to speed up the JavaScript performance of Firefox and today, the team launched the first preview version of Firefox 4 with J�gerMonkey.

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Faster than TraceMonkey - Not as Fast as Chrome

In our own (unscientific) tests with the help of the SunSpider  and V8 benchmarks, the J�gerMonkey version of Firefox 4 easily outperformed the most recent beta of Firefox 4 (around 370ms vs. 450ms in SunSpider and 2200 points vs. 1200 points in V8). At the same time, though, Google's Chrome is still significantly faster (260ms for the SunSpider benchmark and 6631 points in V8 for the current developer version). These benchmark results show that the J�gerMonkey team clearly managed to speed up the browser's performance, but with regards to pure JavaScript performance Firefox is still far behind Chrome.

That said, though, benchmark performance is not always a good indicator for how fast a browser feels in actual usage and there can be little doubt that the J�gerMonkey-enabled build feels faster than the current Firefox 4 betas and the difference with Chrome is barely noticeable.

You can download a copy of Firefox with the J�gerMonkey engine here.

According to Mozilla developer David Mandelin, the team spent the last 8 months "studying the classic research, reverse engineering the competition, measuring, experimenting, designing, prototyping, analyzing performance, scrutinizing assembly code, redesigning, coding, and lots and lots of debugging." The result of this project is a completely revamped JavaScript engine for Firefox that makes demos like this far more enjoyable. Mandelin also notes that the final version should be "a little bit faster yet by the time Firefox 4 is release."

Given the combination of hardware acceleration, better JavaScript performance, a revamped interface and many other small changes, Firefox 4 is shaping up to be a very interesting release for Mozilla. The final version of Firefox 4 is currently scheduled for the Fall.

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For smartphone owners, asking people on the street for directions is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Why bother trying to remember a series of turns and landmarks when your phone can do that and more? Who needs confusing descriptions when you have satellite and Street View imagery? Android users certainly don't.

Google has added "Walking Navigation", a marriage of walking directions, turn-by-turn GPS navigation and satellite imagery, to the newest version of Google Maps for Android.

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The latest addition comes as a part of Google Maps for mobile 4.5 for Android. It takes walking directions, which takes advantage of pedestrian pathways, overpasses and other such things, and pairs them with turn-by-turn GPS directions and satellite imagery.

Simply enter the address of where you're trying to go and chose the "Walking" option from the navigation icon and the app will guide you, following along and vibrating when you reach the next turn. The map even rotates as you turn the phone, orienting the map to the direction you're facing. As Google engineers Andrey Ulanov and Kevin Law note in their blog post, you can "use it like a virtual compass with satellite imagery to look ahead or help pick out landmarks along the way."

If the satellite view doesn't offer enough in the way of contextual clues, the new and improved Street View navigation for Google Maps on Android should help. The feature brings street view straight to your phone and adds "smart navigation", wherein you can simply drag the "Pegman" around to move your vantage point. Take a look:

We often joke with friends about how the smartphone is like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's features like this that make that notion more and more a reality. It wasn't long ago that GPS navigation in a car seemed like a modern day luxury and now we have access to turn-by-turn directions and imagery in our pockets. The integration with satellite imagery is just a step away from Street View integration and we can't imagine that an augmented reality addition is far off. While we often feel silly holding our phones up to the horizon to look for the nearest pizza joint, having this data on-screen as we navigate about our lives may prove even more handy.

What do you think - what's next for mobile personal navigation? That is, aside from getting similar functionality for the iPhone.

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Simplot Australia initially used VMware virtualization software and Intel hardare to create a test and development environment.

The wholly owned subsidiary of the J R Simplot Company saw the immediate benefits and has not looked back since.

Today, more than 60% of the IT infrastructure at Simplot Australia's corporate office has been virtualized.

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Simplot Australia Takes Virtualization Beyond Test and Development

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This post was made possible thanks to a phenomenon I call "twitterdipity."

Twitterdipity is the experience of wading in Twitter's shallow, fast-moving data stream and suddenly - and surprisingly - mining treasure from a tweet. It's casually catching the eye of good fortune in a speed-of-light culture. It's when you score a free ticket to an exclusive event or click a game-changing link at just the right time. My most recent (and exciting) experience of twitterdipity happened when I tweeted that I was reading Paul Levinson's book Digital McLuhan and then the award-winning sci-fi writer, singer/songwriter, communications professor and oft-interviewed media ecologist decided to follow me. Me!

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Guest author Michelle Anderson is a storyteller, media ecologist and community builder for hire. She goes by the moniker @mediaChick on Twitter and just about everywhere else, as well. She is the creator and author of The Miracle in July, an ambitious, genre-busting storytelling experiment seeking to redefine what "success" means in today's global theater. Through teaching, consulting, speaking and publishing, Michelle hopes to inspire storytellers world-wide to experiment with social media ecology in their work. She also bakes one hell of a pie.

As a rogue media ecologist, I play scholarly voyeur on the Media Ecology Association's mailing list. Over the years I've passively learned the intricacies of the interdisciplinary study of the ecosystems of media by eavesdropping on riveting academic discussions. The ones that interest me the most are the endless conversations about Marshall McLuhan, the cutting-edge communications and media theorist who coined phrases such as "global village" and "the medium is the message."

It was from studying McLuhan that I realized that the word "medium" was meant to include roads, electricity and assembly lines as well as broadcast television and the telegraph. I realized that it is the form of a medium, rather than its content, that molds and shapes our view of the world, and that the "message" of the medium is the change in the pattern of humanity. But it is McLuhan's famous 1962 declaration in The Gutenberg Galaxy that "the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of the global village" that got me thinking about the conditions that conjure twitterdipity.

Appropriately enough, from this media ecologist's point of view, it is Twitter's ecosystem that breeds these wonderful moments of twitterdipity. The choice in following (or not following or blocking) a tweeter leads to the customization of Twitter's indiscriminately rich fire hose of data; it makes for a fertile, personalized climate.

Conditions for Twitterdipity

Content published from a world-wide, realtime community of incredibly diverse producers and consumers, who all have access to the same high-volume channels in which to influence others and attract the influential, seeds potential twitterdipity moments. Add to this environment the natural affinity for the brain to treat online and offline social interactions exactly the same - creating the same feelings of empathy and rivalry and social pressure to maintain a community decorum - and you've got yourself conditions ripe for twitterdipity.

Take, for instance, the twitterdipity environment that created this post:

I tweeted that I was reading Paul Levinson's book Digital McLuhan - a key book in my education of how McLuhan's ideas work in the Digital Age. Paul Levinson saw the tweet. He saw my bio. ( I called myself a media ecologist and a "bliss follower.") He decides to follow me. I worked up the nerve to ask Levinson - a man who's been interviewed by damned-near everybody, including Bill O'Reilly in a fun boxing match about the mass broadcasting of beheadings, and whose 1972 pychedelic folk rock album "Twice Upon a Rhyme" still appears on cult collector's lists - to answer 5 questions for a post. Levinson agreed. I smiled like crazy for days.

So, what five questions does a rouge media ecologist ask her academic hero, the award-winning sci-fi writer, singer/songwriter, communications professor and oft-interviewed Paul Levinson? These five questions:

Anderson: McLuhan's 1960 "global village" concept includes a tribal environment prone to discord and disagreements due to the invention of worldwide, real-time interconnectivity of electric technology. Yet, in 1966 he said at an author's luncheon in New York, "The satellites, as a new garbage or climate surround around the planet, are moving information at speeds that the planet can not cope with and have created not a global village but a Global Theater. I no longer use the phrase global village. It's global theater now, and everybody out here, and me too, we're all out to do our thing. Jobs are finished, jobs are over, role-playing comes in." (Hear McLuhan say this at the 3:36 mark.) McLuhan's "global theater" idea involves a global village in which everyone acts as both producer and consumer, actor and spectator. So, why do you think that the temperamental "global village" concept is the one that is commonly referenced as McLuhan's predictive metaphor for the Internet rather than the everyone-as-content "global theater" concept?

Levinson: I think 99% of the ascension of global village over global theater has to do with the homespun, populace appeal of village in contrast to the haute, upper-crust vibes of theater. Most people don't go to the theater anymore - or, if they do, it's to see their kids in a high school play. In either case, theater is far more specialized than village. Also, the village is a antonym to global, which gives the metaphor tension, in contrast to global theater, which sounds like something out of Shakespeare. The 1% is that global village had already caught on by 1966.

Anderson: (That was a long question. Here's a short one!) What do you predict will be the long-term effect of the social web (which is becoming an "equalizer" of sorts) on the offline world in terms of access to information and influence?

Levinson: The long-term effect will be that governments, corporations, universities, elite media will find it increasingly difficult to dole information out on their own terms. Information will be out there for everyone, all the time, anywhere they and the information may happen to be. Further, as I detail in my New New Media (2009), all receivers and consumers of information will become producers - anyone can set up a Facebook page, upload a video to YouTube, Tweet 20 hours a day. This means that the difference between professionals and amateurs - between those whose profession it is to produce versus those who produce for love - is becoming less and less. Anyone can write and edit on Wikipedia, and a survey in Nature Magazine a few years ago found no difference in error levels in the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. We come from a world in which gatekeepers decided what the rest of us could see and hear in our media. With the advent of new new media, the gatekeepers are leaving their positions, and the playing field of significant public communication is open to everyone. This is a great step forward for freedom and democracy.

Anderson: Since the very first modem whine, the Internet has been the perfect environment for groups to propagate. With its infinite space and real-time communication, today the Internet sustains countless communities, ranging from metropolitan and bustling to rural and quiet, and more are forming every day. What are your thoughts on the role of the relatively new career of Online Community Manager, a position created to build and manage groups of digital personalities that are joined together under a common interest or goal?

Levinson: My opinion is the Internet is not about empowerment of new leaders, it is about the empowerment of everyone. The idea of an Internet professional community leader is an oxymoron. Leaders arise without training, and survive or not based on their performance, not their credentials, in the new online world.

Anderson: In 1972, McLuhan participated in a debate on the subject "Do books matter?" by giving a speech which he called "The Future of the Book" (Understanding Me, 2003). "The book is not moving towards an omega point," he said, "but is actually in the process of rehearsing and re-enacting all the roles it has ever played, for new graphics and new printing processes invite the simultaneous use of a great diversity of effects." Do you think McLuhan was talking about a new technology (Kindle, Vook, iPad), or a new process in which we define what a book is (a new technology-neutral format)?

Levinson: I think McLuhan was talking about the Internet, without giving it that name, back in 1972. His view of this new "book" is something I explore in Digital McLuhan, where I point out that the Internet is the media of media. Kindle, iPad, etc. have this same quality.

Anderson: Thanks to innovative digital strategies from Wieden + Kennedy, one of the top brand agencies in the world, the brand Old Spice recently enjoyed a 107% increase in sales. The campaign's raging success also created a new benchmark for large agencies who wish to convince their traditional media-minded clients that using inexpensive (even free!) social media tools in their ad campaigns can be very lucrative. What do you see as the fall-out from this adoption of the social web by "big money" agencies for individual producers and consumers of online content, as well as the smaller Internet marketing firms who specialize in digital strategy?

Levinson: The age of Madison Avenue style advertising - what we see aborning on "Mad Men" - is coming to an end. Rather than advertise on traditional media such as television and billboards, campaigns of the future will be closer to what my namesake (but no relative) Jay Conrad Levinson calls "guerrilla marketing." The advertising campaigns of the future will be increasingly waged in the jungles and dirt roads and nooks and crannies of the Internet - all of which may be more direct routes to our minds than looking at a television.

"The Empowerment of Everyone"

With instant access to everything all the time, our global village has little patience with high-gloss, slick campaigns where consumables are layered with glitz to hide mediocrity within. In a village, everyone knows everyone else's business - their strengths, weaknesses, triumphs and failures - which creates the "equalized" playing field that Levinson described as "a great step forward for freedom and democracy." A global village, one that pairs the oxymoronish intimacy of village life with a worldwide web of connectivity, can then lead to a once-impossible moment of twitterdipity, where an up-and-coming media ecologist in Portland, Oregon can pick the brain of a world-renowned and award-winning author, professor, and media environment expert from the East Coast. As Levinson noted, "the Internet is not about empowerment of new leaders, it is about the empowerment of everyone." Thanks to the global village, that everyone includes you and me.

Top photo by Rosaura Ochoa

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If you use Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS for client projects or for your company you've probably stared at the following line: Requirements: PHP 5.2 or better. Yet, when checking back to see what PHP is actually available through the standard yum repos you find... no PHP 5.3 and not even PHP 5.2. Visions of dependencies flash through your mind.

Luckily, there are PHP RPM alternatives. Let's take a look at where to start.

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The Power of Community

There is good news for the weary developer or sysadmin seeking an up to date and well maintained RPM for PHP5.x releases. From the IUS Community Project FAQ:

The IUS Community Project is an effort to package rpms of the latest stable versions of the most commonly requested software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. IUS provides a better way to upgrade PHP/MySQL/Python/Etc on RHEL or CentOS. The project is run by professional Linux Engineers that are primarily focused on RPM Development in the web hosting industry.

Getting started with IUS is very straight forward and you'll find "a better way to upgrade rhel" for more than just PHP.

Once you've completed the steps outlined for updating to reflect the IUS Yum Repository you can expect to see what you once thought was impossible.

Example of final step for upgrading a stock RHEL5.x system to PHP 5.3 system:

A Name You Can Trust

One concern with repos is who might be behind them. Are they reliable? Can they be trusted? Does the repo maintainer own a copy of the movie Glitter? Serious questions are serious! Accepting any old repo you find on the Internet is just plain unacceptable.

Fear not! Simply refer to the SafeRepo Initiative and know that the IUS Community is sponsored by the fine folks at Rackspace. In fact, you can find IUS linked on php.net under "Binaries for other systems".

Feel better? Now what do you want phpinfo() to return on your RHEL server?

Let us know in the comments below!

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Social check-in app GetGlue has been making significant strides in the mobile space lately with the release of an Android app following success on the iPhone earlier this summer. Today, the popular app which allows users to check-in, rate and like things like movies, TV shows and music, has come to everyone's favorite "lean back" entertainment device, the iPad. With some added functionality (and more sticker deals to boot), GetGlue hopes its iPad app will become your couch surfing app of choice for "second screen" media interaction.

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Lean Back, Check In

Those familiar with GetGlue on the Web or on their phones will find the iPad app very familiar. As one would expect, the app lets you check-in to the service's 8 standard categories - music, movies, TV shows, books, games, wine, topics and celebrities. The added screen size of the iPad lets you more efficiently like, rate and comment on items without leaving each screen by utilizing pop-ups and overlays.

The startup hopes these overlays will encourage social interaction on the app as people enjoy things like movies and TV shows. The overlays, which will be familiar to users of the Twitter for iPad app, allow users to chat and discuss the media they are consuming with their friends and contacts in real-time - a practice that has many broadcast channels and movie studios excited.

Stickers from Glee, Dexter, TWiT and More

So excited, in fact, that many have refreshed their campaigns for special GetGlue stickers, which users can collect by watching and checking into shows and events. FOX has agreed to promote its wildly popular show Glee, long-running hit Bones, as well as a pair of new shows - Raising Hope and Lone Star - with special GetGlue Stickers.

HBO is running a unique campaign that rewards users for checking into each new episode of its anticipated series Boardwalk Empire. If users watch each episode on its debut night in succession, they will "level up" and earn a special sticker at the end of the season. Other shows and movies announcing campaigns include Showtime's Dexter, PBS' NOVA and Charlie Rose, Universal Pictures' upcoming releases Catfish and Devil, and Leo Laporte's TWiT podcast network.

According to GetGlue's Fraser Kelton, media networks have been impressed by the results their sticker campaigns have garnered, attracting them back again for expanded programs.

"Within 5 minutess of True Blood airing 2 weeks ago, 5,000 fans concurrently checked-in with an estimated reach of about 1 million people on Twitter," says Kelton. "The benefit of having trusted recommendations coming out from friends and reaching that number of people is a huge win for them."

Kelton adds that shows and movies that run sticker promotions on GetGlue see far better engagement from the platform compared to those that don't. While this is to be expected, it is evidence that the social check-in platform is a viable market for advertising campaigns from big brands, stations, and studios.

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Automatic translation tools like Google Translate allow you to get a very rough understanding of a text in a foreign language. For the most part, though, these translations are anything but perfect and can't capture the nuances and idioms that professional translators can. Linguee, a Germany-based startup, is a contextual translation search engine that walks the middle ground between machine translation and online dictionary (with some crowdsourcing mixed in for good measure). The tool offers support for English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French and is one of the best online translation dictionaries we have seen.

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The Web as a Dictionary

Unlike most of the online dictionaries you are probably familiar with, Linguee doesn't just replicate a licensed version of a print dictionary. Linguee also offers regular dictionary definitions, but what sets it apart from its competition is that the Linguee team developed something akin to a translation search engine. The company's webcrawler looks for professionally translated texts on the public Internet that exist in two or more languages. The European Union, for example, publishes most of its documents and patents in numerous languages (as does the Canadian government). Linguee also looks for professionally translated texts on company websites and other public resources such as technical journals. Because of this wide range of source texts, Linguee often knows the translations of words that would otherwise only appear in highly specialized translation dictionaries.

Once indexed, the company's algorithms then a) decide whether the quality of the crawled translation is good enough (does the length of the two texts match, for example) and b) create a translation index for the words and idioms in these texts. As Finke told us, the theory behind the company's tools is well known among academics, but before Linguee came along, nobody had really put these theories to work yet.

As Linguee's co-founder Leonard Finke told us earlier this week, thanks to this approach, the tools excels in handling words that have multiple meanings and in translation idiomatic expressions. While Google Translate, for example, turns "ballpark figure" into "Ballpark Abbildung" in German (a picture in or of a ballpark), Linguee knows the right translation ("Sch�tzung"). In addition to the translation itself, Linguee also displays examples of the searched for words in context.

Besides the web version of the dictionary, Linguee also offers plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer, as well as a dashboard widget for OSX.

Crowdsourcing

While Linguee mostly relies on its own algorithms, users can also vote translations up and down and suggest alternative translations. These votes are then taken into account by the machine-learning algorithm.

Users who sign up for the service and offer a lot of good suggestions and contribute their own suggestions get to see an ad-free version of the site. As Finke told us, this is a good way to reward the tool's most active users.

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Multi-column, multi-platform social network client TweetDeck has issued an update that fixes a few bugs and adds "some small, but important, new features". We're talking support for Twitter's t.co URL shortener, uploading pics to Posterous and even sending out tweets that are longer than the 140 character limit.

The update is just for the standard desktop client, not the "super-swanky User Streams Preview version", but TweetDeck promises an upgrade for that is also on the way soon.

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The first feature you might notice in the new TweetDeck is the "Trending Topics" column, which shows Twitter trending topics - or popular topics being discussed on Twitter - and explains the trends using WhatTheTrend.com. TweetDeck even lets you escape ethnocentrism, or embrace it as it may be, by letting you chose the country to focus on for trending topics, because maybe the fact that today is "Administrator's Day" in Brazil just doesn't matter to you. Or maybe it really does.

Two of our favorite new features, however, are "smart cross-posting for longer tweets" and support for t.co, Twitter's new URL shortener that is about to become the default across the network.

If you want to post an update that's longer than Twitter's 140 character limit, TweetDeck will let you, as long as you have a Google Buzz account. It will automatically truncate your update to 140 characters and include a link to the full text on your Buzz account. The only thing we wish here is that it would do the same with Facebook, instead. As for t.co, hovering your mouse pointer over a shortened link will now show the destination URL, taking away the mystery of clicking on a shortened URL.

In addition to all of those, TweetDeck has also added the ability to post photos directly to Posterous - a much requested feature - and support for logging in using a TweetDeck account, which helps to automatically add your accounts if you ever need to re-install.

A full list of additions and bug-fixes is available in the full changelog.

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A new report released today from mobile media provider Myxer examines the current trends among "check-in" applications, that is, the particular group of location-based mobile social networks that allow users to announce their arrival at a specific venue in return for rewards, coupons, deals or other offers. The company found that among the top mobile check-in applications, there was a clear leader: Booyah Networks' MyTown, a location-based game built around your own city's local shops and businesses. MyTown is heavily favored by consumers, attracting 56% of the mobile audience that uses location-based applications such as these. Loopt was in second place, with 12% of users and Gowalla and Foursquare lagged even further behind, at only 8% each.

However, only 11% of mobile users are participating in the location-based social networking community, with the majority of mobile users claiming they're simply "not interested" in these types services.

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Myxer surveyed over 1,500 users in the U.S. and found that only 11% of the respondents used these location-based mobile applications. While that figure seems low, it's actually several points higher than analyst firm Forrester Research's report from July, which claimed that only 4% of U.S. adults used apps like these.

Forrester also claimed that only 1% of those who use location-based apps do so more than once per week. Myxer, however, found heavier usage. 31% of those surveyed claimed they check-in a couple of times per week, 30% check in once per day, 26% check in every hour (who are these people, we wonder?) and 13% said they check in just a couple of times per month.

The new survey also found that the use of location-based services is increasing within its user base, with 74% saying they've been using the apps more often than before, while 27% said they've been decreasing their use. Nearly half (47%) of respondents say they use 2-5 location-based social networks, 45% say they use just one and only 8% say they use 6 or more.

Who Uses Location-Based Social Networks? Those Who Don't Care About Privacy

Another interesting insight the data reveals is that the current users of location-based social networking services aren't overly concerned with their privacy, it seems. A whopping 77% of the users reported that they check in the most often from their own home. Work, restaurants, the gym and events trailed with 16%, 3%, 2% and 2% respectively as other popular check-in venues.

The users of these services are also surprisingly social, especially given the concerns over cyber-stalking that these networks could contribute to. In fact, 59% said that they have more friends on their location-based networks than on their traditional social networks like Facebook and Twitter. 41% said they have less. They also said their primary reasons for using the apps is to share their location with their friends (58%) and to find out where their friends are located (42%).

As for the demographic make up of the users, the largest group (30%) is 35-54 and the second largest group (22%) is 25-24, which seems to imply these networks are skewing older than Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps this is because using check-in services require users to move about around the city, a freedom which tweens and teens don't often have in the same degree. Only 19% of location-based apps users are teens (13-17 years old) and 22% are young adults (18-24). And those aged 55+ make up 7% of users, according to the data collected.

Who Doesn't Use Location-Based Networks and Why?

As for the large majority of mobile users - the 89% who say they don't use check-in services at all - privacy, surprisingly, isn't the top concern regarding their non-use of these services. Instead, 23% of users say they are unable to participate because their phone doesn't have the ability to use location-based apps, which often exist solely as mobile applications on smartphones.

The larger majority (56%) say they're simply "not interested." That engagement hurdle is what makers of location-based applications and games are now working to overcome. By providing more rewards, coupons, discounts and deals while also offering spirited and fun gameplay, some of those 56% may eventually change their minds. As we've noted earlier, rewards are the key to location-based application success.

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It's been a few years since online retail giant Amazon started offering hosted e-commerce payment services in the form of Checkout by Amazon, and today the company has rolled out some upgraded features that should be good news for merchants. Third-party sellers now have the ability to provide customers with a full-blown Amazon.com experience from directly within their own site, including address book and payment method information.

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Amazon believes these updates to Checkout will help deter the abandonment of shopping carts and boost sales for merchants. Previously, Checkout redirected customers to Amazon.com to process orders originating from independent merchant sites, causing confusion and frustration for customers. Now when a user clicks the "Checkout with Amazon" button on a merchant site, they will be able to enter their payment information and access their address book without leaving that site.

"These enhancements to Checkout by Amazon reflect the feedback we've received from merchants who want to offer Amazon.com customers the convenience of using their account information with a more streamlined buying experience," said Baris Cetinok, General Manager of Amazon Payments.

Merchants will be pleased with the deeper site integration now found in Checkout, and customers should be excited that making purchases with their Amazon account on third-party sites its faster and more streamlined. Competitors like PayPal and Google Checkout have allowed customers to buy directly from merchant sites with embeddable tools for over a year. Amazon fans should be glad to see their horse get back in the race and become a more viable option for hosted e-commerce payments.

Amazon has been continually working to improve Checkout, including last year's introduction of PayPhrase, which sped up payments by allowing users to enter a phrase and a PIN to quickly purchase items. The upgrades to Checkout come at an opportune time for Amazon as retailers prepare for another busy holiday shopping season.

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If you have ever pulled your hair out over maintaining SQL statements intermingled with your PHP project code you might not be alone. Perhaps you considered abstraction or wished your database had an API. You might have even heard of an Object Relational Mapper (ORM).

Let's take a quick look at ORM for your next PHP project.

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The Perfect (st)ORM

The ORM offerings for PHP projects have come a long way. A query on stackoverflow returns over 100 hits on php+orm. With that in mind, focusing on one PHP ORM might be helpful as you to consider your next PHP project.

As with any solution in the PHP community you can expect to see several contenders for the best mousetrap prize. While no ORM is perfect, each will cater to specific needs and have varied levels of integration or consideration for PHP frameworks. Features can range from simplified abstraction to code generation to support for various underlying databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird to IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle.

Doctrine was mentioned recently in the RWH review of zfKit as part of its easy out-of-the-box Zend Framework experience. You may also find features in the Doctrine 2.0 release to be of interest if you need caching or support for writing your own interfaces and abstract classes for when your database of choice is not supported at the time of a stable release.

A recent presentation highlighted Doctrine 2.0 as being a fresh take on the expansion of the PHP ORM options showing up in sourceforge, github, and related project hosting services.

Doctrine 2 - Not The Same Old Php OrmView more presentations from Jonathan Wage.

(Slide 14 is an instant favorite)

I want a $drug->new()

Of course, even if you focus on Doctrine you find references to alternative ORM options such as Propel. This is because an ORM can often be found intermingled in wider discussion of PHP MVC frameworks.

For example, Propel is often mentioned in relation to Symfony and CodeIgniter or as another alternative to using Doctrine with other PHP MVC frameworks. In addition, the Propel blog is a good resource for extracting the value when using Propel or any ORM in general.

Again, there is more than just one ORM option in the PHP community. You may have even ended up writing your own at one point or found your MVC framework came with a library that supplied ORM functionality.

When selecting an ORM, what are your considerations? What did you expect to gain from the ORM? Have you had success or strugles with use of an ORM in your projects?

Let us know in the comments below!

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Today, Apple announced it is relaxing the previous restrictions on the use of third-party development tools for the creation of mobile applications on iOS, the operating system that powers the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod Touch. Specifically, sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 of the iOS Developer Program have been modified with new language that rolls back some of the changes that were enacted earlier this year.

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The first two sections included restrictions on the use of development tools that allowed developers to code in languages familiar to them, like Adobe Flash, then port those applications to the iOS platform. Section 3.3.9 also placed restrictions on the use of third-party software within an app whose purpose was to collect and analyze app usage data.

According to the Apple press release, these decisions were made because the company "listened to our developers" and has "taken much of their feedback to heart."

Most of the complaints at the time of the initial changes revolved around Apple's decision to ban the use of Adobe's "Packager for iPhone," a tool that allowed Flash developers to leverage their existing skills in order to produce iPhone applications. The announcement led to escalated tensions between the two companies, and shortly thereafter Apple exec CEO Steve Jobs posted a lengthy piece on Apple.com that explained all the reasons why his company did not want Flash technology on any of its mobile devices, whether as a plugin or as an app-creation tool.

However, today's news doesn't just affect Adobe Flash developers, although they were the most vocal about the prior ban - it could also permit the use of other mobile development technologies including Sun's Java or Microsoft's Silverlight/Mono, notes Apple-watching blog, AppleInsider.

They also point out that the decision, in part, may not be simply because Apple "listened to feedback" but because of recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations that had the regulatory body looking into the complaint regarding the Flash ban, among other things.

Meanwhile, as the language in the Apple Developer continued to change on an ongoing basis, developers interested in building mobile applications for iOS had to remain constantly vigilant that they were not using any technology that could later come under fire from Apple.

When Apple then updated the section banning the use of some third-party analytics services, the move was called out as permitting an unfair competitive advantage for Apple's own iAds advertising platform and analytics service over competitors' services, like Flurry, Distimo and most notably, Google's AdMob, all of which were popular among mobile app developers for monitoring usage numbers and other details about how consumers were interacting with the mobile apps.

Apple says it will also publish its App Store Review Guidelines online in an effort to be more transparent with the community. This decision is likely due to the constant media attention given to each and every mobile application that Apple bars from entry into its App Store, removes from the store, or leaves in limbo, awaiting approval for months on end.

The full text of the Apple Press Release is below:

The App Store? has revolutionized the way mobile applications are developed and distributed. With over 250,000 apps and 6.5 billion downloads, the App Store has become the world's largest mobile application platform and App Store developers have earned over one billion dollars from the sales of their apps.

We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store.

The App Store is perhaps the most important milestone in the history of mobile software. Working together with our developers, we will continue to surprise and delight our users with innovative mobile apps.

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We are fascinated here at ReadWriteWeb about Hadoop. It can be used in so many ways. It gives you that sense of excitement that shows how big data can open up all kinds of possibilities.

So we got a tad excited tonight when we ran across a post by Mike Pearce about "10 Hadoopable Problems: or in other words, 10 things you can do with Hadoop. But excitement turned to disappointment when it reminded us of how limiting we can be when thinking about big data in standard terms.

We won't go into detail about each of the 10 ways Hadoop can be used. You can go check out the post yourself. Instead, we'll highlight a few and provide our own little view about big data, the failings of geek culture and the role information plays in our interface culture.

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Hadoop is a transforming technology that through its analytic capabilities, can change the way we interface with the world. We use the term interface in deference to Interface Culture, the book by Steven Johnson that explored the Web's interactive elements and technology interfaces. He looked at buttons, links and metaphors such as the desktop and traced them back to medieval planning, Victorian novels, early cinema and the rise of our modern culture.

The interface culture we develop out of big data will spawn new works that help guide us into unfamiliar spaces as much as novels helped the Victorian era make sense of the new, industrial world.

Hadoop is a tool increasingly used to make sense of a new world that automatically creates data in overwhelming amounts. We manually create our own data through gestures on Facebook, from the images we post to Flickr and the tweets we post religiously. But data is also created automatically by intelligent agents who do the work on our behalf, sending information from machine-to-machine, analyzing itself along the way, increasing in intelligence through APIs or forking into new realms as its manipulated and turned into apps, recommendation engines and the rest.

Transforming data helps us make sense of an information universe, By analyzing it we create our own interface culture and in the process, better understand our world. New art, new intellectual movements and new societies will emerge from the data we are just starting to learn how to chisel into new shapes, new scuptures if you will that tells stories about who we are.

Unfortunately, the 10 examples (from a Cloudera presentation) don't draw us into a new world of possibilities. Sure, fraud detection (number seven) is important. Goodness knows how often we hear about it. I am sure there are lots of surveillance geeks out there who love the idea of monitoring trade with Hadoop as pointed out in number 8. Ad targeting comes in the four spot. That's a familiar topic. Search quality is ninth. More yawns. You get the picture.

All of these examples explore what we have become accustomed to in geek culture. Possibilities for how big data can be used in a strictly commercial sense or as a way to optimize processes or the technologies we have already developed.

It's implausible to believe that we will see any kind of diversity in geek culture if we continue grinding down this technically oriented view of the data around us. Focusing on incremental improvements in processes has been done for generations. It will make people a lot of money but its impact is minimal in the world we live. It will create jobs. We will without a doubt see a new generation of data analysts but there is more to this big data, right?

Perhaps it is too early to expect a renaissance. It's like we are medieval artists who are struggling to move beyond the concept of flat images. We are too consumed in the technological marvels of what we have created to fully understand the implications of what we have discovered and with it what we can create.

We will admit it is getting simpler to develop technologies and easier for people to use. More people are making apps. We have a new generation of developers who have taught themselves by following the principles of the view-source culture. More women are making inroads. We can thank open standards for that.

It's the software that mixes and cooks up that data which will truly transform our world. When that data is as accessible as flour is for baking or clay for sculpting then Hadoop and other analytics technologies like it will have real meaning.

And perhaps it is the ability to discover data and perform tricks with it that opens up this marvelous world. A world made from the big data we shape into images that help us realize an interface culture of a new modern era.

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Earlier this week we looked at the upcoming launch of Google TV. It's slated for this fall (U.S.) and will be integrated into a new line of Sony Internet TVs. Meanwhile a Swedish company has just launched its own Internet TV, built on top of Google's open source Android Operating System.

The company is called People of Lava and its new line of Internet TVs is called Scandinavia (in the same way that Sony has a line of TVs called 'Bravia'). With the tagline "Window to the World," the Scandanavia comes in 3 sizes: 42", 47" and 55". The new product was unveiled this week at the IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin.

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Firstly, to clarify that Google TV is a software product built on Android. It will be integrated into televisions (like the Sony Internet TV) and set-top boxes. It appears that People of Lava plans to integrate Google TV into its TVs too, but for now it has gotten a jump on Sony by building its own Android-based Internet TV software.

The People of Lava TV will come pre-loaded with applications, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, email client and a web browser. The browser is custom built, based on Webkit (the foundation of many modern web browsers, including Safari and Chrome). The company says that it will launch a "People of Lava App Store," but no time frame has been given. Also included in the TV package is a wireless keyboard with a pointer/mouse.

Right now the TVs are only available to purchase in Sweden.

How Will it Compare to Sony Internet TV?

It will be interesting to see how this fares against the Sony line when that's released in the fall, as Sony has the benefit of having the official Google TV software integrated from the get-go. Sony is also of course a well established TV manufacturing brand, whereas People of Lava is relatively unknown.

People of Lava is clearly trying to get a jump on Google's anointed partner Sony and establish a name for itself in Internet TVs. However it's likely to be short-lived glory, as Sony's offering will surely be more advanced due to the inclusion of Google TV. So the question will become: how fast can People of Lava iterate to compete?

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Advertisers have long talked about the mystical possibilities of using real-time location data to target customers. The technology existed; most cell phones have a GPS receiver in case of emergency. But real-time location data was off-limits to advertisers until Web-centric phones introduced people to the concept of sharing their location in exchange for utility. Soon, along came apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, which essentially trick users into sharing their real-time location with advertisers. Suddenly, location-aware marketing is red hot.

"It's huge and it's increasing," said Michael Becker, a director at the Mobile Marketing Association. "Location is going to play an increasingly critical role in enabling successful consumer engagement through and with the mobile phone."

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For advertisers, the growth of real-time location data felt like an explosion that "blew up overnight," Becker said.

Big name advertisers seem to be throwing money at location-based services. Brightkite is reportedly charging between $10,000 and $20,000 for local promotions. Foursquare seems to be announcing a new A-list corporate partner every week, including Starbucks and MTV. And Shopkick, the treasure hunt of consumption, launched with Best Buy, Macy's and American Eagle among its sponsors - which had to install special audio transmitters in all their participating stores just so the app will know when a user walks in.

Advertisers are excited because location-aware ads really work, Becker said, citing a study that showed nearly 50% of users who are shown a location-aware ad on a mobile device will "take some action," beating out text messaging (37%) and Web display ads (28%).

But isn't that because location-savvy ads are fairly novel? Advertisers were also excited about display ads in the early days of the Web, when users were so unaccustomed to browsing that they clicked on anything that caught their attention. Doesn't it seem like the higher engagement reported for location-aware ads could be because a user is not used to seeing her city or neighborhood mentioned in an ad on her phone?

Newness may be inflating the numbers a bit, Becker acknowledged, but advertisers will just create more engaging and sophisticated ads as time goes on. But location is just one of many important factors in mobile marketing. Advertisers also consider a consumer's age, type of phone, even time of day.

"Location is not necessarily the goal of the interaction. Rather, location is a piece of information that provides context to the user experience and can create a more relevant and engaging interaction with the consumer," Becker said.

Advertisers in the U.S. will spend $1.8 billion on location-aware marketing in 2015, according to a recent report by market research firm ABI Research. (By comparison, advertisers in the U.S. spent $10 billion on search advertsing in 2008.)

Not every advertiser will care about location, said Neil Strother, a director at ABI Research who put together the report. For restaurants and bars, real-time location is crucial. But for NBC or Coke, not so much.

And there are lots of companies hesitant to join in the location game, Strother said. That's because of inexperience and fears about threatening consumers' comfort level. "The next few years will be very important for companies to get it right and not abuse the location information they're getting," he said.

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You can't pay with your phone at the register yet, but you can use it to pay the babysitter. MoneySend, an application from MasterCard for sending and requesting money in informal person-to-person transactions, is now out in the BlackBerry App World.

MasterCard's app lags significantly behind PayPal's mobile payment app, available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry, except perhaps that MasterCard has more cache and credibility with older generations. But MoneySend's shortcomings aside, MasterCard is clearly excited about mobile-enhanced shopping.

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MoneySend for BlackBerry is the latest in a slew of MasterCard-branded apps including Marketplace Overwhelming Offers, which pushes users steep daily discounts, Easy Savings Program, which locates nearby discounts from participating merchants, Priceless Picks, an app to encourage shoppers to geotag and share deals, and ATM Hunter.

MoneySend lets users send, request, receive and manage money from the app. Hook the app up to your bank or credit union and link it to your debit card or MasterCard credit card to send money. You can also create a prepaid account through Bancorp Bank, an FDIC-insured online bank. Then manage your transactions, which are subject to some fees, from within the app. No financial data is stored on the device, according to MasterCard.

With MoneySend, both parties have to have the MoneySend app in order to complete a transaction. You can also send money to the mobile phone number of a non-user, who will then get an invite to join MoneySend and pick up the payment. That means until now, a sender would have to be sure the recipient was using an iPhone.

There was speculation that MasterCard's mobile payments could compete with PayPal's when the MoneySend iPhone app launched three months ago. That doesn't seem to have happened. MoneySend has three out of five stars in the App Store, compared to four out of five for PayPal. Simply put, PayPal's mobile app is more navigable and less restrictive. Also: PayPal's userbase is larger, you can connect its app to non-MasterCard credit cards and you can first bump to transfer money. But maybe opening MoneySend up to BlackBerry's well-heeled users will encourage adoption.

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When Google announced this morning that it would be delivering search results to users in real time as they type a query, it rightfully generated quite a bit of chatter and intrigue in the tech world and beyond.

The changes are certain to fundamentally change the way people interact with the world's biggest search engine. But what is less clear is how this game-changing update will affect search engine optimization and search traffic referrals to Websites.

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The Impact on Speed, Refining Searches and the "Long Tail" of Search

Google Instant does two things: it returns results more quickly and it predicts search queries as the user types.

While it's too early to predict the implications of this with any certainty, a few speculations come to mind. For one, searching on Google is going to become a much speedier process for the end user, who may now be less likely than ever to click through to the second page of results. Searchers will also be able to more quickly refine their search terms on the fly, which could either prove to be good or bad for site owners.

"It seems to me that the top three rankings will get even more value," says Ian Lurie, President of Portent Interactive and blogger at Conversation Marketing. "Also, long-tail search is going to be more important, since folks can just keep typing until they see what they want."

On the other hand, John Ellis at Search Engine Land wondered earlier if Google Instant would "kill the long tail" of paid search advertising by making it less worthwhile to bid on more specific, long tail keywords.

How the User Experience Will Change

According to Avichal Garg, former Product Manager of Search Quality at Google, the impact of Google Instant on SEO and search performance will come as a result of changes in the user experience, not the ranking algorithm, per se.

He cites query construction patterns, click patterns, page scanning behavior and the ease of making search query refinements (re-searching) as examples of user behaviors that are likely to be different from here on out.

"It will have a tremendous impact," says Garg. "User behavior will change. And good SEO is all about understanding end user behavior."

Will It Impact Traffic to My Site?

For insight into whether the volume of search traffic to one's site will change, look no further than the Google's own Webmaster Central Blog, which advises site owners that they "may notice some changes in your search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant." The post goes on to explain that the number of impressions for many search queries is likely to increase. In other words, the number of times a given site is displayed in results (whether they're clicked or not) is bound to go up, since users no longer need even finish typing a search query before the results show up.

Google's Matt Cutts Chimes In

Perhaps the most insightful commentary on Google Instant's potential impact on SEO came in a blog post from Goolger Matt Cutts a few hours after the company's announcement:

"The search results will remain the same for a query, but it's possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson's blog that had been on page 2 of the search results."

Are you concerned about how Google Instant might impact your site's visibility on Google? What do you think about the new feature in general? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Craigslist took down Adult Services in the U.S. four days ago, replacing it with the word "censored" without explanation. Advocates seized on the ambiguous move today, calling on Craigslist to remove the infamous section in cities across the world.

It's hard to say what the effect of shuttering Adult Services will be on the profitability of the sex trade. But it will certainly curtail Craigslist's ability to profit from sex traders.

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The New York Times estimates Adult Services ads could have brought in $44 million for Craigslist this year, based on the $10 it costs to post and $5 to repost. Post-censorship, ads for sex are migrating to other classifieds sites and other sections of Craigslist. The first stop after getting kicked out of Adult Services is the personals section "Casual Encounters," where it is free to post an ad.

By focusing on Adult Services, Craigslist's opponents are targeting a symptom instead of a problem.

"If Craigslist is seriously committed to ending the site's use as a platform for sex trafficking and the sexual enslavement of children and young women, it will immediately close the remaining sections around the world," the groups said in statement.

Ending the site's use as a platform. Not ending abusive sex trafficking, because shutting down Adult Services won't do that. Really, advocates want Craigslist to stop being a "digital pimp," to borrow Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd's phrase. From an advocate's perspective, the fact that Craigslist makes money off of prostitution and sex trafficking - some of it voluntary, some of it coerced and some involving minors - colors anything the company says.

Profit is a powerful motivator and the fact that Craigslist makes so much money off these ads undermines its moral authority [UPDATE: A reader points out that Craigslist started charging for these ads after negotiations with attorneys general and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, so that credit card information could be kept on file. But the ads now constitute a significant portion of the site's revenue]. But is ending that revenue stream a worthy pursuit, given the strong arguments that Craigslist does more good than harm by making it easy for law enforcement to find and track sex traffickers, and empowering prostitutes to escape often-abusive middlemen?

On Monday, there were 23,453 ads posted in the "Adult Services" section across Craigslist sites for cities outside the U.S., according to the anti-human trafficking advocacy group The Polaris Project. By comparison, there were 12,834 ads posted in Adult Services" in the U.S. on Tuesday, July 21, 2009. (Singapore, where the Internet is censored for porn, is the only Craigslist site without an Adult Services section. Ironically, Singapore has an aboveground sex industry regulated by the government.) Getting the section taken down in the rest of the world is now top priority for the groups behind this push.

Craigslist fumbled its public response to accusations that it encourages abusive prostitution (see Feeling Burned By the Press, Craigslist Hunkers Down), even though it has two strong arguments from both the free speech and human rights angles as well as the protection of the law. Perhaps we'll see a better defense based on data collected during the Adult Services blackout when Craigslist testifies before Congress during a hearing on sex trafficking of minors on Sept. 15.

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