Internet & Media

AUSTIN, Texas--Privacy is not dead in the era of online social networking. It just needs careful curation.

That was the message Saturday from Danah Boyd, a social-media expert who works for Microsoft Research and who was Saturday's keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here.

Boyd is one of the original social-media researchers, having spent years studying the dynamics of how systems like MySpace and Facebook impact teens and youth culture, and how that culture is impacting such services. But she also has demonstrated over the years a keen sense of how people across all age … Read more

I am writing this while wearing a rather cool sweatshirt that I put on for the occasion. I bought it at a 70 percent reduction. It is sort of a beige color, and it has a weird diagonal zip. It was designed by an Austrian.

What else would you like to know? I'll tell you anything. I want to be a truly modern human. A model human, really--one who just doesn't care what people know about me. One who will divulge anything to anyone. (Which, incidentally, many Europeans believe is exactly what Americans do on first meeting.)

You … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Analysts reported on Saturday that Apple sold 120,000 units of the iPad, an untested device that the vast majority of consumers have never seen or touched. Can you tap into that same gadget mania to sell an electric car?

General Motors thinks so. The company's Chevy division is a sponsor of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), which it's using as a test platform for all sorts of edgy social-media marketing projects, but perhaps more importantly, it's previewing its forthcoming Chevy Volt plug-in electric car. The skeleton framework of a Volt was set up … Read more

Hunch, a buzzy start-up that answers questions using crowdsourced recommendations, has resolved one query of its own: who's going to fund our B round?

Sources tell me that Khosla Ventures is leading a new round that will add another $10 million to $12 million to the start-up's bank account. General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway, who put $2 million into the company a year ago, are reinvesting.

I'm told that Gideon Yu, the former chief financial officer of both Facebook and YouTube, is steering the investment for Khosla.

Hunch was co-founded by Caterina Fake, … Read more

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski laid out the "broadband plan for children and families" Friday at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Referring to children as "our most precious national resource," Genachowski said "we must do everything we can to educate and prepare them to thrive in the 21st century and keep them safe." New technologies, he said, "can expose our children to new dangers, and can potentially outpace the ability of parents to guide their children."

Genachowski had a mostly positive view of technology for kids, … Read more

Sometimes, we say things we just don't mean. Or, more accurately, that we really do mean, but we wish we hadn't said in public.

Still, with fewer people seeming to care about privacy anymore, the untoward consequences of our free expressions can be costly. It seems, for example, that saying something nasty to your ex-girlfriend on Facebook might cost you 165 British pounds (around $250).

According to the Telegraph, Darren Mattox, a 29-year-old from Wrexham, Wales, confessed in court to writing something "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene, or menacing character" to a Facebook friend … Read more

I'm a big believer in cloud-based music services. As wireless bandwidth increases, there's no reason that my collection of music (or other content, such as pictures) should be limited to the small hard drive that comes with my phone or MP3 player, or bound to various types of swappable memory sticks.

On-demand subscription services like Spotify, Rhapsody, and Thumbplay are one solution. But I'm also seeing more interest in the concept of the "music locker," which lets you back up your computer-based music collection into the cloud--Melodeo is working on an update to Nutsie that … Read more

AUSTIN--They like to say that at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), everybody acts like they're living in the future, which tends to be a very polite way of saying that everyone treats their smartphones as prosthetic extensions of the body. But if it's indeed the future, it's the future from one of those dystopian films where nearly every millimeter of available physical and digital space is somehow plastered with advertisements.

This happens every year. Marketers and advertisers eager to snare the attention of SXSWi-goers away from the glowing screens of their iPhones and Droids flood … Read more

If you haven't been to Paris, I have the next best thing for you: Paris 26 Gigapixels.

According to the site, "Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2,346 single photos showing a very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital." The site allows users to pan around the beautiful city of Paris to see important spots. Users can also zoom in on different sections to get more detail on particular buildings.

For those folks who want to find important Paris monuments quickly, the site also boasts a list of 20 places around the city. Upon … Read more