Digital Media

This won't come as a surprise to, well, anyone who has spent considerable time on the Web, but a new study found that people act much differently online than offline.

According to eMarketer, which published the report on Monday, "cyberdisinhibition" has caused many Web users to behave much differently online than they would in a typical offline setting. In fact, the market-research firm, which cites findings from Euro RSCG Worldwide, says 43 percent of U.S.-based Web users feel less inhibited online. It also found that "the effect is most prominent among females and users ages 25 to 54."

Of course, being less inhibited online can lead to both positive and negative behaviors. The research firm found that the Web helps 55.6 percent of men and 51.4 percent of women feel more "able to to meet new people." Users are also using the Web to "be empowered to do something they wanted to." The study found that 33.9 percent of male respondents and 29.2 percent of female respondents do things on the Web that they might not otherwise feel able to do offline.

That said, Web users are also more likely to take a company or brand to task online than they would in person. The study found that 24.4 percent of male respondents have "lashed out" at companies on the Internet. Women did it a little less with about 15.8 percent of respondents saying that they had lashed out.

eMarketer's report also highlighted an interesting change in the way people prefer to communicate. A whopping 48.7 percent of respondents said they find electronic communication far more convenient than communicating with others in a face-to-face setting.

From a social perspective, 57.6 percent of respondents said they disagree with the assertion that "online socializing is for sad, antisocial types." Phew. That's how I communicate these days.

eBay is criticizing a French court's ruling that orders the company to pay a $2.55 million fine to European conglomerate LVMH.

The auction giant and its European unit were fined 1.7 million euros on Monday by the Commercial Court of Paris, which ruled that the company violated a 2008 court order by not preventing the sale of legitimate LVMH perfumes and cosmetics. LVMH's brands include Christian Dior, Guerlain, and Givenchy perfumes.

In June 2008, the Commercial Court fined eBay $61 million in a lawsuit filed by the conglomerate, which is officially known as LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. LVMH had asserted that eBay had not done enough to stamp out the sale of fake LVMH goods on its site. The court went a step further, ruling that eBay-traded LVMH products--even authentic ones--were not being sold by an authorized reseller. As a result, eBay was ordered to remove all listings of these products.

eBay criticized the ruling then, saying it was an attempt by LVMH to "protect uncompetitive commercial practices." eBay likewise condemned the new ruling.

"Today's outcome hurts consumers by preventing them from buying and selling authentic items online," Alex von Schirmeister, general manager of eBay in France, said in a statement. "The injunction is an abuse of 'selective distribution.' It effectively enforces restrictive distribution contracts, which is anti-competitive."

Despite its objections, eBay argued that it has complied with the 2008 court order. The company said it has used state-of-the-art filtering software to check millions of listings each day, making thousands of authentic LVMH products invisible or inaccessible to French eBay users.

eBay also discounted the proof brought against it, claiming that LVMH offered details on only 1,341 listings out of 200 million posted on the auction site each day. eBay believes those listings were deliberately posted by people to sneak past the filters. In 1,091 of the listings targeted by LVMH, the seller did not accurately describe the item, using misspelled brand names, no brand names at all, or only pictures to describe the product.

As a result, eBay asserts that both the fine and ruling are unjustified. The fine itself is disproportionate given that eBay complied with the injunction," said von Schirmeister. "It is out of step with our legal victories in France, U.K., Germany, Belgium and the U.S."

eBay plans to appeal the new ruling and two other cases tied to LVMH. "We believe that the higher courts will overturn this ruling and ensure that e-commerce companies such as eBay will continue to provide a platform for buyers and sellers to trade authentic goods," said von Schirmeister.

eBay has been in and out of U.S. and European courtrooms for years, sued by companies trying to clamp down on the sale of fake versions of their legitimate products. It's faced courtroom battles with several European powerhouses, winning cases against L'Oreal and Tiffany, but losing suits filed by LVMH.

Twitter has had quite a year. Not only has it attracted worldwide attention and millions of new users, "Twitter" has been named the top word in the English language for 2009.

According to the Global Language Monitor, which examines language usage across the world, "Twitter" beat out "Obama," "H1N1," "stimulus," and "vampire" to take the crown. Interestingly, "2.0" came in at sixth place.

"In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the aftereffects of a financial tsunami, and the death of a revered pop icon, the word 'Twitter' stands above all the other words," Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, said Sunday in a statement. "Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters. Being limited to strict formats did wonders for the sonnet and haiku. One wonders where this highly impractical word-limit will lead as the future unfolds."

To compile its data, the Global Language Monitor uses its proprietary algorithm, called the Predictive Quantities Indicator. According to the company, the algorithm "tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet." It also monitors blogs and social media. Word frequency, contextual usage, and "appearance in global media outlets" contribute to a word's popularity.

Click here to see a full listing of the top words, phrases, and names of the year--and of the decade.

I don't get "Black Friday," and I don't get the people who actually spend Black Friday at the mall. (Also, when did "doorbuster" become part of the argot? I missed the memo on that one). I do get the people who do their holiday shopping online, though, and there are more of them every day.

Here are the latest numbers from ComScore, which says that online holiday shopping is up a bit this year. That's not saying a lot, since last year's sales were soft. But for the record, sales are up 3 percent so far, and Web sales were up 11 percent on Black Friday.

(Credit: ComScore)

But note that consumers say they're spending less overall than they did less year: they told interviewers they intend to spend 8 percent less than they did in 2008.

Not surprisingly, people spent a whole lot of time on the Web's most popular retail sites on Friday: Traffic at Amazon, Wal-Mart, Apple, Target, and Best Buy, sites were all up, ComScore reports.

Next up: Dutiful reporting on "Cyber Monday," tomorrow's artificial construct. Still, I'm not complaining. This is way better than trudging out to the mall for the annual "interview of shoppers in a parking lot" piece that newspapers still insist on assigning.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.

I have avoided Black Friday every year. Somehow, the idea of baying, greedy crowds fighting for $100 off some piece of electronica seems like the equivalent of searching for stray wax in a stranger's ears.

But there's a Best Buy opposite the greatest Starbucks in the world--at Marin City, Calif. (one-time home of Tupac Shakur). And, struggling after an interesting Thanksgiving meal of, well, too much good food, wine, and secrets told after the good food and wine, I parked outside my Starbucks and was drawn by the fascination of the blue and yellow.

A large sign outside Best Buy read: "Line starts here," but there was no one standing there. Had people simply ignored the sign, smashed down the doors, and stormed the building, in search of the weekend's dream of a larger, flatter screen?

I walked gingerly toward the front door, fearing I would immediately see tense bodies and twisted faces fighting over the last box with Samsung written on it. Instead, a chap in the blue polo shirt bid me good morning. Inside, it seemed like any other day at Best Buy.

My receipt, complete with markings from the Best Buy magic marker.

(Credit: Chris Matyszczyk)

People milled around with seemingly little purpose. Best Buy employees stood around, one or two stifling a little yawn, a couple of others not bothering with the stifling.

A few people hovered over the MacBook display. Should they buy the MacBook Pro, or the little white MacBook, on offer for less than $1,000?

Most of the aisles had no more than one person in them. Wandering around was as simple and comfortable as a Wednesday stroll on the beach. But finally I saw a line. What was it that was drawing so many people (at least 15) to one place?

Ah, yes, these were the excited folks trying to line up an appointment with the Geek Squad. Names were being called out. Satisfaction was being doled out.

Then I remembered I needed some ink for my printer. I wafted over to the aisle and noticed that the price of an Hewlett-Packard double pack of black ink and color had actually gone up since I'd last bought some. There didn't seem to be any special offer on this one.

Should I buy it anyway? Wouldn't it be a pain to stand in line?

Then I looked up and saw that the line at the cash registers consisted of precisely three people. Two of them were together. As I paid my $34.87, the clerk had particularly bleary eyes.

"Crazy day, huh?" I said to him.

"No," he said, in an entirely friendly way.

"Is this usual?" I asked, somewhat confused.

"Oh, yeah. I'm happy," he replied.

After he'd taken the time to tell me that the man in front of me in line had enjoyed precisely the same security code on his Amex card as mine, and after another Best Buy employee had marked my receipt with a special marker, I disappeared to Starbucks.

One of the great baristas of our time, Kershina, told me that she'd opened the store at 5 a.m. and there had been around 200 people outside Best Buy at that time.

Now, just after 9, there was no one. It was just another day in the Marin City firmament. How typical this was of the rest of America, I have no idea. However, as I took my lattes back to my car, a couple were piling their own two-pack of boxes, both with an LG logo, into theirs. They seemed strangely relaxed.

Desperate for a deal after sleeping right through Wal-Mart's early-morning Black Friday frenzy? You're in luck. The best deal this holiday season may be just a download away.

(Credit: Handbrake)

And boy, is it beautiful.

Handbrake has long been my go-to choice for ripping DVDs to my hard drive (saves battery life when watching videos while traveling and ensures my kids won't ruin the DVDs), but this particular version exceeds my expectations. Why? Because it delivers over 1,000 new enhancements while delivering better picture quality at a smaller file size and faster.

Or as the Handbrake developers say:

There's an old proverb in the video encoding world: "Speed, size, quality: pick two." It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.

This isn't hype. In my own use of the software during the past week, performance is noticeably faster, and picture quality is awesome.

Importantly, while the Handbrake developers have been hard at work over the past year to update the venerable video transcoder, the team owes a lot to developers from the x264 project:

A large portion of these speed, size, and quality improvements come to us for free, from the x264 project. The past year, like every year, has seen some massive improvements for that video encoding engine. As always, it has been further hand-optimized for better performance. But it has also gained new features like macroblock tree rate control and weighted P-Frame prediction.

This is how open-source development works: Handbrake focuses on what it does best (User interface, features like live preview, etc.) while leveraging the best of other project's strengths.

It's a recipe for a supereasy and very powerful transcoding experience. And at a 100 percent discount now through forever (Handbrake is open source and costs nothing to download), now is a good time to download it and let 'er rip, whether you run Mac (Intel 32-bit and 64-bit, plus PowerPC), Linux, or Windows.

In its attempt to redress the imbalance created by the latest Verizon ads, AT&T has hurriedly cobbled together not just one Luke Wilson ad, but several.

Curiously, one ad features precisely the same strategy as that of the latest iPhone advertising: reminding those who might still be on the fence, on the phone, or even on the lam that you can't simultaneously enjoy voice and Web surfing on the Verizon 3G network--and hence on the Motorola Droid.

So here we have Luke Wilson, still looking a little peaky and dressed in a difficult brown. Behind Luke, we have a man trying to use two phones (by implication, Verizon phones) to perform a task the iPhone will manage alone.

Some might find it entertaining that as his friend attempts to download something on one of his Verizon phones, he complains that it's all going rather slowly. Others might find this both true and funny.

AT&T hasn't merely paid Wilson a little more than 3G to make this comparison. Someone, somewhere, has, perhaps even wisely, said, "We need a map to counter Verizon's map."

So the writers hit upon the idea of a two-part extravaganza (this already aired during Tuesday's "Dancing with the Stars" finale), in which Wilson produces postcards from all the different American towns that really do--no, really--have AT&T 3G coverage.

Wilson says his job is to set the record straight, with respect to Verizon's vicious besmirching of the AT&T network. He tries his best. He tells us that AT&T covers 97 percent of all Americans--yes, 300 million people.

The AT&T map also seems far more filled-in and far more colorful than it appears in Verizon spots, though one suspects that local word of mouth might be rather stronger, in this instance, than national advertising. If you live in Spokane, Wash., for example, and you know someone there who has spotty 3G service on a particular network, that is far more powerful an influencer than any number of Wilson's postcards or Verizon's barbs.

It's enlightening, however, to discover that Wilson once dated someone in Tulsa, Okla., and it didn't work out. Did she catch him simultaneously calling and Web surfing? Perhaps we will never know.

ComScore on Wednesday released October viewing statistics for online video. And although there weren't any surprises at the top, the figures did provide some interesting insight into how users are consuming video on the Web.

According to the research firm, more than 167 million U.S.-based Web users watched video online during October. All told, they watched 28 billion videos. Google easily led the pack, servicing a whopping 38 percent of all videos Americans viewed online, with 99 percent of those videos watched on YouTube.

In a distant second, Hulu delivered 856 million videos, accounting for 3.1 percent of the market and setting a new record for monthly views. Microsoft came in third, with 451 million videos viewed on its site, capturing 1.6 percent market share.

ComScore also took a look at the total number of viewers that consumed video content during October. The research firm found that the average viewer watched 167 videos during the month. Google sites attracted 126 million unique viewers. Fox Interactive Media followed Google, with 53 million unique viewers. Yahoo sites attracted 50 million viewers. Although Hulu didn't make the top three in unique viewers, the average user watched 20.1 videos on the site during October, representing another all-time high for the site.

Some interesting tidbits rounded out ComScore's report. According to the company, 84.4 percent of all United States.-based Web users viewed online video. The average viewer watched 10.8 hours of video in October, which is especially shocking, considering that the average online video was just 3.9 minutes long.

He calls himself Agent Zero. His shirt number is a big, fat zero. And this accurately reflects the number of tweets Gilbert Arenas has posted to his Twitter account.

It's not that Arenas, the Washington Wizards point guard, isn't confident of his literary skills. Oh, no. Just look at his finely sculpted blog.

However, according to The Washington Post, Arenas has no interest in being a small time Twitter player. He wants 1 million followers before he will start to offer tweets from his copious and wondrous life and imagination.

Just last week Arenas told the Associated Press that he's chosen to go for 1 million because "it's so far-fetched."

And when some cruel know-it-all tried to point out that the way folks normally get followers is, well, by tweeting, Arenas replied with the sagacity of Wittgenstein: "I'm trying to do the opposite."

So that you can get some sense of Arenas' twittering possibilities, I have embedded a small piece of film featuring the Arenas bobblehead, quite a character in its own right.

However, I know you'll be wondering just how far away Arenas is from achieving immortal far-fetchedness. Well, he's pretty close to catching Shaquille O'Neal, who enjoys just over 2.5 million followers.

Yes, Arenas has already amassed, at the time of typing this, 5,717 followers. Perhaps the 4-9 Wizards will need to win a few more games before his Twitter page is swamped by mass anticipation of Arenas' first tweet.