Webware

The linchpin of the topic of ethics on online journalism is, of course, "Gizmodogate," in which tech blog Gizmodo paid to acquire a prototype iPhone that an Apple employee left behind in a bar and picked up by someone else.

But the iPhone story isn't the only time that the ethics of tech blogs have been called into question, and in fact traditional journalism has its own high-profile ethical lapses. Think of the plagarism and fabrication scandal around reporter Jayson Blair at the New York Times, or NBC's Dateline TV investigation where producers rigged explosives into GM trucks to prove that they were prone to exploding in accidents.

Online journalism and blogging does change things, however. Today we're going to look at how and why. Our guests are CNET's own editor-in-chief Scott Ard. Also: Kelly McBride from the Poynter Institute. Kelly is a journalist and journalism ethics expert with a deep and fascinating background covering complex news stories. The Poynter Institue is a resource for journalists at all levels in their careers.

Show notes and talking points… Read more

A strange and scary incident while I was researching a story this week has led me to reconsider my recommendation of the Invisible Hand browser extension. This issue also serves to remind us that there are online privacy issues we all face from sites other than Facebook.

As the video in this post shows, when I was looking up information on a product on Google, I found shortly afterward that Amazon knew about my Google search and put the product I was looking at in my "Recently Viewed" slot when I loaded up the retail site.

This cross-site … Read more

Our topic this week: Facebook and privacy. At the F8 conference on April 21, Facebook rolled out privacy changes and new data sharing features. As usually happens when Facebook makes a privacy change, there was a swift and mighty backlash against them. But this time, even the federal government is getting involved--four senators sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to roll back some of the new features.

Do the words Facebook and privacy even belong together anymore? What is going on at the world's largest social network?

To discuss, our guests today are two people who have studied the company in depth. First, in the studio, Declan McCullagh, our politics and policies reporter. And joining us in from Washington DC, Kara Swisher from All Things Digital and co-producer of the D8 conference with WSJ's Walt Mossberg. Thanks for joining us!

Show notes and talking points… Read more

I'm working on a story about understanding and managing Facebook's new privacy options. I'm trying to find the silver lining in the story from the consumer's perspective, so I can present reasonable options other than "just turn it all off!"

Here is one positive thing to emerge: Likebutton.me. It's an aggregation site that reminds me of PopUrls, but instead of just taking headlines from a bunch of sites, it takes the items your Facebook friends "like" and shows them to you on the top of the story lists, followed by … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--The 2010 Demo Spring conference has come to an end, and in its wake we have a new crop of companies new and old with ideas that promise to make our cars, pockets, businesses, and living rooms better.

Prior to the start of the conference, we wrote up a few of the top companies to watch. And after seeing their presentations, we're naming our favorite pitches and products from the two-day conference.

Exaudios makes technology that can tell a person's mood by the tone in their voice. It's a potentially huge product for call … Read more

Why would anyone launch yet another e-book format? That's the obvious question we had at DemoSpring when watching the short pitch by Neverend Media's Chris Kubica. His new format is quite different from existing e-books, because it's designed to support subscribing to a book the way you can sign up for an RSS feed, and it has a return channel to the author built into the format. Plus it has a smart social component.

Years ago, Kubica wrote a book about Filemaker but got frustrated when, nearing the end of it, he realized that software updates had … Read more

Motolingo's Motoriety is a neat tool that marries the data your car is generating in real time with the power of a smartphone to bring some pretty modern capabilities to older cars. There's hardware, software, and a Web service involved in the product, but it looks like it should all work together well.

The hardware component is a small black box that you plug into your car's diagnostic port (all cars built after about 1996 have them). It communicates via Bluetooth to software on your smartphone and monitors things like road speed, engine performance, and the causes … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--The first demo at the DemoSpring conference here that actually made me want the product being shown was from Fliptop.

CEO Doug Camplejohn showed off two aspects of his new content subscription service. The first is a "subscribe" button that publishers can put on their sites. Like the ShareThis service that lets publishers replace dozens of social-network sharing buttons with one, Fliptop's button gives readers a lot of controls to subscribe to content on sites. They can select all content, get digests, ask for only new stories that meet a filter, and so on. … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--Brandfolium's Navid is a clever yet creepy marketplace for ads on Twitter and other social services. With this service, a marketer can find an online writer who's willing to accept paid endorsements in his or her feed, put a price on the paid mention, and schedule the campaign. The site should launch shortly.

Writers open to these campaigns have to register on the service so marketers can find them.

In the launch presentation Monday at the DemoSpring conference, the company's CEO showed a geographic component of the service, too. Marketers can find, on … Read more