Internet

Commenter htchien points out that Chinese users can now reach the Chinese-language Wikipedia through the site's SSL-encrypted gateway.

The standard site, zh.wikipedia.org, is still blocked. (The URL I thought led there, cn.wikipedia.org, sent me to Yahoo China last time I tried.) But for now at least, the secure URL is functional and could open the big wiki to more participation from China.

Htchein is Ted (Hsiang-Tai) Chien, who lists a position as Secretary of Wikimedia Taiwan.

UPDATE: At Ted Chien's request, I have (at least temporarily) removed the secure URL from this post. His … Read more

There's no fighting it. Conference 2.0, as some have called it, is here to stay.

The term refers to tech confabs where audiences communicate about what they're witnessing via a vibrant backchannel on Twitter, blogs, IM, and other forms of live media.

But while this new form of conference interactivity--where audiences are using the online tools to demand to be heard--may best be known for ugly scenes at South by Southwest this year or at Gnomedex last year, there's no reason participants can't turn the emergence of this backchannel into something positive for everyone.

If … Read more

As someone who attends a fair number of conferences in many different cities, it's become painfully clear to me that, in general, the confabs' organizers have not yet climbed fully aboard the green train.

That is to say, conferences are often not the best examples of a focus on taking care of the environment.

For example, while I was told at the recent South by Southwest that its efforts to be green were improved from a year earlier, the endless sea of attendee bags on display--each with a small mountain of literature inside--was a visceral testament to the fact … Read more

I'm reading Henry Blodget's story on Jason Calacanis' rant about how the Demo conference organizers are to blame for the scheduling conflict that pits TechCrunch 50 against DemoFall. And I have to say, I'm a little dubious of Calacanis' statements.

According to Calacanis--who gave Blodget an "exclusive" interview on the matter despite telling me Wednesday that he was deferring to TC50 co-organizer Michael Arrington on the matter--the conflict is all Demo's fault.

(Arrington, by the way, set the tone for the environment by telling me, bluntly: "Demo needs to die.")

Demo Executive … Read more

The scheduling of the TechCrunch 50 conference, which was announced Wednesday, has pit it directly against DemoFall, a long-standing event geared toward entrepreneurs and their products.

And while TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and CEO Heather Harde insisted in interviews late Wednesday that their selection of September 8-10, 2008, as the dates for TechCrunch 50 was about the availability of an affordable San Francisco venue, Arrington also made his feelings about Demo clear.

"Demo needs to die," Arrington said in the interview. "It's just an old-school model...It clearly involves pay to play, and what we're … Read more

For years, the Demo conferences--one in the spring and another in the fall--have dominated the mindshare of the technology press and venture capitalists eager to see the hottest start-ups and new products at their public unveilings.

But now, Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis have scheduled their TechCrunch 50 event--which will showcase 50 hand-selected start-ups--to overlap with DemoFall.

And besides the cachet that comes with being selected for the TechCrunch event--Arrington said in a blog post this afternoon that the 40 companies that participated last year have raised $143 million in venture capital to date--one major selling point for companies that … Read more

Update (3:52 pm): This story got the name of the R.E.M. video wrong. It's fixed in the text below. Additionally, there's new comments from Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd below.

After reading Tuesday night on Laughing Squid that a new R.E.M. video had been posted by the band's publicity firm on YouTube that seemed to blatantly rip off Improv Everywhere's now-famous "freezes," I wrote to the culture jamming collective's founder to get his take.

"I did not know they were making this video and was not involved … Read more

If you're an aficionado of Twitter or the short-form blogging platform, Tumblr, over the last couple of weeks, you've no doubt become aware of the make-your-own-mix tape service, Muxtape.

A seemingly home-spun operation with no obvious profit motive, Muxtape allows anyone to upload a series of songs to its servers to create, and then distribute online, a digital "mix tape" along the lines of the ones you made for your unrequited paramours back in college.

And even as Muxtape has caught fire in the Twittersphere, another service, Mixwit, has come along, also giving users the ability to create a custom digital mix tape, but this time without uploading your own songs. Instead, you choose available songs from two existing music search services, SeeqPod and Skreemr, albeit on a much more polished site that seems primed for seeking to bring in revenue.

As my colleagues Rafe Needleman and Josh Lowensohn have noted, Muxtape appears to be a legal time bomb, merely awaiting the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America, while Mixwit seems to exist on firmer legal footing.

But are those impressions accurate? I decided to check in with some legal scholars to find out.

… Read more

Over at The New York Times on Tuesday, Stephanie Clifford has a piece (Free registration required) pointing out that McDonald's is the main sponsor of the new Olympics-themed alternate-reality game, The Lost Ring.

The piece quotes McDonald's Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon as saying, "The Olympics in Beijing are a very big event for us, and we have a lot of different types of activation, with The Lost Ring being the most creative. Our goal is really about strengthening our bond with the global youth culture."

I appreciated that The Times got someone from McDonald's … Read more