According to the BBC article, Switzerland is taking Google to court over the publication of images on it’s newest Google Street View media product.

Swiss data protection commissioner Hanspeter Thuer said “Numerous faces and vehicle number plates are not made sufficiently unrecognisable”.  The Swiss believe it to be a gross violation of privacy, especially concerning hospitals, schools and prisons, and they have pushed for a cessation of further photography and a removal of all Swiss-related pictures on this Street View service.

Google’s response was that of disappointment, believing Street View to be completely legal in Switzerland.  The world’s mega-company has said it will “vigorously contest” the case.

Best of luck to Switzerland, if they can defeat the powerhouse that is Google, then this case will certainly open doors to other nations, or individuals, wishing to contest other privacy issues they may have with Google.

Not likely.

Rupert Murdoch has done it again: this time, by snubbing Google.

He argues that Google’s method of directing traffic to independent websites (like anything News Corp) defies the essence of his industry. Says Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer:

“It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online (by giving it away for free) so something needs to happen. I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.”

Tell that to everyone using a web service. This is exactly the kind of measure that can gouge an already wounded industry; arguing that content becomes ‘premium’ because of the medium it exists in is a fallacy, especially with how web traffic is moving today.

Google took care to comment by saying that its services ‘direct 100,000 clicks per minute’ to News Corp resources.

“Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

News Corp’s ‘The Wall Street Journal’ already has a paywall service in place, charging users to access the site and it’s content. With about ten million visitors a month, there is still a reliable revenue structure in place…but without that traffic, cuts will most surely be made.

Should journalism only benefit the rich?

And shiny it is. Featuring a ‘historically accurate’ timeline, purchasers of the £60 digital framework will be able to move through the entirety of Christianity akin to that of something Apple. Creator Nelson Saba describes the rationale behind such an undertaking:

“There is nothing wrong with the Bible but we have two generations which favour interactive media. Unless you put the Bible on that media you won’t connect with them. It’s not about mimicking paper. It’s about offering an experience.”

With more and more of the younger generation looking to fulfill their information needs digitally, Glo offers a substantial solution. Albeit redundant, Glo emphasizes the fact that to garner an audience in 2000 and beyond, there must be a more direct form of interaction with the customer – and it must be appealing.

Record labels and the music industry are in for another round of abuse, international copyright standards have been reformed to deal with an old surge in the idea of open and free information.

Wired’s Eliot Von Buskirk is reporting on how a nifty piece of prose from the US copyright act of 1976 is allowing copyright holders to renegotiate the deals they made 30 years ago…or drop them altogether. This poses a huge problem for these companies, often because older records from the 60′s, 70′s, and 80′s “tend to sell more”, says Buskirk.

The reasoning for my blatantly ridiculous title is that this does, in some form, set a standard for information sharing. Law.com writer Eriq Gardner talks about how old-timers The Eagles are planning to issue their notices of termination within the year – allowing their full catalog of songs to be available for free via their website (or by any other means…it’s their’s again). Entertainment lawyer Robert Bernstein comments quite succinctly:

This isn’t just about music. “It’s every type of copyright,” said Bernstein. “It doesn’t distinguish between the types of copyright.”

Congress has seen many versions of an appeal trying to amend this hole in the record labels pantaloons, but nothing is rolling. Could this be the end of conventional copyright as we know it?

Has the ability to communicate globally with virtually anyone, anywhere, anytime, made us antisocial? In an article by Wendy Leung for the Globe and Mail, a scenario is given which at one time would seem outrageous but today is simple ordinary.

You’re at a party, chatting with your pals and enjoying the repartee. Then it happens. “Whats the name of the new Coen Brothers’ movie again? Suddenly, the iPhones fly out.

This scenario is a growing trend in todays social world. Our generation is becoming more adapt to texting and tweeting than they are to actually holding a lengthy [or even short] conversation. It is ironic that this growing lack of social skills in today’s youth though is actually due to the overwhelming amount of social networking tools we have to use today. Why call someone when you can quickly text them? Why walk into the next room to ask when your roommate wants to leave when you can instant message them from your laptop? Todays’ youth is only furthing their lack of speaking skills by attempting to communicate 24 hours a day.

The social world has become one mass party of trying to one up each other on the latest YouTube video or the funniest link through The Oatmeal . This relationship with technology does not have to stop, but limits must be created. Looking again at Leung’s article, society must begin to acknowledge that smart phones and laptops are not the end all of technology. There will be many new devices to come in the future. If we continue to feed this growing obsession, physical interaction will not only become more and more painful, but it will begin to grow extinct. Society must acknowledge the honeymoon period of a new device as simply that and move on; not the end of life as we know it.

Franchises like “Twilight”, “True Blood”, “The Vampire Diaries” and “The Vampire’s Assistant” have exploded into mainstream media, and have spawned a new generation of screeming tween fans, not seen since the heyday of the Backstreet Boys in the late 1990′s, or The Beatles in the 1960′s. “Twi-hards” , the hard-core “Twilight” fans, are, for example, responsible for making the first installment of the movie the most popular DVD of 2009, as well as for bringing in $384 million dollars from the global box office.

This media trend, does not seem to be dying out anytime soon, as proven by HBO’s “True Blood” pulling in millions of viewers each week.  The combination of sexual prowess and the fact that these creatures that have lived for hundreds of years seems to awaken some base desire in fans of this trend.

A close examination of the actual content of vampire media shows that all the stories seems to be closely related. A sexy male vampire attracts a mortal woman, they fall in love, he may or may not suck her blood, and he has to constantly save her life from other, more evil, vampires.  What. a. bore.

Could this be the next trend to take over television and movies?  Will vampire stories surpass and replace “CSI”, “Law&Order”, “NCIS”, and other various law enforcement thrillers that currently dominate the prime time airwaves?  This repetition of the same type of story is exhausting.  It echoes the studio’s current practice, that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t change it’, meaning that if something is making money, why try and produce something new and different for the mainstream media?

Sooner or later vampires will go out of style and will be replaced by ‘the next big thing’, but not before they’ve infiltrated and over-saturated every aspect of media to the point of exhaustion.

This growth is astonishing. Yes, from a utilitarian perspective it’s more efficient than mail, it’s a great medium for displaying art and sharing interaction, but it begs the question of why? I feel as though people are so inclined and determined to become connected, and yet they forfeit so much of their own personal information to this massive database of information. Zuckerberg insists personal information isn’t being sold, but all this directed advertising about boosting my erection isn’t selling me any confidence.

When Falcon Heene mentioned on live TV that “you guys said we did this for the show”, in reference to why he did not come out of hiding even when his parents were yelling for him, it became obvious that the whole thing was a hoax.  The subsequent days showed the little Falcon, who was once believed to be in the runaway balloon floating high above Denver, actually being sick on national television.  Was he so physically ill from lying?  Will Santa Claus bring him any presents this year, or has he been a naughty boy?

If anyone should be withheld from presents, it is the patriarch of the Heene family. Richard Heene and his storm chasing giant balloon are certainly a sad tale.  The man wanted a reality show for his family, but instead got outed across national and international media outlets.

Richard Heene successfully, albeit briefly, hoodwinked the entire world’s media, only to prove that he is about as qualified to raise children as a great white shark.

So what does that mean? Well the parents are rumoured to be pleading guilty to the hoax, but what happens to the children? This episode will surely scar them for life.  I am willing to bet that they will in fact get a reality show when this has all calmed down.  Now that TLC has successfully destroyed a marriage and secured a lifetime of rehab and therapy for 8 children (Jon and Kate plus 8 ) on national television, perhaps their next project will take on the tragic catastrophe that is the Heene family.

Professor Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T, explained that

Economists have long thought that producers — the people making products and running companies — are naturally the ones coming up with new ideas [...] consumers often come up with ideas for products, and companies wait on the sidelines to see if they have mass appeal.

Many new features will be introduced to Twitter users in upcoming weeks that have been inspired by the users themselves. Such features include Lists and Retweets which allow users to better follow their favourite Tweeters and celebrities. Although producers agree that it is hard to predict what will be popular because of the mass production of new gadgets, professor von Hippel and his team are constantly working to figure out

Why are people using this and how could we make that better?

It really has become a user produced world.

2012 is not only created based on the beliefs that the world will end simultaneously with the Mayan calendars, but it plays off the fear that many people hold towards the thought that the end may only be 2 years away. Roland Emmerich’s latest creation not only throws this fear home, but creates a field of destruction. 

The streets of Los Angeles buckle into shardlike ribbons before falling off the face of the earth altogether, carrying all those godless dealmakers and cellphone-talkers with it. St. Peter’s Basilica cracks and shatters like a Wal-Mart Christmas bauble hit with a hammer. Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer statue unceremoniously breaks into chunks and falls to the ground — not even Jesus himself is any match for the massive shifting of the earth’s crust that has occurred because the sun suddenly just got too goddamn hot.

Is this a 2009 prediction of what is to come? Or is this simply another attempt for Hollywood to make millions off of another film that reels in its audiences by producing what millions have been creating in their own heads for years. Everything is confused. Everything is chaotic. And everything hints at the same crazy ideas as The Day After Tomorrow; that you will be safe as long as you have a library to hide in.