This morning pingVision relaunched Pregnancy.org in Drupal 6. The site was wholly designed and developed by pingVision and included several interesting integrations including some custom tools.
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The site allows site members to track their progress within the four primary tracks--"Getting Pregnant", "Pregnancy", "Labor and Delivery", and "Baby and Beyond".

Some of the things we did include:

• Development of a Basal Body Temperature Tool to help keep track of fertility cycles. The tool collects data (such as temperature and how you are feeling) and then uses the Google Chart API to generate a visual of when the most likely ovulation times will occur.
• Creation of a Pregnancy Calendar that follows your pregnancy every day to show you what is happening.
• Inclusion of a Fetal Development Tool that gives a visual representation and facts about where the fetus is in development.
• Integration of live chat and community forums in vBulletin.
• A sizeable import of users and articles from the old and inflexible PHPNuke site.

The site includes ad serving from multiple ad services such as DoubleClick Dart, PriceGrabber, and IntelliTXT.

This project will spawn a new contributed module (by pingVision's Ben Jeavons) called PDS (a generic tool for storing data for blocks) and possibly several others. We'll be blogging more in upcoming days.

Every morning I reach for my iPhone to get the latest news from Bloomberg. (I'd probably go to the NY Times first, but their app is still far too unstable and slow to be of much use.) This morning, one headline jumped out at me:

Twitter Shuns Venture-Capital Money as Startup Values Plunge

Well I had to read that article. And it seems to hint at the piercing of the Silicon Valley Bubble -- not a floating bubble leading to a crash, but rather the isolation bubble, like Bubble Boy. What? Silicon Valley is Bubble Boy?

Evan Williams raised $22 million in funding for Twitter Inc., a Web site used by everyone from Britney Spears to Starbucks Corp. to Barack Obama. Sales? Those could come later -- that was, until the economy tanked.

Twitter may charge companies for access to its users so it doesn't have to ask venture capitalists for more cash, said Williams, the company's chief executive officer. As the value of Internet companies plunges this year, investors are asking for a bigger chunk of the startups they invest in.

"The VCs have the money, but they'll just negotiate harder," said Williams, who sold his previous venture, Blogger, to Google Inc. in 2003. "I want to manage things so I don't have to raise money in 2009."

In the rest of the tech world, and in the business world in general, making money is the first goal. No matter what else you are trying to achieve with your business, you need to make money so you can do the other things you want to do.

Which brings me to the Bubble. Silicon Valley has been this odd duck in the business world: An entire metropolitan region driven largely by R&D. In the Silicon Valley Bubble, the demands upon most businesses regarding sales revenues are largely removed from the environment. The dominant business model? Raise capital, then burn that capital in development of the FooBar Widget (as an imaginary example), hoping you get bought by Google or Microsoft before you run out of money. The real product is not the FooBar Widget, it's the company itself, and the targeted buyer is a new media or tech corporation with deep pockets and a hunger for new ideas.

It's a wonderful sub-economy, this Bubble, if you think about it. And necessary to cultivate many kinds of innovation.

Matt Marshall is blunt:

Last time, circa 2001, the entire VC industry got a “get-out-jail-free card” after the Internet bubble burst. That’s because the scores of new firms created in the late 1990s argued they should be forgiven for any poor performance — it was the bubble’s fault, and everyone was affected. Their investors — chief among them, the elite university endowments –agreed, and gave the VC firms more money to invest again. With most VC funds lasting for ten years, this ensured the VCs a very long life indeed.

He predicts that half the VCs will go under in the current economic turndown.

Barak Rabinowitz has an interesting post on how this paradigm shift is happening in the face of an un-tapped market.

There’s an elephant in the room of online advertising. An elephant in the shape of 400 million social networkers creating and consuming content, clustering around shared interests and activities — all who have yet to be tapped in any major way by web marketers.

Determining how to best reach these people is an ongoing struggle, one complicated by the soaring rate of user-generated content. For the first time, advertisers accustomed to the leading edge are now running to catch up. The conversation is no longer about display ads vs. text ads. Rather, the burning question has become: Who is going to profit from the opportunity presented by social networks, and how are they going to do it?

Some people will perhaps disagree, but my sense is that there hasn't been nearly enough thought put into this aspect as there might of been had the venture-backed Valley economy not been so comfortable in its Bubble. (Call it my reality-based bias as an entrepreneur whose company and clients always need to look to the bottom line.)

The challenge now, Barak points out, is that the end-users of these social network ventures aren't likely to take kindly to big changes to their user experiences, especially when those changes are motivated by revenue generation strategies. What's more:

The bad news for all social networking sites — video portals especially — is that users generally don’t have the mentality to view and click on ads when they are on these platforms. This is why search continues to be the most lucrative advertising strategy. Users are specifically seeking information in that arena. On social networks, people are primarily concerned with communicating with their friends, not looking to buy items or services.

Now with the Bubble deflating under the pressure of the bursting of that bubble of another kind, the investment banking bubble, maybe we'll start to see more innovation in ways to monetize social networks.

The case of Twitter is a good example of that challenge. Whither Twitter now?

[Cross-posted from BlogHer.]

As I convalesced this weekend from Day 9 of a terrible cold that just won't let go, the Thin Air Summit took place in Denver. Thanks to Twitter, I almost feel like I was there. I was tweet-reading in real-time. But you don't need to be there in the moment. A quick search for #tas08 on Twitter and you find a ton of posts. Tweets on sessions, tweets on insights, tweets on new acquaintances....

Last week I learned about the in-fighting (and quite often misogynistic) attacks from conservatives on Sarah Palin. #Palin was a trending topic after the election.

When Al Gore got onto Twitter, I saw it first on Twitter. [Update: Twitter has just changed @al_gore to @algore.]

Protests against California's Prop 8 I heard of first on Twitter.

And I found out that other people did not find True Blood tonight as much of a downer as I did. (Yeah, so it's a vampire show. Can't I have at least a little human kindness? Just a little?) When Tina Fey was going to be appearing on Saturday Night Live, I heard it first on Twitter and was able to set TiVo.

Now I'm sure that anybody reading this who hasn't actually tried Twitter probably has no idea what the heck I'm talking about. There are plenty of explanations of what Twitter is, but what strikes me as being important is less of what Twitter is and more of how Twitter is used.

Because you can follow whomever you want, you can listen just to tweets by people who interest you. Of course, as they tweet with others (using their Twitter handles) you can stumble across other people who also are interesting. Soon you have a metaphorical tree of Twitterers tweeting up a storm of miscellany that quite frequently can surprise you, astonish you, and inform you.

Twitter is as the Twitterer does

Some people seem to live on Twitter. For professional bloggers, Twitter becomes a way of building their online presence, connecting with others, sharing links, and picking up on things happening.

Me, I can't spend that kind of time Twittering the day away. But I don't consider Twitter to be simply a distraction. I learn too much from it. And I catch wind of things friends and acquaintances are doing elsewhere.

Heck, it's gotten to the point where people don't have names any more, they have Twitter handles!

Amber Rhea posts regular updates on what she's tweeted.

Earlier, in these pages, Beth Kanter (or @kanter) wrote about the importance of Twitter.

When I'm asked questions that I don't know the answer to, I admit it and use it as opportunity to demonstrate the value of the social brain or having a good network on Twitter. Unfortunately, I did not have my laptop accessible in that moment.

In reflection, I've been thinking about how much richer it is being social - how you don't have to know all the answers when you have a good network (and a decent Internet connection.) It made me think about another digital divide - for those who don't have the Internet connection or haven't yet engaged on Twitter - the knowledge divide.

Heck, in this age when, according to Wired, blogging is somehow no longer something to do, bloggers like Kristen Lowe are blogging about what they're seeing on Twitter.

Paal Hivand asked a question on Twitter this week, which had me thinking about a recent conversation on ... eh ... Twitter. Thing is, Paal said (in Norwegian) that he was contemplating an article about how knowledge used to be individual, but now is social. I'm not going to go into that statement, just offer this anectdotal evidence for how knowledge in some respects is easier available than ever before (click on the image for a readable version):

She then pastes a screenshot of a Twitter exchange....

I'd just jumped into a conversation between Adriana and Freecloud here - which started with the Albigensian crusade and ended with the Twitterian crusade - and it's also worth keeping in mind that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for Twitter...

Amy Gahran's post a couple weeks ago illustrates how Twitter can even facilitate conversations among disparate people who may not know each other and likely don't even have each other's email address.

The Twitter Insurgency

The adoption of Twitter has been evolving over the weeks and months. Last spring, you would have been hard pressed to find dominant tweet topics outside of tech geekery, or the personal experiences of tech geeks. But by the time the general election was in full swing, politics had come into its own, with Sarah Palin (or #palin) frequently rising up in the topics. (The Next Women report that Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate -- and presidential elect -- to use Twitter.) Now you see a wider variety of topics, including sports, television and news events spreading across the tweetscape.

From the way things look now, it's only inevitable that the trend will continue. Unless you yourself are watching something happen right in front of you (or on live tv), odds are that the news will hit Twitter far sooner than it can get noticed, digested and spat out by the mainstream media.

In fact, the mainstream media have started to adopt Twitter as an important outlet. (And they haven't always been the smoothest about it. Witness the eruption over the Rocky Mountain News' live-Twitter coverage of a funeral.)

My favorite part of Twitter is still what I first got into it for last year: interesting insights:

@agahran. People don't know they care about the quality of writing, they just stop reading poorly written things. #tas08
#

"Wasilla's all i saw" - a Palin-drome
#

My 10-weeks-into-Twitter-world review: it feels... I don't know, *kinder*, than blog world. Less incentive for trolls, stalkers, etc.
#

Friendster informs me that they now have faster slide shows. I can save even more time by continuing to not log in there.
#

Of course, there are other views on Twitter....

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” according to the report.

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the Army report said.

So if you do venture onto Twitter, watch out for those vegetarians.

As I convalesced this weekend from Day 9 of a terrible cold that just won't let go, the Thin Air Summit took place in Denver. Thanks to Twitter, I almost feel like I was there. I was tweet-reading in real-time. But you don't need to be there in the moment. A quick search for #tas08 on Twitter and you find a ton of posts. Tweets on sessions, tweets on insights, tweets on new acquaintances....

Last week I learned about the in-fighting (and quite often misogynistic) attacks from conservatives on Sarah Palin. #Palin was a trending topic after the election.

When Al Gore got onto Twitter, I saw it first on Twitter. [Update: Twitter has just changed @al_gore to @algore.]

Protests against California's Prop 8 I heard of first on Twitter.

And I found out that other people did not find True Blood tonight as much of a downer as I did. (Yeah, so it's a vampire show. Can't I have at least a little human kindness? Just a little?) When Tina Fey was going to be appearing on Saturday Night Live, I heard it first on Twitter and was able to set TiVo.

Now I'm sure that anybody reading this who hasn't actually tried Twitter probably has no idea what the heck I'm talking about. There are plenty of explanations of what Twitter is, but what strikes me as being important is less of what Twitter is and more of how Twitter is used.

Because you can follow whomever you want, you can listen just to tweets by people who interest you. Of course, as they tweet with others (using their Twitter handles) you can stumble across other people who also are interesting. Soon you have a metaphorical tree of Twitterers tweeting up a storm of miscellany that quite frequently can surprise you, astonish you, and inform you.

Twitter is as the Twitterer does

Some people seem to live on Twitter. For professional bloggers, Twitter becomes a way of building their online presence, connecting with others, sharing links, and picking up on things happening.

Me, I can't spend that kind of time Twittering the day away. But I don't consider Twitter to be simply a distraction. I learn too much from it. And I catch wind of things friends and acquaintances are doing elsewhere.

Heck, it's gotten to the point where people don't have names any more, they have Twitter handles!

Amber Rhea posts regular updates on what she's tweeted.

Earlier, in these pages, Beth Kanter (or @kanter) wrote about the importance of Twitter.

When I'm asked questions that I don't know the answer to, I admit it and use it as opportunity to demonstrate the value of the social brain or having a good network on Twitter. Unfortunately, I did not have my laptop accessible in that moment.

In reflection, I've been thinking about how much richer it is being social - how you don't have to know all the answers when you have a good network (and a decent Internet connection.) It made me think about another digital divide - for those who don't have the Internet connection or haven't yet engaged on Twitter - the knowledge divide.

Heck, in this age when, according to Wired, blogging is somehow no longer something to do, bloggers like Kristen Lowe are blogging about what they're seeing on Twitter.

Paal Hivand asked a question on Twitter this week, which had me thinking about a recent conversation on ... eh ... Twitter. Thing is, Paal said (in Norwegian) that he was contemplating an article about how knowledge used to be individual, but now is social. I'm not going to go into that statement, just offer this anectdotal evidence for how knowledge in some respects is easier available than ever before (click on the image for a readable version):

She then pastes a screenshot of a Twitter exchange....

I'd just jumped into a conversation between Adriana and Freecloud here - which started with the Albigensian crusade and ended with the Twitterian crusade - and it's also worth keeping in mind that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for Twitter...

Amy Gahran's post a couple weeks ago illustrates how Twitter can even facilitate conversations among disparate people who may not know each other and likely don't even have each other's email address.

The Twitter Insurgency

The adoption of Twitter has been evolving over the weeks and months. Last spring, you would have been hard pressed to find dominant tweet topics outside of tech geekery, or the personal experiences of tech geeks. But by the time the general election was in full swing, politics had come into its own, with Sarah Palin (or #palin) frequently rising up in the topics. (The Next Women report that Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate -- and presidential elect -- to use Twitter.) Now you see a wider variety of topics, including sports, television and news events spreading across the tweetscape.

From the way things look now, it's only inevitable that the trend will continue. Unless you yourself are watching something happen right in front of you (or on live tv), odds are that the news will hit Twitter far sooner than it can get noticed, digested and spat out by the mainstream media.

In fact, the mainstream media have started to adopt Twitter as an important outlet. (And they haven't always been the smoothest about it. Witness the eruption over the Rocky Mountain News' live-Twitter coverage of a funeral.)

My favorite part of Twitter is still what I first got into it for last year: interesting insights:

@agahran. People don't know they care about the quality of writing, they just stop reading poorly written things. #tas08
#

"Wasilla's all i saw" - a Palin-drome
#

My 10-weeks-into-Twitter-world review: it feels... I don't know, *kinder*, than blog world. Less incentive for trolls, stalkers, etc.
#

Friendster informs me that they now have faster slide shows. I can save even more time by continuing to not log in there.
#

Of course, there are darker views of Twitter....

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” according to the report.

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the Army report said.

So if you do venture onto Twitter, watch out for those vegetarians.

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs on rare pattern and pingVision. Follow Laura!

This Wednesday's Denver/Boulder Drupal Users' Group Meet-Up will have, among other things, a presentation by Al Steffen on working on Drupal using Eclipse, the open source integrated development environment that makes coding -- and specifically coding for Drupal -- so much easier.

Also, Matt Tucker will continue our ad hoc series on things to do with Views by giving a little overview of Draggable Views, which is a module that pretty much does what you'd expect: drag-and-drop ordering of nodes in Views.

But that's just part of the meet-up. As always, the agenda is open.

Have a question?

Launched a website?

Created a cool new Drupal module?

Share it with fellow Drupal aficionados!

Meet-and-greet-and-Za start at 6:30pm, right here in our main meeting room. (Map below.) Presentations start around 7. All are welcome, from experts to the merely curious!

Here's something interesting to keep in mind the next time you're getting fancy with your nodes during the hook_nodeapi presave step: Don't forget your teaser.

I was having trouble with a Drupal 6 website I've been working on, where it seemed almost as if the body was duplicating part of itself (or sometimes all of itself) on the edit - it looked fine when you were viewing the node, but editing it caused things to duplicate within the body field. I tried the usual suspects for fixing - I searched for nodeapi calls inside of the custom modules we'd written to find the culprit, and then even just started turning off modules, and the theme, one by one, hoping to find the culprit that way.

Eventually I just tried using sql to modify the teaser in node_revisions, and when this modification showed up in the edit form, I started doing a search in the code for 'teaser .' - and I found it in node.pages.inc's node_body_field:

<?php
function node_body_field(&$node, $label, $word_count) {

  // Check if we need to restore the teaser at the beginning of the body.
  $include = !isset($node->teaser) || ($node->teaser == substr($node->body, 0, strlen($node->teaser)));

...
  $form['body'] = array(
    '#type' => 'textarea',
    '#title' => check_plain($label),
    '#default_value' => $include ? $node->body : ($node->teaser . $node->body),
    '#rows' => 20,
    '#required' => ($word_count > 0),
  );
?>

The problem is that the edit form for nodes compares the teaser with the start of the body data. If they don't match, then it prepends the teaser to the body data - which is normally used for when the person writing the node splits the teaser/body into two parts.

However, I was changing the body in hook_nodeapi('presave'), which turns out to be after the node teaser was created. The fix was as simple as adding $node->teaser = node_teaser($node->body); to the end of the presave code.

Simplelist is a simple method of getting lists of content to display in pages or blocks on your site. It doesn't try to do everything, instead it relies on node_load to pull in node data and node_view or a theme function to display it. As such, it doesn't require any special coding to use a custom module with Simplelist - it just works.

For example, you could create a block to display 10 images in order of highest ranking or most recent comment, or create a private page containing all nodes submitted by a user in a particular role.

pingVision has won a W3 Award in the Magazine category for the website for Popular Science, PopSci.com. The W³ Awards honors creative excellence on the web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award winning sites, marketing programs, and video work created for the web.

This is the third award pingVision has won for the PopSci website, having won a Gold Horizon Award in the Magazine/News category earlier this year and the Best Drupal Showcase award at DrupalCon Boston 2008.

The PopSci website was developed in Drupal 5, with custom functionality that resulted in some new contributed modules, and involved full migrations from Vignette (with a massive Oracle database) and TypePad. (Read our PopSci.com case study posted on Drupal.org and right here on the pingVision website.)

About the W3 Awards [pdf]:

The W³ is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts ... an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a "Who's Who" of acclaimed media, interactive, advertising, and marketing firms. IAVA members include executives from organizations such as Alloy, Brandweek, Coach, Disney, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Estee Lauder, Fry Hammond Barr, HBO, Monster.com, MTV, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Victoria’s Secret, Wired, and Yahoo!....

In determining winners, entries are judged based on a standard of excellence as determined by the IAVA, according to the category entered.

We are very grateful that our work has received such recognition. Thank you, IAVA!

So it's Halloween time. People don costumes and mock scariness in the face of a world full of scary things.

I should be blogging more. I should be publicizing more. I should be marketing more.

Time, alas, is a limiter. And my energy. I've had a flu shot. I eat not enough enough vegetables. I will on occasion have more than 1.5 glasses of red wine. I eat red meat and watch, now and then, R-rated movies. I don't exercise enough. Cherry pie is my downfall.

Am I scared? So?

After the initial official release of Views 2 nearly two weeks ago, we felt the need to give an official rundown of how we have incorporated some of its features into our production sites. There really are too many new features to discuss in one blog post, but I will try to cover a few new features for site administrators, developers, and themers.

What is Views?

If you're not familiar with Views already, it can be a bit challenging to explain. Views is the most actively used contributed module in the Drupal repository. On the most basic level, it is used to create lists of data. The majority of a website is built upon two concepts: the first being data, the second being presentation of this data. It is for this reason that views is a vital element of many sites.

Views gives you the option to filter the data outputted by a variety of options -- including but not limited to: node type, author, taxonomy term. It also allows you to sort by a variety of different options, including: post date, updated date, number of page views, etc. The list of data can be unformatted or outputted via a table, grid, list, river-of-news, etc.

Using Views, one can create countless lists of data such as:

• River of news
• Image gallery
• User lists
• Highest-rated content

And all this can be done without touching a bit of code.

A Greatly Improved User Interface

The most obvious change with the Views 2.0 is the user interface itself. What used to be thousands of pixels in height now fits before the first page fold in a completely revamped interface.

One of the most useful new features is the ability to create multiple displays within one view. Often, one needs to create a block, page, and feed of relatively the same data. Not only does Views 2 give you this functionality, but it also presents the controls in a unified interface that allows you to quickly change configuration settings between multiple displays.

For example, if you had a page and a block display both showing the most recent 5 blog entries posted to your site, you could simply change the ‘Default’ display to show the most recent 10 entries, and that setting would trickle down to all other displays. This functionality alone decreases the amount of time needed to create and update views drastically. (Of course, one can set a display to override the default display on a per-configuration setting basis.)

Not only has the interface for creating and editing views improved, but you can now create views which are more complex. To begin, no longer is Views node-centric - meaning that one can create lists of almost any data stored in the database, from users, to comments, files, revisions, and taxonomy terms. This opens up a whole new use for views, which, before, was reserved for custom queries.

Views as Attachments

Another new feature of Views is the ability to attach view display to another. By creating a display type of ‘Attachment,’ one has the option to amend or prepend one list of data with another.

For example, creating a gallery-type view which displays the most recent image enlarged with the description to the right, and the next six most recent images’ thumbnails below is entirely too easy with Views 2 and imagecache. Simply create a display which outputs two fields: the first being the image using a large imagecache preset, the second being the node body (or other description field). Then, create an attachment display, which displays a total of 6 nodes offset by 1 (to account for the first large image), and set the imagecache preset to be a smaller thumbnail. Then, simply select your attachment display to propend to your first display, add a bit of CSS to float the large image to the left and bingo, you have a single view that looks like this:
Sample images' source: commons.wikimedia.org

Relationships in Views, and Advanced Help

Another fantastic feature is the ability to define relationships in a view. A relationship allows you to expand the original query to include additional objects.

For example, if you are using a nodequeue to order your nodes, you might want to create a view which is sorted by order within the nodequeue. Simply add a relationship to the nodequeue within the views interface, and you will see a new sort option appear:

You will notice notice in the above screenshot that there are question-mark icons next to Relationships and Sort criteria. These were added via the Advanced Help module, which makes accessing help much easier. For a feature rich module such as views, this functionality is extremely helpful.

Easy Views Theming

Theming a 1.0 View used to be a daunting task. Figuring out which theme functions to override was often difficult and, simply put, was too complicated for beginning themers. Now, Views 2.0 uses a template-based theming system. All of the information as to which tpl files to create is accessible through the user interface under Base Settings > Theme > Information. Moving to a template-based system makes the life of a themer much brighter.

Although all of the discussed features are quite wonderful, the most useful addition to Views 2 is, undoubtedly Live Preview. No longer do you have to save your view, which tabs, and refresh. Instead, everything is handled on one screen, allowing you to work more efficiently.

Views + [other Drupal modules]

There are many contributed Drupal modules that integrate well with Views, making Views all the more powerful and useful.

For example, we are using Views to handle some complex workflows. With the combination of Workflow, Actions, Triggers, NodeQueue, and Views, one can create a feature-rich site that handles complex content creation workflows demanding moderation, approval, and promotion stages. Workflow integrates seamlessly with Views, allowing you to create lists of all nodes in a certain state. Integration of Workflow with Views also adds many other useful filters, sorts, and fields.

We have also used Views to create a custom search page with customizable sort options. It seems that almost every week we find a new use for Views that shortens our time spent on these types of tasks, allowing us to spend more time making sites even more functional than before.

A Valuable Drupal Toolset Created by a Most-Valuable Drupal Player

A special shout out from all of us at pingVision to Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) who was recently voted Drupal's MVP by Packt Publishing mainly for creating such a wonderful contribution to the Drupal community.

Change is coming. In fact, if you look over the past 15 years it's already here: the Internet. What it is now, with blogs and social networks, software-as-a-service and 'net-enabled applications, bears scant resemblance to what it was like in 1995. Think about how much it has changed just since you got on the net. No question: the Internet is evolving faster and faster. Do we know what it will look like in 15 years? Ten years? A year from now?

No. The Internet is changing too fast too fast.

Why Net Neutrality is important

The phrase "Net Neutrality" itself is unfortunate because, alliteration aside, it doesn't really have punch, but it's very important. Liza Sabater describes it as "digital civil rights." It's a clear concept when you talk about governmental control of the Internet. China, with the collaboration of its state-run ISPs and American search engine companies, has already demonstrated that control and censorship of the Internet is already possible.

Alistair Croll points out that ISPs have increasing capability to control what users can access:

There are a lot of bad things on the Internet: spam, child porn, malware, phishing and so on. Until recently, it’s been up to people to protect themselves, using security software or web site blocking. Lately, however, governments and legislators have been calling for service providers to limit where users can go, both to stop criminal activity and to protect naïve surfers from straying onto malicious sites. Recent advances in DNS may soon let carriers comply with such regulations.

In June, three major carriers agreed to purge child pornography hosted on servers their customers operate in their data centers. Having signed New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Internet code of conduct, every major U.S. ISP has also agreed to eliminate access to certain newsgroups. It’s not just in the U.S., either: Australia’s hotly debated Plan for Cyber Safety blocks content that isn’t child-friendly. Subscribers can opt out, but they’ll still be blocked from content the government deems illegal.

What about in cases of control and censorship of Internet content by corporations for non-government-manded reasons?

Claire, of the Hawaii LRB Library, gives a thumbnail:

Network neutrality is generally the concept of ensuring "unfettered access to the Internet" by regulating owners of Internet networks. CRS notes that the two most common discriminatory actions against net neutrality are "the network providers’ ability to control access to and the pricing of broadband facilities, and the incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage."

It's this latter part -- "incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage" -- that explains the concern of every website owner who does not control a piece of the Internet backbone.

Alice Marshall puts it in the context of the tech economy:

I am very concerned that the whole Web 2.0 crowd and the entire tech community are way too complacent about net neutrality. It is true that articles about net neutrality are regularly featured on Slashdot's front page and tech publications have done some great reporting on this, but I think too many people take the point-to-point architecture of the Web for granted and don't realize the entire basis of their business model could be destroyed.

QU writes:

Just what would be left if in fact corporations were left to create the content we see every day? They may edit and put their own spin on items in order to create a more favorable view for certain topics. When *we* create the Internet, we are able to put our own opinion on things, yes but people are also allowed to create their own opinions after reading multiple ideas from multiple people.

This isn't just about being able to hear political statements by Pearl Jam.

In a post about how "Verizon Wireless plans to tack on an extra 3-cent charge for every SMS message sent by Web information services to any of its mobile subscribers," Erick Shonfeld points out that Net Neutrality is not just about politics' effect on business, but also business' effect on politics:

The other way this could backfire for Verizon is that it could raise some serious Net neutrality issues. If it does not apply this charge evenly across the board, or starts carving out exceptions to do biz dev deals (and Verizon made some indications to Silicon Valley startups it was moving in this direction prior to the rate hike announcement), then it will be giving preferential treatment to one source of information over the other.

What if Verizon were charging the Obama campaign 3 cents per SMS message right now, but cut a deal with the McCain campaign to charge one cent per SMS? That is just a stark example, but you see where this can go. What if it charges the New York Times one rate, and the Wall Street Journal another? It becomes a freedom of speech issue.

The candidates' stances

Recently Slashdot pointed up the issue:

"For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of 'network neutrality,' until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), 'both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.'"

Here's Barack Obama speaking on Net Neutrality:

I think it's fair to say that John McCain unequivocably opposes Net Neutrality. John McCain has a tech plan, for which Susan Crawford offers up some perspective:

First, here’s the fact: We don’t have a functioning “free market” in online access. John McCain thinks we do. That kind of magical thinking takes real practice.

Instead, we’ve got four or so enormous companies that control most of the country’s access, and they’re probably delighted that McCain is promising not to regulate them.

The “net neutrality” movement is not about “regulating the internet.” That’s twisted.

You can think of the internet as a conversation being had by more than a billion people walking along a sidewalk. Big sidewalk. Net neutrality would require that the sidewalk keep out of the conversation - not limit it, shape it, charge it based on how interesting it is, or butt in. Right now, our sidewalks are in the business of deciding what kinds of conversations can happen, and they’re no longer required by law to just lie down and act like sidewalks. That’s a problem. We’d like the sidewalks, those basic transport elements, to be separate from the conversation.

Just as the power companies can’t dictate what kinds of purposes people use electricity for, the providers of basic general-purpose communications transport shouldn’t be able to dictate how we communicate.

Danny Weizner notes

McCain’s record in promoting innovation on the Internet and in the large information and communications marketplace is terrible. Mostly, he can claim credit for supporting incumbents over innovators and for failing, in his time as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee to do anything at all to support the innovative and socially beneficial aspects of the Internet.

What about the running mates? leahpeah says:

Biden’s support is ambiguous and I’ll be watching to see how that plays out.

In Wired, Sarah Lai Stirland writes of Biden:

Biden's most-recent reputation in D.C. on telecom issues is more ambiguous, particularly when it comes to net neutrality. Though he ostensibly supported the concept as a presidential candidate during this election cycle, in hearings on Capitol Hill he's been a hesitant supporter for pro net-neutrality legislation.

I don't know if Sarah Palin has said anything about Net Neutrality.

A non-partisan (or bi-partisan) issue?

You might ask why protecting freedom of speech on the Internet has become a partisan issue. Says Techory:

I don’t like to get political on here, but I don’t really see that this is really a political issue, or at least it shouldn’t be one. It really shouldn’t matter what political party you follow, it’s more about getting the most out of the Internet, and not being beholden to your service provider for a certain type of content. This image is an obvious exaggeration, but shows what I mean. This might not matter if there were true competition for internet services, but in many instances there are maybe one or two high speed options in an area (usually phone or cable). If they both happen to do what they please with your traffic, you’re out of luck.

And it's not just about Republicans' opposing Net Neutrality. Democratic New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been pushing through an aggressive government program that threatens Net Neutrality:

Obviously, stopping child porn is a good goal, but Cuomo's approach actually makes the problem worse and sets a dangerous precedent....

...[A] recent look at the details of Cuomo's highly publicized campaign found that Cuomo clearly exaggerated the extent of the problem for political benefit, forcing ISPs to block all of Usenet, despite 99.9997% of the 3.7 billion available Usenet articles being perfectly legitimate content. But that's not stopping Cuomo. In fact, he's going even further.

He's been sending ISPs a presentation from a company called Brilliant Digital that's offering a "deep packet inspection" system that could scan every file sent across an ISP's network and try to determine if it was child porn. Yes, Cuomo is suggesting that ISPs spy on every single file sent over their network now, 4th Amendment be damned....

...Last week, we wrote about Paul Ohm's suggestion that we should create a stronger privacy law that outlawed deep packet inspection, as that would pretty much stop any attempt to break net neutrality without requiring special net neutrality laws. It's worth noting that such a law would also have the added benefit of making it doubly clear to Cuomo that such a program is quite illegal.

I don't know about you, but all of this sounds a bit scary to me.

It's a public policy issue, and we all should get involved

Do we want corporations, or our governments, restricting what we can get to on the Internet? That seems rather Orwellian ... or perhaps more like cable tv. I certainly do not want my access to the Internet be controlled like the cable companies control what shows are available on tv.

But that's me. Maybe most people really want the net to be more like tv?

Stacey Higgnbotham encourages dialogue:

I am curious to hear what the Pew survey says consumers think of the cloud. I would have guessed they don’t think much about it all, unless it’s bringing rain. I’m also curious as to what Google thinks regulators should focus on when it comes to running pools of virtualized servers. Bandwidth improvements and ensuring Network Neutrality are one obvious issue for cloud purveyors, other regulation that should be talked about is how laws and regulations govern the physical location of certain data. Indeed, one interesting side note to Google’s patent for running data centers on the high seas is the lack of jurisdiction in international waters.

On the consumer side, a fair issue to consider is how consumer content stored in such clouds can be used. Witness the kerfuffle over Google’s terms of service regarding Chrome, which tried to claim the right to use any content uploaded or displayed via the browser. But when storing files and data in a cloud, ownership and usage rights are essential, as are clear policies that lay out how such content might be accessed, tracked and monitored. Another issue is whether or not such data could ever truly be deleted from clouds, as former Facebook users had discovered. Not all of these issues require regulation, but it’s worth educating lawmakers about them in advance of more services being offered via the cloud.

No matter where you stand on this, the question seems to be not only where the candidates stand on Net Neutrality, but how the policies and laws enacted over the coming months and years might end up affecting, or even controlling, our conversations on politics.

Who controls the information pipelines? Will you be able to get to this website a year from now?

This post is cross-posted on BlogHer.

Change is coming. In fact, if you look over the past 15 years it's already here: the Internet. What it is now, with blogs and social networks, software-as-a-service and 'net-enabled applications, bears scant resemblance to what it was like in 1995. Think about how much it has changed just since you got on the net. No question: the Internet is evolving faster and faster. Do we know what it will look like in 15 years? Ten years? A year from now?

No. The Internet is changing too fast too fast.

Why Net Neutrality is important

The phrase "Net Neutrality" itself is unfortunate because, alliteration aside, it doesn't really have punch, but it's very important. Liza Sabater describes it as "digital civil rights." It's a clear concept when you talk about governmental control of the Internet. China, with the collaboration of its state-run ISPs and American search engine companies, has already demonstrated that control and censorship of the Internet is already possible.

Alistair Croll points out that ISPs have increasing capability to control what users can access:

There are a lot of bad things on the Internet: spam, child porn, malware, phishing and so on. Until recently, it’s been up to people to protect themselves, using security software or web site blocking. Lately, however, governments and legislators have been calling for service providers to limit where users can go, both to stop criminal activity and to protect naïve surfers from straying onto malicious sites. Recent advances in DNS may soon let carriers comply with such regulations.

In June, three major carriers agreed to purge child pornography hosted on servers their customers operate in their data centers. Having signed New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Internet code of conduct, every major U.S. ISP has also agreed to eliminate access to certain newsgroups. It’s not just in the U.S., either: Australia’s hotly debated Plan for Cyber Safety blocks content that isn’t child-friendly. Subscribers can opt out, but they’ll still be blocked from content the government deems illegal.

What about in cases of control and censorship of Internet content by corporations for non-government-manded reasons?

Claire, of the Hawaii LRB Library, gives a thumbnail:

Network neutrality is generally the concept of ensuring "unfettered access to the Internet" by regulating owners of Internet networks. CRS notes that the two most common discriminatory actions against net neutrality are "the network providers’ ability to control access to and the pricing of broadband facilities, and the incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage."

It's this latter part -- "incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage" -- that explains the concern of every website owner who does not control a piece of the Internet backbone.

Alice Marshall puts it in the context of the tech economy:

I am very concerned that the whole Web 2.0 crowd and the entire tech community are way too complacent about net neutrality. It is true that articles about net neutrality are regularly featured on Slashdot's front page and tech publications have done some great reporting on this, but I think too many people take the point-to-point architecture of the Web for granted and don't realize the entire basis of their business model could be destroyed.

QU writes:

Just what would be left if in fact corporations were left to create the content we see every day? They may edit and put their own spin on items in order to create a more favorable view for certain topics. When *we* create the Internet, we are able to put our own opinion on things, yes but people are also allowed to create their own opinions after reading multiple ideas from multiple people.

This isn't just about being able to hear political statements by Pearl Jam.

In a post about how "Verizon Wireless plans to tack on an extra 3-cent charge for every SMS message sent by Web information services to any of its mobile subscribers," Erick Shonfeld points out that Net Neutrality is not just about politics' effect on business, but also business' effect on politics:

The other way this could backfire for Verizon is that it could raise some serious Net neutrality issues. If it does not apply this charge evenly across the board, or starts carving out exceptions to do biz dev deals (and Verizon made some indications to Silicon Valley startups it was moving in this direction prior to the rate hike announcement), then it will be giving preferential treatment to one source of information over the other.

What if Verizon were charging the Obama campaign 3 cents per SMS message right now, but cut a deal with the McCain campaign to charge one cent per SMS? That is just a stark example, but you see where this can go. What if it charges the New York Times one rate, and the Wall Street Journal another? It becomes a freedom of speech issue.

The candidates' stances

Recently Slashdot pointed up the issue:

"For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of 'network neutrality,' until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), 'both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.'"

Here's Barack Obama speaking on Net Neutrality:

I think it's fair to say that John McCain unequivocably opposes Net Neutrality. John McCain has a tech plan, for which Susan Crawford offers up some perspective:

First, here’s the fact: We don’t have a functioning “free market” in online access. John McCain thinks we do. That kind of magical thinking takes real practice.

Instead, we’ve got four or so enormous companies that control most of the country’s access, and they’re probably delighted that McCain is promising not to regulate them.

The “net neutrality” movement is not about “regulating the internet.” That’s twisted.

You can think of the internet as a conversation being had by more than a billion people walking along a sidewalk. Big sidewalk. Net neutrality would require that the sidewalk keep out of the conversation - not limit it, shape it, charge it based on how interesting it is, or butt in. Right now, our sidewalks are in the business of deciding what kinds of conversations can happen, and they’re no longer required by law to just lie down and act like sidewalks. That’s a problem. We’d like the sidewalks, those basic transport elements, to be separate from the conversation.

Just as the power companies can’t dictate what kinds of purposes people use electricity for, the providers of basic general-purpose communications transport shouldn’t be able to dictate how we communicate.

Danny Weizner notes

McCain’s record in promoting innovation on the Internet and in the large information and communications marketplace is terrible. Mostly, he can claim credit for supporting incumbents over innovators and for failing, in his time as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee to do anything at all to support the innovative and socially beneficial aspects of the Internet.

What about the running mates? leahpeah says:

Biden’s support is ambiguous and I’ll be watching to see how that plays out.

In Wired, Sarah Lai Stirland writes of Biden:

Biden's most-recent reputation in D.C. on telecom issues is more ambiguous, particularly when it comes to net neutrality. Though he ostensibly supported the concept as a presidential candidate during this election cycle, in hearings on Capitol Hill he's been a hesitant supporter for pro net-neutrality legislation.

I don't know if Sarah Palin has said anything about Net Neutrality.

A non-partisan (or bi-partisan) issue?

You might ask why protecting freedom of speech on the Internet has become a partisan issue. Says Techory:

I don’t like to get political on here, but I don’t really see that this is really a political issue, or at least it shouldn’t be one. It really shouldn’t matter what political party you follow, it’s more about getting the most out of the Internet, and not being beholden to your service provider for a certain type of content. This image is an obvious exaggeration, but shows what I mean. This might not matter if there were true competition for internet services, but in many instances there are maybe one or two high speed options in an area (usually phone or cable). If they both happen to do what they please with your traffic, you’re out of luck.

And it's not just about Republicans' opposing Net Neutrality. Democratic New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been pushing through an aggressive government program that threatens Net Neutrality:

Obviously, stopping child porn is a good goal, but Cuomo's approach actually makes the problem worse and sets a dangerous precedent....

...[A] recent look at the details of Cuomo's highly publicized campaign found that Cuomo clearly exaggerated the extent of the problem for political benefit, forcing ISPs to block all of Usenet, despite 99.9997% of the 3.7 billion available Usenet articles being perfectly legitimate content. But that's not stopping Cuomo. In fact, he's going even further.

He's been sending ISPs a presentation from a company called Brilliant Digital that's offering a "deep packet inspection" system that could scan every file sent across an ISP's network and try to determine if it was child porn. Yes, Cuomo is suggesting that ISPs spy on every single file sent over their network now, 4th Amendment be damned....

...Last week, we wrote about Paul Ohm's suggestion that we should create a stronger privacy law that outlawed deep packet inspection, as that would pretty much stop any attempt to break net neutrality without requiring special net neutrality laws. It's worth noting that such a law would also have the added benefit of making it doubly clear to Cuomo that such a program is quite illegal.

I don't know about you, but all of this sounds a bit scary to me.

It's a public policy issue, and we all should get involved

Do we want corporations, or our governments, restricting what we can get to on the Internet? That seems rather Orwellian ... or perhaps more like cable tv. I certainly do not want my access to the Internet be controlled like the cable companies control what shows are available on tv.

But that's me. Maybe most people really want the net to be more like tv?

Stacey Higgnbotham encourages dialogue:

I am curious to hear what the Pew survey says consumers think of the cloud. I would have guessed they don’t think much about it all, unless it’s bringing rain. I’m also curious as to what Google thinks regulators should focus on when it comes to running pools of virtualized servers. Bandwidth improvements and ensuring Network Neutrality are one obvious issue for cloud purveyors, other regulation that should be talked about is how laws and regulations govern the physical location of certain data. Indeed, one interesting side note to Google’s patent for running data centers on the high seas is the lack of jurisdiction in international waters.

On the consumer side, a fair issue to consider is how consumer content stored in such clouds can be used. Witness the kerfuffle over Google’s terms of service regarding Chrome, which tried to claim the right to use any content uploaded or displayed via the browser. But when storing files and data in a cloud, ownership and usage rights are essential, as are clear policies that lay out how such content might be accessed, tracked and monitored. Another issue is whether or not such data could ever truly be deleted from clouds, as former Facebook users had discovered. Not all of these issues require regulation, but it’s worth educating lawmakers about them in advance of more services being offered via the cloud.

No matter where you stand on this, the question seems to be not only where the candidates stand on Net Neutrality, but how the policies and laws enacted over the coming months and years might end up affecting, or even controlling, our conversations on politics.

Who controls the information pipelines? Will you be able to get to this website a year from now?

BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision, and supports Net Neutrality.

pingVision is now accepting applications for the position of pingVision is accepting applications for Office Manager. We're looking for a detail-oriented person to take charge of the general office requirements for our company of (currently) 15 people.

This is a full-time position. We're looking for people living in the Boulder/Denver area.

pingVision is now accepting applications for the position of PHP Developer for enterprise-level corporate and community websites and web applications.

We're looking for a talented, experienced, detail-oriented person with expertise in PHP development and an understanding of user experience. Familiarity with the Drupal content management system is desired, but not required.

This is a full-time position. We're looking for people living in the Boulder/Denver area.

pingVision is now accepting applications for the position of Interactive Designer for enterprise-level corporate and community websites and web applications.

We're looking for a talented, experienced, detail-oriented person with an understanding of user experience, user interface design and information architecture. Familiarity with the Drupal content management system is desired, but not required.

This is a full-time position. We're looking for people living in the Boulder/Denver area.

The regularly scheduled Drupal Meet-Up is happening this Wednesday, October 8th, starting at 6:30pm right here at pingVision.

The agenda is open this month, so bring your questions, your showcase sites, your hot new tip, and your questions. Connect with others who are into Drupal!

The first half-hour will be meet-and-greet, with pizza and beverages.

Whether new to Drupal or an expert, you are welcome!

It's hard to believe that I wrote this more than three years ago:

What I find especially frustrating, though, is how Microsoft forces me to spend so much time pampering their software. Yes, I'm talking about Internet Explorer, the iconoclastic web browser that refuses to acknowledge web standards.

How much online productivity is lost trying to get websites to look and function properly on Internet Explorer?

That would be an interesting question to explore. Talk to just about any web designer, and they will tell you that, for every 100 hours they spend on design, 50-60 hours are dedicated to actual design, and the rest is devoted to creating xhtml and CSS hacks to get it to work on Internet Explorer.

This is just as true today.

It's getting to the point where we're thinking of adding IE6 compatibility as a separate line item on our proposals and agreements. After all, when you're spending 35-50% of your theming time just trying to get a cool new design to work on one rather archaic browser, it's no small matter.

It's a ≈40% tax on web theming.

How can we get out of this? Thanks to Microsoft market share and IT departments' resistance to upgrading, I fear we're not going to be able to say a final good-bye to IE6 anytime soon.

Sophia Locero points to the IE Death March and several other like minded efforts to build a collective movement to simply drop IE6 support, and asks:

So many parties are restless about the state of web browsing, and rather than wait for Microsoft to get its act together, they take it upon themselves to do something about it. It doesn’t really stop with the viral websites. Every few months or so you’ll find a blog post that details how the author has had it with IE (IE6 usually) and that he has resolved to drop support for the browser completely.

One must ask: are any of them making a significant difference in the market share of IE? Or IE6, specifically?

I don't think so. Here at pingVision, nearly every one of our clients requires IE6 compatibility for their web projects, and I don't think that's because they're unthinking or naive about browsers. The fact is that their audience -- and, quite often, their own organizations -- are locked into IE6 by their IT departments.

Will 37 Signals' dropping of IE6 support make a dent in their market? Perhaps not, since their audience is probably already heavily skewed towards Firefox anyway. But our B2B clients would likely see a huge drop-off in traffic if their sites did not support the IE6 that still permeates corporate desktops and workstations the world over.

Still, what we have here is a tax on productivity, and if Microsoft did one thing to help the online economy, it would simply EOL IE6 altogether. Right. Now.

Meanwhile, we'll consider adding the "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Tax" to our estimates as a line item for all clients to see.

MacJournal gets all kinds of raves from the various software reviewing sites, but I have to wonder why.

The raves were enough to get me to overlook the very "web 1.0" style of Mariner Software's website. The MobileMe sync feature was enough to get me to pony up $34.95 instead of going for Journler, which is cheaper now and has a very nice feature set itself. I wanted this app to serve as my new business journaling software. The sync ability is important to me because I often do my best thinking at home, away from the daily hubbub at the office.

Once installed, MacJournal worked fine.

But then I tried to sync it across two computers. Every time the MobileMe sync ran, it wanted to delete several entries.

Right now, after a series of updates, my MacJournal journal has been whittled back down to the first entry I made. Good thing I had saved the rest as one-off backups, because I saw the problem coming thanks to MobileMe's warning about massive changes due to sync.

In the Mariner Software email receipt, it says:

* Have a question or comment? Join the Mariner Software Discussion Forum.

http://www.marinersoftware.com/forum/

Like most forums, you have to register to post. However, once I registered, I was informed:

Before you can login and start using the forum, your request will be reviewed and approved. When this happens, you will receive another email from this address.

Lovely. Nothing like the warm welcome of customer support! Mariner offers no support email, so this is it: A discussion forum jailed off from the real world.

–Not that I expect much from the forums. The existing threads have very stale content, much of it about problems syncing, with no clear resolution. One poster even goes so far to advise everyone to skip MobileMe sync for MacJournal altogether, and use a direct syncing application to pass the database back and forth.

That's not what I wanted!

So MacJournal is turning out to be a major dud software purchase and likely a waste of $35. Maybe I will just stick with Bare Bones' Yojimbo, which I use for note-taking, and expand my use of it to include journaling. The problem there, though, is there's no way to export Yojimbo except one entry at a time, which again is pretty frustrating for an application in 2008.

*sigh*

Update September 16th:

Not one to just rant and quite, once my user account was manually approved today, I posted this issue in the Mariner forums. So far, the only response is from someone else experiencing the same problems. Alas.

Update September 19th:

No other responses. I would say this does not bode well for expecting any kind of support. Mariner MacJournal is not at all recommended by me.