Our Digital Lives

If the Internet totally upended where we buy our presents for Aunt Betty and Cousin Bill, social media is about to revolutionize how we decide what to get them in the first place.

A new study from Deloitte says at least 17 percent of holiday shoppers will use social media to build their gift lists this year, including finding discounts and coupons, researching potential ideas, peeking at their friends' and family members' wish lists, and sharing their own wish lists.

Mobile phones are also going to play a bigger role, with more of us using them to locate stores (55 percent), research prices (45 percent), read product reviews (31 percent), and even search for discounts and coupons (32 percent).

A quarter of the over 10,000 people who participated in the study said they planned to actually make purchases via their phones. That's likely to shake things up even more for brick-and-mortar retailers. As a commenter on Click Z pointed out: "As phones get smarter I expect to see more window shopping with purchases actually being made cheaper online."

Image: WordPlay on HubPages

So this is interesting. The Vatican has decided it could do better on the communication front so it's holding a four-day conference starting today on the Internet in general and how young folks in particular use new media.

The symposium follows a few snafus earlier this year, including one, the Associated Press notes, in which the Pope rehabilitated ("un-excommunicated") a bishop who, it was later discovered, had made comments denying the Holocaust. The AP reports that the Pope was upset that Vatican officials hadn't "done a simple Internet search" on the bishop.

Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia have sent representatives to the conference, which is drawing about 100 people from around Europe. A Swiss hacker and an Interpol cyber-crime expert will also discuss hacking.

The Telegraph reports that the Pope is already quite digi-literate and has his own laptop and an iPhone. The AP reports that the Vatican's top spokesman has said the Church wants to get better at using new technologies to spread its message.

"Our dream in this global village created by new technologies is that the church and Jesus' disciples can have their tent—Jesus' tent—so that the attention of men and women who walk the streets of the world is turned toward it," he said.

At a panel on technology hosted by TIME today as part of its TIME 100 Roundable series, TechCrunch founder and editor (and past TIME 100 honoree) Michael Arrington said one of the technology trends that scares him the most these days is the amount of personal information that's being collected about people by private corporations.

Arrington: I'm worried about privacy issues. The companies out there gathering data on the stuff we do on Twitter, publicly scraping the stuff on Facebook, it's amazing how much data [they're collecting]. I'm worried it can be abused.... There are companies out there whose whole business is to gather as much information as possible, who our friends are, what we do....

Josh Quittner, TIME editor-at-large and panel moderator: So you'd like regulation around that?

Arrington: I like the way Europe does things, where the human being comes first, and they're very careful about how you store data.

The panel featured (from left) recent TIME 100 honorees Digg CEO Jay Adelson; Arrington; Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life; and Jeff Han, chief scientist and founder of Perceptive Pixel (and creator of the CNN Magic Wall). Quittner is at right.

Video of the panel will be posted to TIME.com.

So this is where news organizations earn their proverbial keep, no? A disaster like the Bay Bridge closure that turns the lives of the locals upside down. When people want to know—need to know—the latest.

So we were wondering, in this modern age, with a proliferation of news sources: Who are you turning to to keep you up-to-date on Bay Bridge news?

We were going to do a poll, but we figured there's far too many potential sources to list. Like: San Francisco Chronicle (print), SFGate, KCBS, KGO AM, KTVU (TV), KTVU.com (Web site), KRON-TV (TV), KRON.com (Web site), Oakland Tribune (print), InsideBayArea.com, CBS 5 (TV), cbs5.com (Web site), KGO-TV (TV), ABC7News.com (Web site), 511.org, Bart.gov, SFBart on Twitter, Twitter's #BayBridge hashtag, SFAppeal, SFist. Or some other? Who're we forgetting?

So let us know in the comments where you're getting your Bay Bridge news from (you can put as many sources as you like). If we get enough answers, we'll do the math and figure out who's the go-to-source of this kind of news these days. (We might even get all fancy and put it in a pie chart or something.)

Over the last couple of weeks, we've been all agog over Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus quitting Twitter. Now comes word that British songstress Lily Allen is giving up the Twit as well.

And not just that, according to the Mirror (UK). The formerly tech-focused Allen, known for sending out digital dispatches, is also quitting MySpace and giving up her Macbook and Blackberry—"to avoid temptation."

After the 24-year-old started sending out as many as 20 tweets a day, her boyfriend reportedly got fed up. "He told Lily: 'It's me or Twitter,' " the Mirror quotes a pal as saying. "And she chose him."

Which makes us wonder: Is giving up social media going to be the new rehab? Will quitting Twitter become the next surefire headline-grabbing celeb confession: "It was getting out of control. My family finally confronted me, and I had to accept I had a problem."

Perhaps. After all, there are those who've long contended that our digital toys can be downright addictive.

Photo credit: Benoit Derrier (Creative Commons license)

Good news for all those young women out there who've made Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" the ringtone for when their boyfriends call: A federal court has ruled that the playing of ringtones in public places—without a "public performance license"—does not constitute copyright infringement.

In June, ASCAP asserted that playing snippets of copyrighted songs as cell phone ringtones constituted "public performances." Had the court agreed, each cell phone ring could have been liable for statutory damages, according to the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the three organizations who filed an amicus brief challenging ASCAP's position.

Yesterday, a New York court agreed with EFF's position. "The ruling is an important victory for consumers, making it clear that playing music in public, when done without any commercial purpose, does not infringe copyright" EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohman wrote on the organization's blog.

First she just turned them into watercolors for herself. Then she started posting them to her blog. Then she started selling copies on Etsy. And now she's talking book deal.

The New York Times has a story about Brooklyn editorial and children's book illustrator Sophie Blackall who's been turning entries from Craigslist's "Missed Connections" section into works of art.

"These illustrations have recurring themes of love, loss, regret and hope," Blackall tells the Times. "Even the most grim postings have this little kernel of unflagging hope which is just so lovely and optimistic."

There are really only a few things you should never post online: Indiscreet pictures from spring break, tweets about what an awesome time you're having with the boys when you told your gf you were working late, and of course, anything that sounds like a threat to kill the president.

Apparently, the folks who posted a poll Saturday on Facebook asking respondents "Should Obama be killed?" forgot that the NSA has armies of bots scanning the 'net 24/7 for any indication that someone might be planning harm to the occupant of the Oval Office. (Though, for the record, in this case, it was a blogger named GottaLaff who discovered the poll and started writing about it.)

So now, as the Associated Press is now reporting, the Secret Service has started an investigation. Facebook has since removed the poll, whose possible answers included yes, maybe, if he cuts my health care, and no.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is one of the people who's not going to be happy to hear about the poll. At a press conference following Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst at the State of the Union, Pelosi became emotional, saying the increasingly violent rhetoric surrounding the health care debate reminded her of the atmosphere in the days preceding the assassination of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk.

"I wish we would... understand that some of the ears that [those kinds of statements are] falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statements may assume," she said at the time. "You have to take responsibility for any incitement that [your words] may cause."

One of Gavin Newsom's core strengths is the ability to spot a good idea elsewhere and appropriate it for use here. Which is all well and good, except for the fact that subsequent celebrations of local successes seem to forget that credit for the idea behind the initiatives ultimately belongs elsewhere.

But in the case of the new DataSF App Showcase, we're willing to overlook the self-promotion (the "mayor's vision" of a more collaborative and open government, as described on the Showcase page, seems less homegrown than a piggybacking on emerging Gov 2.0 ideas elsewhere) because of the kindly hat tips to what are clearly the inspirations for this venture: the Apple and Facebook app ecosystems.

The site, just launched, is a collection of all the desktop and mobile-enabled apps you can use to get insight into what's going on in this city—everything from Crimespotting (an interactive map of crime in San Francisco) to TrainSchedule (an iPhone app of area transit systems).

The App Showcase is part of a larger initiative that's turning city datasets loose and letting regular Joes develop apps on top of them. "We are trying to turn government into an organizing platform for civic engagement by giving our residents the tools to build the kind of government that works for them," Newsom wrote on Mashable.

InsideFacebook tracks new Facebook apps, particularly how fast they're growing. They noticed something perhaps not altogether surprising, in retrospect, this past week: Two apps for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr and one for Rosh Hashana were this week's top gainers.

Kartu Labaran, the fastest growing app, with 63,000 users, lets you send digital greeting cards for Eid. Eid Sweets (the one in Arabic script, below), the third-fastest grower, with 34,000 users, lets you send virtual goodies. And Shana Tova! Rosh HaShana 5770, fourth, with 46,000 users, similarly lets you send virtual gifts for the holiday.

Graph from: Inside Facebook