After years of debate, the decision to make the web more inclusive in this way by the nonprofit board’s 15 voting members received a standing ovation after a week-long series of meetings in Seoul, Korea.

This will allow governments to submit requests for specific non-Latin domain names, as soon as mid-November, and we’ll start seeing them used early next year. Non-Latin versions of “.com” and “.org” won’t be allowed for a few more years, however.

On October 29, 1969, the Internet came in not with a bang, but with a “lo.”

Letter by letter, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from his school’s host computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock was trying to write “login,” starting up a remote time-sharing system, but the system crashed after two letters, and lo! The Internet was born with the first data message sent between two networked computers.

To be fair, the creation of the Internet was peppered with other milestones that could be considered more or less historic. After all, at the core of the Internet was packet-switching–the process of breaking down data into blocks and routing them individually–and in 1968 Donald Davies of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory gave the first public presentation of the idea.

But if we can all agree that communication–e-mail, chat, social networking–is what makes the Internet tick, Kleinrock’s first message was the most significant early step towards what we have today.

Look how far we’ve come–and how much further we’ve yet to go. The internet started with a lo, evolved into a social stream–what will come next? How much more pervasive will it be in another 40 years?

I can’t wait to find out.

Ali: Are you usually this friendly with strangers?
She: Always.
Ali: Any particular reason?
She: A stranger is a safe place. You can tell a stranger anything.
Ali: Suppose I put it in my book.
She: You write fiction.
Ali: So?
She: So you won’t tie me to the facts.
Ali: But I might tell the truth.
She: Facts never tell the truth. Even the simplest facts are misleading.
Ali: Like the times of the trains.
She: And how many lovers you’ve had.

Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

If there is any phrase that summarizes what enabled us to advance as far as we have, it’s “question everything.” Yet as more information becomes available to us via the web, we wander farther and farther away from this concept. Lost? Google Maps. Doubt? Wikipedia. New crush? Google.

This would be excellent if the information available to us was always accurate. The problem is that it isn’t and we’re no longer used to doubting all data until verified. The problem with the disparity between the digital and analog was illustrated perfectly today by Dr. Mark Drapeau, adjunct faculty member in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In a post on his Posterous, he detailed an incident at Washington’s Union Station, where he was boarding an Amtrak train.

An abridged excerpt:

A few weeks ago, someone installed new screens around Union Station that give gates and updated information about trains. You know, “On Time,” “Boarding,” and so forth. You can find summary boards around the train station, and individual boards near the gates. They’re coordinated, and most likely run by some central software.

As we were running a few minutes late to board, the automatic screen at the gate switched from “On Time” to “Boarding.” Except we weren’t boarding at all. The attendant said it would be just a few minutes, and the door was shut with a fabric rope. The attendant went in the back with his walkie talkie to check on something and we quietly stood by the gate, about a hundred of us.

Suddenly, we hear a shriek. A middle-aged woman is running at us, yelling about how her train is boarding, hurdling over people and their bags. “Where’s the train to Newport News?! My train is boarding!!” Before anyone could say two words to her, she quickly glanced at the sign that said “Boarding,” tore off the fabric barrier, barged through the door, and started running towards the escalator to the train.

This is a good example of how updated technology not only can be merely a cosmetic improvement, but also can be harmful when used improperly. In this case, Amtrak personnel clearly knew we were not boarding, yet the signs said we were.

In the minds of people these days, virtual boarding is as good as the truth, and we saw this with the middle-aged woman, who ran by a hundred people waiting to board because a digital display convinced her that her train was boarding.

This is a similar problem to the “celebrity death hoax” phenomena whereby Kanye West or a similar high-profile person is declared “RIP” by an enterprising Twitter user–and the information spreads like wildfire. Being dead on Twitter is now equivalent to actually being dead, unless you literally “resurrect” yourself via a YouTube video (Zach Braff) or a late-night TV appearance (Jeff Goldblum).

Today’s incident could have been prevented in a number of ways. It was very minor, but it serves as an example of what happens when half-assed technology is involuntarily injected into our daily lives by people we don’t know, who don’t care about us. If we don’t have standards about making digital information match reality, where does that logically leave society? Working bathrooms declared closed? Incorrect pricing on lattes? Misleading highway directions during an emergency?

What I want to know is: Who’s going to be in charge of coordinating the digital and the real as our country moves toward a more technocratic future?

It’s a loaded question. One of the greatest aspects of the internet is the freedom with which it provides us. Coordination would require regulation. Do you draw the line at stations and airports providing information? Doesn’t it logically follow that any resource offering information (be it medical, historical and scientific) should comply? And so would the content provided by citizen journalists who are more and more providing the information for their communities. What would this regulation look like? More importantly, how would it be enforced?

The verdict? Journalists in a cross-section of 79 newsrooms across the nation feel the transition from print to digital is too slow. Many of the nearly 3,800 responders said the shift was taking too long, with only 20 percent longing for the good old days of print. The breakdown looks like this:

1. 12 percent are “digitals”, meaning they spend most of their time online. They are the youngest group, with an average age of 38.
2. 11 percent want a more major shift, and could help that shift happen in their newsrooms, but they feel pessimistic about staying in the business much longer. Most of those in this segment have been in the business for at least 15 years.
3. 50 percent feel newspapers should increase their efforts toward digital media moderately. They want an equal split between online and print work.
4. 14 percent think that the 30 percent of time they devote to digital media during the work day is sufficient and see no reason to go further.
5. 6 percent actively wish digital media would go away.
6. 5 percent are leaders who have been in the business more than 20 years and who want to shift to the web completely. They’re optimistic about the change and see their career options brightly.

A careful look at the study indicates that what sets apart journalists who want to become more engaged online is not youth as much as how much time they spend online outside of work and how much knowledge they have of their audience preferences:

Previous Readership Institute research has proven the importance of customer knowledge as a first step in building media use. Real customer focus also includes acting on the results and letting customer needs drive internal decision-making. This study offers a new reason why knowing the audience is important: it helps stimulate a desire to transition to online work.

The immediacy of feedback and climate of engagement enables a journalist to understand what’s a hit and what’s a miss in real time. This motivates their engagement, which leads to more engagement and growth. It’s a positive cycle when the newsroom equips its team with the right tools and guidelines for digital interaction.

Unfortunately for most newsrooms, few are doing so. The survey revealed that more than half of the journalists working primarily in print had had no training in the to equip them for a transition to digital media. One in four journalists reported having had no training at all. Incredible.

You can read the full report here.

THE BALLOON BOY INCIDENT

On October 15, 2009, news broke that six-year-old Falcon Heene had floated away in a balloon made by his father in Fort Collins, Colorado. The media and public were stirred into a panicked frenzy only to discover, when the balloon landed near Denver International Airport hours later, that there was no one aboard. A search for the body of the child found nothing. Heene was eventually reported to have been found hiding in a cardboard box over the garage of his family’s home. There is a criminal investigation of the Heenes underway and now many believe that the entire thing was staged to draw attention to the family’s aspirations for fame.

I don’t know what really happened in the Heene household, nor do I have any clever quips about what it all means about the state of modern society. What I do know is that the Heenes asked for our attention and support and broke our trust in them. We will never believe them again. It’s the 21st century boy who cried wolf.

THE EFFECTIVE CALL-TO-ACTION

In early January of 2009, David Armano asked the readers of his popular blog Logic+Emotion to help his family help a friend of theirs whose life had put her in a difficult position. He knew it’s not easy to ask people for donations and that that the crumbling economy made it less likely that people would contribute. His post was short and got right to the point:

I’ve been at this blog for nearly 3 years now and have never asked for something like this—I hope I’ve earned enough trust to be able to ask something back from you. Above is a picture of Daniela and her family. Brandon, age 6, Daniela, age 9 and little Evelyn age 4. Daniela is divorcing her spouse after years of abuse. In recent years her mortgage went unpaid and she’s lost her house.

As of this moment, Daniela’s family is staying at our house and we are trying to help her find a one bedroom apartment for her family to live in. With Evelyn, her youngest having Down’s Syndrome and Daniela herself being a Romanian immigrant with very little family support she literally has no one to turn to. Except us (all of us).

Daniela cleans houses when she can leave her family. I’m not even going to tell you what she gets paid—it’s obscene. Right now her options are pretty limited, aside from an apartment, there is only a group shelter. Not very pretty.

Here’s what we are asking. Right now, Belinda and I are opening our home, but it’s tight as we have no basement. We’ve committed to giving as much as we can spare, diverting funds from other places. I’m asking if you could think about doing the same. Or at the very least, helping get the word out about this. We are looking to raise 5k for Daniela and her family. Enough so that she doesn’t have to worry about a deposit or rent for a while.

I know this is the worst possible time to ask for anything…. I don’t have anything to offer back. Not an ego list or top donators directory. I can only hope that this thing we call “community” puts its money or heart where its mouth is. Please do whatever you can.

Respectfully, David and family

What happened? Donations poured in to a startling total of $16,880. David Griner summarized the forces that seemed to be at work in this unprecedented show of support. The first one is the most important, and the backbone of this post: rarity.

Armano has built himself a reputation as a brilliant commentator on business and the social web. His content is valuable to us–we tune in because we trust his judgment and insight. Secondly, he provides this information (quite often in beautifully minimalistic infographics) at no cost to us and gives us feedback on our own ideas, whether in his blog, comments section, Twitter, or Facebook. So when he asked his Twitter followers and readers to do something for him, we did it. At the time my now ex-husband was in a panic, we were liquidating all of our assets, and awaiting a financial Apocalypse that was hurtling toward us at light speed. I knew he’d have more than a word with me about throwing money at people I didn’t even know. But I didn’t hesitate.

And neither did 544 other people.

THE TRUST FUND

Every once in a while, we do need the support of our network. Maybe we need a ride to a conference in a nearby town. Maybe we’re launching a new product and we want to get buzz going. Maybe we want to see if anyone wants to buy a laptop bag we impulse bought that turned out to be too small or too big for our needs. It’s not as urgent, but the same rules apply–if your network feels your content has value, if they feel you have given them something, they’re going to do what they can to help.

My friend Damien Basile calls it The Trust Fund: “When you invest time and energy into someone you form a relationship. When this happens you create a ‘Trust Fund’ where both you and the other person either add or subtract trust from this mutual fund you have set up.” Asking for help requires trust. Do you have enough in your trust fund to make that request?

Not a single one of us is faultless, but how many of us know one person who just, oh, takes the cake Heene-style? How likely are you to stretch a helping hand the next time you see one of their tweets asking for support? Exactly.

VOTE FOR ME!

So there I was, standing in front of the school, about to give a speech about why they should vote for me. A closet introvert (surprised? Good, that means I’m doing something right), I didn’t want to address them myself, so I’d made a horse paperbag puppet. My promises were simple–we’d be able to order lunch from more franchises, I’d address the ridiculous little song we were made to sing at assembly about having a positive attitude with the principal, and so on. I’m convinced they voted for me because I was the girl who invited her whole class to her birthday parties and because I’d never asked for anything from anyone until that moment.

I won by a landslide.

So here is my point: before you consider what you’re asking, think about what you’re giving. Your space online is yours to do what you will, but be consistent in your offerings. People who read what you put out there come back time and time again because they know what they can expect from you. Yes, even if 50 percent of your tweets are conversation tidbits without much context. Be gentle in your metamorphosis–remember it’s not just you in that bus.

Engage. David Armano didn’t just put out content for three years before he asked us to help him out. He put out content and he interacted with his readers across multiple platforms. He, like most power-users of social media, know that the blog post or tweet is not a closing argument but a springboard for discussion. This is a big part of the Trust Fund. Your readers take you seriously–do you show them that you take their feed back seriously?

If you say you’re going to do something, follow through. I know this is hard, God knows I’ve dropped the ball with as much aplomb as I’ve followed through. Learn to avoid failing to follow through (or worse, having a nervous breakdown because you’re so much of everything to everyone that you’re nothing to yourself) by being selective in your commitments. Saying no is not rude, just be transparent about your limitations. And at the very least, be fast to notify people when things aren’t going to turn out as you’d promised. Time is scarce, but consideration doesn’t cost a whole lot. Take those two minutes, even if it means shooting a short text in the middle of a stressful call with a client.

EPILOGUE

Having said all this, thank you all for voting for me for the 140 Conference NOW Awards and Mashable Open Web Awards. Your submitting a vote says to me that you value my content and I am both humbled and honored by your gesture of appreciation. But you will not see me ask you to vote for me so lightly anymore.

One day, I may call upon you, my dear friends. And that day, without a doubt, you will know that what I’m asking means a lot to me. But just to make sure that you know, I promise to take the time to explain to you exactly why I need your support.

Now I ask all of you to think of your trust funds the next time you’re about to pelt your friends and readers with “vote for me” DMs. And if you absolutely must call upon me, avoid the form-letter feel of such a message and opt for e-mail. You don’t need a horse puppet and definitely not a UFO-shaped balloon, just a simple message that lets me know why this means so much.

My favorite to date is his Business Lessons Learned From The Fruit Stand, which I excerpt for you here:

Near the station there is a fruit stand selling all kinds of fruit. The fruit stand was packed to the gills with fruit, all meticulously stacked and ordered into piles, rows and boxes. One would think that a shop like this does brisk trade given all the human traffic from the station–thousands of people must pass this shop every day. However, in the 10 minutes I was standing there, nobody bought any of the neatly ordered and boxed fruit.

People were however, buying fruit from a small corner of the stall where they had cut up whole fruit into pieces, and put them on a stick. Buying a piece of fruit like this is not very economical but any false economy is negated by the convenience of being able to eat it immediately. In the 10 minutes I was there, they sold about $100 worth of fruit.

You might be selling the right product, but are you selling it in the right way? Is there an untapped market out there for you if you adapted your product ever-so-slightly?

“Fruit for thought,” he says, in typical Yongfook-style. If you’re not following that Posterous, you really should be.

LA Weekly goes mobile.

The app is simple. It has five main categories: a calendar of events to see what’s happening around town; a music guide to see who’s playing where; a restaurant guide to get the noms on; a late night section chock full of reviews; and slideshows, featuring the work of some of L.A.’s best photographers on their nights around town (not that I would know or anything, but loading an LA Weekly slideshow on Safari takes much too long to really show off how popular you are as you stand around outside some other event smoking a cigarette, so thanks for this. Not for me, of course–for other people who are shallow and self-absorbed).

The app also features a “Nearby” option that uses your location to discern what is happening nearest to you. This is not quite UrbanDaddy’s The Next Move (as it doesn’t enable you to search by time, location and other criteria), but then, it’s not supposed to be. UrbanDaddy gives you options. LA Weekly tells you what’s hot, what’s happening, what’s right now.

And if that’s not the way of L.A., I don’t know what is.

Drawbacks? There are no articles to be read here, just reviews (which is a good thing, as I would like to keep the print version of this publication around for as long as humanly possible), no form of interaction with other users (like you have on lalawag’s app–which is vital to growing and fostering community), and no way to add places to a favorites list.

They don’t absolutely have to do anything about the first two. But the third would be nice.

Oh, and PSFYI: Fishbowl LA’s suggestion merits careful consideration: “a constantly updated emoticon for the mood of editor Drex Heikes. ‘I feel like pitching a series of articles about the plight of parking enforcement hybrids, I’ll just check to see if Heikes isn’t already bored.’”

There should really be an app for that.

“It’s the economy, stupid.” — James Carville, 1992

“It’s a people-driven economy, stupid.” — Erik Qualman, 2009

Oh, and this video? I found it via @laura_no_esta.

This, perhaps, is the biggest difference between bloggers and journalists. A journalist cannot be rewarded in any way for his or her coverage, while many on the forefront of web 2.0 have worked to delineate best practices for web personalities who receive compensation (direct or indirect) for their product placement, these guidelines have not reached a consensus. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is moving to change this. Their new guidelines dictate that web personalities pitching these products are to be made liable if their claims or other content misrepresent the product or company they’re pitching.

Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks, the award-winning PR and new media agency in Silicon Valley, wrote about the FTC’s vision for bloggers and web personalities at TechCrunch:

In a discussion with Mary Engle, the acting deputy director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection, she articulated to me, “It’s not about preventing citizen journalists from becoming citizen advertisers, that’s just not true. We’re acting to ensure that bloggers don’t create a bias in the consumer decision-making process. Consumers just need to know that what they’re reading is technically an advertisement.”

Whether the post is compensated with cash or with free product or rewards, the FTC views them equally. Engle observed, “The real test is whether or not the consumer’s impression or decision would change if they knew the post was sponsored.”

The FTC Guides advise that an advertisement employing a consumer endorsement on a central or key attribute of a product will be interpreted as representing that the endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve.

It’s about responsibility and credibility.

Solis believe that compensating bloggers and influencers directly or indirectly can’t but cloud their ability to be unbiased about the products they’re discussing, thereby risking their credibility and the trust of their audience.

I don’t necessarily agree. As I wrote in The Balance between Money and Credibility, I think it’s possible to endorse the brands that you believe in and maintain credibility and trust by being upfront and disclosing your relationships.

In that regard, Solis brings up important rebuttals:

If we examine Forrester’s case for sponsored conversations, we’re essentially fueling word of mouth by paying for social or topical authorities to share their views about our company or product brand in their domain. This is important. We’re talking about paying people to write about a company or product on their existing, personally-branded content platform associated with it’s already existing, captive audience. This theoretically sparks Webwide buzz that connects a brand to the community of would be customers who rely upon these personalities and voices in the both the blogosphere and statusphere to make informed decisions.

Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.

The matter of disclosures as warning signs is not unfounded. It is up to every blogger and influencer to word their disclosures so these are fair, but the association with a brand can serve to make them experts in terms of this brand’s products, which can be useful for consumers when seeking specific information. It is a blogger’s and influencer’s responsibility to be informed about the products they support. For a company, it is important to reach out to bloggers and influencers whose personal brands reflect the product they’re trying to place (and this ties in to an earlier post I wrote Pitching to Bloggers the Right Way.

Personally, I think the FTC guidelines will enable consumers to feel more secure about the reliability of the content they encounter and it will also help bloggers and influencers undertake paid conversations in a much more clear-cut manner that enables them to preserve their credibility and the trust that they have created with their respective audiences.

For those interested in the subject matter, Social Media Today will be hosting an Ethics of Blogging webinar on Thursday, September 24 at 10:00AM PT, which will discuss: transparency; web content as a marketing tool; online privacy; and compliance and legal obligations. For more information, visit their site.

While fans are welcome to post messages about teams and players, they are not to update any kind of play-by-play accounts of games or post extensive footage taken at games.

The reason? According to a statement NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy made to Forbes, “the NFL sells exclusive rights to television networks and radio stations to broadcast the games and posting text or video recaps of each play could undermine the league and its broadcasting partners’ efforts to make money airing the games.”

What happens if you don’t follow the rules? The NFL will get in touch with you and tell you to pull the content. If a user refuses, the league will consider filing a lawsuit. Frightening, isn’t it? The problem is that the NFL doesn’t have property rights over fans’ tweets.

According to Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, fans have the same right guaranteed by the First Amendment to publish accounts of football games, even in play-by-play form, that any news organization.

“Imagine a national or global brand monitoring intense volumes of conversations in real-time (at trending topic speed), which usually averages about 4,000 plus updates per hour,” says Brian Solis in a piece for Social Media Today. “Now picture the NFL attempting to identify offending parties within the noise and in turn, singling them out for official review and potential enforcement. The NFL would essentially need to implement a social media police force, which is impractical and expensive, or it would require the use of turks to perform this process on game days, but still face the burden of justifying action.”

In terms of preventing the spread of video footage, the NFL and its teams could put a clause on the back of game tickets specifying fans are prohibited from using recording equipment in stadiums. It goes without saying that enforcing the rules would be difficult and because the league doesn’t have property rights over the recorded footage, the task of proving that the presence of the footage in social networking sites reduced the value of their broadcasts falls entirely on them.

Licensing is a real issue that many sports organizations are going to have to face as social media becomes more prominent among fans. It’s going to require a careful balance of protecting leagues’ own broadcasting revenue and finding a way to encourage fans to participate in the experience.

This ban is not the way, but it’s something. And in this world, that’s how we learn best: by trial and error.

(And for those of you wondering if I would be this calm about this if the FIFA went draconian on social media, yes, I’m glad soccer moves too fast for me to say anything other than some variation of OMGOMGGOOOOOOL!)