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The Government and Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that the Federal Communications Commission does nothing with about four out of every five consumer complaints that it puts into a database and investigates. Even worse, the GAO could not discern from its survey of the FCC's complaint process why the FCC takes no enforcement action with 83 percent of the complaints it looked into from 2003 through 2006. "Without key management tools, FCC may have difficulty assuring Congress and other stakeholders that it is meeting its enforcement mission," the GAO report warns. That's putting it mildly. If the FCC does set up some serious net neutrality guidelines for ISPs like Comcast, how can P2P application users and other consumers know that the agency will take their comments seriously?

he Two Steps I'll Always Be Ahead Of You By Dear Media, I usually don't like to brag until after the war has officially been won, but some sites have already blown my cover, so I am without the luxury of waiting. On June 19th, Bandaids launched a YouTube Viewer with the intention of making Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend the Most Watched Video of all time on YouTube. In the time that the Viewer was running, it recorded 1.2 million loads of Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend video page on YouTube. Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, Wired.com, The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, TMF, and hundreds of other media outlets around the world picked up on the story resulting in quite the frenzy. Some praised the campaign saying, "It's the kind of view-gaming that advertisers would normally consider fraud - that is, if what the fans were doing wasn't better than the best advertising Lavigne and her label RCA could buy." Others... okay, the majority... just called us dirty old cheaters. But like a magician revealing the M.O. to a convincing trick, I have to admit that Bandaids' YouTube Campaign was nothing but misdirection. Bandaiders didn't cheat: the YouTube Viewer was a Hoax. All along, I knew that YouTube capped the number of views added to a video at 200 per IP address per day. As such, the only way to make Girlfriend the most watched video on YouTube the fast way was to increase our reach, not our views per person. And the best way to do that was to use viral marketing to tap into traditional news sources. So our members went about inflating the count on the YouTube Viewer and spreading the link around the net. In the mean time, the real end game of the campaign was unfolding nicely. As media outlets around the world began accusing Bandaids of cheating Avril's way into the record books, they drove thousands upon thousands of curious folks to watch Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend video on YouTube (yes, even you Perez). This resulted in a much larger boost to Avril'

Mobile Phones, Human Rights and Anonymity I've been playing around with my new Nokia N95 for the last couple of weeks and quite amazed with its ability to stream live video from the phone to the Internet. Like last weekend when I streamed from the Smithsonian Kite Festival; for around 30 minutes I gave a tour of the festivities and took questions from users as they watched the stream over the Internet. I've also spent some time talking it up with colleagues at NPR, brainstorming the possibilities of what would happen if reporters used these phones - or if their sources did. The example that keeps coming to mind regarding the latter scenario is the rioting in Tibet. While some video has leaked out, it's been limited and often delayed. Imagine if the protestors were able to webcast their protests - and the ensuing crackdowns - live over their phones using China's GSM network? The video would stream live and get crossposted via tools like YouTube, Seesmic and Twitter, spreading the content around so it can't be snuffed. But that raises an obvious question - how long could protestors or dissidents get away with such activities before getting caught? If you were running software on your phone to send live video over a 3G network, like I've been doing on my N95, you'd think it wouldn't take too much effort on the part of the mobile provider and/or government to figure out which phone was sending the signal and its precise location. So that got me wondering: is there a mobile equivalent of Tor? For those of you who aren't familiar with it, TOR is a software project that helps Internet users remain anonymous. Running the TOR software on your computer causes your online communications to bounce through a random series of relay servers around the world. That way, there's no easy way for authorities to track you or observe who's visiting banned websites. For example, let's say you're in Beijing and you publish a blog the authorities don't like. If you just used your PC as

Online video viewers' short attention span seems especially relevant to advertisers looking to strategically trim ad budgets as the economy contracts. For starters, it is clear that post-roll ads are of limited effectiveness. A three minute video that has a post-roll ad in the final seconds, for example, will only be viewed by 16.62% of the initial audience, on average. Another takeaway is that overlay ads should be displayed as early as possible in a video, preferably within the first few seconds. On YouTube, where most overlay ads appear at about 10 seconds in, 10.39% of a video's initial viewers are not likely seeing the ad.

Stephen Colbert interviews Jane McGonigal about how gaming is productive and good for us.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle talks with Stephen Colbert about the subject of her book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other." She argues that we should exercise more restraint when using technology.

BBC report on a survey (done by GlobeScan) on Internet Access as a Human Right. Interesting that so much of the world is barely media literate, yet thinks internet access is a human right(?)

In this book Pintak discusses the Arab media revolution by using interviews with professional reporters and editors whom are experienced with reporting in the Near East.