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150,000 folk viewed our Nokia Test Lab video this weekend - hi!November 24

Shared by Whatleydude
Wow! Nice work dude!

Hello to the 149,024 people who viewed our Nokia Test Lab Video on Vimeo this weekend.

That’s quite a lot of school halls filled with mobile fans.

Be-A-Magpie Is PayPerPost For TwitterNovember 24

Shared by Robert Scoble
I hate businesses that totally live on top of other people's infrastructure but don't share the wealth. I think that's unethical, but maybe that's just me. You'll see that I'm participating in the comments on this TechCrunch post.

Like much-criticized PayPerPost for blogs, German/UK startup Be-A-Mapgpie will pay you to insert advertisements into your Twitter stream.

Advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis, and the ads are promised to be delivered to relevant audiences based on keywords. That means Be-A-Magpie will analyze the content of your Twitter messages to see if there is a match to particular advertisers.

The TechCrunch Twitter account, with 31,000 followers, can earn a whopping €14,410.51 per month, it says.

The service auto-determines the number of ads to insert per legitimate Twitter message - the default is one ad for every five Tweets. The service inserts the ads automatically by storing your Twitter credentials. As for disclosure - well, there really isn’t any. A #magpie hashtag is added to each Tweet, but that’s it.

It’s not clear if Twitter will object to this. Their terms and conditions

On the legacy of Chairman Kevin MartinNovember 24

Shared by Aaron
I tend to agree with Prof. Lessig more often than not, but when FCC Chairman Kevin Martin assumed the role, he wasn't the active reformer that Lessig today praises. Honestly, Martin at first seemed cut from the same cloth as former Chairman Powell.

That said, something in Martin changed in the last couple years. I like to think that he realized that in the waning years of the administration which appointed him, he realized he really was beholden to no one other than then American public. At that point, he started to make decisions in the public interest. Unfrotunately, in the grand scheme of thing, I feel it was just too little, too late.

So a new President means (the chance of a) new Chairman of the FCC. Before he passes, it is timely to begin to reflect a bit upon the chairmanship of the current chairman, Kevin Martin.

A clue that this is an interesting and important chairman is the fact that he's an equal opportunity anger-er -- the left has loved and hated him, the right has loved and hated him. I'm an increasingly strong admirer. His contribution to sensible thinking about infrastructures was established with his taking the lead in imposing network-neutrality-like rules on Comcast. But it is the unanimous decision freeing "white space" spectru

Thoughts on China’s Web Users: Part 1November 24

Shared by Robert Scoble
One thing that pisses me off about China is that they use their firewall to protect their own businesses. They have tons of clones of Facebook and MySpace and other services internally (Baidu is a clone of Google) but the firewall which is used to censor "unharmonious items" also makes US sites slow (or makes them impossible to reach --

wordpress.com isn't reachable there, for instance). So, that gives local sites a major leg up. Unfortunately our government can't do a damn thing about this new form of protectionism because we're in debt up to our eyeballs to the Chinese (and we're soon going to go even more in debt to them due to our bailouts). Grrr.

I just spent the last couple of days in Beijing, working with the wonderful folks from Mozilla China, meeting with the major tech players, and covertly observing user behavior with other UI researchers in internet cafes. It was on of the most intense learning experiences I’ve been through in recent memory.

This is a brain dump, in no particular order, or some of the observations from the trip.

Slouch Browsing

The ineffable Mike Beltzner made roughly the

Catering to information obsessionNovember 24

Shared by David
I agree with this: But I also think Scoble is an outlier. A vast majority of his life just IS reading and then linking. A great job ;) - but outside the norm of how regular people consume information.

The moment that launched years of overzealous information consumption, filtering, sharing, and engagement, for me, was seeing Scoble’s feedreader on a screen in 2005.  He was subscribed to 1200 feeds.

Since then, he’s shifted his information production and consumption around from stream to stream as necessary to stay at the absolute front of the curve as news breaks.  In his case, it’s usually technology news that he’s engaged with, but take the following bits of this blog post to heart if you produce a news site of any size:

“Some of my friends say I’m really stupid to stop spending so much time obsessing over TechMeme and blogging and to be spending so much time on FriendFeed and Twitter.

That might be so. But already my inbound news is more diverse AND faster than TechMeme and my outbound “Likes” and “Comment” feed is pretty damn good cause it includes all sorts of different data types. Quick, how often have you seen a video on TechMeme? I can’t remember the time. But vid