In contrast to a ban on US Marines from using Twitter and Facebook on the military network, Britain’s Ministry of Defence has told troops they’re free to use social media tools and should apply “common sense” when deciding what to share online.
What’s more, the MOD has said it will sponsor soldiers who want to use blogs and Twitter to share stories of military life with the outside world.
1. Service and MOD civilian personnel are encouraged to talk about what they do, but within certain limits to protect security, reputation and privacy. An increasingly important channel for this engagement, and to keep in touch with family and friends is social media (such as social networking sites, blogs and other internet self-publishing). Personnel may make full use of these but must:
Follow the same high standards of conduct and behaviour online as would be expected elsewhere; Always maintain personal, information and operational security and be careful about the information they share online; Get authorisation from their chain of command when appropriate (see para 2 below);
2. Service and MOD civilian personnel do not need to seek clearance when talking online about factual, unclassified, uncontroversial non-operational matters, but should seek authorisation from their chain of command before publishing any wider information relating to their work which:
Relates to operations or deployments; Offers opinions on wider Defence and Armed Forces activity, or on third parties without their permission; or Attempts to speak, or could be interpreted as speaking, on behalf of your Service or the MOD; or, Relates to controversial, sensitive or political matters.
Online Presences “Encouraged”
Perhaps the most surprising section, however, is the MOD’s support of social media tools in communicating with the world. The section reads: “Service and MOD civilian personnel are encouraged to operate sponsored online presences to help communicate their work, including as part of their official duties, as long as these are authorised in advance”.
In fact, the wording of the document is wildly opposite to the US Marines’ order issued this week, which essentially ruled out the use of all social media tools on the DOD network. The MOD memo instead focuses on the need to “harness new and emerging technologies, new unofficial online channels, and new unofficial online content in order to communicate and disseminate defence and Service messages and build defence and Service reputation”.
It’s a policy that’s likely to earn praise from bloggers, and could foster a positive brand image for the British military. What’s more, starting online conversations about military life might also help with recruitment to the armed forces.
Earlier this year, Apple submitted a spec to the IETF for live streaming multimedia content over HTTP, leading some to suspect that a live video protocol would soon be making its way to iPhone and iPod devices. With the new 3.0 version of the iPhone OS, that HTTP live streaming protocol became a reality, and while there were already a handful of live video apps on the iPhone, they’re presumably now a lot better.
This list is a round up of some of the live TV options available on the iPhone. Most of these apps work best over wifi (and a few won’t work at all over 3G), and generally live streaming is a big drain on battery life. Still, being able to catch up with live television or out-of-market broadcasts when you’re not near your TV is a great option for iPhone owners to have.
Available in both free and paid options, netTV offers live streaming access to over 200 channels from around the world, including a larger-than-usual number of channels from the US. The quality is generally pretty good, though I did experience some issues when first connecting to a channel, and of course it varies from channel to channel (depending on the source of the video stream).
TVUPlayer plays live TV for over 300 channels, though only a handful of channels broadcast at the right bandwidth to play well. Some of the video feeds come in choppy or with audio syncing issues (I actually couldn’t get audio to work at all), a result of the iPhone’s hardware limitations according to the developers. Still, the app offers an impressive line up of live international television channels, even if many of them are strange.
WorldView Live isn’t exactly TV, but it is live streaming video. The app provides access to thousands of live web cams from around the world. Only a handful (about 60, according to the developer) are actually live video, but the app does offer an interesting, if voyeuristic, view of the world for armchair travelers.
The $2.99 Television application isn’t live TV, but it offers access to an impressive line up of television video catch-up services. The app, which only works over wifi, lets users watch on-demand video from HBO, ESPN, NBC, FOX, CBS, Comedy Central, CNN, Sky and more.
The live application from France’s channel 24 news offers live, video-on-demand streaming from the network in French, English, and Arabic over wifi, 3G, and even Edge! Of course, the video will be pretty choppy and low quality over Edge, but it’s unique among live video applications for even offering that option at all.
Al Jazeera’s iPhone app, from Livestation, has 24/7 live streaming of its English-language news channel over wifi and 3G. The quality is very impressive and the app is under active development — so bugs don’t stay unsquashed for very long. If you are streaming over 3G, though, be aware that every 10 minutes you watch takes about 7.2mb of bandwidth, which is important to know if you’re not on an unlimited data plan.
Livestation offers a live streaming video app for BBC World News, as well, but the €3.99 application is only available in the UK (so I wasn’t able to try it out).
Major League Baseball’s MLB.com At Bat 2009 application may be pricey at $9.99, but it’s well worth it for die-hard fans that want to keep up with their team or out-of-market teams on the road. The app offers live audio broadcasts of every game to all owners of the app, and two games are offered over live video each night. For MLB.tv subscribers, however, every game can be watched live via the iPhone app (excepting those blacked out due to local market restrictions). The quality of the video streamed by the app is very impressive, especially over wifi.
The last of the pro golf tour’s yearly majors, the PGA Championship, is next week at Hazeltine National Golf Club and the Professional Golf Association is making sure everyone can watch the tournament no matter where they are. The app gives users access to live video streams of four marquee groups (think big name players like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Padraig Harrington) on Thursday and Friday, and two more groups on the weekend. You can also watch the entire field play through the course’s par 3 holes during the whole tournament.
This is actually the third live video app the PGA has put out this year. They also had iPhone apps for tracking the Masters tournament and the US Open, and in March, CBS put out a March Madness application with live video of the year-end NCAA college basketball tournament. We’d expect both organizations to do the same in 2010.
If you like Norwegian football, then the free TV 2 Sporten app is for you. Jam-packed with live news and score updates, the app also has a live video section with goals and other game highlights. Of course, it will all make a lot more sense if you speak Norwegian.
A pair of chirpy Brits have come up with a way to revolutionize weight loss by combining cycling with Internet browsing…perhaps. The Webcycle, by Matt Gray and Tom Scott, is a fun project that increases the speed of your Internet connection based on how fast you peddle: reading text doesn’t take much peddle power, but streaming a YouTube video requires a little more physical exertion.
Scott writes of the project:
It’s a handy way for internet addicts to get fit: the faster you pedal, the faster your internet goes. The fitness possibilities are wonderful.
It’s an exercise bike, with sensors on the pedals, connected to an Arduino and a laptop running Ubuntu with wondershaper.
Serious kudos to Matt Gray – he did all the tough hardware hacking, I just got the software working. And provided the bike.
And yet after all that work, they decide the YouTube clip worthy of high-speed pedalling is Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up…was this all just a ruse to Rickroll us?
A Facebook mail thread between two college bunkmates is going viral this weekend after earning over 3500 votes on social news site Digg.
The College Humor post by blogger Jeff Rosenberg says of the thread’s origin: “My cousin Jordan is starting his freshman year this coming August. He just got his roommate assignment and sent this over to me the other day.” The exchange, which starts simply and quickly escalates to a class war, pretty much speaks for itself. It’s so amusing, in fact, that we’re led to question its authenticity.
A helicopter and plane have crashed into each other over New York’s Hudson River today, with early reports of at least one casualty. The story is of course unravelling on Twitter, with at least one Twitter user witnessing the crash first hand, and others providing a stream of updates.
Twitter user @ziggfather posted the above Tweet along with the Twitpic of the river shown below. Hudson River power boater @MychaelS was on the river and took Twitpic’d a photo of the coastguard on route.
Most chillingly, Twitter user @weekendoasis claims the Twitpic below is a photo of the tire from the plane involved in the crash. He Tweets: “Tire from copter crash in nyc .. landed in front of my car while driving”.
Those looking for up to the minute information on the situation can follow @marcambinder – The Atlantic’s political editor is tweeting updates as they come in.
Retweeting, as we’ve mentioned previously (see HOW TO: Retweet on Twitter), is becoming a very useful way to share content on the web. For one company, it’s become so important that they’re closing down their original news filtering service to focus on ranking stories by retweets.
The founders of fav.or.it, a filtering service that aimed to make reading the news easier through smart prioritization of RSS feeds, today announced they are retiring their news ranking site.
Instead, they will focus all their energies on Tweetmeme, the spin-off service they launched to rank news stories on Twitter. The fav.or.it website will become the company’s corporate site, and the original service has already been taken offline.
The ability to change your original vision is a flexibility all entrepreneurs need. Twitter itself was famously a side project of podcasting startup Odeo – the founders sold that company when they saw Twitter taking off. No one can blame the fav.or.it folks for cutting their losses and focusing on the part of their business that’s making the most progress.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most celebrated album covers of all time: The Beatles’ Abbey Road cover, taken on August 8th 1969.
Hundreds of Beatles fans descended on the pedestrian crossing outside the Abbey Road recording studios today, many attempting to recreate the iconic album cover.
If you can’t make it to Abbey Road today, however, there’s a live stream of the crossing available on the Abbey Road website…through which you can vicariously watch tourists and fans re-enacting the cover while avoiding being run over by the traffic.
If you check Twitter’s trending topics right now, you might notice that one of the top topics is “Blogtv Sucks.” Blogtv is a live video platform that has a number of YouTube celebrities. However, it’s not as big as competitors Ustream, Livestream, and Justin.tv.
So why is it trending? It’s a combination of the power of a single YouTube celeb, Deefizzy, and the Ustream social stream feature. Deefizzy (Damon) was a regular user of Blog.tv, but after multiple bad experiences with its moderators and what he deems unprofessional conduct, he switched to Ustream. And he’s laying all of his hate into Blog.tv by naming his live channel “Blogtv Sucks.”
So how does that turn Blogtv Sucks into a trending topic? It’s due to Ustream’s social stream feature – essentially a Twitter chat. Every chat message posted sends out a tweet from the user with that phrase attached. Get enough people tweeting (like the 200+ viewers Deefizzy has currentl) and you have a trending topic. Ustream’s the same reason why Tila Tequila and Soulja Boy trend every so often
It seems that the power of YouTube fame is transferable to Twitter in a big way. Deefizzy’s still railing into Blog.tv on live video – probably not something Blog.tv wants. But if you’re interested in seeing the carnage, we’re included the embed below:
Twitter already gets plenty of press attention, but when it went down yesterday due to a DDoS attack, the news seemed to have unprecedented reach, serving as top story on a number of mainstream news sites for a good part of the day.
Why was this such huge news? The cynical onlooker might say that because old media wants to highlight when things go wrong in new media. However, the more realistic answer is that because of how massive sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even LiveJournal and other impacted services have become, when they go down, it's a story that impacts tens of millions of people.
Over the past couple days, I've been a guest on CNN Live to discuss the issue: yesterday as the story was unraveling, and today as myself and an excellent panel (Kevin Mitnick, Om Malik, and Sarah Milstein) analyzed the aftermath of the attacks. Check out the videos below, and for our full coverage of the social media meltdown, see the resources at the bottom of this post.
In contrast to a 
Perhaps the most surprising section, however, is the MOD’s support of social media tools in communicating with the world. The section reads: “Service and MOD civilian personnel are encouraged to operate sponsored online presences to help communicate their work, including as part of their official duties, as long as these are authorised in advance”.
Earlier this year, Apple submitted a spec to the IETF for live streaming multimedia content over HTTP, 
A pair of chirpy Brits have come up with a way to revolutionize weight loss by combining cycling with Internet browsing…perhaps. 
A Facebook mail thread between two college bunkmates is going viral this weekend after earning over 3500 votes on social news site 
A helicopter and plane have crashed into each other over New York’s Hudson River today, with early reports of at least one casualty. The story is of course unravelling on Twitter, with at least one Twitter user witnessing the crash first hand, and others providing a stream of updates.
Retweeting, as we’ve mentioned previously (see 
Instead, they will focus all their energies on 
Today marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most celebrated album covers of all time: The Beatles’ Abbey Road cover, taken on August 8th 1969. 
If you check Twitter’s trending topics right now, you might notice that one of the top topics is “Blogtv Sucks.” 
Twitter already gets 
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