As inevitably as night follows day, the debate about paywalls started in earnest during early 2009, a few months after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, and several months after online display advertising stopped growing.

Publishers have spent the past year obsessing about paid content. Yet in the meantime, something wholly inevitable and largely unnoticed has happened to online advertising. In the UK, the market entered recovery mode in Q309. During Q409, combined search and display revenues surged by 10.4%.

Double-digit growth (or something close to it) may even prove sustainable. In the US, eMarketer forecasts that online display will grow at 8.2% this year — faster than search.

Is something similar happening to online display CPMs? Last year, conventional wisdom insisted that the price publishers could charge advertisers for reaching 1,000 users had collapsed on a permanent basis, thanks to a vast influx of cheap display inventory. In a pro-paywall column written last month, the FT’s John Gapper laid out the contours of disaster:

Rates for online display ads have been falling steadily as competition has proliferated, with most sites now finding it hard to get more than $4 per 1,000 impressions on their pages (or $14m for the 3.5bn hits on all US newspaper sites monthly).

Yet other sources contradict this view, suggesting a recovery in pricing power. It’s particularly interesting that this evidence comes from the ad networks, who were blamed so aggressively in the first place for bringing vast amounts of new inventory on to the market.

Forrester offers a similarly surprising forecast for US online display advertising. Between 2009 and 2014, the analyst firm suggests, expenditure on online display will more than double, to $16.9bn.

Forrester forecasts that online display expenditure will grow by annualised average of 17% during the same period. Once again, that’s faster than the growth expected of search (15%).

Of course, these are just forecasts. There are plenty of publishers who still dismiss the long-term potential of online display (including, for example, Meredith Corporation, the US magazine publisher).

Yet there’s something more than rebound psychology behind these optimistic forecasts. There’s a widespread faith that Google will succeed in becoming a powerhouse in online display.

Notably, Google’s advertising exchange — a trading platform for advertisers and media owners — appears to be gaining traction. There’s even a suggestion that real-time bidding for inventory on ad exchanges forces up the price of impressions. Google — and its rivals — have always claimed that this would be the case. Perhaps soon, we’ll start to see hard evidence.

This apparent revival of online display comes at an awkward moment for those who are devoting all, or most, of their energy to erecting paywalls.

A trade-off exists between selling online advertising and building up paid content revenues. You can choose to do both. But you cannot hope to maximise revenues from both.

Perhaps paywall publishers will soon find themselves grappling with more than the challenge of getting readers to open their wallets. Soon enough, they may also have to fend off criticism that the recovery in online advertising revenues has passed them by.

It contains over 60,000 bricks and four working clocks. It took eight weeks to build. This LEGO version of St Pancras was created by Warren Elsmore, Chairman of the Brickish Association (a society for adult enthusiasts of the plastic blocks).

"I chose St Pancras Station after the Brickish Association completed a PR project for LEGO, whereby we re-created a number of UK landmarks for local schools," he says. "That project included 30 St Marys' Axe (The Gerkin) and Big Ben, but I've always liked St Pancras since the time I used to commute into Kings Cross or St Pancras itself. Because the building is so complex, it presented a great building challenge too. Though not quite as tough as the Barlow shed, which is my next project!"

Click through the gallery to see closeups of this marvellous creation. Further snaps can be found on Warren's Flickr stream, and his web site. And there's a neat video over on the BBC.

All pictures from Warren Elsmore, and used with permission.

How the Super Bowl ad featuring David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno came together.

As I started writing this, it was hovering around 39˚C here in Sydney. Gusty, burning hot air. Too hot. It could not have been more different to New York, where I'd been a week or so earlier, where the temperature had been hovering around -7˚C and down to -15˚C with the windchill. I was in Manhattan for a Microsoft Research event: their annual 'social computing symposium', and this year was loosely focused on 'the city'. Many thanks to Tom Coates + Matt Jones, Liz Lawley, Clay Shirky et al for the invite.

Here are my notes on the event, with a dash of local colour thrown in for good measure.

(There are some other excellent notes, from Nicolas Nova and Liz Goodman, and a fine set of photos from Julian Bleecker that capture the essence of the event.)

The venue was the now near-legendary ITP at NYU, set in a typically sturdy building on Broadway, around Greenwich Village and the other relatively opaque NYU buildings, so I was often tramping around in the scruffy, rough-hewn nature of American urban fabric - I'm always struck by how different the various surfaces of the street are here, compared to Paris, say; Manhattan's are muscular, tough, fractured, brutish; I like it.

The surrounding streets were festooned with discarded Christmas trees. The relatively low-rent retail around here had a discernible air of desperation about it ("40% off sale price!"). The recession is far more evident than in Australia. 

Walking to and from the hotel on Union Square was a particular pleasure for the three days I was there. The soundscape of Manhattan is immediately and easily familiar, shaped by the buildings such that it bounces around the streets: the rattle of distant subway under your feet, accompanied by  a welcome draught of warm air blown up through the sidewalk; the chatter of hundreds of different dialects; the rolling thunder of supersized trucks careening through the rough and ready streets; the bawls and drawls of homeless and helpless; fragments of cellphone conversation; Dirty Projectors on the iPhone; eventually, the freezing wind howling round the blunt edges of my hotel ... For all that insecure New York is now often gripped in the fear that the party has moved on, that it is no longer the centre of the world, or the locus of American creativity, or that the US itself sometimes now feels like an un-developing nation, that it is beginning to unravel at the seams, or is at least being leapfrogged by others ... For all that, New York is still utterly beguiling, every single time. Beautiful.

(However, I was taken by Smith Magazine's 'Big Apple in Six Words' vs. Jay-Z, spotted on Flavorwire. As they point out, as if we needed reminding, "we do not live in the same New York as Jay-Z.")

This year's Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium had pulled together a fine set of people including Genevieve Bell, Julian Bleecker, Ben Cerveny, Tom Coates, Anil Dash, Russell Davies, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Adam Greenfield, Liz Goodman, Usman Haque, Tom Igoe, Natalie Jeremijenko, Steven Johnson, Matt Jones, Jennifer Magnolfi, Mike Migurski, Nicolas Nova, Ray Ozzie, Clay Shirky, Kevin Slavin, Molly Steenson, Linda Stone, Alice Taylor, Anthony Townsend, Duncan Wilson and many more. (A little US-centric, understandably.) Some old friends, some new ones, many I didn't know. Given the combination of social technology and the city, and the timezone, this was a great group of people.

The event stretched over two days, with series of talks grouped into loose themes followed by breakout sessions to pick apart what we'd heard. It more or less worked. Some of the talks were very good indeed; others just OK, but all were interesting on some level.

The most compelling talk was Kevin Slavin's, which is already being spoken of as one of the great presentations of the 21st century. If there were a Nobel Prize available for Powerpoint, Slavin would be a shoe-in for this round (although I have a sneaking suspicion it was Keynote, and thus disqualified). It was a majestically imaginative construction, a teetering house of cards, each new level beautifully delivered, veering from the physics of stealth bombers to the overwhelming dominance of high-frequency trading in the stock markets, via the early history of trading in lower Mannahatta, to today's NYC where real estate transactions in an entire sector of the city are dominated by optimising the physical proximity of algorithms to the mass of telecommunications infrastructure that is the 'carrier hotel' of 60 Hudson Street, before all of financial services ascends into the singularity and leaves this corporeal realm behind.

Something like that, anyway. Virilio 2.0, live on Broadway.

He was preceded by the dauntingly/hearteningly prolific Steven Johnson, who had just finished the manuscript for his latest book a couple of days previously. All of Johnson's books are worth reading, just as his projects from Feed to Outside.In have been worth watching, and the forthcoming book would appear to be right up my strasse, concerning the relationships between urban form and innovation and creativity. (Actually, it'll be interesting to see if it's 'innovation' or 'creativity'. Two very different schools.) Johnson's talk was tantalising, in that it described the routes taken by some of his trains of thought, but not that much of the content. Yet.

There were some Johnson-esque graphs (as he joked, it's obligatory to draw some when Clay Shirky is in the room) indicating relationships between creativity and size of city i.e. the bigger the city, the more innovative (don't worry; he went a little further than that). The measures of creativity will surely be explored more in the book too, for here they seemed a little over-focused on techno-scientific measures (products, patents etc.). Creativity of course also includes things like ballet, painting, stand-up comedy and gardening, few of which would register in such a measurement; but for that matter, would also include innovative services like the iPod, which have been predicated on very few patents (just ask Nokia), but rather, in the words of Patrick Whitney, protected and defined instead by a more "systemic nature of innovations and by trademark". Equally, I'd be interested in explorations of creativity (or perhaps innovation) applied outside of technology or creative industries sectors, but in manufacturing, agriculture etc.

Perhaps these activities might show up, but this initial definition should be an interesting section of Johnson's book. Equally, size may matter, but cannot quite be such a direct relationship - again, using that US techno-scientific measure, the hundreds of cities in China that are bigger than their US equivalents would simply not show up. Yet many are surely creative - and equally perhaps many are not.

I'm sure Johnson's approach will depend far more on the relationship with form than size, and here I hope he goes beyond 'the swerve' and Jacobs-isms - as useful as they are, I think we have a wider laboratory of urban environments at this point, as I tried to outline in my recent notes on New Songdo City.

The graphs he drew - which you can almost see in the above photo - indicate the direct relationship between metabolism and mass in animals, and so also indicate the biological and open systems theory angles that Johnson often approaches the subject from, which combined with a natural feel for Brooklyn-esque urbanism, tend to offer fresh insights to the field.

With my 'designing creative clusters' hat on, I cannot wait to see what he's come up with as Johnson tends to synthesise previously disparate concepts with considerable skill and imagination, and communicates them wonderfully well.

Sandwiched in between Slavin and Johnson, a good old-fashioned technical demo. And one that worked. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrated the new Bing Maps interface. I wasn't expecting much. I was blown away.

There are videos of Blaise talking about this around the place, so I won't go into too much detail, but what impressed me were the Silverlight-enabled transitions between the various zoom levels, the smooth switching of projection from 2D to isometric to tiles of angled aerial photography to street level, and the incredible integration of PhotoSynth at this street level. I'd been wondering about a genuine application for PhotoSynth for years, but with the latter on-hand, Bing Maps can even 'go inside' certain buildings - usually museums, galleries, admittedly - into 3D user-created photo-worlds.

It gives you pause for thought - although Google Maps has a massive lead in this market (as Flash does over Silverlight for that matter) these things - being non-physical, free, and with little embedded personal capital - can be relatively easily displaced. There is little friction.

Equally interesting is comparing Google and Microsoft's approaches here. An over-simplification perhaps, but with PhotoSynth providing a form of user-generated creation of the building/street, Microsoft are deploying emergent, colloborative processes at that scale, whereas Google are driving a car with a camera on its roof around every street in the world (more or less) to create their StreetView. Which is a top-down strategy if ever I saw one. Instead, Google deploy their bottom-up processes at the 2D map scale, via MapMaker etc. (although Building Maker is blurring the line here, with emergent process at the building scale. If that gets integrated into Maps, as it surely must, that's interesting. With buildings, Google users do structural engineering; Microsoft users paint the facade with photos and do interior decor.) And if this paragraph was a diagram it would look like this:

The afternoon session, concerning government, was less impressive. They didn't really focus on urban governance, which would've been useful, and few participants appeared to have much idea of the processes, politics and issues in that world. Having said that, Anil Dash was excellent: amusing, insightful, cleverly-structured and inspirational. 

An obligatory Post-It note exercise, envisioning urban applications, was sandwiched in between these two sessions.

The morning of day two was 'curated' by Tom Coates and Matt Jones, and concerned 'the city as social technology'. After Tom gave a scene-setting presentation characterised by verve, imagination and an incredibly distracting clip of the monkeys and the monolith from 2001, Molly Steenson gave a great presentation that at first glance concerned the history of computers and architecture, yet really dealt with issues of design, agency and artificial intelligence in architecture. 

I particularly appreciated Molly's evident ambivalence with Christopher Alexander, something I share, and also that she handed round some actual physical artefacts, in the form of the proceedings of 1960s ACM conferences on computer graphics and the like. It was a whistle-stop tour of Ivan Sutherland's famous Sketchpad demo, Marvin Minsky, J.C. Licklider, Negroponte's early work (The Architecture Machine, which is delightfully dedicated "To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture".) As we use AI increasingly on projects, albeit at the basic levels of agent-based modelling for instance, it's fascinating to reflect on the lengthy history of this work.

Duncan and I then gave our talk about our various projects. I should apologise here for running out of time. It turns out that one presentation plus one presentation does not equal one presentation. It does in fact still equal two presentations. Who knew? Either way, I think the presentation went well, and we were fortunate to be able to take over Ben Cerveny's workshop session to continue the conversation, as Ben had business to attend to.

Usman Haque followed us, with a hugely entertaining, almost totally off-the-cuff discussion, which genuinely engaged the punters. He ran through a series of statements he'd "heard around the place" - most of which revolved around applying web metaphors to urban environments - asking whether people agreed with them, before revealing he didn't agree with any of them and outlining what he did believe. It was feisty, scattershot, funny, engaging and insightful. As a rhetorical tactic, it worked, and I happened to agree with just about everything he did believe in, for what it's worth. A couple of references to follow-up: Stanislaw Lem's Peace on Earth and H. Von Hurster's 'On Self-Organizing Systems and their Environments'.

The 'breakout' sessions split four ways afterwards, with Matt Jones, Nicolas Nova and Jennifer Magnolfi all leading sessions I would've liked to have participated in. But Duncan and I were leading the other, and so we continued our talk of instrumenting urban environments.

The group involved Haque, Jeremijenko, Goodman, Bell and Yahoo Research's Elizabeth Churchill amongst others. Duncan showed videos of his work on the "stabilising" of the Millennium Bridge, perhaps one of the first high profile sensor-based projects Arup had done. It never fails to intrigue people. The first video showed the swaying of the bridge on those first days; the second showed the trials once the dampers had gone on, wherein crowds of volunteers, many adorned with sensors, walked back and forth across the bridge. The rather saucy name given to the phenomenon discovered by engineers and researchers during this process - 'synchronous lateral excitation' - also caused a stir in the workshop. 

Following this, Natalie Jeremijenko led a great discussion about the role of the designer/engineer in projects like this, and what levels of agency they/we have within the contemporary development process. We eventually got onto the harsh cut-off in built fabric development processes, wherein little information on the inhabited phase of projects - the ongoing design phase, as adaptive design would have it - is gathered, and certainly rarely acted upon by professional designers or developers. Tough but important questions; exactly what such a session should be. Genevieve Bell, Natalie and I had a good chat afterwards, in a curious but enjoyable little "Australian" cabal, holed-up in frozen NYC.

(This 'breakout' discussion maybe indicated one of the few problems with the symposium - that few present had experience of actually working with city governments or property developers, say, on urban-scale projects that affect either governance or built fabric (some certainly did, outside of Duncan and I, but by far a minority). Of course side-stepping existing structures is a valid tactic in terms of achieving change; not everything must be reinvented from within 'the system'. You still need to know what to side-step though. While I'm being critical, there was also a tendency to grasp for biological metaphors and insights when thinking about the city - and perhaps more understandably, urban systems. While there is considerable insight to be gained from such approaches - and biomimicry in particular, from a design perspective - there is also considerable difference with cities, and citizens, and the way they work. Equally, although many here came from different backgrounds a way of thinking has emerged concomitant with developing web-based structures and systems, and we might have benefited from further external references - a biologist, an architect, a landscape designer, a policy-maker, say. Then again, this was a social computing symposium after all.)

For some reason, the afternoons for both Monday and Tuesday weren't as good as the mornings had been. I'm not sure whether this was due to the sessions themselves, or fatigue (and certainly my jet-lag kicked in big time on Monday, so perhaps it was just me). Yet maybe the afternoons tended to fall apart because the conversations stimulated by the morning needed some time and space to be expressed. This drifting focus wasn't just due to the event being in Manhattan, and therefore surrounded by distractions, as people did stay in and around ITP in the main. It's just that the conversation needed to dissipate, that half-formed reflections needed to be articulated. So it tended to, and attention was lost a little in the afternoons as a result. That's how I read it anyway.

The aforementioned Anil Dash Show was an exception on the afternoon of the first day. But I cared little for the presentation on governance structures of Burning Man. As Matt Jones commented at the time, perhaps there's a gene for appreciating Burning Man which seemed lacking in many of us. Actually, I don't think it's genetic - I just suspect that Burning Man is rubbish. But then I've never been. And I'm English.

Tuesday's afternoon session on (urban) games was also a little variable, though Kati London of Area/Code gave great overview of some of the best work in this area, including their own fine work. Dennis Crowley of FourSquare was also very entertaining, but if the technocratic/biological metaphor had been slightly, well, pervasive throughout the two days, so had been the game metaphor. As longer-term readers will know, I've previously focused on football, and video games such as Grand Theft Auto, as metaphor to some extent, but generally in terms of notation of interactive systems, and exploring the (creative) tension between the individual and a system. But the idea of competition and point-scoring - of seeing everything as a game - becoming an overriding metaphor for everything (with its tendency towards individualism and acquisition) is limiting at best.

For notes on other talks, Liz Goodman appears to have the most complete set. The absence of notes from a talk above means little or nothing.

Before the event kicked off, Duncan and I walked over to the new Cooper Union building by Morphosis (after I'd been so impressed with the Caltrans building in LA), which I rather like the look of. 

After the event, a quick tour of the High Line, which is of course wonderful. With a fair wind, notes on those to follow. (All photos from this New York visit are here.)

After New York, down to California and a couple of days in the Arup San Francisco office. Though I was working for most of it, it was good to briefly catch up with friends there too, and then finally get out for a bit of a walk on the last afternoon. If I'd been strategic, I could've gone to San Francisco Federal Building to complete my hat-trick of Morphosis buildings but didn't make it. Next time. Still, I feel I got under the skin of the city a bit for the first time. Report: San Francisco is largely appealing.

Last night’s Super Bowl telecast on CBS is shaping up to be one of the highest rated football championship game in decades, if not all time. According to early Nielsen figures, the game drew a 46.4 rating in the top markets. The figures indicate a 10% increase over last year’s Super Bowl between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers. There’s even talk that when final numbers are tallied the game will surpass the 1983 M*A*S*H finale as the most watched TV program ever. Our media critic friend nineteen80snore predicted such an outcome, also rightly guessing that ratings would be huge in Washington D.C. because the city’s residents were snowed in. The D.C. market earned a 56 share, second only to New Orleans in viewership among top cities. UPDATE: CBS spokesperson Ed Harrison has confirmed that last night’s Super Bowl has surpassed M*A*S*H as the most-watched TV program in history. An estimated 106.5 million people watched the game, according to Nielsen.

Hello, Hollywood. On the heels of the Foursquare-Bravo TV deal, news of several additional major media partnerships involving the location-based social networking app have dropped this evening.

According to various reports, Zagat, Warner Bros., HBO, the History Channel and ExploreChicago have all been added to Foursquare’s media and entertainment mix. Here are the partnerships that appear to be live or coming very soon:

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Zagat

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The New York Times is reporting that Foursquare has signed a deal with trusted restaurant review service Zagat. Zagat’s official Foursquare page is already live and includes official Zagat rated tips and recommendations that users can add as to-do’s to their Foursquare experience.

Zagat is calling the partnership, “Foodie Love,” and there’s even a new accompanying foodie badge. What’s also interesting is that Zagat.com is extending the partnership beyond Foursquare and starting a “Meet the Mayor” online interview series that will feature discussions with prominent Foursquare mayors.

Foursquare’s relationship with Zagat is clearly an answer to Yelp’s introduction of check-ins, especially given the trusted and prestigious nature of Zagat content.

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Warner Bros.

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Earlier this evening we received some intel in our inbox about a Warner Bros. partnership with Foursquare around the studio’s upcoming movie, Valentine’s Day. Per Foursquare’s other big media partners, the deal includes content in the form of tips and to-dos, but these are themed around romance and Valentine’s Day activities. Of course, it wouldn’t be Foursquare without a badge to go with the campaign.

The Valentine’s Day Foursquare page includes text that reads, “Visit and check-in on Foursquare at any of the locations on our Valentine’s Day inspired list of the most romantic places in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston to get a Valentine’s Day badge! Then go see the movie, in theaters on February 12!”

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HBO

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We found HBO’s Foursquare How to Make it in America page via AdAge. The series premieres on February 14th, and although HBO isn’t ready to go on the record about their Foursquare relationship, a page packed with show-related tips is already live. The deal appears to be structured in a similar fashion as the others, and includes the addition of show-specific badges for “Culture, Living, Cocktails, and Nightlife.”

The idea seems to be that viewers can turn fiction into reality and live like the show’s main characters, Ben and Cam, who are “two enterprising Brooklyn twentysomethings as they hustle their way through New York City, determined to achieve the American Dream.”

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More Major Media Deals

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AdAge is also reporting that the History Channel is exploring similar options with Foursquare, and thanks to a tip sent in via email, we uncovered an ExploreChicago page that is reminiscent of Metro News’ relationship with the location-based game.

ExploreChicago happens to be Chicago’s official tourism site, and the deal includes three Chicago-themed Foursquare badges (which we believe to be the ones above) that users can unlock by checking-in across the city.

Tags: entertainment, explorechicago, Film, foursquare, hbo, MARKETING, media, social media, tv, warner bros, zagat

Available for viewing online. Over a single generation, the Web and digital media have remade nearly every aspect of modern culture, transforming the way we work, learn, and connect in ways that we're only beginning to understand. FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin (Growing up Online) teams up with one of the leading thinkers of the digital age, Douglas Rushkoff (The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool), to continue to explore life on the virtual frontier. The film is the product of a unique collaboration with visitors to the Digital Nation Web site, who for the past year have been able to react to the work in progress and post their own stories online. Dretzin and her team report from the front lines of digital culture--from love affairs blossoming in virtual worlds, to the thoroughly wired classrooms of the future, to military bases where the Air Force is fighting a new form of digital warfare. Along the way, they begin to map the critical ways that technology is transforming us, and what we may be learning about ourselves in the process.

Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010
We are pleased to announce that the Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010 will be held on Saturday 17 April at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds.  Old Broadcasting House is an excellent venue in Central Leeds, in the Civic Quarter just off the Ring Road.

We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative

As in Stoke-on-Trent in October, we will be using the Un-Conference format and we hope to have some of the very best hyperlocal publishers and special guests attending on the day.

After the success of the Pork Pie rounders, arranged by our own Nicky Getgood, there is a rumor that a skool sports day is being planned for one of the sessions, more than that we can’t yet announce, yet….

50 Tickets will be available on EventBrite from 1400 today (8 February)  with further tickets being made available after we have ensured that local bloggers in Yorkshire and the North East have got their tickets.

We will be publishing updates at http://talkaboutlocal.org and on Twitter @talkaboutlocal or you can search Twitter for TAL10 to see what other people are saying the Un-Conference Google Group is reopened for you to start discussing and planning what you hope to gain from the event.

Talk About Local Un-Awards
The glittering Talk About Local Un-Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday evening after the Un-Conference at a venue yet to be confirmed. As you will no doubt remember we were going to hold the Un-Awards in Birmingham earlier in the year, but after much procrastination and it being left on a low light we decided that it made logistical sense for us to hold it in conjunction with the Un-Conference.

Tickets for the the Un-Awards will be available on Eventbrite as soon as the venue is confirmed.

Recently, I had the privilege of hearing Arianna Huffington speak at a fundraiser for the wildlife rehabilitation organization Wildcare. Her focus was on the significance of activating empathy, in this case, even for the smallest inhabitants of our planet. Though she playfully labeled Wildcare low-tech but high-heart, the organization itself aspires to be high-tech which got me thinking about the impact and continuing evolution of the Social Web.

Can technology help us build channels that facilitate not just participation and engagement, but true empathy?

We have certainly seen an explosion of social communication beginning with blogs and most recently in the form of tweets echoing from the farthest corners of our world. Online experiences are in the process of being fully recast and re-centered, not around websites, but around individuals. For many, our days are now peppered with quick exchanges with friends and strangers alike on Facebook, Twitter, etc. These new social channels are making celebrity both demystified and tantalizingly accessible. Have you @replied to Bill Gates or Shaquille O'Neal? We cluster around trends and shout loudly into the ether at news cycles.

Where, then, will these new shared experiences lead us? Here is one example and I am guessing that there are all manner of variants emerging. A day after the earthquake in Haiti, I began seeing updates from a good friend and former business partner. He had loaded his small private airplane in Jackson, Wyoming, left his wife and children and flown to Florida to pick up 6 physicians and transport them to Port-Au-Prince. For the next week, with his more nimble aircraft, he flew missions between the Dominican Republic and Haiti carrying people and supplies as the country struggled to grapple with the extent of the devastation. What was striking to me was that my friend had never shown the slightest inclination toward humanitarian action. Why now? Why this level of engagement? I can't help but believe that as awareness and communication become more personal, we are driven closer to that "activation" moment. He returned profoundly changed. His actions echoed through his news feed reverberating further through people like me who continue to marvel at this empathic transformation. I feel compelled to retell his story.

Technology, however, often presents us with dueling opportunities. On one hand, we can now find community of absolutely like-minded individuals where we can repeat and amplify our own feelings, biases, arguments, and politics. We can tear down, troll, and hate others who see and think differently. The differences have always been there, but with a 24/7 news cycle, blogs, Facebook groups, and Twitter, we see them in stark relief. It is messy. Messy in the way that President Obama recently described the legislative process. We've clamored for transparency and the power to speak and be heard. And now, all the yelling reveals what a daunting task it is to bridge our differences.

On the other, with all this new social technology we can start to put ourselves into the shoes of others. At South by Southwest last year, futurist Bruce Sterling related the transformation of the book industry, where the disruptive force of new media is changing the landscape. His seemingly odd affinity for visiting Austin's most right-wing bookstores drew laughs from the mostly liberal crowd, but his impulse and interest was very real. Niche in media and community is now working its way back into the real world. For Sterling, he feels compelled to bridge that gap; he needs to know how and what and why people think the way they do. Tuning them out is not an option. For all of our cultural advances, we can not yet genetically code our beliefs and pass them on efficiently to new generations. Fortunately, this inefficiency pushes us to question, to innovate, and to grow.

For now, tragedy seems to be the primary means of uncovering our global humanity. Earthquakes, bombings, plane crashes, political unrest, et al. grab our attention. For some, the incipient news cycle delivers an endless stream of "disaster porn" providing entertainment and a diversion from our own problems. For others, technology is enabling participation to reach out and help disaster victims on an escalating scale of commitment (Linking to blog posts, Liking and Retweeting status updates, Texting donations). In a very meaningful way, we are embarking on a transition from awareness to action. As major media sites become increasingly engaged, we will see bold efforts like the Huffington Post's Impact section whose intense focus on personal stories of those in need will eventually transform the regulations around charitable giving to individuals. We will have a real capacity to change the lives of others directly. These new opportunities hold the promise to awaken a global spirit that can transcend divisions.

So, what will it take for our shared human experience to rise to the fore? Have you had a profound (or mundane) experience that caused you to look differently at another person or about yourself? Can high-tech be high-heart?

More on Social Networking

Since my attempts at capturing web developers’ hearts and minds by publishing fundamental research have failed miserably but my thirst for attention continues unabated, today I will once more shout at iPhone developers. That’s proven to work.

More specifically, today I will shout at web developers who think that delicately inserting an iPhone up their ass is the same as mobile web development.

Before we start, a little thought experiment. Suppose I proposed the following:

1. IE6 is today’s most advanced browser. (Note: this was actually true back in 2000. Please bear with me.)
2. IE6’s market share is about 80%.
3. The other browsers are way worse than IE6, and developing for them is a pain; something we’re not interested in and are a bit afraid of.
4. Therefore we will develop websites exclusively for IE6.

Would you agree with those sentiments, even if we’re back in 2000 and IE6 is really the best browser we have?

Or would you reply that our sites should work as well as they can in all browsers through the use of web standards, progressive enhancement, and all the rest of the best practices we’ve been preaching for the past ten years?

I distinctly remember a time when we web developers cared about such concepts. But those times are long gone.

The head of News Corp. and the editor of The Guardian are facing off over whether newspapers should charge for content on the Web.

• Democrats fear Republicans will win seat held since 1974
• President's poll ratings fall further amid health care impasse

The Democratic party faces another election test after the death yesterday of John Murtha, a congressman dubbed by his colleagues the "king of pork".

Murtha, aged 77, had been in the House of Representatives since being elected to his Pennsylvania district in 1974.

The fear in the party is that Republicans will notch up another victory when a special election is held, probably May.

The Democrats have been panicking since losing Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat to the Republicans last month.

Murtha's nickname referred to so-called pork barrel politics – bringing government spending to bear in a representative's own district.

His death came on a day that saw Barack Obama's poll ratings fall further. A Marist poll found that only 44% of voters surveyed approved of his job performance, down 2% on December. More alarming for Democratic strategists, 57% of independents disapprove of his performance.

Murtha's death will have a neglible impact on the arithmetic of the House, where the Democrats have an overwhelming majority, unlike in the Senate. But another defeat in the spring would add to the sense of panic among Democrats in the run-up to the Congressional mid-term elections in November.

Murtha's office said he had died in hospital after complications following gallbladder surgery. He had been in hospital for several months.

His election in 1974 marked him out as the first of those to have served in Vietnam to make it into Congress.

He was popular on the left as one of the first senior Democrats in 2005 to turn against the Iraq war. But he was also one of the leading exponents of 'pork-barrel' politics, a practice that has long been reviled outside Washington and is one of the reasons for the present levels of disenchantment.

Murtha, as chairman of the House defence appropriations sub-committee, added 'earmarks', special spending projects to help his district, to defence bills, hence the King of Pork.

Scandal hovered over him throughout much of his career.

Murtha faced a tough race for re-election in 2008 after sabotaging his own campaign by referring to some of voters in Pennsylvania as "racist".

One of the reasons for the turnaround in Democratic fortunes is opposition to Barack Obama's health reform plan.

The president will make a fresh push this month to get his troubled health reform package through Congress by meeting both Democrats and Republicans, hoping to find common ground.

The half-day discussion at Blair House, opposite the White House, will be broadcast live on television to counter public criticism that too many deals in Washington are made behind closed doors.

Obama announced the meeting during a CBS television interview on Sunday evening. "I want to consult closely with our Republican colleagues … to ask them to put their ideas on the table. I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward," he said.

The Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, welcomed the move as "a real, bipartisan conversation", but added: "The problem with the Democrats' healthcare bills is not that the American people don't understand them; the American people do understand them and they don't like them."

The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, welcomed the meeting, but suggested he was unlikely to compromise, calling for the Democrats' bill to be shelved.

The move buys the Democrats a few more weeks while they debate among themselves whether to push forward with the bill or abandon it. The version of the bill passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve would extend health care to 30 million more Americans.