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Here we go with this week’s ReadWriteWeb events guide. Remember to download the calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.

Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

Sponsor

12 September 2009: New York City

Twestival

Twestival, famous for harnessing the power of social media to bring people together for great causes, is hosting a star-studded event in New York City, in association with Brooklyn Bowl and Flavorpill, benefitting non-profit CampInteractive. CampInteractive is a local non-profit that empowers at-risk, inner-city youth through the inspiration of the outdoors and the creative power of technology.

100% of all money raised through ticket sales will go towards CampInteractive.

With stars in abundance, NYC’s “Celebrity Bowling” tournament represents a unique opportunity for Twestival-goers to bowl with entertainment elite. Participants are invited to purchase a special group package that will score them a lane to bowl with a star.

The night will be packed with live performances featuring some of New York’s most exciting emerging artists, including Twestival favorite, Eclectic Method.

Buy your tickets now!

21 – 23 September: San Diego, California

DEMOfall 09 Conference

DEMOfall 09 promises to showcase the most comprehensive portfolio of credible emerging technologies, vetted by VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall and leading technology analyst Chris Shipley. Alpha Pitch, a new DEMO program, puts you in front of the most promising entrepreneurs with products in the alpha, prototype, and development stages of their life cycles. These are pre-revenue companies that have no more than one round of seed funding and are ready for your investment dollars.

DEMO is the launch pad of emerging technology and a true market performer for visionary investors, entrepreneurs, and industry influencers alike.

ReadWriteWeb readers pay only $1996. Save $500 off the standard fee by registering before August 15th.

22 September 2009: London

Realising the Benefits of Web 2.0 in Financial Services

If you are responsible for marketing, compliance, e-business, customer communications, or internal communications at a financial institution, you won’t want to miss this series of events:

The UK’s first conference focusing specifically on Web 2.0 in Financial Services:

• What is happening now? Current applications and experiences of social media in the financial services market;
• Hear how social networking is changing the approach of firms to marketing, PR, and customer interaction;
• Explore opportunities to enhance internal communications, process improvement, and compliance;
• Understand the developing legal and regulatory framework for Web 2.0;
• Identify the next steps for social media in financial services.

ReadWriteWeb readers get a 20% discount. Use the code KM6298RRWEB.

22 – 23 September 2009: Singapore

Social Networking World Forum — Asia

This two-day conference hosted by the Social Networking World Forum – Asia features key speakers from social networking publishers, advertising agencies, industry analysts, software developers and equipment manufacturers, pay-TV and network service providers, mobile operators, and more.

• Joint exhibition combining social networking and mobile social networking formats
• Evening networking reception
• Discount for early booking (expires August 21st)
• Free pass for exhibition only

22 – 23 September 2009: Melbourne, Australia

Marketing Now!

On September 22-23 a movement of highly engaged, passionate thought leaders and professionals will gather in Melbourne to demonstrate the power of social media for business today. Marketing Now! brings together the best of the best in new marketing innovation in two intensive days of interactive training designed to empower a new generation of change agents and business leaders. Marketing Now! will change the way you think about communications by equipping you with the tools and insight to foster advocacy and community for your business.

Follow Marketing Now on Twitter for conference updates.

30 September 2009: on Twitter

Twittamentary

Update: Call for submissions of stories and videos is now open. In this documentary, filmmaker Tan Siok Siok peels away the hype and explores the human dimensions of how lives connect and intersect, and then are affected and changed, as result of encounters on Twitter.

Twittamentary is created in the open spirit of the Web. Twitter users are invite to contribute ideas and videos to the film. When the film is completed, it will be released online under a creative commons license. In other words, you are both the contributor and the audience.

The 24-hour storytelling event on 30 September 2009 shares the videos submitted up till then in a round-the-clock marathon in which participants get to watch the videos online, rate and comment on them, and tweet about them.

2 October 2009: Seattle, Washington

ExpressionEngine Roadshow

The ExpressionEngine Roadshow is a traveling conference designed to bring together experts and users to learn ExpressionEngine techniques and share insider tips. Now in its second year, and second city, the 2009 conference will be a full day event. The show runs from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, with breakfast before, a party after, and lunch in between, all included in the price of admission. Follow @eeroadshow on Twitter for the latest details.

8 October 2009: San Diego

Mobile Application Stores conference

As a partner seminar of Intenational CTIA WIRELESS I.T. and Entertainment, the Mobile Application Stores conference will focus on the tremendous opportunities in the mobile apps stores eco-system. The event is designed to give a complete understanding of how to capitalize on this exploding market.

Participants will discuss strategy and deployment in application stores such as Apple (iPhone), Google (Android), RIM (Blackberry), Nokia (Ovi), Palm Pre, and Microsoft, as well as other emerging application stores. To learn more, visit www.mobileapplicationstores.com or write to events@nextvisionmedia.com.

22 October 2009: London, England

Cloud Computing World Forum

The Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event for professionals to learn and discuss the future development and integration of cloud services. This one-day conference will provide a focused platform for the global cloud computing industry.

The Cloud Computing World Forum is the place to meet all the key decision makers from all of the cloud service providers in one place. Show highlights include:

• Hear from leading case studies on how to integrate cloud computing into working practices,
• Learn from the key players offering services in the cloud,
• Benefit from pre-show online meeting planner,
• Evening networking reception.

23 October 2009: Durham, North Carolina

The Social Media Business Forum

The Social Media Business Forum will feature national and local speakers from marketing companies, technology companies, and social networks discussing ways in which business communications have changed because of social media. Sessions will look at internal and external communications methods for both B2B and B2C companies and provide actionable takeaway items for attendees to immediately implement in their businesses. The forum targets business owners, executives, business communicators, key organizational stake holders, and anyone interested in gaining practical knowledge about social media.

Early bird registration is $125 until September 18, and $250 thereafter.

4 – 5 November 2009: Raleigh, North Carolina

Internet Summit 2009

Internet Summit ’09 will feature over 75 speakers, including representatives of major Internet brands such as Twitter, Pandora, Google, Salesforce.com, Digg, Technorati, CBS Interactive, Huffington Post, Blogger, Tree.com, and many more.

Topics will include social media, blogging, real time, mobile, video, search, online advertising, e-commerce, analytics, the cloud, and more.

Join over 1200 entrepreneurs, senior marketers, and executives in the conversation about the future of the industry and how to capitalize on the shifting dynamics of the Internet and tap into its unlimited business potential.

9 – 10 November 2009: Santa Clara, California

Social Networking World Forum — California

This event taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center actually consists of three conferences: two days dedicated to social networking, one day dedicated to enterprise social media, and one day dedicated to social TV. Key speakers include social networking publishers, advertising agencies, industry analysts, software developers and equipment manufacturers, pay-TV and network service providers, mobile operators, and more.

• Joint exhibition combining social networking and enterprise social media formats
• Pre-show online meeting planner for delegates
• Discount for early booking (expires September 25th)
• Free pass for exhibition only

10 – 13 November 2009: Las Vegas

PubCon Vegas

PubCon Las Vegas is a multi-track educational conference hosted by SearchEngineWorld & WebmasterWorld. PubCon events are for thought leaders and professionals in search engine and Internet marketing to gather and to share best practices in the design, development, promotion and marketing of their Internet businesses and brands. PubCon London 2009 is a social networking event.

11 – 12 November 2009: Denver, Colorado

Defrag 2009 Conference

As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on and gather feedback from that data. In the largest sense, we’re all looking to augment the pace at which we achieve insights on raw data — to accelerate the “A-ha” moment.

Defrag explores the intersection of topics like:

• Business intelligence
• Business process management
• Social computing and analytics
• Next-level discovery
• Enterprise 2.0
• Next-gen email
• The semantic Web

1 – 3 December 2009: London, England

Online Information & IMS 2009

Online Information and IMS together create the largest event dedicated to the information industry. Consisting of an exhibition delivering over 9,000 visitors from 70 countries, a conference and a show-floor seminar program, the event provides an annual meeting place for the global information industry.

Online Information is once again set to play host to thousands of information professionals, information end-users and publishers from around the globe, meeting suppliers of online content, e-publishing, and library management solutions. IMS provides a forum for IT, business, and information management professionals to find unlimited, relevant advice, educational content and compare solutions under one roof. Attend IMS and meet suppliers of content management, search solutions, and Web 2.0 technologies.

15 – 16 March 2010: London, England

2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum — London

The 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum takes place at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. The two-day event features four dedicated conference streams:

1. Social Networking World Forum
2. Enterprise social media
3. Social TV World Forum
4. Mobile Social Networking Forum

The event features key speakers from global brands, organizations, social networking publishers and developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies, content producers, and more.

• Full workshop program within exhibition area
• Evening networking reception
• Pre-show online meeting planner for delegates
• Free pass for exhibition only

Download this entire events calendar in iCal format.

Discuss

Every startup needs exposure. So as part of TechCrunch50, we’ve signed up some major partners to give $1.3 million worth of advertising to the startups launching at the conference next week. We’ve already announced the first $1 million of this advertising from Facebook, Google (Youtube), Microsoft (Bing) and MySpace.

They are being joined in their generosity by Break Media, Glam Media, AIM, and Amazon Web Services. All of them will be giving advertising in kind to the TechCrunch50 finalists. Amazon will be giving credits for Amazon Web Services, something every startup can use. And Perkins Cole, as previously announced, will be providing free legal advice.

With a total war chest of $1.3 million in advertising, you can expect to be reminded about these startups well beyond their launch.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Editor’s note: The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. TechStars is a startup accelerator program that selects about ten companies and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from top investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders. TechStars operates annually in Boulder, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts.

TechStars has now been operating for three years. Three of the original ten companies from 2007 have already been acquired (SocialThing by AOL, Intense Debate by Automattic, and Brightkite by Limbo). In February, we covered the news that TechStars had expanded to Boston. Today, TechStars debuted nine new startups from the inaugural Boston class. The teams presented on Thursday to about 200 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Don was in attendance today and these are his notes on the startups that presented at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (MS-NERD)

TempMine is looking to change the temporary staffing market. The company believes that they’ve found a way to make the temps, employers, and agencies happier with a single solution. Temp workers create a profile on TempMine that is automatically updated as placements occur, providing more transparency and traceability to the process.  Employers can search directly for temps across the inventory of multiple agencies, finding the right fit. Agencies retain control over placements of their best temps. The temp agency only gets involved after the employer finds the exact temp they want. There is no cost to employers or temps to use TempMine, but they do take a 1% commission from the agencies. It is an $86B industry, so 1% can add up.

LangoLab is the most entertaining way to learn a new language—by watching popular TV shows and videos with subtitles. LangoLab leverages the American media machine that is constantly churning out entertaining content and then provides an engaging “watch and learn” experience complete with translations, definitions, user generated language notes, and self testing.  Many people have learned English just by watching TV with subtitles, and this is the online equivalent. English as a second language is the largest market. As an example, Rosetta Stone had $250M in revenue last year, and the total market is around $30B.

Localytics provides mobile usage data and analytics for the mobile market, similar to companies such as Flurry and Medialets. Localytics says that it has both real time and “deeper” analytics than the competitors, allowing you to slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to gain better and more immediate insight into the usage of mobile applications. They also explained that they’ve open sourced critical components so that developers can know exactly what they’re putting into their applications, and that their mobile components are highly optimized for performance. Localytics is cross platform and already supports Blackberry, Android, and iPhone applications, with Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm planned for the near future. Localytics uses the Freemium model: free basic service, with paid premium services. They already have 60 customers, adding 10 new customers each week, and they just launched.

AmpIdea is working on web-enabled baby monitoring as a platform for delivery of various services such as video monitoring, sleep tracking and analysis, statistical comparison, music streaming, and even an integrated baby encyclopedia (Baby 411) which suggests techniques to soothe sleeping babies based on age. While they’re at it, they’re using wifi as the delivery mechanism for audio and video monitoring, which eliminates the static and range issues that plagues traditional baby monitors. For new parents money is no issue when it comes to safety and a good night’s sleep. The sleep scheduling monitor keeps a record of when the baby is sleeping and waking up over time. This helps the parents schedule when to put the baby down for naps and night time sleep. AmpIdea sells the monitor hardware and charges for additional services.

HaveMyShift has built a tool that allows hourly shift workers to trade shifts online. The company is using a grassroots approach and encourages employees to sign up and trade shifts with or without the blessing of the company itself.  They’re seeing strong viral adoption in the Chicago area market where, for example, 80% of Starbucks stores there already use the application. Many of the listings offer “bonus money” to tempt others who work for the same employer to pick up a shift, and last-minute shift changes can be filled with paid emergency promotional placement. HaveMyShift makes money by taking a percentage of the bonuses offered to other workers to cover a shift. Absenteeism costs US employers more than $200M every day. There are 74M hourly workers in the USA, working 888M shifts. HaveMyShift says that it’s simply facilitating a process that goes on anyway, and making it easier on everyone involved.

oneforty is creating an app store for Twitter applications, open to any developer who wants to build and sell a Twitter app. The company organizes the apps by category, allows for ratings, media coverage, profiles (showing what applications are used by various users), and the necessary e-commerce infrastructure. Oneforty takes a percentage of every sale. Funded by angel investors just 15 days after the start of TechStars, the company is also advised by Guy Kawasaki who says that oneforty founder Laura Fitton (@pistachio) was a major influence on his initial use of Twitter. Laura also taught Twitter for Business at Harvard Business School.

AccelGolf.  30,000 golfers are already using AccelGolf, after just 3 months in beta, for stroke tracking, range-finding, and personalized improvement of their golf games. The company showed off their BlackBerry and iPhone applications and explained that the heart of their system is really the community of avid golfers who are now connecting and building their own social network. AccelGolf offers personalized improvement tips by analyzing strokes of golfers who are just slightly better than you, and presenting areas for improvement based on your past performance.  AccelGolf suggests which club to use, and where to place the shot, based on your past performance on a specific course. In one example the company showed the iPhone application calculating odds based on past performance for landing a risky shot over a sand trap on a dog leg left. AccelGolf already has 70% of all golf courses loaded in their system. They use the GPS on your phone to determine your position and calculate distance to the pin.

Baydin uses email, and the words in the email, to create keywords to search for other relevant information. It is similar to Xobni, but goes beyond email data and searches all the files on your hard drive, and document repositories across your corporate network. It automatically launches the search in the background while you are reading the email, and presents the relevant results in a side panel in Outlook. The founder used an example from his first job where he designed a USB circuit board. He didn’t know that five other divisions had already designed similar boards. Baydin would have found references to this and saved him the effort of reinventing the same board. Baydin is an Outlook plug-in so it is easy to draw comparisons to Xobni here, but Baydin seems to be more focused on unlocking hidden corporate knowledge vs.. analyzing email that you’ve already received.

Sensobi bills itself as a personal relationship manager (PRM) and also reminds me a lot of Xobni , but it goes beyond email and looks at phone calls and other activity on your phone contact list. In practice, it’s a BlackBerry address book replacement that shows you the last time you communicated with your contacts, who’s falling off your radar, and who you need to get back to quickly. You can set a reminder for each contact to remind you to connect with them within a specific time interval. It does this by analyzing the email, contacts, text messages, and phone calls on your Blackberry and then presenting your contacts in a relationship-focused view. For any contact you can see the last several communications of any kind with them. The team edition takes this one step further and allows co-workers to share and leverage a unified view of communications with each contact. Sensobi uses the Freemium model, with paid premium services for $50 or $100 per year. Over 6,000 downloads in just 6 weeks, while still in beta.

TechStars plans to bring about a dozen of the 19 companies from Boulder and Boston to San Francisco on September 30th for a “best of” repeat performance. Here is coverage of the San Francisco TechStars event from last year.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Hot or Not was fun in high school and college. You see a girl or a guy (depending on your taste) and you rate their hotness on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s mindless fun. The iPhone reinvigorated the game a bit because it remained a great time waster on a great time wasting device. But there are no shortage of mindless games for the iPhone, so Hot or Not had to step it up a notch, and it’s trying to do just that with a new game: Hot or Not War.

The game takes two mindless classics and smashes them together. It’s the card game War and it’s Hot or Not, all in one very simple app. Except, the game really isn’t too much like War at all. Instead, you are dealt 5 cards face up, as is your opponent. You then pick whichever one you think has the highest Hot or Not rating (their average rating on a 10 point scale) and so does your opponent. You do this for 30 seconds and the person with the most victories, wins the round. The first side to win a set number of rounds (1, 3, 5, or 7) wins.

But also unlike the card game War, when you pick people with the same Hot or Not rating, you don’t actually go to war (throw down more cards). Instead, that’s considered a tie and no side gets any points and you move on to the next set of cards. Also, if you lose, you don’t pick up your opponents cards as the number of cards you have doesn’t matter.

So, okay, it’s really not anything like War, but still, it is fairly fun and addicting. It’s basically a game of, are your tastes in attractiveness in tune with those of the masses?

You can play either against a computer oppontent or against a friend on the same iPhone. You can’t, unfortunately, play online against other players. Also a bit annoying is the sign-up and sign-in process, which is several steps. Luckily, you only have to do it once.

Just as with the Hot or Not website, you can set what gender you are interested in, as well as what age range.

It’s more mindless iPhone fun, looking at attractive (or not so attractive) people. The game is free, available now in the App Store here. And remember: Always pick the girl in the bikini. She always wins.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Editor’s note: With all of the debate lately between RSSCloud versus PubSubHubbub, we wanted to hear from a developer who could actually tell us which one might be better and why. The following guest post is written by Josh Fraser, the co-founder of EventVue, who is an active contributor to PubSubHubbub in his free time.  He has contributed several client libraries for PubSubHubbub including a WordPress plugin. Guess which side of the debate he falls on.

In the past few months, a lot of attention has been given to the rise of the real-time web.  The problem is that the web wasn’t designed with real-time in mind.  There is a huge need for the tech community to get behind new protocols that will power this fundamental shift in how web applications work.  Today I want to take a look at two of the leading protocols that enable real-time notifications on the web.  While there are older protocols that enable real-time notifications like XEP-0060, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud are two new protocols which show a lot of promise of gaining adoption.

Both PuSH and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today.  Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling.  Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?”  Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time.  This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears.  Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven.  By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new.  We’ll tell you.”

Dave Winer deserves the credit for coming up with the idea long before anyone else.  In fact, the <cloud> element was added to the RSS 2.0 specification in 2001, but has only recently been revived (largely in response to the interest in PuSH).  rssCloud made major progress this week with the announcement that WordPress was adding rssCloud support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. In contrast, PuSH is currently enabled for well over 100 million feeds with adopters including Friendfeed, Blogger, Google Reader, LiveJournal, Google Alerts and FeedBurner. I expect to see many more services adopt these new protocols soon.

But if you find yourself confused about how they are different, you’re not alone.

Conceptually, both protocols are very similar.   Both add a simple declaration to a feed that tells a subscriber which hub/cloud has been delegated the responsibility of handling subscriptions.  Both protocols have a centralized hub that notifies subscribers when new content is published.  Both protocols are HTTP based.

The subtle differences in implementation are important to understand, however.  And in my opinion, PuSH is the better protocol for now. There are basically three things that make PuSH a more robust protocol:

First, PuSH doesn’t just tell you that something changed, it actually sends you the new content (also known as a “fat ping.”) This is an important feature that is missing from rssCloud.  Not only do fat pings make integration simpler for subscribers, they also eliminate the danger of inadvertent denial of service attacks as thousands of subscribers respond to the ping notification and request the updated feed at exactly the same time.  This problem is well known in computer science and is often referred to as “the thundering herd problem.”  While this would be relatively simple to fix in rssCloud, it has yet to be addressed.

Second, PuSH allows variable callbacks (custom URL’s for where the notification is sent) which rssCloud does not.  The rssCloud specification states “Notifications are sent to the IP address the request came from. You can not request notification on behalf of another server.”  This is highly limiting since you cannot separate the servers which are handling subscriptions from the servers which are receiving the ping notifications.

Third, PuSH has a more friendly policy for handling unsubscribes.  In rssCloud, every feed is automatically unsubscribed after 25 hours.  In PuSH, there is an explicit unsubscribe function with the option to automatically unsubscribe after a given amount of time.  Again, this small detail matters a lot when you’re operating at scale.  With rssCloud, RSS readers will be responsible for resubscribing millions of feeds every night – which is far less efficient than sending subscribe/unsubscribe requests only when something changes.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t benefits to rssCloud.  It is far easier to implement an RSS cloud than it is to implement a PuSH hub.  By design, PuSH hubs are not simple to implement.

There are other small differences, but these are the issues that matter most.  Everything else boils down to semantics.

I want to address a couple of misconceptions that are floating around about both protocols.  For example, many people think that rssCloud is simply about building a distributed alternative to Twitter.  This is largely due to Dave Winer’s stated goal for rssCloud to create “a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140-character status messages.”  While that is certainly an interesting use-case, it promotes a very narrow view of the protocol and what it enables.  I think rssCloud has far more potential than Dave gives it credit for.

The biggest misconception about PuSH is that it is somehow owned and controlled by Google.  This simply isn’t true.  Not only are there plenty of independent developers like me working on PuSH, there are also other PuSH hubs like SuperFeedr which aren’t controlled by Google. Brett Slatkin points out:

Our spec development process is completely transparent. You can see every code check-in since August 5th 2008. All discussion is on the public mailing list (there is no Google-internal one). The whole point of this spec is to be open, decentralized, and not in control of any company.

Overall, I believe that both PubSubHubbub and rssCloud represent a huge step forward for the web. While I personally believe that PuSH is a better choice, competition is always good and will make both protocols stronger.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Libertinus)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

U.S. citizens will soon be able to log in to government websites using their Google account, or the URL of their Yahoo profile. It’s a significant embrace of the open and emerging tech standards the Obama administration promised.

The U.S. government pilot program will allow people to interact with various government websites using an OpenID or an Information Card, he nation’s information technology officer will announce Wednesday. These are two of the most popular emerging technologies that let web users manage their identities across multiple websites.

Under the new program, which will go into effect in the coming weeks, people will be able to sign in, request information, participate in forums and build user profiles on the government’s websites without having to set up a new user account. Anyone will be able to interact with the government sites using credentials provided to them by Yahoo, Google, AOL, VeriSign or PayPal, among others.

The pilot  is scheduled to be announced by the U.S. government CIO Vivek Kundra at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning.

The win here for the user is twofold.

First, you’ll have fewer logins and passwords to manage — your OpenID is a skeleton key that gets you in to every site. It eliminates the scenario where you’ll have to create one user account to interact with Homeland Security, another to access housing records, and another to ask a question about healthcare. Second, OpenID and the other technologies that support it afford you a high level of control over exactly how much information about you gets shared with the site you’re logging in to. Those who only want to pass along the minimum can do so, and those who want to build a fullblown user profile can do so, as well.

This initiative is a major step toward opening government services and making public data accessible on the web, according to Chris Messina, an OpenID board member and the CEO of Citizen Agency.

“The U.S. government taking real steps to adopt open technologies has the potential to enhance and simplify citizen engagement,” Messina said. Because it has blessing of the administration’s top techie, he stressed, “This isn’t just some little skunkworks project off to the side.”

It also comes at a time when public discourse over issues like health care reform, global warming and education are reaching a fever pitch and many citizens are itching to have their questions answered or their grievances heard.

The government agencies participating in this program are the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). All of their websites will begin accepting OpenID and InfoCard credentials within the coming weeks.

That’s only a handful of government agencies, but the OpenID Foundation, the nonprofit governing body that oversees the growth of the open source technology, hopes Wednesday’s announcement will kick off a domino effect across Washington, according to board member David Recordon, who now works at Facebook.

“For us, this is a helpful way of saying, ‘Hey all of you other government agencies, if you’ve been wondering what you have to do to adopt these technologies and increase public participation, here’s a stake in the ground you can point to that will help you get up to speed more rapidly,’” Recordon said.

OpenID is a digital identity standard that lets people use a single ID, like a Google username or an AOL profile, to log in to multiple websites. Several major companies are already OpenID providers, including Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace, and Microsoft. Facebook is expected to become a provider soon.

InfoCard is a similar standard, championed by Microsoft and Equifax, to help users manage their digital identities.

However, the new pilot program won’t allow users to log in using credentials from just any ID provider. People will only be able to use OpenID or InfoCard credentials provided by the ten companies in the pilot program: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, CitiGroup, Privo, Equifax and Wave Systems.

These companies have undergone a certification process — designed by the Information Card Foundation, the OpenID Foundation and the federal government — that guarantees certain privacy safeguards. For instance, the sites have to use SSL to handle logins, and they have to provide psuedonymous identifying information so the government can’t correlate user identities (and track a single user’s behavior) across multiple agency websites.

This trust framework is there to reassure to the public, says Recordon. “You shouldn’t have to sacrifice security and privacy to participate in open government,” he says.

Messina contrasted OpenId to Facebook Connect, the popular social network’s way of letting users log in to other sites such as news sites using their Facebook ID. Comments on that site can then be shared on a user’s Facebook page.

“Facebook Connect spews user data all over the net, but when it comes to the government, that’s the last thing you want,” Messina said. “Using OpenID, if you don’t want to reveal any information about who you are, you are completely pseudonymous.”

The feds plan to start small. One plan is to let users of the National Institute of Health website — which is full of detailed medical information — to save their research by bookmarking articles, without the government having any idea who actually controls a given account.

While that may not seem like a huge step, Messina says federal agencies are good at adopting what works at other agencies.

“Once we get a few successes going, this will happen very quickly,” Messina said.

Additional reporting by Ryan Singel.

See Also:

• As Facebook Connect Expands, OpenID’s Challenges Grow
• Facebook Throws its Weight Behind OpenID
• And Data for All: Why Obama’s Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Gov’t …
• The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House?
• What Obama Is Learning from Facebook, Google and Ideo
• Gov 2.0 Summit – Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences …
• OpenID Foundation website
• Get an OpenID

Tweetdeck, the popular, free Twitter client, is expanding its reach to Facebook and MySpace. The new versions of the desktop and iPhone program let you post to all three networks and read feeds from them, all within the same interface.

The big idea here, according to Tweetdeck founder Iain Dodsworth, is to make Tweetdeck a more powerful way to keep up with everything — like a web browser for socially distributed information, be it news, memes, or photos.

“Instead of just being a Twitter client, we want to be a new type of browser,” Dodsworth said. “Instead of browsing web pages, we want people to use Tweetdeck to consume all different sources of real-time data… [this] is the first step towards that vision.”

In addition to the MySpace and Facebook integration, which worked smoothly when we connected multiple accounts, the new Tweetdeck lets you group Facebook friends into subgroups, so you can follow work friends, personal friends and frenemies in separate columns. (Tweetdeck presents your social media feeds as a series of highly configurable columns — essentially, you get one for each account, group or service.)

A new image tool lets you drag images or folders of images onto Tweetdeck on the desktop in order to share them. You decide which of your Twitter, Facebook and MySpace accounts to post the images to, type a message, and everything else gets taken care of automatically.

As we’ve mentioned before, there’s just too much information on Twitter (not to mention Facebook and MySpace) for anyone to make sense of it all — even with a great software client, a full pot of coffee, and nothing else to do. The second new aspect of Tweetdeck’s new approach is a new directory of groups to make it easier to subscribe to the feeds you should be subscribing to, because without that, the Twitter concept mostly falls apart.

“No one’s really cracked the whole discovery problem on Twitter,” said Dodsworth. “There are directories already on the web, but they’re based on individuals, and I don’t think the correct approach to this, for a mainstream user who’s not sure what’s going on, is to be presented with a list of thousands of people to add one at a time.”

Tweetdeck curates these groups by hand, which you can add as columns in Tweetdeck with a single click. However, Dodsworth told us he plans to crowdsource the creation and maintenance of these groups with a voting mechanism that will make certain voices more or less heard as the community rates each contributor up or down.

If it works, it’ll be something like Digg — except that it will rate sources of information rather than stories.

Tweetdeck, currently about a year old, has been downloaded millions of times to the desktop and iPhone, according to Dodsworth, with 92 percent of its users saying they access the app at least once a day and half of respondents saying they use it “all day every day.”

See Also:

• Hands-On: Tweetie for Mac Shakes Up Twitterverse
• $23.3 Million To Twitter-Based Startups
• Facebook Confirms Denial-of-Service Attack (Updated)
• New Tool for Putting Music on Twitter: Clever or Stupid
• Denial-of-Service Attack Knocks Twitter Offline (Updated …
• Open Source ‘Twitter’ Could Fend Off the Next Twitpocalypse
• SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era
• Twitter Paid $6 or Less for Crowdsourced ‘Birdie’ Graphic
• Use Twitter Like a Television Network
• The Best Ways to Discover Music Through Twitter

Screenshot courtesy of curiouslee

Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well.

Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors.

Would you wear that device? I think I would. I can imagine that advances in hardware and batteries will soon make these as small as you like. And I can see them becoming as ubiquitous as wrist watches were in the last century. I see them becoming customized fashion statements.

Privacy disaster? You betcha.

But ten years ago we’d be horrified by what we nonchalantly share on Facebook and Twitter every day. I always imagine what a family in the 70s would think about all of their photo albums being posted on computers and available for the entire world to see. They’d be horrified, they couldn’t even imagine it. Heck, a life recorder is less of a privacy abandonment step forward than we’ve already taken with the Internet and electronic surveillance in general.

A Business Week article talks about a ten year old Microsoft project called SenseCam (more here) that is just such a device.

It’s clunky today and doesn’t do most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph above. But a true life recorder that isn’t a fashion tragedy isn’t that far away.

In fact I’ve already spoken with one startup that has been working on a device like this for over a year now, and may go to market with it in 2010.

The hardware is actually not the biggest challenge. How it will be stored, transcribed, indexed and protected online is. It’s a massive amount of data that only a few companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) are equipped to really handle anytime soon.

But these devices are coming. And you have to decide if you’ll be one of the first or one of the last to use one.

Will you wear one? I will. Let us know in the poll below.

Would You Wear A Life Recorder?(survey software)

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Two things that would end hypocrisy and make the world a better place: Priests should be allowed to get married, and the New York Times should update its Ethics Policy.

The venerable and vulnerable newspaper finally starts talking about the “Pogue Problem” out loud to its readers. For years David Pogue has covered Apple (and other tech companies). And for years he has been authoring books on Apple products. He doesn’t get paid by Apple for the books, but his bias is clear and he has been accused to conflicts of interest more than once by other mainstream media. Dan Lyons has a very funny take on the whole story which is worth reading.

If you have any doubt about Pogue’s opinion of Apple, this should clear it up.

We actually celebrate this kind of behavior, as long as it’s disclosed to readers. But the New York Times has a different standard, and Pogue’s reporting is a clear violation of their Policy on Ethics in Journalism, in my opinion:

Though this topic defies firm rules, it is essential that we preserve professional detachment, free of any hint of bias. Staff members may see sources informally over a meal or drinks, but they must keep in mind the difference between legitimate business and personal friendship. A city editor who enjoys a weekly round of golf with a city council member, for example, risks creating an appearance of coziness. So does a television news producer who spends weekends in the company of people we cover. Scrupulous practice requires that periodically we step back and look at whether we have drifted too close to sources with whom we deal regularly. The test of freedom from favoritism is the ability to maintain good working relationships with all parties to a dispute.

The NY Times generally self-regulates. If you’re too close to a source, you need to “step back” and evaluate your writing and “must be especially wary of showing partiality.” Of course, we think it’s best to show your partiality instead of hiding it, tell readers your relationships and then let them decide. Pogue’s bias is obvious, and we have no issue with it.

But we do take issue with the NY Times preaching about ethics when they continue to engage in the same behavior, sans disclosure.

The NY Times ethics policy also says “When we first use facts originally reported by another news organization, we attribute them.” But in our experience that isn’t always the case.

The one thing the NY Times has is its brand and its people. They aren’t first to stories but they generally get things right. Trying to hide conflicts of interest hurts that brand, particularly when they hide, hypocritically, behind an ethics statement that prohibits the behavior they’re hiding. It’s far better to keep everything in the open. Transparency is what’s important, not appearances.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

NYT Public Editor Clark Hoyt: our love affair continues. You’re like the Internal Affairs of the Times! All the cops/writers probably hate/fear you. Especially after giving David Pogue a curbside beating for shilling his Apple book with a Times review.

See, NYT tech columnist David Pogue—who Hoyt is nice enough to laud for his “high-energy” and for the way he can “entertain” and help out the “the technologically challenged like me” with his writing—reviewed Apple’s new operating system, Snow Leopard, for the Times. He gave it a very positive, wonderful, glowing review, calling it “sleek” in the headline. Which might be—okay, definitely is—a conflict of interest when viewed in light of his book about how to use Snow Leopard! Sleek!

And then Clark brought down the Hammer of Hoyt upon his face:

I presented the facts to three ethicists: Kelly McBride at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in Florida; Bob Steele, a professor at DePauw University and a scholar at Poynter; and Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All agreed that Pogue and The Times were facing a clear conflict of interest.

Aw, shit, son! You got yourself a conflict of interest. Hoyt then proceeds to go all Denzel in Training Day on him, and the rest of the Times:

Pogue is by no means the only Times writer with other interests. Thomas Friedman commands $75,000 for a speech, and his books are blockbusters. Another Op-Ed columnist, Frank Rich, is a consultant helping HBO develop new programming. A. O. Scott, the film critic, is about to become co-host of “At the Movies,” produced by ABC Media Productions. Mark Bittman, The Minimalist, an independent contractor like Pogue, writes cookbooks and appears on PBS. John Harwood, who writes from Washington, is CNBC’s chief Washington correspondent.

Okay, great. So Hoyt goes on to name the levels on how this is a tricky conflict of interest and the different ways in which the Times tries to circumnavigate this kind of situation. And the end result of all of Hoyt’s headbusting?

Larry Ingrassia, the business editor, said that, prompted by my questions, editors decided to make disclosures to readers regarding Pogue’s outside activities. On his Times Topics page online, Pogue posted a statement of ethics, saying manufacturers have no involvement in his manuals and that from now on, if he is writing a book about a product he is reviewing, he will disclose it to readers. It says his personal investments are in a blind trust to avoid any question of reviewing products in which he has a direct financial interest. A disclosure was appended to the Snow Leopard column online.

Times’ readers get a disclosure. Not a vigilant, angry, pissed off tech nerd who’s willing to actively take the piss out of Apple no matter what the consequence, but some guy who’s basically a symbiotic leech of their company’s product, and a statement for their readers that they know he’s one. Hoyt may have a badge, a gun, and a big nightstick, but he ain’t allowed to kill with it. Which is too bad. Because with kickers like this…

It was good that The Times addressed the issue now. Windows 7 is being released within a month. Pogue is planning to review it. The “Missing Manual” is already for sale.

…you know Hoyt would be pistol-whipping sucka bitch Times conflict-of-interest perpetrating writers like it was nobody’s business.

Bill Keller, are you listening? This man is your enforcer.