Google's bid for open wireless

Two years ago, Google partnered with Earthlink to offer a plan for San Francisco to provide free wireless access without dipping into the municipal budget. The City bit and today, San Franciscan's are still waiting for their wifi. Rumor has it that the deal has been killed by Earthlink, but according to a recent Guardian article Google's interest in wireless internet is still very much alive.

As part of the Coalition for 4G that also includes Intel, Skype and Yahoo, Google has successfully lobbied the FCC to change the way a portion of the airwaves are sold.… Read more

A new use for Speed Dial!

Earlier this month, New York enacted an Air Passenger Bill of Rights. Among other things, it requires that airlines make minimal provisions for passengers stranded on the tarmac for more than three hours. If you've done any traveling with kids, you probably know how difficult it is to both pack light (a key strategy for successful travel generally) and to pack enough stuff so that if there's a delay, you can keep the little ones occupied. The New York law bounds the problem a little bit: if your longest leg is 6 hours, you can be relatively assured that your outbound leg from a New York airport won't add more than 3 hours to that. But as the US Customs and Border Patrol SNAFU at LAX confirms, airport authorities don't seem to get particularly concerned about tarmac waits of 6, 8, or 10 hours, be they outbound or inbound. I think that when traveling with children, that's a bit much. What's a parent to do?… Read more

Google News adds unique commenting feature

For anyone who's ever been quoted in a newspaper, you've likely read over the article with great anticipation only to conclude that the reporter completely missed the mark, or at least neglected something you feel is important to your story. It's human nature. Unfortunately, there isn't much you or the news agency can do to clarify and remedy the miscommunication. Sure, newspapers can, and do, print corrections, but only when there is a factual error in the story, and they hardly rectify the situation. While not a perfect solution, the folks at Google News have recently begun soliciting comments from participants and subjects covered by the news report.

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Avoiding tween-oriented spyware and scams

Parents may think that their kids are safe online as long as they limit their surfing to topics like squeaky-clean Disney star "Hannah Montana." Unfortunately, new research from McAfee points out that scammers hijack pop culture topics, so that when kids search for popular songs or stars, what they sometimes get is data-stealing spyware or porn-redirects.

McAfee research analyst Shane Keats was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog. Keats explains how an innocent search can go awry:

"When [kids] first get to an offer for a Hannah Montana screensaver, they just click yes. Three or four … Read more

America on a media diet?

Today's Boston Herald reports that Americans consumed less media in 2006 than they did the year before. Are we losing interest in media or are we just becoming more efficient consumers?

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Debunking Baby Einstein

When I wrote about "marketing to your reptilian brain" on Tuesday, I was just hearing the news breaking about the new study that suggests that babies' viewing of Baby Einstein videos may hamper rather than accelerate language acquisition. Since I was writing about unconscious marketing techniques, I ran with the McDonald's Wrapper research rather than the Baby Einstein findings.

The runaway reporting of the Baby Einstein story caught me by surprise, because I had assumed that on some level we all knew these videos were just a crutch we used to keep the kids occupied while we … Read more

Marketing to your reptilian brain

Marketing can take many forms, from appealing to higher values such as education--think Baby Einstein--to persuasion in the form of clever, sticky messaging.

But it seems lately that many online advertisers are dropping any attempt to appeal to our higher cerebral functions and are aiming straight for the reptilian brain. News sites like CNN, MSNBC.com, and The New York Times are peppered with banner ads that feature attention-getting but meaningless animated characters that dance on the edges of the screen. What fascinates me as a former neuroscientist is that these images are crafted to be irresistible. … Read more

ROK, scissors, paper

Our daughter has reached the developmental milestone of trying to create for herself working models of objects she observes in her everyday life. Last year she drew pictures of houses; this year she's trying to make actual houses. Of course, modeling clay is a great material for her constructive tendencies. But modeling clay has its limits--anything that's more than an inch thick doesn't bake very well in the oven. It's difficult to really appreciate the house-ness of something about the size of a small carrot, red roof or otherwise.… Read more

Women are blogging; why isn't the media listening?

The BlogHer '07 conference met in Chicago last weekend, bringing together 800 women of the 13,000 members of this vibrant online community. If you didn't hear about it, it's because the national media didn't bother to report it.

Jennifer Pozner, founder of Women in Media & News (WIMN), writes a scathing analysis of this oversight on the Women's Media Center blog, reporting that "only three Chicago newspapers covered the conference, as if this national assemblage of women writers and videographers were simply a local story. Not one national network or cable news broadcast deigned to mention it."… Read more