Read more about Steve Jobs’s new toy over at TechCrunch.

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The project is called Persona’s, and it’s  from MIT’s Media Lab.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

The Persona’s project will crawl the Internet for articles and content that includes your name.  If you have a very common name, your results may be skewed for obvious reasons.  The project is far from perfect but it’s a neat little tool.  Watching the bot crawl content may be more fun than the results itself.  Give it a try!

As many of you know, communication is power.  What are Iranian’s to do who are walled off from the world for the most part?  They turn to caring individuals across the globe through social media.  Tech savvy Iranian’s (especially university students) have turned to users on blogs, Facebook and Twitter for help.  They have organized DDoS attacks which have since been now collectively decided to be a bad idea and for the most part have ceased.  They are asking outside users to create fresh proxies to get around Iran’s web filters to allow Twitter updates and uploading video of the violence to YouTube.  They are using these proxies to e-mail United States media companies to tell their story and provide information.  It is amazing that social media, especially Twitter has put out a ‘cowboy call’ to anyone with technical skills to help those in Iran in any way possible.  Users are posting translated U.S. military field manuals on how to treat gunshot wounds and other injuries.  They are providing their technical insight on comm networks like cell phone towers and satellite phones.  All of this is going down LIVE! as CNN runs another Larry King re-run.  The best part about this is the 140-character limit.  People are pushing ‘to-the-point’ facts because they don’t have room to ramble.

This I feel will be a key turning point for Twitter as it is being used as a organizational tool and communications platform.  It is the only lifeline to the outside world for some Iranian’s.   This situation as it continues to rage on will be studied for some time and will be a turning point for Twitter and company.

Another backbone for organization has now become iran.whyweprotest.net.  This site virally spread online on Tuesday only helped by the folks at thepiratebay.org linking to it showing their support for protesters in Iran.  Another Internet privacy company, XeroBank, has showed its support by offering free encrypted VPN’s  to Iranians to allow communication.

From BoingBoing

How you can help those in Iran…

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.

2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.

3. Keep you b.s.  filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don’t retweet impetuously, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.

4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.

5. Don’t blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don’t publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don’t signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind…

The following is an excerpt from iran.sharearchy.com

Mobilize the Masses

There’s a lot to be done

Sure I can get a iPhone 3GS, but with no upgrade discount or contract commitment it will cost me $599 for the 16GB model or $699 for the 32GB model.  Is AT&T out of their damn minds?

All the customers AT&T lured in with the iPhone from day 1 are now being told to “F*** off” as AT&T drops prices for new customers who don’t mind the old 3G 8GB hardware as low as $80 refurbished, or a brand new 16gb iPhone 3GS for $200 with two-year contract.

I won’t even get into the debacle about AT&T not being able to deliver on MMS messaging or tethering for at least a couple months.  MMS?  Really AT&T?  Something that even the cheapest candybars can do? All carriers in other countries will be offering MMS and tethering which the new iPhone is more than capable of doing, except AT&T.

AT&T must really feel confident they can hold onto their exclusive contract with Apple.  However, Apple ripping on AT&T at WWDC with boos coming from the crowd doesn’t inspire much confidence in that notion.

I hate you AT&T, you and your poor business practices.

YouTube announced

Analysts have stated YouTube is on track to lose 470 Million dollars this year to bandwidth, content licensing, hardware storage, sales and marketing and other expenses. 

YouTube Revenue – $240 Million

YouTube Expenses – $711 Million

So what will Google end up doing with YouTube?  They will likely copy their competition, Hulu.  Hulu is substantially smaller than YouTube, but has attracted big time advertisers with their focus on premium content like TV shows and full-length movies.  Being tied in with mainstream media giants like Walt Disney Corp and NBC Television probably doesn’t hurt when trying to attract advertisers.  So YouTube will jump ship and start offering more premium content like Grey’s Anatomy and the latest Wall-E movie.  Why?  Quite simple really, no one wants to advertise on a video of you arm-pit farting the ABC’s.   You can already see YouTube’s baby steps towards ‘Huluization’ on their ‘Video’ page.  They have added ‘Shows’ and a ’Movies’ tab to the sidebar. 

YouTube needs to monetize fast or Google may have to make some tough decisions to make on the video money pit.  Make money or face certain death YouTube *Evil Laugh*.

Extras…

Will they remove their company tagline of ‘Broadcast Yourself’? 

Will they remain their company TheirTube?

At around 10 p.m. I was told of 10 squad cars and a flurry of activity surrounding a small tavern about 2 miles away from my home.  Bartenders at the tavern recognized the suspect and called 911 right away.  Officers were staked out trying to observe the suspect with binoculars as more units got into position.  Finally they entered the establishment and it was the suspect, they placed him under arrest with no incident.  As soon as they declared ‘suspect in custody’ and he was led out, I immediately jumped on my Twitter with this post:

‘I think Wausau ‘Rambo’ Suspect has been captured – Wausau/EMPD captured him sounds like.  @wsaw @waow #wausau’

I @replied it to the local television stations and hash-tagged my city.  Within minutes WSAW-TV, the local CBS affiliate here in Wausau @replied me with the following post and this tweet conversation ensued.

These tweets were fed to WSAW-TV over a period of about 15 minutes, yet within 20 minutes of the cuffs going on the suspect.  WSAW followed up with local law enforcement authorities and had the story live on their website within an hour of the suspects arrest, all with never leaving their newsroom (I believe).

This all happened a short time after the local 10 p.m. newscast when both television stations had personnel in the newsroom.  WAOW-TV has a Twitter account, but why weren’t they monitoring it?   This time it cost them the first lead on a fairly large story while their competition severely beat them to the punch, all thanks to Twitter. (WAOW-TV did finally get the story up at 1:31 a.m., two hours behind their competition)

This is another great example of Twitter delivering breaking news faster than any other communications platform.  Traditional media must remember the two-way nature of Twitter and monitor their account for viewer interaction and tips on stories like this evening.  Twitter is not just a broadcasting platform, at least it should not be used like that.  Twitter is a great initial scrape for preliminary information and breaking news.  This information though likely first hand from someone is still subject to fundamental journalism like fact checking.  The challenge for media outlets will be how to filter and take in vast amounts of this ‘scrape’ and find the golden nuggets while distinguishing genuine information from the potentially bogus.  Media outlets can make their Twitter presence even more valuable by increasing buy-in from their viewers.  Imagine a live streaming feed directly from 1000′s of your viewers that are on the go 24 hours a day with the ability to pump out tweets in mere seconds?  That’s power folks.

Journalism is pitch-forking in two directions.  On one side you have the raw unfiltered and unchecked media and information streams like Twitter, Twitpic etc.  On the other side you have traditional media where they are counted on for being accurate and providing contextual analysis of the story.  The two media pieces are currently feeling out one another trying to find models that work to generate synergy.

Twitter is essential in any newsroom today.  This idea is not breaking news I assure you.  If your corporate boss disagrees and feels it’s waste of time, I’ll gladly come and provide your media organization with a presentation!  This story is another check mark chalked in favor of Twitter distributing breaking news.  On Twitter within 60 seconds of the cuffs being slapped on, not bad…

Not bad at all!

Want more information about me?  Check here.

I want to personally commend @mikell for monitoring his organization’s Twitter and getting the jump on this story.  Follow him!