Let’s say a company is about to launch a new product and, as is the standard practice, they have pre-briefed a select group of media outlets and bloggers about the news under an embargo.

The launch date is close and writers have already prepared their news stories so that they can push them as soon as embargo is lifted. And then something strange happens – one media outlet publishes the story ahead of time thus breaking the embargo – intentionally or unintentionally.

Find Who Broke the News Embargo?

Broken embargoes can be frustrating for journalists and bloggers as the limelight (and page views) often shifts to the news publication who did not honor the embargo.

If a news embargo gets broken, here’s a simple way that may help you determine the name of the publication that broke it in the first place.

Step 1. Go to google.com/realtime and type a few words from the story headline.

Step 2. In the timeline, click an area where you have minimal number of tweets around that story. That’s when the news first broke on the Internet and looking at the tweets, you should be able to figure who broke that news.

To give you an example, Google pre-briefed a number of publication about the priority inbox feature of Gmail and the news was supposed to stay under embargo until 9 AM. eWeek however published the story  at 8:36 AM while others still had their story in the queue.

This technique works because most sites now auto-syndicate their content to social sites like Twitter and Facebook. Since all the stories are getting on Twitter, you can easily sort them by publication time through the timeline of Google Real Time search.

Who Broke the News (or the Embargo) First?

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Ever wonder how strong your password is?

Just type your password in the input box of How Secure is my Password and this nifty little tool will tell you how long it would take for an average desktop computer to crack your password using the Brute Force method.

The tool uses the simple formula “(number of possible characters ^ password length) / calculations per second” to derive that number but it can also determine if you are using one of the common passwords (like qwerty or 123456) that can be cracked instantly.

“How Secure is my Password” runs inside your browser through JavaScript and therefore your passwords won’t be transmitted anywhere while you are checking their relative strength.

Related: How Strong is your Password

Test your Password Strength Online

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

There are quite a few ways by which you can create multiple email addresses inside Gmail.

For instance, if your email address is hello@gmail.com , any email that’s addressed to either he.ll.o@gmail.com or hello+world@gmail.com will also be delivered to your main inbox since Gmail ignores dots and anything that’s after the plus symbol in email usernames.

Therefore, theoretically speaking, you get an unlimited number of email addresses with one Gmail account. This gets even more interesting if you are using Gmail with Google Apps.

Email Aliases in Gmail for Google Apps

In the case of Google Apps, you can assign nicknames to your email account and messages that are addressed to the nickname (or alias) are also delivered to you.

For instance, if you run a website at example.com, you can have one mail email address and then setup aliases like tips@example.com (for blog tips), advertise@example.com (for potential advertisers) and so on. Thus you have to deal with only one inbox.

To setup an email alias in Google Apps, log in to google.com/a/example.com as an admin (replace example.com with your domain name) and click the “Users and groups” option.

Select the email username for which you wish to setup aliases and then click “Add a nickname” to associate another email username with this user. You may associate up to 30 different nicknames per user in Google Apps.

When you reply to an email that’s addressed to one of your nicknames, the “From” address may still have your main email address. You can however change that quite easily.

Open your Gmail Inbox –> Settings –> Accounts and click “add another email address you own” under “send mail as.” Type your new email alias here, verify the code and you’ll now have an option to decide which of your email addresses should show up in the “From” field.

Thus, if you ever want a new email address, you don’t have to create another user in Google Apps – just add a new nickname to your existing email address.

Related: Check Multiple E-Mail Accounts

Get Extra Email Addresses for your Gmail Account [Google Apps]

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Claims that Philadelphia authorities are charging bloggers a fee have caused a media furore – but they're simply not true

Churnalism travels fast, especially in silly season. Stories about a supposed new tax on bloggers in Philadelphia have bounced round the US media, with buzzphrase "Philly blog tax" appearing everywhere from CNN to New York Magazine. "Philly wants to tax bloggers", said Gawker. "How does a financially strapped city [...] make a little cash? Tax the bloggers," said the New York Daily News. "Freedom of speech under attack as Philadelphia becomes First City To Impose A Tax On blogging" reads one local blog headline.

But there is no blog tax. Philadelphia levies a licence fee on small businesses, which is no more a tax on bloggers than the UK's VAT is a tax on chocolate buttons.

The rumour started when the Philadelphia City Paper ran an article last week headlined "Pay up", which detailed how blogger Marilyn Bess received a letter demanding $300 for a "business privilege licence". "I've been very interested to see how many writers addressed this topic and used my name without talking to me," Bess told MediaGuardian. "One of my favourite articles in this mess said: 'She probably assumed she was getting a summons or jury duty'. I thought no such thing."

The City Paper story appears to accuse the city of singling out bloggers – if you only read the strapline, that is. "Got a blog that makes no money? The city wants $300, thank you very much." The body copy explains the rather more mundane truth, but why let the facts get in the way of a good sell? The US media certainly hasn't.

Staff at Philadelphia's department of revenue seemed surprised when MediaGuardian got in touch to ask if it had decided any such thing (it hasn't). "There has been quite a bit of sensationalism and misunderstanding," a spokesperson said. "Philadelphia does not have a licence or tax just for bloggers [but] does require anyone doing business and generating revenue for profit to register and get a business licence with the City of Philadelphia." This costs $50 a year, or a lifetime fee of $300, and is only for those making money. "A blog or website that doesn't generate revenue would not be considered a business."

The problem is "people not taking five seconds to realise it's not a blog tax, it's a tax on all the commerce in the city," says Sean Blanda, co-founder of tech news site Technically Philly and an ex-employee of the City Paper. "But people thought it was an affront to free speech. It says nothing about free speech." As Blanda wrote on his blog : "There is no 'blog tax' in Philadelphia. None."

The move will speed up access for people using the site via iPhones or Android

Mobile users in the UK, Europe and Middle East can now access an HTML5 version of Google's YouTube video site, speeding up access for those accessing it via iPhones, Android or other mobile devices with browsers able to render HTML5 video content.

The launch comes as mobile use of the web is growing rapidly: Google says that YouTube's mobile site, m.youtube.com, gets more than 100m video playbacks a day – roughly the number of daily views youtube.com was getting when being acquired by Google in 2006 – and every minute an hour of video is uploaded to the site from a mobile device. Mobile video playback also grew by 160% in 2009 on the previous year, along with an increase in adoption of devices able to stream video.

The US version of the HTML5 site for mobiles was launched last month.

Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the UK consumes the most YouTube videos on mobile devices, followed by France, Italy, Netherlands and Switzerland.

The original mobile version of YouTube launched in 2007, but relied on versions of Adobe's Flash for playback – which was too taxing for most devices. Since then, the development of the HTML5 web standard, and of mobile browsers – notably WebKit, used by Apple in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, and by Google in Android – able to play back embedded video content using the H.264 codec, rather than Flash's usual Sorensen or VP6 codecs, has meant that HTML5 video use has become feasible.

Google says the decision has been driven by the dramatic growth in mobile access to YouTube, which is more than doubling every year.

Several short-form video sites are building players in HTML5: Vimeo brought out a hybrid HTML5 version of its player earlier this month, designed for better mobile playback. But when US-only TV and movie streaming site Hulu unveiled a major revamp of its display earlier this year, it did so using Adobe Flash, saying HTML5 "doesn't meet our customers' needs".

The use of HTML5 does not mean that Flash is shut out of YouTube's mobile version: Adobe's product can encode video in H.264 as well. But the growing use of desktop browsers such as Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, which can render H.264 video – and with the forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 also offering it – poses a long-term question about Flash's continued widespread use.

Brightcove, the video hosting service for many media organisations, began offering an HTML5 version of its site in March this year. The New York Times and Time Inc were among the first media outlets to integrate it – allowing playback on Apple's popular mobile devices, which do not use Flash.

Closer to home, Erik Huggers, director of BBC future media & technology, recently defended the corporation from accusations that its widespread use of Flash – on the iPlayer, in particular – betrayed a commitment to open standards.

"Our use of Flash is not a case of BBC favouritism, rather it currently happens to be the most efficient way to deliver a high quality experience to the broadest possible audience," Huggers said, adding: "The fact is that there's still a lot of work to be done on HTML5 before we can integrate it fully into our products. As things stand I have concerns about HTML5's ability to deliver on the vision of a single open browser standard which goes beyond the whole debate around video playback."

Though the BBC does deliver H.264-encoded video to Apple mobile devices, it does not do that for Android devices, citing concerns about copying of content via the Android platform, and instead serves Flash-based video to them.

However YouTube has said that HTML5 is still some way from becoming the new standard for streaming long-form video content, such as BBC iPlayer content. "While HTML5's video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don't support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs," said John Hardin, software engineer at YouTube, in a blogpost published in June. "Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube's video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it."

Microsoft has put its eggs in the HTML5 basket with next year's release of its internet Explorer 9 browser. Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's senior director of internet Explorer, said in May this year: "We're all in on HTML5. We've been co-chairing the HTML5 working group, and we're actually leading the HTML5 testing group."

Application downloads are forecast to overtake revenue generated from voice services by 2013, upping the demand on network traffic

Flat-rate mobile data tariffs look like an endangered species in the US and Europe. Mobile operators say that the all-you-can-eat model is damaging their ability to increase their revenues, and that the cost of building next-generation networks and providing the backbone capacity for the data is a "critical challenge".

In a survey for the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the majority of mobile operators in the US and Europe also say they want to charge to prioritise the delivery of network traffic – which would do away with the principle of net neutrality on wireless networks.

And, fearful that handset makers and companies such as Apple, Google, Nokia and BlackBerry maker RIM will reap all the benefits from selling downloadable phone apps, nearly 80% of mobile operators told the EIU that they would benefit from opening their platforms to independent software developers, with 45% believing they should open their own "app stores" to compete with those like Apple's iPhone App Store and Google's Android Marketplace and Nokia's Ovi Store.

Apps are becoming increasingly important to handset makers as a means of distinguishing themselves, but operators have seen little benefit from them. Instead, apps usually lead to greater data use from smartphones – but on flat-rate data tariffs, that simply means greater costs for the network operator.

Ofcom figures from the first quarter of 2010 show that 18% of the UK population user their mobile handset to access the internet. That is expected to increase alongside purchases of smartphones.

Executives expect the downloading of applications to outweigh income generated from voice calls by 2013, and 55% of those surveyed said they should be allowed to recoup some of the money invested in enabling this increasing usage of data.

In the US, AT&T signalled the end of flat-rate data tariffs for iPhone users in June, shifting to a model where owners could get up to 2 gigabytes of data per month on standard contracts. In the UK, the four main operators this summer also ended flat-rate tariffs for iPhone owners which were introduced in 2007 when the device was launched.

As the number of smartphones being used has grown, so have the demands on networks' data backbones, which have struggled to keep up, while networks have been hampered by flat-rate data tariffs which they introduced to tempt people to use their services – and then found were taken up so eagerly that the systems struggled to fulfil demand.

Current regulation stipulates that no preferential treatment is given to data carried over networks, but the increase in usage of applications, video streaming and internet-connected gaming has meant operators have had to invest in ways of delivering data to users.

Proposals recently laid out by Google and US telecom Verizon left room for wireless, mobile networks to be able to discriminate in how they deliver content, saying that the future internet will largely be wireless and shouldn't be bound to rules governing the internet of today.

Last week private discussions were held in the US between lobbyists – thought to include Yahoo and Microsoft – to try come to an agreement on how to manage internet traffic, following the breakdown of net neutrality talks held by the country's Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

• One of the UK's smaller internet service providers, Demon, today unveiled a new broadband package charging customers £3 extra per month for the prioritised delivery of gaming traffic over its network.

Foursquare and Gowalla may fear Facebook's new geo-location service – but perhaps it's really aimed at classified ads

Facebook's geo-location service has finally arrived – ladies and gentlemen, Facebook Places. It mimics the "checking-in" functionality made famous by Foursquare and Gowalla, and allows Facebook users to see where their friends are, and when.

But it goes deeper than that. Facebook has worked with Foursquare and Gowalla to fully integrate their services; it allows badges and check-ins to be imported – not only from Foursquare and Gowalla, but MyTown and Yelp too. The smaller services are exposed to hundreds of millions of users while Facebook becomes a geolocation services aggregator overnight.

Whether these services should be worried depends on the space Facebook moves forward into. Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown rely on a strong gaming element to gain traction. Foursquare helps local businesses and national brands generate and deepen consumer loyalty. Yelp is about peer recommendation. Facebook could move into any one of these spaces without blinking.

But perhaps there are bigger fish to fry – namely Craigslist. In 15 years, nobody has challenged the site's supremacy in the area of classifieds. That's not to say there aren't start-ups that consider themselves contenders, but none have come close to the site's (rumoured) nine-figure annual turnover or its ubiquitous association with online classifieds.

Since 1995, Craigslist has been instrumental in migrating a cash-rich revenue stream from newspapers to the internet. But Craigslist hasn't moved on since. The most obvious evolution of classifieds is the migration to mobile, utilising geolocation. Craigslist has had more than two years to play with the iPhone, yet has no mobile presence other than a third-party app that mimics the navigation of the site, instead of playing to the strengths of the device.

The iPad version is even worse – all that on-screen real estate, and it's still menu-driven. Why not a map, for crying out loud? Craigslist's own efforts are non-existent – despite its millions of dollars, the site isn't optimised for mobile browsers.

Craigslist, in a continued attempt to keep things simple, has dropped the ball. The mobile web – through web and native mobile apps, and optimised websites too – will revolutionise business in the next five years, just as the internet did 15 years ago. Ignoring trends in design is one thing; ignoring consumer-driven platforms is quite another.

When I look at Facebook Places, I see an impending marriage with Facebook Marketplace and a serious threat to Craigslist. Don't think of Facebook Places as simply being about checking in; it's about the broader ability to create geo-tagged content that can have relevance to tens of thousands of users in a given vicinity.

A simple Marketplace button on the mobile app (and the site) that mashes together Google Maps and local listings local to the user – or allows the user to add simple, geo-tagged listings with photos too – would enjoy massive takeup and become an essential service in no time. Why would you ever look at Craigslist again?

Jane P is using two email addresses that she doesn't much like, can't change, and which depend on her ISP. She would like a more professional way of handling her email

I have had my email address at fsnet.co.uk for many years, and I use it to send emails to my professional contacts from my desktop PC using Outlook Express. However, when I use Orange webmail from my laptop, I have a different address, which Orange says I chose, but it looks rather anonymous and faintly suspicious. Orange insists that it cannot be changed, though I could have a new identity with the suffix @orangehome. Do I have to start all over again, possibly with another ISP, which would involve changing my email address? As I do not especially like Orange webmail anyway, what would you recommend?
Jane P

You're lucky to have retained your Freeserve address for so long, but there's no guarantee that any ISP's email addresses will survive takeovers, or that the email service will continue to work adequately. Having two completely different addresses is another problem for you, and for your clients.

I think you should start by registering your own domain name, because you will be able to use it for as long as you like, no matter which ISP you choose. It looks more professional to have your own name or company name as your email address. The cost is not prohibitive. At the moment, you can buy YourOwnName.com for £80 for 10 years, and/or YourOwnName.co.uk for £9 for two years. These prices are from Easily.co.uk – if you click to "buy a domain" on Orange's webmail site, that's where it takes you.

There are lots of domain name suppliers who provide hosting and email forwarding. The main thing to watch out for is that the domain name is registered in your name, not theirs. This avoids being held to ransom if you decide to move your name to a different host.

Once you have your domain name, you can log on to your Easily account and tell it where you want it to forward your email. In my case, it's Gmail, and this may well be the best choice for you too. Open a Gmail account with YourOwnName, click on Settings and use "Import mail and contacts" to try to retrieve email from both your previous accounts. Also, use the "Check mail using POP3" section to keep fetching new email from these old accounts as they gradually fall out of use.

I'm not sure if you can collect your old email from Orange Webmail, because its help page doesn't even explain how to download email with Outlook Express. However, try the settings pop.orangehome.co.uk (incoming) and smtp.orangehome.co.uk (outgoing).

The next step is to go to your Gmail account's Settings tab, and select Accounts and Import. This time, click on "Send mail as" and tell Gmail you want to send email from JaneP@YourOwnName.com (ie, using the email address you entered at Easily for the domain name you registered). You will have to verify this address, but the email that Gmail sends to JaneP@YourOwnName.com will appear in your Gmail inbox. To verify it, just copy the code from the email and paste it in the verification box. Now you can send emails from JaneP@YourOwnName.com and your clients can reply to JaneP@YourOwnName.com, though you are actually using Gmail.

In the future, Google might go bust (unlikely), change the way Gmail operates (inevitable), or start charging for features that are currently free. If this happens, you can change to a different email service without changing your email address. To do this, simply log on to Easily.co.uk (your domain name host) and change the email forwarding address from Gmail to your new service.

So far, we have set up Gmail for use as a webmail service. This works pretty well, but you have no copies of your emails, and Google could easily lock you out of Gmail or block your account without giving you any warning, or any reason. You must therefore download all your Gmail (which now includes your Freeserve and, we hope, Orange webmail) to an email program on your desktop PC.

To do this, go to your Gmail account's Settings, click "Forwarding and POP/IMAP", select "IMAP Access" and enable IMAP. Next, go through the process to "Configure your email client (eg Outlook, Thunderbird, iPhone)". When you have finished, your email software will be able to download and store all your email, and you can back it up. IMAP doesn't delete anything, so all your email will still be on Gmail as well. This means you can use the website to answer emails from your laptop or mobile phone while travelling.

There are advantages to using a desktop email client. It's faster and more efficient than a web interface, and you get more features, including real folders. Desktop software usually lets you sort email in date order or reverse date order, by sender, by subject line, or by size, etc. Gmail does not have these common features because it would put strain on Google's servers. Your PC has power to spare.

I've used Mozilla Thunderbird – a companion program to Firefox – for IMAP email, but you could use something else. The obvious candidates include Microsoft Outlook, which is part of Microsoft Office, and Windows Live Mail, the free email program in the Windows Live Essentials suite. (WLM is useful because it lets people use Hotmail from their PCs instead of via the web.) The IMAP set-up is pretty much the same. However, KhimHoe.Net has an illustrated guide: How to setup Gmail's IMAP in Windows Live Mail.

Either way, I would not recommend using Outlook Express, which Microsoft discontinued about three years ago. If you upgrade to Windows 7 – which is a good idea – then your new PC will have Windows Live Mail not Outlook Express. The latest (Wave 4) version of WLM has an Office-like ribbon interface, a calendar, and some good features such as Quick views and Photo mail (which is integrated with SkyDrive, Microsoft's free online storage). It might be a good idea to transfer all your Outlook Express email to Windows Live Mail now anyway.

I've described the process for Gmail partly because it's what I use myself. You can probably do much the same thing with some other services, and possibly with
Windows Live Hotmail. You can use it with your own domain name, though I've not tried it. I've spent a lot of time switching people from Hotmail to Gmail, but the latest version has improved. While it still has teething problems, the whole suite – including Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive, Live Sync, and the Windows Live Photo Gallery – is powerful, and better integrated than Google's offerings. I'd still go for Gmail for professional use, and it has a lot of geek appeal, but the Live Hotmail/Essentials combination is worth considering as a home and family option.

Continue reading Intel acquires McAfee for $7.68 billion

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