Digital Pulp Blog

Recently the NYTimes took a deeper look into targeted Facebook ads that use personal information to grab attention and found they either work brilliantly or come across as seriously creepy…

“The site’s pages are also home to countless ads from smaller companies that can be funny, weird or just plain creepy — those suggesting you are, say, eligible to get a free iPad because you are exactly 26 years old, or entreaties to see what your offspring would look like if you had a child with a celebrity.”

As in the real world, it seems there are limits as to how familiar you can get with someone you’ve never met. Read the full article at: Ads Posted on Facebook Strike Some as Off-Key or check out the related multimedia piece that shows actual Facebook ads as seen by four demographically diverse users: Facebook’s Targeted Ads

After many months of strategy, design, development and extensive user testing in all phases of the project, the new interface for IEEE Xplore Digital Library is now live!

We started with an incredible research tool that delivers full text access to over 2.5 million documents of the world’s highest quality technical literature in engineering and technology and added a new interface with a lighter design, interactive elements and improved search capabilities to give researchers more results with less effort. We are very proud to support the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology as they look to continually improve the research experience.

Take a look… http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/guesthome.jsp

“What I love about the new IEEE Xplore is that it not only represents a major milestone in the evolution of IEEE’s flagship content delivery platform, but is a great example of IEEE delivering on its mission of “Advancing Technology for Humanity”. – Prakash @ IEEE

“The new site provides a clean, simple interface with robust search capabilities enabling easier discovery of articles and a smarter research experience.” – Casey @ IEEE

“IEEE Xplore provides some of the world’s most influential engineers with intuitive tools and workspaces. Working closely with IEEE to fulfill on this mission has been a privilege and we look forward to future rollouts. Stay tuned.” – Erika @ Digital Pulp

A special thanks to the Digital Pulp team for their tireless work and to IEEE for taking it the last mile!

We’ve all read the wikipedia definition of FAIR USE and have spent more hours than we would care to admit reviewing the four factors in Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. But we still struggle with how to apply the rules in the real world. This weekend NPR’s Scott Simon interviewed Joel Rose in an attempt to bring clarity to the issue of what exactly is ‘fair use.’

Mr. ROSE: Artists, filmmakers, reporters and commentators have the right to take copyrighted materials without permission or payment, says McIntosh, as long as they’re using those materials to make something new. It’s the same principle that the producers of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central employ every night.

What we found really interesting in this interview was how important the Sony-Betamax case was back in 1984.

Mr. ROSE: That applies not just to content but to the devices that deliver it. Sohn says fair use is what gives you the right to record TV shows and watch them later, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the so-called Betamax case.

Ms. SOHN: Imagine if in 1984, after the Sony-Betamax decision had come out, we had said, OK, we’re going to stop there. You can record things for home use, and that’s the limit of personal fair use. You wouldnt have MP3 players like the iPod; you know, we probably wouldn’t have TiVos that could send things to your computers.

Read the Full Story at NPR | Wikipedia Definition | U.S. Copyright Office Definition

Because this blog post is meant for educational purposes and we only published a small portion of the interview with the goal of driving users to the original work, we see providing excerpts from this interview as fair use.

To be even more exact, kids ages 8-18 are spending 7 hours and 38 minutes on average consuming media. And they are not focused one device or channel. They’re multitasking so actually taking in 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content according to a recent study published by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

What we found particularly interesting…

• The majority of kids today have mobile phones (66%).
• More and more television viewing is occurring sometime after the show airs thanks to online video streaming and digital video recorders (41%).
• Time spent reading remained steady but reading magazines dropped over these past five years.

Read the CBS News Report: Youths Spend 7+ Hours/Day Consuming Media
Or take a look at the original study: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds

Rarely do we actually think about presidents on President’s Day. To change that this year, we asked DP’ers two important questions…