Kenneth Corbin

Social media is a wonderful thing. Not a day goes by that I don’t get a pitch from some eager startup trying to squeeze a little more juice out of the social Web, talking about how they can do it better — more connected, more open, more social, and on and on. Sadly, all that […]

Bowing to pressure from key lawmakers, Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin has canceled this week’s meeting, where the commissioners were scheduled to vote on a controversial plan to create a free, nationwide broadband network, among other items. In a letter to the chairman delivered last week, the presumptive chairmen of the House and Senate Commerce […]

WASHINGTON — It’s easy to look back at the last five years and marvel at the transformations ushered in by an increasingly open and collaborative Web. Industries across the board — from media to entertainment to finance — have been stood on their heads. And yet, to some, government seems stubbornly left behind. Here at […]

WASHINGTON — As the U.S. struggles to rebuild a broken economy and address the myriad other challenges it faces, the software industry is calling for lawmakers to place IT’s needs at center stage. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) today unveiled a policy agenda recommending that the incoming Obama administration bring a technology perspective to every […]

Scanning around the blogosphere and the popularity rankings on sites like YouTube and Twitter is a great way to take the pulse of the times. People vote in herds to tell us matters most to them, what they like, what they hate. It’s called the wisdom of the crowds, and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has applied […]

Kevin Martin at the CES 2008 show in January. (Reuters) UPDATED: A new report from a House committee is blasting the way the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin managed the agency during his nearly three-year tenure. The 110-page report (PDF), entitled “Deception and Distrust: The Federal Communications Commission Under Chairman Kevin J. Martin,” alleges […]

The one-upmanship continues among the giants of social networking, with MySpace trying to vault ahead of its chief rival with new ways for members to move their identities fluidly to sites across the Web. The News Corp.-own site today unveiled MySpaceID, an ambitious set of features for porting data and applications back and forth with […]

Barack Obama again reminded the progressive tech-policy set of why they have embraced him as their patron saint with his weekly radio address (embedded below) over the weekend. The subject of his address, like much of the talk in these gloomy pre-holiday weeks, was the economy. Obama announced several planks of his economic agenda aimed […]

The jots and turns throughout Yahoo’s past year paint a clear enough picture of a Web pioneer struggling to figure out its future. Amid the spurning of the Microsoft deal, the Google partnership’s failure and CEO Jerry Yang’s impending resignation, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has been experimenting with a number of initiatives to open its platform, […]

Amid a series of gloomy predictions and a lackluster start to the holiday season, e-commerce spending caught up with last year’s mark, thanks to a strong week after Thanksgiving. According to online metrics firm comScore, Dec. 1 to Dec. 5 saw sales jump 9 percent from the same period in 2007, an increase that was […]

Craigslist made a splash last month when it announced a set of policy changes aimed at stamping out sex crimes facilitated through the Erotic Services section of its site. But sex workers and legal experts say the measures are likely to have scant impact on the shadowy world of online prostitution. Following the initial report […]

With a new administration waiting in the wings, Net neutrality advocates believe they have turned a corner in their fight for an open Internet. The Open Internet Coalition (OIC), an umbrella group representing trade associations, nonprofits and technology companies, is calling on President-elect Obama’s transition team to take several steps to ensure that the principles […]