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Careful with that axe, Jeff...

An Indiana Deputy AG, Jeff Cox, has been fired for sending chilling messages via twitter and elsewhere, suggesting that riot police fire upon peaceful protesters at Wisconsin' state capitol building.

On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn't end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: "Use live ammunition."

From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials." In response to such behavior, he said, "You're damned right I advocate deadly force." He later called me a "typical leftist," adding, "liberals hate police."

Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.

This isn't trivial - the union-busting effort against those who serve the public is spreading to other states.

The incident seems all the more troubling now that the public-sector union fight playing out in Wisconsin is now headed to other states—including Indiana, where GOP senators Tuesday passed a bill that would abolish collective bargaining for state teachers. (Indiana's Republican governor walked back his support of the measure Tuesday after taking stock of the opposition.)

Mother Jones article, with screen captures of Cox's blogs posts and tweets

Looks like Gaddafi's strategy of making war on his own people is beginning to backfire. There's very clear evidence that the Libyan military is rejecting his rule, based on his use of mercenaries and his commands to use heavy weapons on civilians.

Soldiers brought rockets and heavy weapons which had been used in an assault on citizens in central Benghazi on Saturday as Gaddafi tried to keep control of the city. Doctors in Benghazi said that at least 230 people were killed, with a further 30 critically injured.

There was also the clearest confirmation yet that Gaddafi's regime used outside mercenaries to try to suppress the rebellion. Adjoining the police station a large crowd gathered in another courtyard. Upstairs, the Guardian saw a number of mercenaries, allegedly flown in the previous week, being interrogated by lawyers and army officials.

An air force officer, Major Rajib Faytouni, said he personally witnessed up to 4,000 mercenaries arrive on Libyan transport planes over a period of three days starting from 14 February. He said: "That's why we turned against the government. That and the fact there was an order to use planes to attack the people."

Guardian piece on Benghazi

Guardian's live updates on the whole Libyan situation

Al Jazeera's coverage

Opération Lybie has organized a bunch of dialup numbers for Lybian citizens to use in case the government cuts off their internet access (see the similar effort at using POTS lines for Tweeting in Egypt).

I'm relaying a message from a Libyan citizen, who came on IRC channel #FDN to talk about opération "Libya White Fax".
The idea is to send a PDF document to the Libyan population via FAX (using traditional FAX or SIP) to a given list of Libyan phone numbers.

The faxed document contains a list of international phone numbers for dialup users to access so they can get back on the Net. Obviously this will be expensive, but it'll get around the "Internet Kill Switch" strategy.

One dialup service donor is France's FDN. Here's their statement (they started offering dialup during the Egyptian crisis).

Now I kind of wish I hadn't trashed all my old modems... who knows when we'll need these again?

Opération Lybie (scroll down for English)

We Rebuild's Libya page has broader information on infrastructure and counter-censorship.

Here's a realtime view of Tweets coming out of Libya, provided by TrendsMap. Great way to follow the conversation.

TrendsMap Libya

Virender Ajmani, who has a talent for Google maps mashups, has created a new one that lets you see Tweets in realtime from several countries in the Middle east that are experiencing popular unrest.

From the developer's blog:

Here’s a look at Middle East “Protests” on Twitter which are mapped out on Google Maps. This Google Maps Mashup shows the latest tweets from around Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Iran tagged with the respective country names. The map animates thru the latest protest tweets from the region. The tweets are displayed at geotagged location on the map at an interval of 5 seconds.

Mibazaar TweetMap page

Developer's blog

via BoingBoing

I had an interesting conversation with an old friend the other day about why a brand would write a mobile app, when there are such dynamic possibilities available for Facebook apps.

Aside from the desire to get your brand out of the Facebook sandbox, I thought of a few things you could do with an app that might be a little harder when working through Facebook, even Facebook mobile - geo-tagging and phone calls among them.

Fortuitously, here's a roundup of 6 mobile apps that stand well on their own, both for usability and branding.

Here are six companies that use the mobile web smartly, creating an altogether different experience than traditional online by using the strengths that the mobile device has to offer. They have been separated into two categories, one for advocating user purchases and the other for overall content and efficiency.

Category 1: Purchase intensive

These web pages make the buying experience extremely straightforward.

Starbucks Coffee. The Seattle-based company has been one of the industry leaders in using mobile to spread its messages and promote its brand. While using geolocation sites like Foursquare and Facebook Places to reward customers who buy Starbucks products, the company' recently expanded the value of its app by allowing customers to pay for their drinks by waving their mobile phones over an in-store reader. By providing added convenience and utility to its mobile experience, Starbucks' mobile efforts are leading the pack, while making the case for a wallet-less future.

Dominoes Pizza. Of course ordering a pizza through a mobile phone should be a no-brainer. But Dominoes has gone beyond the simple store locator feature to simplify the ordering process to a few finger taps. Not only can customers save all their credit card information and track the progress of their pizza through their mobile app, but they can also receive personal SMS texts that offer special deals and promotions based on previous orders.

eBay. The popular online auction website is trying its hand at augmented reality, a term that will likely become part of the digital vernacular in the next few years. While its mobile web page is more or less an abbreviated version of its traditional website, eBay has relied heavily on apps to help optimize its presence within the mobile realm. By downloading the Junaio app along with the eBay app, customers can monitor their favorite eBay auctions in real time through their mobile phones. If you don't think that's cool, you might need to get your cool meter fixed.

For the other three, see the
iMedia Connection post.

Here's an extreme example of how no-one - not even a fairly heavy-handed government - can keep people from talking about what matters to them.

As you probably know, the Mubarak administration have shut off internet access for the whole country, in response to widespread protests and civil disobedience in Cairo and other cities.

Now, a team of developers have cooked up a way for callers using ordinary phones to get messages out to Twitter.

Granted the messages all go via one account, and are thus pretty much anonymized, but the point is - you can't silence people forever, no matter how much control you think you have.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

Boing-Boing post

Google Blog

(Image: Egyptian pay phone, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from s_w_ellis's photostream)

The good folks at Target Marketing Magazine have asked me to present on the topic of how (and why!) to use online document customization and management strategies to solve marketing problems.

I'll be focusing on how retail, franchisee and sales agent systems can benefit from the ability to customize ads, sales support materials, point-of-purchase, direct mail, etc.

If there's time, we'll look at setting up localized cross-media campaigns, and may even get into personalized URLs.

The webinar's free, but you do have to register:
Registration Page

On the lighter side...

Maniacal Rage has some pretty funny crash reports allegedly submitted to Adobe for Photoshop CS4.
Sample here:

Article at Maniacal Rage

Thanks to BoingBoing for the tip!

Over at All Things Digital, Peter Kafka thinks Apple's iAd scheme is headed for total (or near-total) domination of the ad space on the platform:

I’ve talked to some mobile ad companies that are more hopeful. They think Apple will let them compete with its iAd platform in a fair fight.

Maybe they’re saying that because they have to appear optimistic. Maybe they really believe it. But I think they’re wrong. I think Apple intends to own the ad market for its app ecosystem.

Full Article at All Things Digital

For those who need a refresher, here are some first-look observations and some interesting strategic thoughts from Hill Holliday. Sample:

The big thing that iAd really does is it brings new thinking into the capabilities of mobile display advertising and it wasn’t brought to you by Google. Google has been badly lagging in all aspects of mobile and Apple probably saw the lack of innovation in the mobile advertising market and decided to put their stake in the ground. Let’s also be clear here that mobile display advertising isn’t yet a billion dollar business, this isn’t about the money for Apple but reshaping the industry as they saw fit.

The bottom line for Apple is the continuing creation of new and free apps for the App Store while everything else, like being the innovator in mobile advertising, sticking it to Google, pre-emptively blocking Adobe are just bonuses.

Full post at Hill Holliday

And thanks to MIT Advertising Lab and Ilya Vedrashko.