At the powerhouse Abu Dhabi Media Summit here at Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, two of the biggest third-party search deals are being negotiated behind the scenes, we have learned. It just so happens that all the players involved were here for the last day or so: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, News Corp (NYSE: NWS) contingent of Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Jon Miller, and AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong.

The public posturing of News Corp-vs-Google and AOL-poaching-execs-from-Google aside, there is a lot at stake here. Between News Corp.‘s MySpace deal and AOL deal, those are the two biggest third-party deals Google has on the search side, and both are being talked about separately by the parties here, a source told us. Also, both AOL and MySpace deals are expiring this year.

The biggest absentee from the conference: Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Early on during the planning of this conference, MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer was supposed to speak but it didn’t come through. One could argue that with the MSFT-Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) deal now in implementation stage, it could be that its hands are full with any “smaller” third party search deals, and that both AOL and MySpace deal will probably go to Google again, though on radically different—read reduced—terms than when they were first done.

The MySpace-Google three year deal, done at the height of MySpace’s popularity, is expiring in August, about six months from now, so likely a bit further along in renegotiations, than the AOL-Google deal, which is expiring later in December.

Regular readers will know my love for all things location. In particular, these check-in location-based services fascinate me, mainly because I see them as a bridge between social networks as we’ve known it, and actual social interaction in the real world. Foursquare has been my app of choice over the past year (it launched almost exactly a year ago at SXSW). But the latest version of Gowalla has me thinking about switching sides. At the very least, I’ll be using both at all times now.

Gowalla version 2.0 for the iPhone just hit the App Store today. With it, you’ll notice a few different things. First and foremost, the overall look has been updated from a sort of Army green, to a more subtle light green that is much easier on the eyes. More significantly, the toolbar has been reworked so that now social activity is front and center when you load the app, while your own activity is the last tab. Both of these changes are things I’ve complained about since day one with Gowalla, so they’re certainly welcome. But that’s not why I’m excited for the app. I’m excited because it takes the idea of the check-in and extends it.

Specifically, you can now add pictures and comments to check-ins in Gowalla. This makes for a much richer social experience both using the app and the website (the data goes over there as well). As founder and CEO Josh Williams describes in the video below, there were a lot of people who wanted to talk about the social activity on Gowalla, but previously they had to text message or email their friends to say something like “hey I saw you check-in at the restaurant, want some company?” Now, that type of dialogue can take place all within the app.

Now, others have tried to add additional layers to check-ins in the past. Why I think it works with Gowalla 2.0 is because they keep it simple. The application is extremely handsome (since the beginning, everyone is quick to note how good the designers are working for the team) and intuitive. There are only a few basic things you can do, and all are obvious from the main screen. You can either check-in at a venue, comment on your friends’ check-ins (with the new chat bubble in the stream), look at the spots around you, see trips (pre-planned venue excursions), or look at your own activity.

Previously, with Gowalla, I thought the focus was too much on their virtual items. Those are now tucked away in your Passport (your profile). They’re still important, and will be increasingly so for Gowalla’s revenue model (trading virtual goods for real-world items), but they’re not in your face, confusing users.

All that said, there are two downsides still to the service. First, the social activity stream includes everybody that your friends with. With Foursquare, the people currently in the same city as you are highlighted; Gowalla doesn’t do that. I suspect that will be very annoying to my friends not going to Austin this week for SXSW. Their stream will be a constant reminder that they’re not there — and they likely could care less about my check-ins, since they can’t possibly come and meet me.

The second downside is that Gowalla’s API remains read-only. That means while other services can pull out Gowalla’s data, they can’t put anything back in. That means there will be no Gowalla apps besides the ones they make (at least for now). Williams explained the rationale behind this as Gowalla wants to stay in control of the user experience (a rather Apple-like argument). That makes some sense, since there are all these virtual goods that will be flying around, and it will be hard to make sure every third-party app is implementing them correctly. Also, Gowalla is much more strict about its location-based check-ins then say, Foursquare. They’re so strict, in fact, that it’s been an issue in the past (and in some cases, still is), with people not being able to check-in places they’re actually at because the GPS is wonky. At the same time, this helps a lot with gaming the system, and that will be increasingly important as Gowalla strikes deals with partners based around check-ins.

Listen to Williams talk more about the new app, as well as his thoughts on AT&T’s network, some SXSW specials, rivals, and yes, even the news that Facebook is apparently looking at federating some of Gowalla’s (and Foursquare’s) data for its own location offering. He also notes that with the new release, Gowalla is expanding the idea of checking-in to be more of a bucket of elements now, including images and comments. Interesting. (Sorry in advance that I shot the video vertically on my iPhone — gotta stop doing that.)

You can find Gowalla 2.0 in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

Excruciating up-to-the-minute coverage of some irrelevant bullshit story that has no ramifications whatsoever.

The App Store censorship horse may have been beaten to death, but mainstream German media—whose iPhone applications have been censored by Apple because of its content—are not surrendering. I'm glad. In fact, I hope they win this war. More »

The Board of Education in Kansas City, Mo., accepted a sweeping and contentious plan to shrink its school system in the face of dwindling enrollment, budget cuts and a $50 million deficit.

Sonos, the Santa Barbara, California based startup that develops of wireless multi-room music systems, is taking a new round of financing from London-based Index Ventures, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Partner Mike Volpi, a forcer Cisco exec who found himself in the middle of a huge drama last year around eBay’s Skype spinoff, will join the board of directors of Sonos.

Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.

Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.

Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.

Sonos wouldn’t comment on this story. But we believe the deal will close and be announced in the next week or two.

Previously undisclosed e-mail messages provide new evidence about Senator John Ensign’s efforts to steer lobbying work to the husband of his former mistress.

When it comes to competition, CNN president Jon Klein fears Facebook. The man at the top of the news network believes that the social network is more of a threat to his business than other broadcast media organizations.

In a recent question-and-answer session with BusinessWeek, Klein specifically states, “We want to be the most trusted source,” and, “I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.”

The intriguing statements come just weeks after Hitwise released data showing that Facebook’s new role is becoming that of a news site. As a news portal and discovery engine, Facebook has the power to make or break a story, a power that clearly threatens the rank and file of the old media elite.

Where we discover news is no doubt changing, but that’s not all bad news for CNN. We tend to think that the power wielded by newsies on Facebook could prove to be an advantage for CNN should the network really cater to the social networking crowd.

For example, in recent months we’ve seen the ratings of award shows skyrocket; part of the ratings bump correlates with web denizens experiencing the televised broadcast with their friends, family and followers online. It would seem logical then that TV and online can coexist in a mutually beneficial relationship.

As for CNN’s immediate future, Klein’s comments also indicate distinct strategies for web and broadcast. Moving forward the company plans to continue with video content on CNN.com and ramp up affiliate deals with the likes of HBO and Time Inc.

So where do you get your news: CNN or Facebook?

Disclosure: Mashable has a content syndication partnership with CNN.

[img credt: Pragmagrapher]

Tags: cnn, facebook, media, News, trending, tv

Longtime readers of this site probably know that I’ll be speaking on a panel at SXSW on Monday with NYU’s Jay Rosen, Apture’s Tristan Harris and paidContent’s Staci Kramer about the future of context. I trust that if you’ve been reading and you’ll be in Austin for SXSW, you’ll be in Hilton H on Monday morning at 9:30. This is a preview of my opening argument for the panel. If this seems like familiar territory for me, don’t worry, the panel is going to cover plenty of untrodden territory. And the session will be all the better if you share your thoughts and questions in the thread below. Also see Jay’s conversation-starter here.

If you’re like most people, you have a certain amount of ambient knowledge that health-care reform is happening. You pay attention to headlines, and you see a lot of stories about Nancy Pelosi saying this, or Mitch McConnell saying that. You catch a line or two about it in a Presidential address. You’ve watched some headlines about it in the evening news.

Chances are that most of the information you’ve encountered about this subject has been what I’d call episodic. Over time, you may have heard a lot about budget reconciliation, insurance premium hikes, the public option, the excise tax, the Wyden-Bennett bill, the Stupak amendment, and on and on and on. You know that Democrats are trying to do something to the health care system, but it’s either a government takeover or an insurance industry giveaway. Hard to tell.

This constant torrent of episodic information is how many of us encounter information about current events. This has been true for as long as any of us has been alive, but in the wake of the real-time Web, it’s become ever more constant and ever more torrential.

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

It turns out that in order for information about things like the public option and budget reconciliation to be useful to you, you need a certain amount of systemic knowledge to be able to parse it. You need an intellectual framework for understanding health care reform before the episodic headlines relating to health care reform make any sense.

It further turns out that this systemic knowledge is actually a whole lot easier to provide than the episodic stuff. At the pace of daily news, health care reform seems really, really complicated. But one of the most knowledgeable journalists reporting on the health-care process has already distilled almost every health care system in the world into four essential types. It would take maybe ten minutes to fill in the details on this framework, but once you get that knowledge, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand the system we have in the US, and the system that the Democrats are trying to turn ours into. From there, all those headlines about “bending the curve” actually start to make sense.

Right now, the most common way the news industry attempts to impart systemic knowledge is by wedging it into our episodic reports. We’ll give you tons of stories on Congresspeople sneezing something that sounds like “reconciliation” and every time, a little ways in, we’ll say something like, “Reconciliation is a procedural tactic originally designed to speed adoption of budget resolutions through Congress.”

This is completely bass-ackwards. Journalists spend a ton of time trying to acquire the systemic knowledge we need to report an issue, yet we dribble it out in stingy bits between lots and lots of worthless, episodic updates. We do this for several reasons – high among which is your continued willingness to read story after story and watch ad after ad to get updates we could sum up in a sentence – and also high among which is the fact that we used to deal exclusively in media that are pretty rigidly bounded by time. The only way we knew how to tell the story is in terms of “What happens next?” not in terms of “What’s happening.”

These terms I’ve been using – “intellectual framework,” “systemic information,” etc. – this is what I mean when I say “context.” I’ve pitched you on the consumer benefits of context, but information creators are also slowly beginning to come around to the long-term ROI of delivering context as well, for several reasons. For one thing, our information becomes much more valuable and much more desirable to you as your framework for understanding it becomes better. Jay Rosen has astutely noted the uptick in attention to financial crisis stories after This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money episode laid out the context of the crisis. For another thing, the success of Wikipedia and the enduring popularity of items like “The Ultimate Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Social Media” has taught us there’s a real market for context. There are also significant advertising benefits to having more sophisticated structures for information than “latest updates.” We could dwell on the “why” for a long time.

But I want to use our time at SXSW to explore a more forward-pointed question: How?

For the first time, we have a medium perfectly equipped to capture and deliver both episodic and systemic information. How will these two modes of information interact on the Web? What sort of design and storytelling structures must we invent to impart context? Fundamentally, in a medium that’s not constrained by time, what is the future of the Timeless Web?

Help make our panel better. What are your thoughts, and what are your questions?

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Magazine.org | Mediaite.com
Among the 51 magazines nominated in 23 categories are 20 magazines with multiple nominations -- led by New York and The New Yorker with 10 each and National Geographic with 7 -- and 8 never-before-nominated titles, says the press release. General Excellence/Print finalists in the large circulation category are Time, Real Simple, ESPN The Magazine, National Geographic and Sports Illustrated.

A closer look at the statistics on death from sudden acceleration reveals why there's little need to fear driving a Toyota.

WASHINGTON—Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions of dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words unsure of what to do next.

Sure, you’d think the chief executive officer of a company struggling to emerge from bankruptcy and desperate to salvage an $8 billion buyout-gone-bad would have better things to do than pester his underlings with crazy proclamations. But in the case of Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, you’d be wrong. The man at the top of the [...]

Over on the Official Google Blog, you can read a very, very exciting announcement: Google Maps now offers biking directions! As my teammate Shannon mentions in that post, we've been constantly asked when this feature will be made available. But as an engineer working on the directions team, I'd often get questions about why Google Maps didn't already have biking directions. After all, we've had driving, walking, and public transit directions for some time, so what is it about biking directions in particular that presents an engineering challenge?

Well now that the good news is out, I can lift the curtain and explain the many factors and variables that we've had to take into account to put this whole feature together:

• Bike trails: Our maps contain over twelve thousand of miles of biking trails. First, we had to figure out where trails are, so we worked with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to get much of our trail data. Once we had trails mapped out, the next task was to incorporate them into our routing algorithm. The algorithm is weighted to strongly prefer routing on these trails rather than roads open to automobile traffic, so your directions will try to put you onto a trail as long as it won't take you totally out of your way. On our bicycling layer (found under the 'More' button), these trails show up in dark green.

• Bike lanes: For more than 150 cities in the US, we know which streets have dedicated bicycle lanes. These are also prioritized when coming up with a routing suggestion. On the bicycling layer, you’ll see these roads indicated in bright green.

• Recommended routes: For many cities we also information on streets that have been designated as good for cyclists, so we them into account in our algorithm. These roads are indicated with dashed green lines on our bicycling layer.

• Uphill slopes: l don't know anyone who enjoys biking up a hill, especially when you're trying to get somewhere you need to be. Going uphill is worse than simply being much slower; it's also exhausting and can take a toll on the rest of your ride. Our biking directions are based on a physical model of the amount of power your body has to exert given the slope of the road you’re biking on. Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you’ll require and the speed you’ll achieve while going uphill. We take this speed into account when determining the time estimate for your journey, and we also try hard to avoid routes that will require an unreasonable degree of exertion. Sometimes the model will determine that it's far more efficient to make you ride several extra blocks than to have to deal with a massive hill. My teammates in San Francisco were relieved to see that this does indeed work!

• Downhill slopes: Many cyclists will tell you that going downhill is annoying for a different reason: you may have to ride your brakes all the way down. All else equal, we try to avoid routes that require a lot of braking. Of course, in some cities, including my hometown of Seattle, this isn’t always possible! And if you feel like you need a big workout and want to climb some hills, or if you just love that wind-in-your-hair feeling of a long downhill (you better be wearing a helmet and staying safe!), you can always turn on the terrain layer to check out the hilliness of an area for yourself.

• Busy roads: Cyclists often tend to prefer to stay off of fast roads, and not even cross them unless it's necessary. This is roughly the inverse of driving directions, where you want to stay on arterials and freeways, so we had to rework a lot of those fundamental calculations when coming up with our biking directions algorithm.

• Busy intersections: We try to avoid making you cross busy streets with a lot of car traffic and long wait times.

Even having figured out how to account for all these variables and cost-estimates in our algorithm, the biking direction feature would not have been possible without our new base map data which allowed us the flexibility to easily incorporate bike trail data, a fundamental part of this feature. It also allowed us to readily incorporate feedback directly from our users, and we welcome all your feedback and suggestions via the "Report a problem" tool -- after all, biking directions are still in beta and we're continuing to work on adding more data about bike trails, bike lanes, and preferred roads. Both of these updates were made in October, at which time we promised that that biking directions were in the works, and now five months later: here they are!

Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I'm asked is often "So when's Google Maps going to add biking directions?" We're big biking fans too, so we've been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don't want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!

Today we've added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that's exactly what we've done.

Let's say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select "Bicycling" from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:


So, how does it work? Well, I'm based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let's say I'm trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend's house in Montlake:


This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route — just like with driving directions — and we'll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm.

We've also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you're zoomed into a city, click on the "More" button at the top of the map to turn on the "Bicycling” layer. You'll see three types of lines appear on the map:

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We'll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the “Report a Problem” tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.

We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!

Posted by Shannon Guymon, Product Manager

What is the future of the Internet in America?

How do we close the digital divide that leaves some 35 percent of American households without broadband access? Should we follow Finland's lead, which made a one-megabit broadband connection a legal right for its 5 million citizens last fall? What is the role of technology in our schools? Like shelter, like food, like books, is an Internet-connected laptop a necessity for every American student?

These are just some of the questions that HuffPost Tech readers -- yes, you -- can ask Julius Genachowski, the blog-friendly chairman of the Federal Communication Commission. On Tuesday, FCC will release its much-discussed (and much-blogged about) National Broadband Plan, a comprehensive road-map for bringing fast, affordable high speed Internet access to all Americans. (You can read details of FCC's plan on Broadband.gov.) And following its historic, laudable efforts to bring governance closer to the online masses, YouTube's CitizenTube channel is allowing users to upload short video questions to Genachowski. Deadline for submission is Sunday, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

You can ask questions about security and privacy, Internet in schools and network neutrality, among other topics. YouTube asks that videos be 20 seconds or less. You can vote on your favorite videos on CitizenTube, and Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, will ask a few of your top-voted questions during his video interview with Genachowski on Tuesday.

So think, record a video and submit your question.

We all must play a role in developing the Internet's future.

Bedbug-sniffing dogs are the new and furry front line in an escalating domestic war.

The rise of social media has brought journalists some powerful new storytelling and information-gathering tools. However, with these new opportunities have come some new risks.

At Reuters, we have just published some social media guidelines that lay out some basic principles and offer recommendations that should prove useful as journalists navigate what can sometimes seem a chaotic landscape.

In building the new guidelines, we’ve embraced some basic principles:

• We encourage the use of social media approaches in Reuters journalism.
• Accuracy, freedom from bias and independence are fundamental to our reputation. These values and the Trust Principles apply to journalism produced using social media just as they have to all other journalism produced by Reuters.
• A distinguishing feature of Reuters is the trust invested in its journalists to rise above personal biases in their work and to apply common sense in dealing with the challenges offered by social media.

This last point is particularly important to me.

I’ve written in the past about how we depend on our journalists to rise above their biases to cover stories in an independent way, whether they’re in Gaza or Washington–or anywhere else.

As comments have shown–and will no doubt show again–there are those who will never believe this is possible. And there are those who would actually prefer to read, listen to or view only those information sources that confirm their own worldview.

Some news organizations have been more proscriptive with their rules or guidelines for journalists using social media–and it’s tempting to provide the rule-hungry with specific latitudes and longitudes of what’s acceptable.

But I think that approach sells short the ability of journalists to use their brains and to see–and report on–a world that’s changing every day.

That’s why I think of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism as a living document, one that helps us navigate that changing world with an eye on the future while being grounded in the ethical behavior and high standards that have brought us so far.