Prostitution on the Internet is hardly a new phenomenon, and shocking as it might be, child prostitution isn’t particularly a new problem in general, either. We’ve been doing the social media crime blotter series for a while now and I really haven’t touched on the prostitution angle in a big way up until this point because when you look at crime related stories in connection with social media, that is the noise you filter around.

So it isn’t particularly unexpected that CNN recently ran a fairly high profile “special investigation” into Craigslist and it’s role in the online sex trade. Generally, it’s very difficult to get brand new Craigslist CEO to comment on their erotic services section and the role it plays in the illegal business of paying for sex (underage or not), but he weighed in for the piece with a few choice words this time around:

Craigslist executives said they abhor the fact that their site is being used for child prostitution but believe that the problem could be harder to track if they removed the category. “It would be a bigger problem if we removed that category and had those ads spread throughout the site,” said Jim Buckmaster, chief executive officer of Craigslist.

In his response to CNN, Jim Buckland says that if the “erotic services” section remains in place, it makes it all the more easy to track illicit activity; if it’s all centralized, you can spot the illegal stuff more easily. He also made mention that Craigslist voluntarily works with authorities in tracking sexual crimes that have connection to the usage of their system.

If you look online into the places for responses to this assertion, two bloggers that cover this type of story regularly immediately spring to mind: ValleyWag’s Melissa Gira Grant and CraigsCrimeList’s Trench. Both bloggers provide two very disparate views of the continual onslaught of these types of incidents. In the case of CraigsCrimeList, Trench responds with:

“If you shut down the erotic services section of craigslist where would these ads go? Used cars? Furniture? Pets? Real Estate? You mean the places where people who don’t use hookers would actually see the ads and actually flag them?”

On the other hand, Melissa Gira Grant attempts to deflect the criticism to the site:

“Buckmaster certainly gives the role of concerned small businessman the appropriate gravitas, but it comes off as a little wooden. Personally, I would have pointed at Dave Elms, jailed proprietor of TheEroticReview and been all, “Why are we the focus of a scary CNN feature? Where’s the salacious magazine piece about that guy, Ms. De La Cruz?”

Taken in context of Melissa’s entire body of work, though, it’s clear that while she doesn’t support underage prostitution, she’s highly sympathetic and supportive to online sex workers. Meanwhile, Trench has traditionally taken the role of the critic, frequently citing cases that support his position that prostitution truly isn’t a victimless crime, and that it’s the responsibility of all social networks to take a more active role in clamping down, though Trench doesn’t give a free ride to the parents of delinquent children either.

The truth, as usual, is somewhere near the middle.  A drum I continually beat here is that parents are responsible for their children (not only legally, but morally).  If your child is selling herself as a prostitute online, then you as the parent bear far more responsibility for that than Craig or his list.

While I agree with Trench that if Craigslist were to take down the erotic services section, online sex trade on the site would likely halt instantly, there is nothing to prevent that same culture from migrating over to MySpace, Facebook, or any other number of very popular social networks that have dark corners that are difficult to police.  It is a game of whack-a-mole, and just as it was pointless to take down all of the ALT.* hierarchy in USENET to eliminate a few child porn pictures, eliminating erotic services from Craigslist will do little to end online sex trade.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Connecticut Attorney General Calls Out Craigslist For Selling Sex
Atlanta Requests Craigslist to Remove “Sex Ads”
Craigslist Adds Posting Fees in 4 More Cities
Craigslist Speaks Spanish, Too
Listpic Cut Off by Craigslist
eBay Sues Craiglist; Tired of Not Making Big Money?
Craigslist Sues eBay: Wants All its Shares Back.

Filed under: Transportation

Man, Tesla's been busy today -- in addition to the announcement of the Model S and Elon Musk's promise of a sub-$30K electric car in four years, word on the street is that the company's inked a deal with Daimler AG to supply it with lithium-ion batteries for upcoming electric cars. Daimler's CEO has said the company was open to leasing battery tech to get out an electric Smart by 2010 and it's rumored that the German marque is looking to ditch gas entirely by 2015, so going to Tesla, which has been working on battery tech for some time, isn't a totally out there proposition. Just a rumor for now -- given Tesla's generally-prickly relationships with others, we'd wait for an official announcement before getting too excited about a Roadster-powered SLR, but it's certainly intriguing.

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You may recall that eBay execs were trying to require the use of subsidiary PayPal for payments in Australia -- which resulted in a bunch of protests. That, in turn, resulted in the Australia Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) saying that this probably broke the law. Not surprisingly, eBay has now agreed to indefinitely delay the plans to require PayPal, saying that it would wait for a final ruling from the ACCC. Of course, it still seems like a situation where this would present another opportunity for eBay competitors to try to steal customers away from eBay.

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Pluribo is a Firefox plugin that displays short summaries of product reviews on Amazon.com. Pluribo scans through reviews customers on Amazon have left and automatically creates a one sentence summary that is somewhat akin to a Zagat review. While Zagat uses human editors to compile its reviews, though, Pluribo is fully automated. Right now, Pluribo only works for the electronics section of Amazon's store, but the developers are planning to expand this to the rest of Amazon's offerings soon.

Here is a typical summary that Pluribo created for a SanDisk MP3 player: "This has been on the market for a while. Although there were objections to the software, users are happy with the low price, product support, and battery. If you don't care about the software, it has potential."

Besides summarizing the reviews for a specific product, Pluribo also compares those reviews to other products in the same category to see where the reviews for this item were different. Pluribo will also give more weight to reviews that were considered 'helpful' by other Amazon customers. Pluribo keeps most of this information in the background. However, when hovering over a keyword in the summary, a small pop-up will display a list of relevant phrases Amazon's customers used to describe the item, as well as some more of the statistical data Pluribo used to compute its summary.

In testing out Pluribo, it consistently displayed accurate summaries of the actual user comments - a testament to how well the developers have tuned their algorithm to at least this limited range of product categories.

Pluribo's overall execution is quite seamless and Pluribo does not slow down the load times on Amazon, as it only gets to work after the page is fully displayed.

However, Pluribo seems quite restricted when it comes to what items it will display reviews for and for which it will just display a 'coming soon' message. Right now, it only works well for MP3 players, GPS navigation systems, and digital cameras. It also seems to work best for products that have been reviewed at least 30 times.

Also, it would be nice to see Pluribo start pulling in reviews from other sources besides Amazon's own customers. The fact that it only works as a Firefox plugin is also going to limit its appeal to technically savvy users for the time being.

Overall, Pluribo is a fun and (when it's working) useful plugin - though for the time being, its a bit too limited to be of real help. It's real potential is only going to be realized once the developers get out a version that works across all of Amazon's offerings and maybe even expands beyond Amazon to include other online stores.

Ah, how I wish I had one of these things. I’ll let the experts explain the gist:

Building on the immense success of the Nikon D3 professional D-SLR camera, the D700 offers pro-level performance and an extensive array of features and innovations in a comfortably nimble platform. In addition to the Nikon-original FX-format CMOS sensor, the D700 incorporates Nikon’s EXPEED Image Processing System, Nikon’s renowned 51-point auto focus system with 3D Focus Tracking and two Live View shooting modes that allow photographers to frame a shot using the camera’s three-inch high-resolution LCD monitor. The D700 also features Nikon’s sophisticated Scene Recognition System and a new active dust reduction system.

12.1 megapixels, 0.4ms shutter lag, ISO up to 25600 (jury’s out on that one), live view, 8fps up to 17 RAW shots (pretty decent) and probably the best autofocus in the business right now. I’d say they’ve got a nice camera on their hands. Being a Canon man myself, I wouldn’t know my way around this beast of a Nikon, but I have to say I’ve got a serious case of gear envy right now. Of course, the thing officially costs $2,999.95. High res pictures and new lens details if you click below.

There are also a couple lenses available, an 85mm and a 45mm, both “perspective control” lenses, used for the tilt-shift photography that’s so cool right now. There’s also a new flash, but not knowing much about flashes I’m just going to say that it looks perfectly good (I’m still learning about flashes). Here’s those high-res pics I promised; click to make ‘em big.

God, it resizes them ugly, doesn’t it? The actual pictures are super nice, I promise.

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website or application that displays itself as a Flash (SWF) file. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now.

Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:

We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

Turner acknowledges that this invisibility so far “has been a big problem for those developing rich applications.” After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty your Website is if nobody can find it. Flash applications and Websites (many ironically created by ad agencies) have not been able to take advantage of any of the search-engine juice that so many online ad campaigns depend upon. This should be seen as part of Adobe’s larger efforts to remove any remaining restrictions associated with Flash (in April, for instance, it opened up the Flash runtime as part of its the Open Screen Project).

Google is already rolling out the SWF-indexing technology, while Yahoo still “has some work to do,” says Turner. Even so, this won’t solve all the problems with Flash content showing up on search engines.

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Since the launch of the new Zune store and the advent of XNA development for Zunes, there has apparently been quite a lot of activity. I’ve been waiting for a nice omnibus post like this one to point me in the right direction. You’ve got your tetris, you’ve got your solitaire, you’ve even got a chat app — although if your Zune is close enough to another Zune that you can communicate, you’re probably better off talking than tapping out letter after letter on its little pad.

Go, Zunatics! Download and see what’s must-have. I personally am going to get me a little Tetris. [thanks for the tip, Mike!]

Europe’s new Internet conference, TWS2008, is an exciting conference that takes place today (July 1st) in Tel Aviv, Israel. The conference is organized by the Israeli popular blog the.co.ils and aims to find and present the 10 most promising Internet startups in Israel.

Ten startups were chosen out of 100 that applied. The startups were selected by an impressive list of judges. Amongst them were Guy Kawasaki, our very own Pete Cashmore, Om Malik, Deborah Schultz, Brian Solis, Allen Stern, Chris Brogan, Yair Goldfinger, and Emily Chang. Today, the spotlight is on these 10 startups that were able to convince our judges that they have a unique offering to the world.

Here are the 10 winners:

Wix is an authoring platform that allows users to create striking and easy-to-build web content in flash (web sites, widgets, blogs etc), and publish it anywhere they want online. Users can create content without coding in flash/html or being constrained by templates. At the heart of the product is the drag & drop editor that allows users to pull in any content from the web or from their own media files (video, audio, animation, text etc) and create web content.

WorkLight develops and markets a line of server products that allow organizations to do more business securely using popular consumer Web 2.0 tools and technologies, like iGoogle, Windows Live, Netvibes, Facebook, and others. Through WorkLight, employees, channels, partners, and consumers connect to protected enterprise data (and to each other) using Web 2.0 services.

HiveSight helps marketers discover new facts about consumers. The technology sifts through and analyzes millions of social media profiles and blogs to construct consumer profiles. HiveSight’s customers use the online application to write simple queries that define consumer panels, and get instant reports on demographics, consumer interests, trends and more. It’s the fastest, easiest and most affordable way to explore consumer markets and discover new insights.

Qoof is the video commerce platform that bridges the world of Online Shopping, Internet Video, and Direct Response TV to create a distributed, targeted, and ersonalized video commerce network. Think QVC for the internet. The most powerful way to sell a product online is with video and as more merchants are looking for video solutions, the Qoof Platform is their answer.

WikiAnswers gives you useful answers about anything by harnessing people’s collective knowledge, but with a wiki-twist. The mission is to grow a collaborative answers resource; anyone can ask, answer or edit questions, building a global Q&A database covering all topics.

Dapper’s vision is to allow people to consume the web where, when and in whatever format they choose. Dapper users point and click on the content they want from a website, and Dapper turns this content into a live semantic feed that can be used in a variety of formats (RSS, widget, XML). Dapper is leveraging its core technology to create live content-based ads (MashupAds) that combine publisher and advertiser content within an interactive ad — creating the world’s first content ad network.

Mo’Minis is a revolutionary platform for the development and publishing of mobile games. The platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to rapidly create original games from scratch and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate and share game assets on Mo’Minis developers’ community and enjoy distribution and monetization services through various on\off-deck channels.

Kaltura provides the first open-source video management platform, empowering any site with online video. With Kaltura, web publishers can seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate interactive and collaborative rich-media functionalities, including uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura also offers its global network of publishers content hosting, transcoding, advertising, merchandising, and syndication.

MocoSpace is a mobile social network that allows anybody with a web-enabled phone to have a full social networking experience on their most trusted device, the mobile phone, whenever and wherever they want. Members Users enjoy expressing themselves and staying connected to friends by setting up a profile page, sharing photos and video, chatting, inboxing, instant messaging, blogging, debating in forums, sending mobile cards and playing games.

Nuconomy’s Studio is the world’s first “performance insight platform,” built from the ground up to provide completely new ways to measure today’s interactive Web. Go beyond the old page view model and start to measure the new metrics of the web – your users and site engagement and contribution metrics.

TWS2008 is honored to give the stage today to these promising startups and show the world how much Israeli technology has to offer.

In 2009, the conference plans to open the event to all European startups and to become the official European launch pad for Internet startups in the region.

For all those of you who are not in the area or haven’t registered to TWS2008, all videos wil be published the following day.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Tomorrow in Tel Aviv: TWS2008
Google I/O Ticket Winners Announced
Webby Awards Winners Announced
Announcing the Winners of the Google I/O Ticket Giveaway
LG’s Video Contest Hosted on YouTube
Mashable.com Awarded Most Improved Blog
Firefox Extension Contest is On & Poppin’

Filed under: Digital Cameras

We've been teased with the inevitable launch of the Nikon D700 DSLR, but it looks like our introduction is pretty much here with the nascent of a product presentation video that's supposed to hit the internets tomorrow. Observe as the nice man rubs the camera and says naughty things in French (hopefully we'll have a translation soon). He goes on to show off the new interface, quick menus, battery port, pop-up flash, and even gets a nice shot through the new viewfinder. In all seriousness, this is looking like a slick new camera. You're still looking at around €2,600 ($4,000), a July release, a 12-megapixel sensor, and sensor cleaning system. More information is sure to surface tomorrow when our friends across the pond wake up. Hit the continue link to be taunted a second time.

[Thanks, Pete]

Continue reading Nikon D700 presentation video revealed early, it's very nice

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Google, Verizon, HP, Cisco and some others are apparently teaming up to put money towards buying patents to keep them out of the hands of patent hoarders who would turn around and sue them. This isn't a new concept, and has been tried before -- and it didn't help much. The problem is that many of the worst patent suits aren't from "known" patents, but someone claiming a patent on some minor feature that everyone thought was obvious. Also, this type of action only encourages more bad patent activities by adding another buyer to the market. Now, questionable patent holders will recognize that they can also just sell to this patent pool, rather than selling to some patent hoarding firm. This is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper, but will have little to no effect on slowing down or stopping bad patent lawsuits, and may actually encourage more of that activity.

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