Fans of the Netflix option to watch movies online are getting a nice gift Monday: No more limits to how much you can watch via the Web per month!

Up until now, all Netflix customers were restricted to how many hours of streaming video they could watch, but under the new plan, only those who pay $4.99 a month will be restricted. Add this to the news that they are going to be releasing a set top box for you to stream movies directly to your television, and this could accelerate the consumer jump from tangible media to a disk-less existence. Perhaps we will soon be offering our apologies to Sony for the early arrival of rain on their Blu-Ray parade.

The timing of the announcement seems to be in reaction to the rumors that Apple will introduce iTunes movie rentals on Tuesday at Macworld. Though nothing is official yet, the rumors indicate that Apple rentals will be around $3.99 apiece, a difficult sale when Netflix customers can expect to have unlimited access to films online as well as get the benefit of continuing with disc rentals each month. Apple will likely need to rely more strongly on iPod/iPhone empire than they may have planned as a result of this imminent announcement.

[via AP]

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If you’ve been surfing the Web on your iPhone, and hit a broken Flash video link, there is now a way for you to get those to jive with your device. A new bookmarklet named iTransmogrify! has been released that will activate the broken link and allow you to play the video via the iPhone’s YouTube application.

When you come across the broken link, go to the bookmarklet, the page reloads, and you then see an image of the video which bears a YouTube-like playback button. Click the icon and the video runs. Handy for those invisible embeds you come across. You can find the link you need over at JoeMaller.com.

Note: Mashable weekend editor Paul Glazowski attempted to operate the bookmarklet on his own iPhone. The link triggered the iPhone to open its native YouTube application, but displayed the error “This video does not currently support iPhone.” If your attempts to verify that this code works correctly are successful, please do let us know.

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Earlier today, we mentioned a story concerning a dispute had between university administrators and a student in the state of Georgia in 2007 involving an allegedly troubling Facebook profile photo. Following that, we have here an item about a couple of Web services and a university professor who’s fed up with seeing them occupy the academic place.

So she’s banned them from her lecture hall.

University of Brighton professor Tara Brabazon claims that students have grown too accustomed to taking “the easy option when asked to do research.” The easy options being the popular Web reference Wikipedia and that quaint, mischievous little search engine known as Google. And she has now supposedly disallowed any students currently partaking in her course(s) from using any of the two utilities.

Now, you might ask if she’s at all serious about pursuing such a cleansing. One would rightly think it all but impossible to purge the classroom and its occupants’ laptops entirely of wikis and Internet searches, yes? Well, I assume she is in true pursuit of this “goal.”

Yet she is naïve in thinking she can accomplish what she has set out to do.

The mindset of the professor mentioned here – as well many educators elsewhere – can be thought to be somewhat analogous to the logic employed by record companies today facing the prospect of radical change. A number of specialists in certain fields of study – be it history, literature, science, etc. – see the open source landscape of the Web and are frightened. They see chaos. They see so many variables, and so many loose ends, that it appears unsafe to them. So they revert to the trusted resources of years past and completely discount anything new and “officially unapproved.”

What they need to understand now is that processes of learning and sharing knowledge have shifted tremendously since the advent and the rise of the Web and the immense growth of its collections of data. It is no longer enough for “the people” to accept a one-way-road mentality. Individual participation and contribution is now crucial to progression.

Wikipedia, to name one of the two services targeted by the professor, is a treasure chest of information, and was put together by a great many individuals. Some consider it then to be impure and unreliable. But what it really is is an ultimately fascinating experiment that is more trustworthy and perhaps even more important for the advancement of education than most any encyclopedic project to come before. Why? Because it’s just about as perfectly democratic as a social invention can get (given the imperfection of humans beings). And that makes it a hugely powerful platform on which to create what could be the second iteration of the Library of Alexandria.

So rather than pass it (and the same goes for Google) off as something unstable or something which changes too dramatically to be considered an anchor, it should be embraced by educators and academic institutions the world over. And that includes professor Brabazon.

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It looks like A La Mobile, a software designer which specialized in Linux development, is going to be soliciting the first complete suite of applications built on Android, the open-source mobile OS developed by Google. This is the first whole product to come out using Android as the basis for its selection of applications, finally moving it from a concept to a real-world tool.

The package A La Mobile is marketing includes all the normal things one would expect from a smartphone, such as dialing, calendar, camera, organizer, and so on.

There is also a collection of Google apps thrown in such as a Web browser, Google Maps, etc.

The new system is primarily being tested on an HTC Qtek 9090 handset, but it will work on all handsets that can accept Android. There is no word yet as to which carriers or hardware manufacturers may opt to experiment with A La Mobile’s offering, but this is, at the very least, a sign that we can expect Android to emerge on the consumer radar rather soon.

[via USA Today]

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I was reading the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine yesterday evening (it is delivered to my drive on Saturday mornings, despite officially being a Sunday publication) perusing The Medium, a weekly column by Virginia Heffernan, in which she addresses items mostly to do with technology. (Last weekend’s piece was a brilliant expose on the modern day word processor. This weekend’s topic concerns genealogy sites on the Web.)

And in the middle of reading Heffernan’s article, I had this strange – and entirely unrelated – thought come to mind. I wondered, how much of the daily dish of technology news centered around Web-specific subjects has to do with big-name businesses (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.), and how much time and effort by journalists and bloggers is designated to covering the world of startups? Subsequently I questioned, is the ratio a fair and just balance?

I’m sure you can guess my own answer to the latter of the two questions. The allotment of words given to startups is really not at all fair and balanced.

Sure, startups get headlines. Sometimes. On occasion, the stories that concern them are about the rounds of funding a few have gotten. Or perhaps there are some news released that focus on their having been acquired – by much larger fish.

Rarely does it seem, however, that the small guys really get a fair shake. Why? Well, part of it is that they’re simply not the most popular kids in school. Another reason is that there’s really just no time for them to be heard as often as many would like.

The fact is that big-name brands get mentioned by the media because they appeal to massive audiences. More people use Google, than, say, ChaCha. Hence the disparity. MySpace has millions and millions of users. Many smaller social networks…don’t. Size does matter.

But are those reasons enough to justify the seeming unevenness of the playing field? Shouldn’t the tech world be the place where businesses, big and small, have equal opportunity to spend a solid moment (or many) in the spotlight?

Yes, it absolutely should be a region where fame has no favorites, where it has no substantial bias. But sadly, that kind of idealism can’t be so. I have to think, considering that blogs and big media titans alike only have so much manpower to devote to various stories on a given day, that, yes, it is okay for startups to be routinely passed over for scoops from Redmond and Mountain View. There’s an ever-present need for some measure of editorial discretion, and it’s entirely understandable that new blood isn’t generally seen to be as “publishable” as the guaranteed-to-get-hits type.

Of course it is true that Yahoo! and Facebook and the like started off small. They once were working out of garages and one-room offices, operating on budgets measured in thousands rather than billions. And they did get noticed, and grew to become the massive enterprises they are today. But how they navigated their way up the ladder is really the parallel one needs to draw when looking at the current crop of newbies to the tech market. With intelligence, cunning, a good bit of marketing savvy, and perhaps a natural affinity for café grande and Italian and Asian takeout, a new generation of stars will make their way more and more often to center stage.

It’s survival of the fittest. And oftentimes editors simply don’t think many startups are, in the words Adolph Ochs, “fit to print.”

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Using a site like Facebook can do a college student a lot of good. It can help an individual manage dozens of friendships. It can help in the organization of meetups and events. It can even help someone better search for birthday or holiday gift options for fellow associates. Granted, one’s social circle would have to be of the stripe that enjoys blasting news of various purchases made via the now-infamous system known as Beacon. But, nevertheless, ‘tis possible to make use of the network’s various features, controversial or otherwise, to one’s benefit.

Using Facebook can also get you booted out of college.

That’s what happened to T. Hayden Barnes, who, according to a piece recently published by InsideHigherEd.com, was “administratively withdrawn” from Georgia’s Valdosta State University. A student in his sophomore year, Barnes evidently managed to upset Ronald Zaccari, the university’s president, enough last May to get shown the proverbial door. His crime: opposing Valdosta’s plan “to build two large parking garages with $30 million from students’ mandatory fees.”

Barnes didn’t have a very cordial relationship with the university before his forced departure. In the spring of 2007, he posted fliers critical of the scheduled development; sent letters to school administrators as well as the campus newspaper; and wrote mass emails to the student body. He was a busy and quite vocal chap before his expulsion, for sure.

The outstanding factor, though, for Barnes’s withdrawal was evidently a picture posted to his Facebook profile in which he portrayed a collage of images showing president Zaccari, a bulldozer aside the proposed parking garage, and the phrases “No Blood for Oil” and “S.A.V.E.-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage.”

Translation: Zaccari found that Barnes signified a “clear and present danger to (Valdosta State)” and proceeded with his removal, which he said would only be reversed if the student could prove to have been examined by a non-university psychiatrist to certify that he was “not a threat to himself or anyone else, and that he would receive ‘on-going therapy.’”

The story doesn’t end there. Barnes proceeded to obtain “endorsements” from both a psychiatrist and a professor and appealed the president’s decision with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But the Georgia Board of Regents, the channel through which Barnes was required to address the problem he had with college administrators, chose not to reverse the expulsion. The matter is still pending.

Now, if we are to look at this story objectively, one can perhaps see why Zaccari may have been compelled to take action in response to Barnes having posted said image. Yet, withdrawal from the university looks to have been rather excessive. The correct way to address the situation would have been to offer Barnes and any immediate family members to discuss the protestations made.

Of course, I digress here. Such stories of controversy involving social networking sites are abundant – and will only continue to grow in number. I simply found this particular dispute to be especially worthwhile to mention, as it involves the topics of online protest and free speech. The questions I put to you now are: Do you think Barnes’s expulsion was warranted? Do you find this instance involving Facebook unusual? Do you recall any similar conflicts occurring?

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What’s it take to make $10 million in 12 months in these wonderful times of mighty Web growth? Apparently not very much.

Not very much work, that is. Today’s New York Times delivers a nice, sprightly memo about a 29-year-old coder based in Vancouver, Canada, who managed to put together a dating website, dubbed Plenty of Fish, which, because it is purportedly a self-sustaining entity, requires of its owner, Markus Frind, only about 10 hours per week of attention and care.

And funnily enough, it’s hardly a design in perfectionism. The site, purportedly begun as an educational exercise for Mr Frind meant to help him get closely acquainted with the programming language ASP.NET, is quite rough around the edges.

A tour of its front page alone will show that it indeed bears a rather elementary makeup. (The NYT’s Randall Stross seems to draw parallels between Plenty of Fish and Craigslist.) For one, there is an absence of any software to correctly format images uploaded by users. The result: distortion, distortion, and more distortion. Of course, Frind doesn’t seem too concerned which such a “trivial issue.” He claims users are not bothered by their misshapen features.

The reason being that his service is entirely free. That’s right. Whereas sites like Match.com and True.com levy subscription fees upon their members, Frind opens the door to all with nary a credit request. Instead, he makes his millions solely through advertising. With some 600,000+ members now on board (he claims there’s a significant 30% overturn every month, but that, overall, more people are joining than leaving at any given moment), he gets a steady supply of clicks – some of which are linked to affiliate marketers, which can grant Plenty of Fish dozens of dollars for a single hit alone.

As for customer service, there is none. There’s almost no direct interaction with Frind and his userbase. Instead, he has established a member forum, which supposedly provides ample troubleshooting resources. (I suspect that 30% loss rate mentioned above must correlate with the company’s lack of professional CS.)

So, the lesson to be learned from this entrepreneurial success story is pretty clear. The recipe for a $10 million annual payout: don’t produce brilliant code; don’t care too much about your users’ troubles; and strike convenient ties with easy ad money. Sweet and simple. And ultimately very rewarding.

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If you’ve been having problems with Flickr today, remain calm, it’s not just you.  Their problems started around 5:30 EST, and are still going.  You can follow along on their blog, and try not to laugh as they get increasingly frustrated.

Things should be back to normal soon… they hope.

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Good news for those who sell houses online. Zillow finally spoke up about how every real estate site seems to handle information differently - and how that just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

So Zillow, recently out of beta, decided it was time to speak with some of its fellow industry members - Yahoo Real Estate and Trulia - and get to collaborating on decent standard all could share. Their collective standard will now allow a home seller to assemble a single listing, one which will work all participating in the effort.

The idea was definitely a good one. The Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), not too long before the announcement of the standard was made, requested that such universalism be applied to the industry. In an open letter delivered last week to Zillow, Yahoo, Trulia, and Google, Michael Wurzer, the newly appointed chair of the trade group, said, “With a single standard being widely adopted across the industry, brokers will be able to enter listings once and deliver them when and where they want, including your sites.”

The RESO must’ve been happy with the speed with which this was accomplished. Selling property online just got a whole lot easier for realtors around the country.

[via ClickZ]

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Wired recently ran a piece by David Kravets about the less-than-total obliteration of DRM. In the article, he speaks of the demise of restrictive software, and the benefits that have come with the slow but steady decline of digital copy protection. Yet he also finds that record companies have simultaneously dropped overt limitations and developed an affinity for the “watermark,” a piece of unique code that allows anyone (Sony, Warner, to name a couple) with the right tools to determine which individual among hundreds or thousands of mostly anonymous people purchased one or more downloads.

The question Kravets raises has to do with both the potential for undesired information filtration and privacy issues. He sees the fact that purchase information, when embedded in a song file (which can then be traced at the whim of the RIAA and/or IFPI), is something of a pre-emptive invasion of one’s identity. Considering how little time it took for various bits of DRM to be subverted, it’s not entirely out of the realm of reason to think watermarks – which can easily bear sensitive information – could be cracked just as quickly, and not at the pleasure of original downloader.

Now, if I’m honest here, I imagine that watermarking won’t drive consumers to beat down the doors of their nearest ACLU or EFF offices demanding an end to the practice. Juxtaposed against out-and-out DRM software blocks, it’s likely to be something to occupy the back burner for most folks. That said, the digital watermark is something that has not yet been brought openly to the attention of those it might concern (everyone who buys music downloads). And for that, it shouldn’t legally be attached to any file transferred from iTunes, Amazon, or any other online music service.

In order for record companies to perform these tiny embeds “fairly,” they need to receive the explicit consent of consumers. Which they have not sought. Rather, it’s another one of those clauses proverbially laid out in ultra-fine print that just so happens to automatically become enacted following the confirmation of a purchase. And that ain’t okay with me.

That said, I’m not surprised in the least that watermarking is done in the absence of DRM. Would you put it past the Big Four – and many independent music sources – to do this sort of thing? My guess is no.

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