Moore said she would like to see laws increase the penalties for sex traffickers and also secure greater funding to help rehabilitate victims. She has been working with the Department of Homeland Security on the issue and that she and Kutcher are currently working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking too, according to this Politico story.

Moore and Kutcher are working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking and she wants to see increased penalties for offenders and more funding for victims. And, according to Politico, they’re enlisting social media to help the cause too:

The actress said she is also helping to put together a task force called the DNA (short for Demi and Ashton) Trafficking Tech Task Force which will include “some of the brightest minds of Silicon Valley” –from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist” — to help with the issue.

“Technology has enabled the problem, but technology can be used to solve the problem,” she said in the interview. “For those abusers and predators online, they better watch out. We’re looking to expose the anonymity by which they are taking comfort.”

The DNA Foundation (@DNAFoundation) launched Jan. 25.

The organisers of the Paris exhibition — titled “Action 1″ — viewed thousands of internet videos from Iran before making a selection to present at a gallery on one of Paris’s busiest shopping streets, the rue de Rivoli.

Banks of television sets there show dramatic video of young people throwing stones at security forces, riot police carrying out savage beatings and scenes of blazing tyres and cars.

One bank made up of nine screens shows the same troubled street scene shot from various angles — street level, rooftops, apartment windows. Often the voice of the person filming can be heard.

“Come away from the window… He (a policeman) is loading his gun,” says a woman’s voice in Farsi, the most widely spoken language in Iran, in one of the videos to which the exhibition organisers have added French subtitles. . . .

The political potential of the mobile phone video is soon to get a further artistic and cultural examination at another Paris-funded cultural organisation, the Forum des Images.

Next month it will host the latest edition of its annual ground-breaking mobile phone film festival “Pocket Films.”

This year it looks at the “place the (mobile phone) camera has taken in countries where democracy cannot have its voice heard, such as Burma (Myanmar) or Iran,” festival coordinator Benoit Labourdette told AFP.

According to the BBC, his first tweet translated to: “Hey how’s it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I’m off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!”

In addition:

A close aide, Public Works Minister Diosdado Cabello, announced . . .  that Chavez supporters planned to “storm” social networking sites.

“The opposition thinks it owns the social networking sites – they think Twitter and Facebook belong to them,” he said.

“We’re fighting and there are seven million of us who will have Twitter,” he declared, referring to the membership claimed by Mr Chavez’s United Socialist Party.

Chavez has close to 200,000 followers, and he has, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, invited Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales to join as well:

“The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used,” he said after posting two messages on his page @chavezcadanga.

//

“I invite Evo and Fidel,” Chavez said. “Evo – are you on Twitter? Let’s invite Evo to Twitter,” Chavez said during a visit to a cattle ranch with Bolivia’s president.

Both Morales and Castro are close allies of Chavez and the three men are Latin America’s most vocal critics of what they call the U.S. empire. . . .

Many Venezuelans laughed when Chavez announced he would join Twitter, wondering how their famously verbose leader, who speaks almost daily for hours on end, will keep to the service’s 140-character limit.

Chavez’s page name includes “candanga,” which translates locally as a rebellious or strong-willed person.

The letter was sent last month by privacy and data protection officials from  Germany, Canada, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In addition to concerns about Google Buzz, the company’s latest foray into social networking, the officials also criticize Google Street View, which features pictures taken by cameras mounted on cars.

According to this AP story:

The officials complained that Google launched [Google Street View] in various countries without “due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms.”

“In that instance, you addressed privacy concerns related to such matters as the retention of unblurred facial images only after the fact, and there is continued concern about the adequacy of the information you provide before the images are captured,” officials said in their letter, posted on the Web site of Canada’s privacy commissioner.

Google said it has “discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today’s letter.”

“Of course we do not get everything 100 percent right – that is why we acted so quickly on Buzz following the user feedback we received,” the company said in a statement, adding that it tries very hard to be upfront about what data it collects from users and how it uses the information. . . .

The officials called on Google to create default settings that protect users’ privacy and to ensure that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use.

“We recognize that Google is not the only online company with a history of introducing services without due regard for the privacy of its users,” the letter says. “As a leader in the online world, we hope that your company will set an example for others to follow.”

The New York Times has more on Twitter’s donation of its archives to the United States’ oldest federal cultural institution:

TWITTER users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated.

Not a few are pure drivel. But, taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians. They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.

“Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,” said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, “Digital History.” What’s more, he said, “Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.”

The Library of Congress isn’t the only institution getting the tweets, though it’s the most scholarly.

The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, “We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.” The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”

BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.

This Reuters story has some stats the Chinese company’s rapid growth:

Baidu posted first-quarter net profit of 481 million renminbi, or $70.4 million, up from 181 million renminbi a year ago. Analysts expected profit of 366 million renminbi, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Baidu is, unsurprisingly, reluctant to credit its growth solely to Google’s departure:

“We saw marginal benefit from this so-called semi-exit of Google,” Robin Li, Baidu’s charismatic chief executive, said during a conference call to discuss his company’s results.

“We are certainly benefiting from this. But at the end of the day, the China search market is still in its very early stage,” Mr. Li said. “The performance of Baidu is largely driven by our own execution, not the competitive landscape change.”

A couple relevant excerpts:

For a lot of people in the media, tweeting is almost obligatory. Why not for you?

There’s only so much you can do in a day. And I don’t feel I lack for platforms for expressing myself. I have books, I write for the New Yorker. If I gave people any more, they’d get sick of me. . . .

A Facebook group with 200,000 followers – is that an illusion of mobilization?

It depends on what you’re trying to do. If I’m putting together a flash mob, that I want everyone to meet me in half an hour in Times Square, it’s really useful to have 100,000 followers on Twitter. If I want everyone to go to my website and buy my new book, it’s incredibly useful to have 100,000 followers on Facebook. If I want to start a political movement to overthrow a tyrannical regime, it may be less useful. If you follow me on Twitter, I do not own your heart. I may own your pocketbook momentarily. And I may own your attention for five seconds, but that’s it.

In The Tipping Point, you talk about ideas spreading just like epidemics. Do social media accelerate that spread?

Do ideas spread through social media? I don’t think they are vehicles. People aren’t spreading ideas on Twitter, they’re spreading observations, perhaps. The point of Tipping Point is that I was very interested in face-to-face interpersonal reactions. If social media or online communication is the means to the creation of a personal connection, it’s a fabulous thing. But if it’s an excuse to not make a connection, it’s ultimately a trivial thing.

The Pentagon, not surprisingly, is not happy about the release of the video. Critics of WikiLeaks say that the more widely viewed 17 minute edited video is misleading in that it does not “make clear that the attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and that one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade,” according to this New York Times article.

The Times article also delves into how WikiLeaks is able to operate because of the digital age.

By releasing such a graphic video, which a media organization had tried in vain to get through traditional channels, WikiLeaks has inserted itself in the national discussion about the role of journalism in the digital age. Where judges and plaintiffs could once stop or delay publication with a court order, WikiLeaks exists in a digital sphere in which information becomes instantly available.

“The most significant thing about the release of the Baghdad video is that several million more people are on the same page,” with knowledge of WikiLeaks, said Lisa Lynch, an assistant professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, who recently published a paper about the site. “It is amazing that outside of the conventional channels of information something like this can happen.”

Nancy Scola of Personal Democracy Forum cautions against viewing the footage as news and a threat to journalism in this post:

But one thing to keep in mind here is that Wikileaks’ tragic footage is a document; it’s not news.

News requires some amount of perspective, context. The problem with seeing this admittedly horrific episode in the Iraq war ripped from its moorings is that the average American news consumer, at least, has been very little prepared to make sense of what it all means, even after seven years of war in Iraq. Is what we’re watching an aberration? Is this a normal Tuesday in Baghdad? The function of a journalistic class is to help citizens make sense of the world, a world that grows ever more confounding every day, especially as we see more of it, in real-time and often in living color. (Not for nothing is the site called Wikileaks, as in collaboration.) As the web made it easier and easier for everyone to collect and distribute bits of information, the American news world has floundered. . . .

The alternative for journalists not afraid of the future is to look at Wikileaks not as a competitor or their replacement, but as an amazing resource of historic possibility. Wikileaks’ video footage that seems to sum up all that is confusing and horrifying about modern war isn’t a threat to journalists. It should be looked upon as manna from heaven.

Scola also includes an interesting addendum as to where the video is most widely viewed:

[A]s this useful infographic from its YouTube page shows, it’s popular in a wide range of countries and regions, including all of Latin and South America, Europe, Russia, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and a smattering of African countries including Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria

Not all those countries are close allies of the United States, and the video probably won’t endear the U.S. military to people who think that the Iraq War was wrong. But despite the Pentagon’s opposition to the video’s release, it was unveiled at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., less than one mile from the White House.