SiliconBeat

A few months ago, I wrote a column calling the Federal Trade Commission’s attempts to regulate blogging a mistake:

“I have no doubt the folks at the Federal Trade Commission have all the best intentions when it comes setting out disclosure guidelines for bloggers in order to protect consumers. But it’s an effort that’s doomed from the start.”

I can’t link to the column because it’s behind our paywall. But I figured no good would come of it.

Well, I didn’t expect the FTC to listen to me, and they didn’t let me down. On Monday, the FTC released new rules to regulate product endorsements in advertisements and blogs.

I could offer up an extended rant on this, but I’ll just point you to Jeff Jarvis’ stinging rebuke instead. Jarvis writes: Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington revealed that he had received hundreds of documents about Twitter sent by someone who had hacked into the company’s system. Arrington said he planned to post some documents related to Twitter’s business. This set off a firestorm of debate about the ethics. With Arrington posting a follow up to his original post here.

I was truly amazed at the overwhelmingly negative feedback from the TechCrunch community about his decision. You can see the harshness continue on Twitter here.

I posted my own thoughts in the comment section, which I’m re-posting here: Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that didn’t take long. It only took Mark Cuban one day to break his monastic vow of silence.

On Monday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed an insider trading case against Cuban. The feds claimed Cuban received confidential information from the CEO of Mamma.com and turned around and dumped his shares, saving $750,000 when the stock dropped the next day.

Perhaps the biggest shock of all came next: Cuban wrote on his blog that he would say nothing beyond issuing a statement about the charges.

Bo-ring!

Fortunately, that self-imposed muzzle came right off Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

Topic A for discussion this morning are the insider trading charges filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against former “Dancing With The Stars” also-ran Mark Cuban. Oh, and he’s also the guy who owns the Dallas Mavericks, wants to buy the Chicago Cubs, and has an ego the size of Silicon Valley.

The complaint filed Monday contains the good, old-fashioned kind of allegations. You can read the full complaint here. In essence, the SEC claims that Cuban was an investor in the search engine Mamma.com. Back in 2004, the company briefed him on plans to issue a new round of stock, which would likely dilute shareholder value and cause the stock price to drop. Also, Cuban was ordered not to tell a soul.

According to the SEC, Cuban called his broker and told him to dump his Mamma.com shares. The stock dropped almost 10 percent the next day, and Cuban saved about $750,000. Nice (allegedly).

You can read the full complaint here. But Gawker provides the highlights here.

One of the tastiest morsels from the complaint comes from a conversation between Cuban and the Mamma.com CEO:

“The CEO prefaced the call by informing Cuban that he had confidential information to convey to him, and Cuban agreed that he would keep whatever information the CEO intended to share with him confidential. The CEO, in reliance on Cuban’s agreement to keep the information confidential, proceeded to tell Cuban about the PIPE offering. Cuban became very upset and angry during the conversation, and said, among other things, that he did not like PIPES because they dilute the existing shareholders. At the end of the call, Cuban told the CEO “Well, now I’m screwed. I can’t sell.”

But then, apparently, he did sell. Allegedly.

And what does Mr. Cuban have to say about all of this? Read the rest of this entry »

In case you forgot to mark your calendar, today is OneWebDay. That means today is the day we all do, um, something, or other. Okay, I’m not really sure.

I’ve had several folks ask me about OneWebDay. And I feel like it’s something that as a good citizen and a mediocre business columnist in Silicon Valley that I ought to know about. Certainly, all the cools kids seem to be talking about it today.

But I’m still trying to figure out what it’s all about, and what I’m supposed to do, or think about, or not do, as the case may be. So here is what I found. Read the rest of this entry »

At the Idea Lab blog, where I’m part of a group working on projects related to the future of journalism, I have a new post today on our work in Second Life. As part of The Next Newsroom Project, we needed to build a version of our newsroom in this increasingly popular virtual world. I talk abot some of the challenges, especially for me since I had never been in-world before:

“After playing around with it for several evenings, I quickly realized that I could probably spend the entire year of my grant just learning how to make a chair in Second Life. So I went looking for some help. Fortunately, I found it at Duke University through the Information Science + Information Studies department.”

You can read the full post here.

Last week, privacy advocates went into a tizzy over the ruling by a New York judge that YouTube must turn over all its data about which videos that its users watch to Viacom. The latter is suing YouTube, which is owned by Google, over copyright infringement.

It’s a reminder, of course, of what lies at the heart of the Internet. In essence, companies like Google have turned the Internet into a vast collector of personal data which they then use to figure out how to get us to watch, read or buy more stuff. The amount of knowledge a company like Google has about your personal Web surfing habits would likely boggle your mind if you knew the full extent of it.

But the outcry left me wondering just what everyone was so worked up about.

Read the rest of this entry »

The big legal battle over who started Facebook came to San Jose today, in theory to discuss a proposed settlement with the plaintiffs, ConnectU, the folks who claim that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg initially worked for them but took their idea and started Facebook. You can get some background here and here.

I say “in theory” because while I came down to the U.S. Federal District Court in San Jose for a hearing on the case, I have no idea what’s going on the courtroom: District Court Judge James Ware closed the hearing to the public and kicked out all the reporters. Read the rest of this entry »