Back in March 2007 I received an email from a friend telling me about the plight of Eric Volz. If you remember, he was sitting in a Nicaraguan jail accused of murdering his girlfriend. Although this bit of news happened to be true, I was initially unconvinced and it took me a fair amount of time to figure it out. I chronicled this episode on my blog in an article entitled, “Searching For News.” The thesis was simple, we live in the information age and unbranded information, even if received from a trusted source may not be true.

“Now we are entering (some would argue that we have been in one for a decade) a world where emails from friends with seemingly real news stories and seemingly real references may be casually passed along and consumed as facts. We’ve always trusted our friends as good sources of info. We’ve grown up (even the digital natives) in a world of trusted news brands — why shouldn’t we be conditioned to believe what we read if formatted like news, is, in fact, news?

This is just the beginning. UGC as video content has made all the news this year, but the real story is just bubbling under the surface. The moulin of user generated news is about to seep under the branded news glaciers we believe will never melt or fall into the sea. Let’s just hope the melting ice doesn’t redraw the map to the point where we won’t recognize the coastline.”

In recent weeks there has been an inexplicably high amount of misinformed news … seemingly more than normal. While this is nothing new (Remember Jayson Blair?), the nomination of a relatively unknown politician as John McCain’s running mate has spurred all sorts of unsubstantiated rumors; from the baby factor, to drug use, drunk driving, guns, political kick backs, affairs, the list goes on and on. It would make a good soap opera but for the fact that the story is too trite and the characters are too stereotypical.

First, there were blogger accusations that Mrs. Palin had covered up her daughter’s pregnancy by claiming it to be her own. Some claimed that four-month-old Trig, who was born with Down syndrome, was Bristol’s baby, not Sarah’s. As we all know, Bristol is five-months pregnant, which debunks this rumor. However, the rumor hasn’t evaporated and there are certainly thousands, if not more, who still believe Sarah was covering for her daughter.

It’s not just bloggers getting in on the action, “real” reporters (whatever that means) can’t get enough either. So much so that the fine folks at Bloomberg have hosted several rather comical, absurd articles in the past few weeks. First was their inclusion of the Steve Jobs obituary on August 27th. . While it is commonplace for major news outlets to pre-write obituaries of famous people, Mr. Jobs opened his speech at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event this week by proving he was not dead. If that’s not bad enough, Bloomberg also had a hand in publishing the Sarah Palin drunk driving report, which, it turns out, isn’t true. It was her husband, Todd, who was arrested for a DWI, 22 years ago. .

In a similar instance, a 2002 story from the Chicago Tribune on United Airlines filing for bankruptcy was mistaken as new by Income Securities Advisors Inc. and subsequently picked up by Google News and, you guessed it, Bloomberg News. The story effectively tanked United Airlines stock, causing a 76% drop in share value. All this just two years after United emerged from bankruptcy protection.

One of the most popular of the Sarah Palin stories, and there are a handful of good ones, is the infamous American flag Bikini/AK-47 photo. This photoshopped masterpiece spread through the web like wildfire, so much so that CNN reporter Lola Ogunnaike commented that Palin “looks good in a bikini clutching an AK-47, but is she equipped to run the country?” Too bad it’s not the Governor and it’s not even an AK-47!

Another piece of Palin intrigue was the open letter written by Wasilla, AK resident Anne Kilkenny, who has supposedly known Palin for years. The letter highlights Sarah’s rise to power and her actions along the way. Kilkenny is objective, and honest in her assertion that she herself has sparred with Palin in the past, specifically over the banning of books in the town library. This letter was picked up for publication by The Nation, The [Illinois] Daily Journal and the Anchorage Daily News. But, as with the Eric Volz story, I received an email about this letter from a friend in Upstate New York who told me that he had received it from two different people that morning. Were his sources credible? Was this letter real?

My imperfect solution was to check the letter out on urbanlegends.com and snopes.com. They said the AK-47/bikini pic was fake, the list of banned books was fake and the letter from Anne Kilkenny as partially true. The open letter from Ms. Kilkenny, a lifelong Democrat who supposedly attended every city counsel meeting during Palin’s first year in office, was even featured as part of an article in the New York Times. Partially true?

We media professionals have slid down the slippery slope of journalistic integrity much farther than I could ever have imagined. Some of our most trusted news sources are using User Generated Content as source material and have no more ability to check their facts than average Internet users do.

Mistakes happen, UAL was serendipitously taken out to the woodshed and their share price with it. It could have happened to anyone. But having a CNN reporter think, for a second, that the picture of a woman in a bikini holding a rifle could actually be Governor Palin and reporting it as such is truly inexcusable for a professional news organization. Anyone with a minute of training could tell you that the weapon was not an AK-47 and that the picture was most likely “fun with Photoshop.”

In these times of ubiquitous communications tools, video production, audio production and graphic arts capabilities, it is incumbent for professional news media outlets to exercise above average judgment and demonstrate a higher standard of editorial decision-making. Otherwise, it will all just be noise.

Shelly Palmer is a consultant and the host of MediaBytes a daily news show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment, Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2006, Focal Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). He is the Vice-Chairman of the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences an organization dedicated to education and leadership in the areas of technology, media and entertainment. Palmer also oversees the Advanced Media Technology Emmy® Awards which honors outstanding achievements in the science and technology of advanced media. You can read Shelly’s blog here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net

While the cable networks are doing their best to cover every aspect of the activities at the DNC, they simply can’t cover everything. And, certainly nothing but the biggest names are covered by the broadcast nets. However, there is one place where you can see and experience absolutely everything you might want to see in HD. Even if you don’t have an HD television set or a DVR. www.demconvention.com.

The site uses a technology from Move Networks that will deliver HD-quality video to your computer and, in fact, it adjusts the video automatically to take advantage of the combination of the speed of your Internet connection and the quality of your computer. The video is brought to you commercial free and, more importantly, commentary free. It is just like being in the hall.

Rich media websites come in all shapes and sizes. Some are focused on video clips, some on interactivity, but they all have one goal - great UX. That’s trade lingo for user experience. The DNC is about a great many things, but the speeches are front and center - and there are plenty of them. As far as UX goes, demconvention.com is excellent. Want to see President Clinton’s speech, Hillary’s, Joe Biden’s? All just one click away. Interested in some of the interstitial material, the mini docs or some of the lesser-known speakers … maybe two clicks away.

Is demconvention.com cannibalizing the traditional television audience or just making the party’s message accessible to a younger, more tech-savvy voter? I think the later. And, I also think that millennials, digital natives, digital immigrants and even digital tourists are enjoying the ability to watch video of this quality on demand. This site truly delivers on the WIWWIWWIW (what I want, when I want, where I want) advanced media consumption promise.

Kudos to the convention organizers for putting together an excellent rich media website and for giving everyone access to both live and VOD full screen, high quality video. It just one more technical tour de force from a campaign that has mastered advanced media in this, first-ever, online presidential race.

Shelly Palmer is the host of MediaBytes a daily news show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment, Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2006, Focal Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). He is the Vice-Chairman of the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences an organization dedicated to education and leadership in the areas of technology, media and entertainment. Palmer also oversees the Advanced Media Technology Emmy® Awards which honors outstanding achievements in the science and technology of advanced media. You can read Shelly’s blog here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net

The headlines read “Amazon Earnings Double” as news of amazon.com’s quarterly earnings hit the web. This is not true, by the way. The numbers include a one-time boost from the sale of their European DVD rental company … oops. Amazon’s North American sales remained strong growing 35% year over year. As for high fuel costs and the future of free shipping? Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos said “Since we offer free shipping and Amazon Prime offers fast free shipping, the burden is upon us to make sure that we can do that in a way that is economical for us, so that customers can continue to enjoy those free shipping offers.” All in all, it was a pretty good earnings report for Amazon and the stock is up about 8% on the news.

I’ve read a bunch of analysts’ reports looking for a mention of the fact that Amazon is in the middle of a transition to a technology company and that their service offerings portend a significant upcoming trend and revenue growth opportunity. I couldn’t find a word, so here’s my brief on Amazon, the technology company.

About two years ago, Amazon started Amazon Web Services (AWS), their cloud computing company. It offers four core services: Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queuing Service and SimpleDB. In non-technical terms: Amazon offers storage (like a hard drive), computing (like the CPU in your personal computer, only better), message queuing and database management. In the coming months you are going to hear about cloud services from companies like: Google, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle and even Salesforce.com.

What makes these services unique? They are all accessed over the public Internet and, in the case of AWS, all of the heavy lifting occurs at Amazon. So, you get the benefits of a humongous IT infrastructure in a “pay for what you use” business model. And yes, at 15 cents per gigabyte of S3 storage and 10 to 80 cents per hour (depending upon configuration) of EC2 computer processing, it is way cheaper than building your own data center.

How much cheaper? While doing research and fact-checking for my book Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV, I happened upon a reference to an interesting corporate title: vice president of electricity. It was a senior-level management position that existed at many major corporations during the early years of the industrial revolution. Back then, if you needed industrial quantities of electricity, the best (and possibly only) way to get it was to generate it yourself. Next to the vice president of engineering, there was no executive at any of these companies with more technical skill and training than the VP of electricity.

As we all know, within a few decades, this position was replaced by a line item on the P&L that simply said, “Electricity.” Complex generators and the technologists to run them were replaced by off-premises companies that provided all of the required electricity through a utility grid. On premises, the only skill required was the ability to plug a machine or appliance into a wall socket.

A hundred years later, at the dawn of the information age, the exec in charge of high technology in a modern business is the vice president of IT. If you need industrial quantities of computer power, the best (and possibly only, until now) way to get it was to build the data center yourself.

The 20th century VP of electricity and his 21st century counterpart, the VP of IT have a great deal in common. If you follow that logic and spend any time thinking about the next generation of utility-grade grid computing schemas, you could posit that we are all headed for a day when every computer in America or possibly the world will have access to massive computer, and storage, clouds and that there will be companies that harness, license and provide access to this off-premises technology for others to use. Cloud or Grid computing is not new, but the reality of a utility-grid for computer power, when realized, will change the world into an unrecognizable place. Access to that much storage and computing power has never been in reach for average individuals. It may be the most exciting transition in the offing.

So, why no mention of Amazon’s foray into the cloud? It could be that it’s just early days. To maximize its operating margin, Amazon needs all of this technology. In fact, they need every aspect of their technological infrastructure to be best of breed. This technology is already available to consumers, Google Apps, Apple’s MobileMe and Amazon’s S3. When will Amazon, the technology company, start to see its own share price moved by having their heads in the cloud? As soon as the Vice Presidents of Electricity (IT) acknowledge that the technology is “enterprise ready.” As soon as big business, and more importantly small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s), can avail themselves of this remarkable cost savings, Amazon is going to really see its quarterly earnings double.

Shelly Palmer is the host of MediaBytes a daily news show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment, Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2006, Focal Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). He is the Vice-Chairman of the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences an organization dedicated to education and leadership in the areas of technology, media and entertainment. Palmer also oversees the Advanced Media Technology Emmy® Awards which honors outstanding achievements in the science and technology of advanced media. You can read Shelly’s blog here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net

Kung Fu Panda is doing a great job for Paramount this summer. As of today, the movie has grossed $196,680,294. It is still playing on 3,347 screens nationwide and after five weeks in release it is still number five behind Get Smart, Wanted, Wall-E and Hancock. So imagine how surprised I was to receive an email from a casual acquaintance yesterday offering me a link to an HD copy of the film.

Kung Fu Panda won’t be released on home video for months, so not only was this guaranteed to be an illegal copy, it was guaranteed to be either a bad video bootleg made with someone’s HD camcorder in the theater, or a very good copy of a stolen file - the file was pristine.

Now, this is not an unusual type of email to receive and it is not a new phenomenon. There are literally hundreds of P2P (peer-to-peer) networks out there with copies of every movie ever made for the taking. What gave me pause was that this particular file was not on a P2P network, it was on sitting on a private, subscription-based storage cloud.

Other than the legal issues, there is really no risk to downloading this file. Nobody knows what I’m downloading. A few years ago, you would call this type of private network a “darknet.” But that’s not exactly what this is. This is more like the type of service-layer, Internet-based, storage cloud you’d use to back up your hard drive, send large business files or move large disk images around on. And, because it is private and from a trusted source, the file won’t be a spoof or infect my computer with a virus. All the stuff that keeps me out of the P2P networks doesn’t apply here. Yikes!

This may seem like a subtle change from a legal point of view. It probably is. But, from my perspective, the ramifications are paradigm shifting. Think about this - you have a bunch of pretty big movie and TV show files on your hard drive that you bought from iTunes or ripped from DVD. You really need the local hard disk space back so subscribe to a service like RapidShare or MegaUpload. You back up the files to the cloud. So far, so good.

A week or so later, you’re online chatting with friends and someone says something about some episode of a show or movie you have stored. Being the very friendly type of person you are, you send them a link to the file. After all, it’s not that different from lending them a physical CD or DVD, right?

At the end of the day, P2P networks and strange or alien files are not going to cause any more economic hardship for the content industry than they are causing right now. However, good natured, good citizens using private storage clouds are going to be hugely hurtful. And, if good citizens can cause irreparable harm by paving the road to hell, imagine what bad natured, bad citizens will be able to accomplish with the same technology. Trust me, the computer network does not know the nature of its users.

Just for fun, I sojourned to a few storage cloud sites and got an up-close, personal view of the issue. Here’s some hands-on knowledge:

YouSendIt is a seemingly harmless service that now offers an Outlook plug-in that will automatically use a storage cloud to send oversized files. The free service is file-size limited, you can pay for big uploads if you need to. YouSendIt says that businesses will like their service because of the value-add of trackability. They might. People will like it because the business is paying for it and they can send monster files everywhere through Outlook.

Sure private “light-nets” enable businesses to move large files easily, but the darknet side is a safe haven for pirates and file sharers of all sorts.

A simple Google search for “Coldplay sendspace” will round up numerous results for full album .zips of their latest and back catalog.

With sites like RapidShare and Mediafire, file sharers don’t need P2P networks or bittorrent networks or bandwidth. All that is needed to upload and share a file is a standard compression tool (stuffit, winzip) and Internet access. Once uploaded, the file is searchable from all over the Internet and can be shared with anyone. Or, you can simply make it available to your private darknet.

Some sites have delay periods for non-members, but waiting 90 seconds won’t deter anyone who is trying to get access to a specific file. Also, sites like SendSpace and RapidShare only allow a certain number of downloads per file (100 for YouSendIt), while others, like ZShare and Mediafire, keep a file active as long as it has been downloaded in the past six months. Many sites offer premium membership packages, but they aren’t really necessary, unless you’re sharing a lot of GB’s. For Free, any one can download applications, albums, and movies — it’s as simple as highlighting a file on your screen.

If you’re interested in seeing all of this for yourself, here’s a short list of sites to visit. Oh, and don’t forget to visit Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. Pretty much anywhere that tech companies offer free storage, you’ll find a bunch of people sharing files.

Drop.io (drop.io)
MailBigFile (mailbigfile.com)
MediaFire (mediafire.com)
MegaUpload (megaupload.com)
Pando (pando.com)
RapidShare (rapidshare.com)
SendSpace (sendspace.com)
YouSendIt (yousendit.com)
ZShare (zshare.com)

There are many, many more. Some of these companies were funded by selling their investors on the idea that this type of file transfer could be ad-supported. It is not a sustainable model. According to Yaron Samid, the founder of Pando, the bandwidth and storage costs add up too quickly and the sites must restrict file sizes or charge for their services.

Everyone I know is starting to use cloud storage for backups as well as the normal doing of business. In a very short period of time, this technology is going to become so easy-to-use and commonplace that the law of unintended consequences may innocently take the movie business to the place where the music business has gone to die.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now. Want your mind blown, check out Apple’s mobile me http://www.apple.com/mobileme/ which launches today. Then you’ll realize, you really don’t know clouds at all.