Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd took a decidedly different approach when considering social networking at today's LeWeb conference. In speaking to a room packed with more than a thousand entrepreneurs, investors and journalists, Boyd explained how we tend to focus on the positive aspects of social networking services. Technologists tend to praise web publishing for its ability to encourage artistic expression and public dialogue. In contrast, Boyd makes the point that negative and disturbing web content can also serve as a vehicle for change. Sponsor Boyd explains how those who monitor online profile information, tend to have something to gain from it in a negative way. For example, oppressive governments often monitor the web for signs of criminal activity in order to enforce laws or suppress certain activities. Nevertheless, Boyd believes the visibility of violence, drug use and criminal activity can also be used by regular netizens for constructive purposes. She references "eyes on the street" - a concept coined by urban sociologist Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Writes Jacobs: "There must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street.  They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.  The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce a sufficient number of people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks." Boyd believes this same concept can be applied to online safety and health. Says explains, "The web makes available all parts of society and it's up to us to find a way to make it constructive." With Facebook's user base often cited as being bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world, netizens have the visibility to do more than simply consume content. Boyd's presentation reveals that while the internet has the power to uncover the abuses and oppressions that are happening around us, ultimately it's up to us to decide whether or not to acknowledge and help remedy them. Photo Credit: Ewan McIntosh * For more updates on LeWeb, follow along on the Social Media Club House Discuss

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Says Danah Boyd, Leverage the Web's Most Disturbing Content

Twitter's default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you're afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever. Really, though, people who take tech seriously don't fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we've received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It's a pretty surprising list. Sponsor May this serve as a memorial and a reminder that when new communication media emerge - even the most savvy people can get on board and fall for the oldest tricks in the book. Remember also, this could happen to any of us (apparently, perhaps) and thus the old saying "there, but for the grace of the Fail Whale, go I." "I made $300 today with http://ifortune4u.com" - and assorted variations... Bio: Market analyst following datacenters, energy efficiency, and blade servers. That's complicated stuff but probably pretty mechanical. No wonder a little human-engineering was able to overcome this person's defenses. Bio: Enterprise Comms Analyst That's Comms as in communications? Bio: Industry analyst: enterprise communications [Different person, same analyst firm as the above] Oops. Why are these analysts, some of whom charge up to $1000 per hour for their work, falling for a scam that promises relatively small sums of money? Bio: Consultant in large scale data warehousing. Looks like just a little bit of your data just got warehoused! Bio: Strategy planning at [Giant European Firm] Enterprise Communications How's this for an enterprise strategy? Know a phishing scam when you see one. Bio: Customer Interaction Analyst at [Giant Marketing Research and Analyst Firm] / Speech Reco and UI Geek / Trendspotter Oh my... Bio: an investor and co-founder of [common web 2.0 term].com; a founding partner and Vice-President in [big Web 1.0 company]...8 million page-views and 1 million unique visitors per month...with zero marketing budget. Surely there were people pulling scams like this back when you were...building a website with 8m monthly pageviews...with zero marketing budget... Want to brush up on your social networking skills, so you can stay off of lists like this? Check out Sarah Perez's post from October How to Avoid Malware on Facebook and Twitter: 8 Best Practicies . You can find the whole ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here . You can follow us with the knowledge that we aren't going to spam you with scammy Direct Messages - or at least if we do you can write a blog post teasing us about it. Discuss

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7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell For Phishing Scams

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil' s mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels. Sponsor Features The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools. In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work. Turn Your Blog Into a Book If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image. Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost . These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle. Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords . Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week. Discuss

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FastPencil: Turn Your Blog Posts into a Published Book