France delays move to make Web giants pay for networks

By Leila Abboud – France backed away from legislation to make Internet companies including Google pay for the burden they place on telecommunications networks, opting instead to ask a commission to study the controversial issue.

France’s Socialist government is concerned that Web giants weigh down networks with traffic without contributing to telecom companies’ investments in high-speed systems, echoing a position held by European telecom operators.

Big Web companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix reject the idea of paying telecom operators to have their content reach customers. more> http://tinyurl.com/bf2d4x6

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This Is the Future of News

By Dan Macsai – “You all have this notion that news comes from reality,” says Rick Stengel, TIME’s managing editor. But like any other product — or any other “artificial thing,” as Stengel put it, “created by people like us for people like you” — news can change drastically depending on who’s producing it.

Now that anyone with a Facebook account can report what is happening, it’s up to media brands to offer insight.

“We need to get back in the knowledge game,” says Setrakian, whose Syria Deeply aims to paint a fuller picture of the Middle East by combining mainstream news with user-generated content. more> http://tinyurl.com/9l9t9jl

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LinkedIn seeks wider use with ability to “follow”

By Alexei Oreskovic – Professional social network LinkedIn Corp will let its users “follow” and receive updates from people outside their personal contact list, a move that could entice users to spend more time on its website.

The new feature means that celebrities and ordinary LinkedIn users alike will be able to post messages, share photos and links to news articles that can be read by a broad group of people.

The ability to have followers will initially be available to only 150 LinkedIn users the company has pre-selected. more> http://tinyurl.com/9bdeyc9

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Time to Admit What We Already Knew: Online Ads Stink

By Derek Thompson – Let’s start at the top of the list. Yahoo! is a content behemoth, with 300 journalists and 700 million monthly visitors in 30 languages, and a business model that is broadly considered hopeless. “Yahoo has what all media companies want, which is a large audience,” David Carr wrote for the New York Times. “The company just doesn’t know what to do with it.”

Speaking of having a large audience without knowing precisely what to do with it, let’s move down the list to Twitter, a bonafide attention hog with 140 million active users and $140 million in revenue in 2011. If revenue triples this year and Twitter doesn’t add a single active user (both unlikely scenarios), the company will make $3 per active user, which would bring it in line with another company — Facebook. more> http://tinyurl.com/ck5qxnr

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4 Ways Verizon Is Trying To Get Rid of Me

By Christine Crandell – After researching 4G Smartphones, polling my Facebook friends, and attempting to compare phones on the Verizon website, I bite the bullet and went to the Verizon store in Palo Alto, California.  The salesperson asked probing questions, looked up my account and along the way changed my opinion of Verizon.

Unable to get my recently purchased Mifi cards to work, I called support.  After providing my account number four times to a successive string of agents up “the chain”, none were unable to solve the problem.  Technical support was equally unproductive and a support case was opened which to this day has never been followed up on. more> http://tinyurl.com/6o3o3dd

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