CBS Interactive, a division of old-media television network CBS, announded yesterday the debut of MOBLOGIC, a new daily web video show.

MOBLOGIC, which begins airing episodes today, paints itself as offering “news and politics with attitude.” The show will be hosted by Lindsay Campbell, the former host of video podcast Wallstrip (which started out as an independently-produced show, but is now also owned by CBS). The Moblogic website says the show will “put the news cycle in perspective by talking to ordinary people on the street.”

Rather than trying to reach out to new media consumers by repackaging mainstream content on the web, CBS Interactive is making clever use of the experience and expertise of podcasters in the creation and production of the show, engaging the writing and production talents of Adam Elend and Jeff Marks, who also currently work on Wallstrip.

The introductory video clip made us feel as though they’re either trying to be very cutesy-clever, or they don’t really know what it is they want to be or do. We’ll check back next week to see how that goes.

A launch party is being held tomorrow in Austin, Texas at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival.

Libsyn has announced an update to it stats offering will be released on Monday.

Addressed in this release:

• lack of updates for new files
• low numbers for past 9 months
• speed to load stats UI
• accuracy of data
• user agents list (zune, appleTV, iPhone, miro, etc added)
• real trending data over time.. per month/week/day downloads of episodes or entire show
• general confusion from v.1.5.2

The “old stats” 1.5.2 will continue to be updated while “new stats” 1.6 continues to catch up for some users. They expect to stop updating the old stats offering by the end of the month.

iEmulator.com, a provider of emulation solutions, has announced iEmulator Touch,  a touch-enabled PC emulator environment for iPhone and iPod Touch users running firmware version 2.0.

“Imagine being able to run most popular PC software anywhere, with full Internet connectivity, without having to lug a notebook PC around,” said John Czlonka, General Manager of iEmulator.com. “It’s a fundamental shift in how people will use mobile devices, and makes thousands of new applications available for the platform.”

“Apple’s new iPhone and iPod Touch software development kit is allowing us to quickly port iEmulator to these innovative devices,” he went on to say. “It’s an amazing development and operating environment.”

Apple today introduced the iPhone software development kit (SDK) at a special event held on its Cupertino campus. In doing so, it hit the ball out of the park, delivering the deep enterprise support that businesses want and delivering the whiz-bang sh** that everybody else wanted to see.

If that weren’t enough, Apple announced a $100 million iFund to kick-start the development of great mobile apps.

Plus Spore on the iPhone.

Delivering The Corporate Goods

The iPhone 2.0 beta release, which is immediately available, includes both the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) as well as enterprise features such as support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to provide secure, over-the-air push email, contacts and calendars as well as remote wipe, and the addition of Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to private corporate networks.

Apple has licensed Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft and is building it right into the iPhone, so that iPhone will connect out-of-the-box to Microsoft Exchange Servers 2003 and 2007. Built-in Exchange ActiveSync support also enables security features such as remote wipe, password policies and auto-discovery.

The iPhone 2.0 software supports Cisco IPsec VPN to ensure the highest level of IP-based encryption available for transmission of sensitive corporate data, as well as the ability to authenticate using digital certificates or password-based, multi-factor authentication. The addition of WPA2 Enterprise with 802.1x authentication enables enterprise customers to deploy iPhone and iPod touch with the latest standards for protection of Wi-Fi networks.

The iPhone 2.0 software provides a configuration utility that allows IT administrators to manage multiple iPhones, including password policies, VPN setting, installing certificates, email server settings and more. Once the configuration is defined it can be easily and securely delivered via web link or email to the user. To install, all the user has to do is authenticate with a user ID or password, download the configuration and tap install. Once installed, the user will have access to all their corporate IT services.

But enterprise support is just the start of it. Apple also introduced the SDK, the App Store, a giant bag of money and some whiz-bang games.

The Citizen Media Law Project has published a free online legal guide. The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School‚Äôs Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center founded to “explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development,” and the Center for Citizen Media, an initiative to “enhance and expand” grassroots media.

The Legal Guide is organized like a book, with a hyperlinked table of contents, but is also searchable by state, topic, or keyword. Topics include starting a business, privacy concerns, and intellectual property considerations. CMLP says that the guide is a “work in progress,” so users may want to check back from time to time for additional information. The group also invites lawyers, academics, journalists and others to help them in their work to “facilitate citizen participation in online media.”

The CMLP provides legal training and resources for people and organizations involved in different aspects of citizen media, as well as doing research and advocacy on issues relating to free speech, newsgathering, and intellectual property.

There have been a lot of headlines over the last few days about iCrime – the idea that the popularity of iPods is leading to a surge in violent crime.

The source for these stories is actually a nearly six-month old paper (pdf) by the Urban Institute research group. The paper argues that the recent surge in violent crime defies easy explanation, and then goes on to propose that the rise in violent offending and the explosion in the sales of iPods and other portable media devices is more than coincidental.

In fact, they argue that “America may have experienced an iCrime wave.”

Here’s the meat of their case:

In the fall of 2004, a new generation of iPods was introduced and consumer demand exploded. By the end of 2005, more than 42.3 million units had been sold, and by the end of 2006, the total was almost 90 million.

In 2005, for the first time in 12 years, violent crime increased—a trend that continued in 2006. This followed a relatively long period of decline. From 1993 until 2004, the violent crime rate fell every year, for a total decline of 38 percent. At the same time that violent crime rates began to rise, America’s streets filled with millions of people visibly wearing, and being distracted by, expensive electronic gear. Thus, there was a marked increase in both the supply of potential victims and opportunities for would-be offenders.

Past crime waves are thought to have occurred in a similar way—triggered by the introduction of a new high-status and expensive product. For instance, in the 1980s and 1990s, the proliferation of such valuable products as expensive basketball shoes or North Face jackets may have led to new crimes. However, in past instances where the supply of crime creating products increased, the consumer population purchasing these goods—and the would-be offenders coveting those products—made up a relatively small part of the U.S. population. By contrast, iPods are everywhere, and, unlike a jacket or a sneaker, one size fits all.

Unfortunately, the Urban Institute’s paper doesn’t make a very strong case; it’s not clear if the popularity of iPods and the rise in crime is coincidence, correlation or causation. In fact, the paper doesn’t tackle the most obvious question: is some significant portion of the increase attributable to ipod-related crimes?

The Urban Institute has found an iMeme, but it makes more headlines than sense.

Image: polpulux

A lot of people have trouble explaining Twitter.

The people at Common Craft, a series of short explanatory videos, do the job with Twitter in Plain English.

Favorite line: “Real life happens between blog posts and emails.”

Tech publisher Ziff Davis Media filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday, citing a decrease in revenue from print advertising and subscriptions as contributing to its decline.

The company, which publishes PC Magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly and a variety of web sites, has half a billion dollars in debt, but only $313 million in assets.

The company’s troubles are likely a bellwether for other media companies that fail to capitalize on the Internet. Ziff Davis’ tech focus meant that its readers quickly transitioned to getting their news and information online. It also meant that Ziff Davis was faced with competing with blogs, audio podcasts and video podcasts.

As a result, the company’s revenue from print advertising fell from $215 million/year in 2001 to $40 million in 2007.

BlogTalkRadio today announced that it has updated its Cinch mobile podcasting service to let you use a custom podcast feed URL. Previously, your podcast feed URL was automatically set to your mobile phone number.

When the service was introduced, we questioned the decision to embed your phone number in the feed url:

I question a service that makes it easy to do something dangerous.

BlogTalkRadio’s service uses your phone number as the URL of your podcast feed, and embeds your phone number in the feed in several ways:

http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/ Cinch is a voice to RSS service provided by BlogTalkRadio. To use this service simply call (646) 200-0000, record your message, hang up and subscribe to http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/858342####

By using this service, you’re not just advertising your phone number to the world, you’re doing it in a way that makes it easy for automated crawlers, spammers and Internet creeps to find.

This was a concern for a lot of people.

At the time, BlogTalkRadio’s Kris Smith let us know that customized RSS feed URLs would soon be available.¬† They’ve followed through quickly on their promise.

Creating a custom feed URL is a matter of visiting the site and providing:

• your phone number
• your preferred feed URL and
• your email address

With the changes, Cinch deserves another look.

If you’re interested in a service that makes creating a podcast via your cell phone a no-brainer, you’ll want to check out BlogTalkRadio’s Cinch.

Rain Recording has introduced a new Windows digital audio workstation, Solstice Spider Edition.

Rain’s new audio + gaming workstation includes an AMD Phenom 9000 Series quad-core processor, the ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series GPU, and the AMD 7-Series chipset.

“Rain has seen the convergence of our audio workstations for the purpose of not only music production, but video and multimedia content creation as well,” says Rain president Bill Paschick. “We regularly work with artists and producers who create scores for video games, television and film. On the other side, we see a lot of musicians who are also into gaming. And so the time is right to give gamers and content-producers a machine focused on both of these capabilities.”

US price $2,799.95; UK price £1,399.95 (inc. VAT)