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Confess 2 Me is a site where people who are feeling down for something wrong that they have done can tell the world about it, without having to disclose who they are. On the other hand, the site will also be useful to people who like to study the nature of human being as they will be able to learn more about why people do the things they do, and what does it take for them to repent for what they have done. The confessions that you can read on this site do not stick to a single line of thought or severity. Read more Learn more about Confess2.me in Dataopedia.com Find out how much Confess2.me is worth with Stimator.com

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors yesterday in D.C. As part of an apparent strategy of mollifying the media, he insulted the integrity and professionalism of bloggers and the quality of blogs. You know. Like this one. “There is an art to what you do,” he said to the real journalists. “And if you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are.” Sponsor My hand to G-d, I’m not even sure where to begin with this one. First, I am a journalist. I mean an I-worked-for-a-newspaper, I-was-a-stringer-for-Reuters, I-was-a-host-for-NPR, I-freelanced-for-Newsweek type journalist,the sort of journalist our CEO friend was presumably talking about. But I’ve also been a blogger since 2004. This blog I now write for is in the top ten of blogs for readership and has a sterling rep for…can you guess? JOURNALISM, you blowhard. How many journalists blog? How many bloggers are journalists? How many blogs are chockablock with journalism? This motif of the whirly-eyed blogger in his pajamas was getting stale before I started my blog. (And for the record, I haven’t owned pajamas since I was old enough to shave.) “We have goals in common,” Schmidt oozed. “Google believes in the power of information. We believe that it’s better to have more information than less.” Well. It’s funny he should mention that. Schmidt, if you’ve been rusticating outside the Kuiper belt, first attracted journalistic attention, for more than his balliwick as head bean-counter at Google, when he blackballed all CNET journalists . This was a reaction to a journalist doing her job. In response to his pooh-poohing privacy questions, Elinor Mills Googled him and then published what she found. How…dare she? He’s also gained some WTF-points by trying to silence his alleged former mistress, Kate Bohmer. She had what appeared to be a fictionalized portrait of him on her blog until he marshaled a horde of lawyer-bots and sicced them on her. But being creepy is not enough to warrant coverage, not on this blog anyway. The problem is, Schmidt’s actions create a pattern of hypocrisy in relationship to the information and privacy issues on which he has so frequently pontificated. If Schmidt were the CEO of the world’s largest culvert manufacturer, it would hardly matter. But he isn’t and it does. Schmidt is a man who guides one of the world’s largest online information chaebols . He sets, or influences, policy that affects millions of people. And his Byronesque declamations of Google’s position in the moral vanguard of the Internet age seem difficult to countenance when they are set off at every turn with actions that contravene the company’s public values. Maybe Google needs some sort of guiding trope, a first-principal that all of its people could refer to; something that, if Google employees found themselves unable to harmonize with it, would oblige them to give notice and maybe run off to develop more efficient well-poisoning systems for orphanages. Something like… DON’T BE EVIL. Discuss

Recently we looked at the state of Linked Data in 2010 , noting developments such as governments putting public data online and Thomson Reuters putting structure around commercial data using OpenCalais . In a follow-up post, we explained the distinction between Linked Data, Open Data and the Semantic Web . Georgi Kobilarov, who runs a Linked Data startup from Germany called Uberblic Labs , recently issued an interesting challenge on his blog. He asked: if we had a Web of Data, what would you build? Not to steal Georgi’s thunder, but we think this is a great question to put to ReadWriteWeb readers too. Sponsor Here’s Georgi’s idea: “If we had a Web of Data, I would built an application for painless travel planning. It would integrate flight plans, train timetables, bus routes, car rental offers, etc. And the user would be able to just say: I want to go from A to B: Find me the best/cheapest/fastest routes. With a Web of Data, an application could do all that combining for me, the same way flight booking sites do that today for just flights.” Here’s my idea for an app that uses the Web of Data. I’d like a web site or app that allows me to discover the locations of original art works by my favorite artists, and then create travel itineraries for me to see some or all of those art works (most famous artists have their art works scattered around the world, in various museums and galleries). It’s possible that there is a web directory of artists somewhere that has some or even all of this data already, but if so I haven’t found it. I ask for this because every now and then I search the Web for a painting that I saw in a book. A recent example was a Modigliani painting that I was attempting to create a copy of , for my beginners acrylic painting class. The original painting was called “Portrait of Madame Hanka Zborowska.” One of the results from Google told me that the original painting is located at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, Italy. I could potentially spend hours hunting down the locations of Modigliani’s paintings, using Google – and it’s likely that some of the data isn’t currently online. So it would be great if I could query one web site or app: tell me where all the originals of Modigliani’s paintings are in the world, and draw me an itinerary for visiting all or some of them. Heck, maybe even book my flights and hotels! That’s my example of what I’d build from a Web of Data. Now tell us what site or app you would like built , if the data was available on the Web. Discuss

It’s worth noting that the cloud certainly has borders. It’s the one reality that proves the cloud computing movement may seem at times abstract and vague but in the end it is the international politics of our world that creates some of the deepest issues for its place in the world markets. According to InformationWeek , The 451 Group presented a webcast that showed cloud computing adoption trails in Europe and Asia. About 57% op spending is in the United States with 31% in Europe and 12% in Asia. The numbers get even more polarized when you only look at the adoption for infrastructure as a service. A full 93% of spending is in the United States with 6% in Europe and 1% in the United States. Sponsor The low numbers almost makes it seem like some artificial effect is in play. And in some ways it really is. A lack of European data centers services by the large providers affects adoption. Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis are the primary companies looking to develop a presence in Europe. But they need to build data centers before they can have any real presence there. According to the 451 Group, 99 percent of European businesses are either small or mid-sized organizations. And they have plenty of choices from telecommunications providers. But here is an interesting twist. InformationWeek: One obstacle to both sides is the U.S. Patriot Act, which gives the U.S. government a right to demand data if it defines conditions as being an emergency or necessary to homeland security, and a measure that contradicts that power when the data is of European origin, the European Union’s Data Protection Directive. In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that an agreement negotiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was too broadly construed and violated the EU’s directive. The agreement was about sharing data on European airline passengers headed for the U.S. The data sought by the U.S. was too broadly construed and violated the EU’s directive, the court said. “Both measures could prevent establishing a cloud without borders,” said 451’s William Fellows. Cloud advocates say services established via an Internet data center should be accessible by people around the world, and they are in the case of Google search or Facebook apps. But when it comes to sensitive data, national borders still prevail because of conflicting laws.” The issue is apparent now with Google’s issues with the Chinese government. It’s not the technology that is making cloud computing an issue. It’s international politics. Discuss

The App Star Awards is a contest that highlights brilliant and innovative upcoming applications for the iPhone (and now the iPad, too). Created by AppsFire , the service for sharing iPhone applications, the event draws submissions from all over the world. This year’s group, for example, included 80 unreleased applications from 20 different countries including Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Spain and Italy, in addition to the U.S. The finalists, 33 in total, have been broken down into three main categories: ” Games ,” ” Utility and Other ,” and ” Entertainment and Fun .” As part of the jury for this contest, we got a first look at some of the apps. Some early standouts are below. Sponsor iPhone Apps Silentale : A startup that organizes your conversations and contacts from multiple services including email, Facebook, Google, Twitter, SMS and more, is soon to be an iPhone application. This may actually prove more useful than the web app since you can browse your contacts by name or type, access links to their social network profiles and see a list of all your communications – no matter what platform they originally occurred on. Atlas : Another application fighting check-in fatigue. Similar to check.in ( previous coverage ), this app automates check-ins to Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite and, wait – what’s that? – Facebook, too? Hmm. Solar Walk : A model of the solar system for the iPhone. But this is no science fair mockup, you can pinch and zoom your way through space, rotating planets, reading details about the celestial bodies and more. It’s like Google Earth for the Universe. Pocket Zoo : An adorable (and educational) app for kids featuring over 40 animals, illustrations, photos, animal info and live animal cams from around the world. Woobius Eye : An app that lets you share sketches with phone call recipients. Take a photo, add an email address and make a call. Point to the drawing with your finger and circle items. The friend on the other end of the line can do the same.