Over at Ars Technica, Matt Lasar does a nice job pointing out how the FCC’s quarterly indecency complaint totals have again been inflated by one group: the Parents Television Council. This is something Lasar has written about before and he’s one of the few journalists who continues to ask sharp questions about the ongoing manipulation of these statistics by PTC. As Lasar notes in his latest piece:

for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March? 179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council‘s website. And sure enough, there’s a plausible instigator—a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV’s Family Guy.

This “complaint box stuffing” is something I wrote quite a bit about in the past, especially in my 2005 paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” As I pointed out there, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” Specifically, as I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), the FCC quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints in 2003 & 2004 that PTC  requested:

• On July 1, 2003, the agency began tallying each computer-generated complaint sent to the FCC by any advocacy group as an individual complaint, rather than as one complaint as had been done previously. The advocacy group benefiting from that change had challenged the FCC to make the change by June 30th and boasted later that it was responsible for the FCC’s redirection, citing reassurances of FCC commissioners.
• In the first quarter of 2004 — the time when the Super Bowl incident with Janet Jackson occurred — the FCC began counting complaints multiple times if the individual sent the complaint to more than one office within the FCC. This change, which had the capability of increasing by a factor of 5 or 6 or 7 the number of complaints recorded, was noted in a footnote of that quarter’s FCC Quarterly Report. The footnote acknowledged that “[t]he reported counts may also include duplicate complaints or contacts…”

As I have made clear before, I have absolutely no problem with the PTC, or any other advocacy group exercising their First Amendment rights to petition their government and make their views known. What I do have a problem with — a very big problem, in fact — is when one group so disproportionately influences the process, especially by changing the way complaints are counted. And I’m even willing to ignore the “robo-complaint” nature of their automated complaint-generation machine. After all, countless other groups use similar tactics today to flood government offices and agencies with thousands or even millions of digital form letters. But when you change the rules of the game to favor you and your preferred outcome, well, that’s just shameful.

What’s even more troubling about the way the FCC changed it complaint counting process to make the PTC happy is that the agency failed to provide the public official notice of these changes outside of some limited and quite confusing fine print in the footnotes of quarterly reports. Look as hard as you want at the FCC website and you will not find any press releases or summaries of these changes during that period. And there does not appear to be any mention of these changes in any speeches by FCC Commissioners or bureau chiefs then or since.  More shockingly, as far as I can tell, the FCC only made these methodological changes for indecency complaints, not for any other category of complaints that the agency receives!  Finally, and probably worst of all, these bogus numbers were then used by FCC officials and congressional lawmakers as supporting evidence for the supposed public outcry for more regulation of television and radio.

It’s an outrage, especially when you realize that the programs that the PTC wants censored are among the most popular on television, as I thoroughly documented in my paper.  In other words, they don’t speak for most of us when it comes to what we want to watch or listen to.  I hope the new FCC understands these bogus indecency complaint numbers do not reflect the wishes of most consumers.  Finally, those in the PTC or elsewhere who are offended by “The Family Guy” or other shows on television have plenty of tools and methods at their disposal to make sure those programs are not seen in their homes.  Please don’t try to impose your will on the rest of us when you have the tools at your disposal to do this job for you and your family.  Let’s not make Uncle Sam our National Nanny.

California has asked the Supreme Court to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that a California video game statute was unconstitutional.  [Game Politics.com has complete coverage, and there’s more over at Ars and USA Today’s Game Hunters blog.]

Brief background: In late February, the Ninth Circuit upheld an August 2007 ruling by a California district court decision in the case of Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger [decision here], which struck down a California law, passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), which would have blocked the sale of “violent” video games to those under 18 and required labels on all games. Offending retailers could have been fined for failure to comply with the law.  After being challenged by the Video Software Dealers Association and the Entertainment Software Association and, the district court blocked the law arguing that it violated both the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution.

California’s decision to appeal the law up to the Supreme Court [petition is here] sets up a potential historic First Amendment decision (if they Court agrees to take the case, that is).  California is asking the Court to consider two questions:

1. Does the First Amendment bar a state from restricting the sale of violent video games to minors?

2. If the First Amendment applies to violent video games that are sold to minors, and the standard of review is strict scrutiny, under Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. F.C.C., 512 U.S. 622, 666 (1994), is the state required to demonstrate a direct causal link between violent video games and physical and psychological harm to minors before the state can prohibit the sale of the games to minors?

California is essentially asking the Supreme Court to engage in a constitutional revolution and upset a century’s worth of First Amendment jurisprudence.

The State wants the Court to equate violent media content with sexual content, which in certain limited cases can be regulated if deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors” (“HTM”).   If you thought that business was messy and hopelessly arbitrary, just wait till we let the Federal Communications Commission or state regulators open this new Pandora’s Box of content regulation and go after “excessively violent” content.

I’ve sorted through some of those thorny issues before (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and there’s just no getting around the fact that it is remarkably difficult to come up with any sort of workable test for what counts as “excessively violent” media content.  And that may be one of the reasons that the courts have historically steered clear of bringing violent content under the HTM standard. As EFF noted in a filing to the FCC this week:

speech can only acquire HTM status as a result of sexual content. Courts have repeatedly held that nonsexual depictions of violence are not covered by the HTM doctrine and are just as constitutionally protected for minors (against state action) as they are for adults. A series of court decisions, for example, has repeatedly invalidated state attempts to regulate minors’ access to violent video games.

I’m not an expert at reading legal tea leaves, but I really would be shocked if the Supreme Court took this case because I doubt they are eager to “unsettle” this relatively settled body of law and bring about a First Amendment revolution in the process.

The full text of the California appeal follows below.

Calif Appeal of VDSA Case to Supreme Court http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15694645&access_key=key-1kpkxx35dnffdodp2g81&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

And so begins another fight over data retention. As Declan summarizes:

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations. The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates. […] Two bills have been introduced so far — S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act.

Julian also has coverage over at Ars and quotes CDT’s Greg Nojeim who says the data retention language is “invasive, risky, unnecessary, and likely to be ineffective.”  I think that’s generally correct.  Moreover, I find it ironic that at a time when so many in Congress seemingly want online providers to collect and retain LESS data about users, this bill proposes that ISPs be required to collect and retain MORE data. One wonders how those two legislative priorities will be reconciled!!

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good that Congress is taking steps to address the scourge of child pornography — especially with stiffer sentences for offenders and greater resources for law enforcement officials. Extensive data retention mandates, however, would be unlikely to help much given the ease with which bad guys will likely circumvent those requirements using alternative access points or proxies.  Finally, retention mandates pose a threat to the privacy of average law-abiding citizens and impose expensive burdens of online intermediaries.

We’ve had more to say about data retention here at the TLF over the years.  Here’s a few things to read:

• Yahoo! Data-Retention Policy vs. The New Justice Department, by Cord Blomquist
• Another Reason to Be Wary of Age Verification & Data Retention Mandates, by Adam Thierer, October 30, 2006.
• Mandatory Data Retention: How Much is Appropriate? by Adam Thierer, June 26, 2006.
• Internet Data Storage Is The Wrong Way To Combat Child Sexual Exploitation, by Hance Haney, Sept. 20, 2006.
• Data Retention on the Move, by Jim Harper, June 1, 2006.

Matt Lasar of Ars tells us not to worry about the Fairness Doctrine being revived, only to go on and cite several lawmakers who have said they’d like to revive it. Meanwhile, over at the American Spectator, somebody called “The Prowler” seems to have all sorts of unnamed sources on the Hill telling him the Fairness Doctrine will be revived any day now.

Who knows what to believe. But let’s keep our eye on the real issue here. The danger is not that the Fairness Doctrine gets back on the books in the same form; it’s that versions of it sneak in through the back door via other regulatory initiatives. As Cord Blomquist pointed out here last April, “localism is the new Fairness Doctrine.”  There are a lot of people are running around Washington today insisting that government must intervene in the marketplace to “save media localism” and “strengthen the public interest obligations” of local TV and radio broadcasters.  There’s been an FCC proceeding open on this issue for some time, and everything about it reeks of the Fairness Doctrine in drag.

This effort is being spearheaded by the media reformistas whose short-term goal is to reinvigorate the amorphous “public interest standard” such that the FCC has open-ended powers to regulate everything under the sun going forward. That’s why a key part of the “localism” battle is their effort to breathe new life into “ascertainment rules,” which used to be more formal and required broadcasters to strictly report everything they aired and did in their communities. There’s lots of talk of ensuring more “accountability” from broadcasters regarding how they serve their local communities, and there’s even rumblings of “local community boards” who will sit as mini-free speech Star Chambers and pass judgment on whether local media outlets are doing their job.  Again, it’s all just the Fairness Doctrine by another name.

The Left is essentially engaged in a brilliant diversionary tactic here: Let the those opposed to the Fairness Doctrine work themselves up into a lather about it but then tell them that you have no intention of reimposing it and so there is nothing to fear.  Meanwhile, they are pushing all sorts of regulatory nonsense in through the back door under less ominous-sounding names like “localism requirements” or “public interest” reforms.  All this was scripted out years ago in reports by Free Press and the Center for American Progress. (See this and this).  And check out this extraordinarily disturbing editorial — “A License for Local Reporting” — by several journalism professors that foreshadows what is to come.  It’s all a massive affront to the First Amendment.

Incidentally, Brian Anderson and I summarize all these new threats in our book, A Manifesto for Media Freedom. And, to peer inside the mind of the media reformista movement, you might want to read my essays on “Information Control Fantasies,” “What the Media Reformistas Really Want,” and “Thoughts on the Media Access Movement.”  The Fairness Doctrine may not be revived verbatim, but this war is not yet over.  Be vigilant, defenders of free speech!

Here’s some good background and analysis from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) about the history and constitutional issues surrounding the Fairness Doctrine. (Matt Lasar has a summary of it over at Ars). The report, authored by CRS legislative attorney Kathleen Ann Ruane, does a nice job of outlining why, given heightened Supreme Court scrutiny of speech controls since the Red Lion days, the Fairness Doctrine would face serious constitutional scrutiny is it was re-instituted today:

It is possible that, in light of the proliferation of different types of media outlets since Red Lion, the Supreme Court will abandon the scarcity rationale for applying a lower standard of scrutiny to restrictions on broadcasters’ speech. If the scarcity rationale is abandoned, the Court will likely begin to apply strict scrutiny to broadcaster speech restrictions like the Fairness Doctrine. Because the Supreme Court has struck down regulations similar to the Fairness Doctrine when applied to other types of media, it seems unlikely that the Fairness Doctrine would survive review under strict scrutiny. […] Assuming that the Supreme Court would continue to apply intermediate scrutiny to government restrictions on broadcasters’ speech, the Court would then need to decide whether the Fairness Doctrine withstands such scrutiny. The Court may choose to uphold Red Lion and the Fairness Doctrine under the principle of stare decisis, which requires courts to adhere to precedent. The Court also may choose to analyze a newly established Fairness Doctrine in light of evidence regarding its effects on speech that has developed since the Red Lion decision. To do so, it would have to answer two questions: (1) whether the Fairness Doctrine advances a substantial government interest, and (2) whether the doctrine is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.

But it most certainly would not pass muster is applied to cable or satellite:

It does not appear that the Fairness Doctrine may be applied constitutionally to cable or satellite service providers. The Supreme Court has held that content-based restrictions on the speech of cable and satellite providers are subject to strict scrutiny. Strict scrutiny requires that the restriction at issue advance a compelling government interest and that the restriction be the least restrictive means of achieving that interest. Content-based regulations of speech in the print media are accorded strict scrutiny. The Supreme Court has recognized that regulations similar to the Fairness Doctrine, when applied to the print media, are not constitutional. If regulations similar to the Fairness Doctrine could not withstand strict scrutiny when applied to the print media, it appears unlikely that similar regulations would withstand such scrutiny when applied to cable or satellite providers.

Complete report is embedded below as a Scribd document.

CRS Fairness Doctrine Report http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=12301246&access_key=key-ck3gk7wdn7wz0e6pihg&page=1&version=1&viewMode=list

Over at Ars, Ryan Paul has an appropriately sharp-tongued response to the Mozilla Foundation’s troubling move to become a cheerleader for the European Commission’s ongoing antitrust efforts against Microsoft. Apparently Mozilla will assist the EC’s investigation “by offering expertise about the browser market.”

Paul focuses on what’s wrong with this in both a micro and macro sense. He rightly points out that the potential remedies here do not bode well for the future of this sector, since regulatory tinkering with high-tech product standards is bound to end badly and create a terrible precedent for future interventions. “It’s hard to find a rational argument in favor of mandatory standards enforcement,”  Paul says. “It would be punitive and unhelpful to the advancement of the web.” Moreover, Paul notes that things have never looked better on the browser front:

Claims that Microsoft’s monopoly status has eliminated competition in the browser market sound hollow in the face of the profoundly vibrant browser market that exists today. The record-setting launch of Firefox 3 added up to over 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours alone. Firefox’s global market share continues to climb every month and the browser has grabbed almost 30 percent of the European market.

And let’s not forget about those two little companies called Google and Apple who have competing products in the field! They’re making serious inroads in the browser wars. Moreover, Microsoft is struggling to hold on to whatever “dominance” they have left in their core market: OS. As Paul concludes:

To the observant tech enthusiast, all signs seem to indicate that Microsoft’s monopoly is on its way out. The Redmond giant is in no danger of annihilation, but it’s definitely not positioned to dictate terms to the rest of the industry anymore.

But what is perhaps most shocking about Mozilla’s call for intervention is the way that Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker minimizes the importance of not just Firefox, but the entire open source movement, when justifying EC intervention in this marketplace.

“The success of Mozilla and Firefox does not indicate a healthy marketplace for competitive products,” she wrote. “I am convinced that we could not have been, and will not be, successful except as a public benefit organization living outside the commercial motivations. And I certainly hope that neither the EU nor any other government expects to maintain a healthy Internet ecosystem based on nonprofits stepping in to correct market deficiencies.”

As Paul points out in his Ars story, “[Mozilla’s] position on this matter is highly questionable.” Indeed, I believe it’s more than just highly questionable, it’s a bit of insult to an entire community of developers. Paul is generally correct in his response that:

There are quite a few open source software enthusiasts who would argue that, for a broad range of software products, the emergence of a Mozilla-like model is actually desirable and highly advantageous for consumers. A point will eventually arrive for many kinds of software where there is simply no point in trying to derive value from shrink-wrapping it, and then efforts will converge around collaboratively-developed open source implementations that will displace and eliminate the need for proprietary commercial implementations. Why should that be viewed as unhealthy?

Indeed, but it actually goes beyond that. The message that Mozilla’s Baker seems to sending to the open source community is: You can’t change the world. Your voluntary, collaborative actions cannot correct market deficiencies or fulfill unmet needs.

Geez, isn’t that what the open source movement is all about?!  I’m hardly some sort of open source / free software fanatic — indeed, I envision a future full of plenty of open source AND proprietary types of software and service — but the beauty of the open source movement to me is the way it has so nicely filled unsatisfied niches of demand in the software universe.  And, here’s the really important point, as Paul points out in his Ars article:

The popularization of the open source development model arguably emerged as a response to Microsoft’s monopoly. Developers had to find innovative ways to compete with an entrenched product. If the government had intervened in the software industry at an early stage and those conditions hadn’t existed, the browser market could arguably be a lot less rich and competitive than it is today. If Internet Explorer had never gained the dominant marketshare to necessitate a change in the status quo, the only browser choices we would have today might be between an ad-encumbered Opera and a proprietary Netscape.

That is exactly right. I have been making the argument for many years that it is at a market’s supposedly darkest hour that we are likely seeing some of the most exciting innovation being spawned. People don’t innovate most when they are completely happy with the world around them. It’s when they are pissed-off that they get cracking!!  Mozilla’s Firefox is the perfect example of that. And so is just about everything that Google and Apple have developed in response to Microsoft over the past 10 years.

And yet, sadly, the folks at the Mozilla Foundation want to now become handmaidens to the state — and the European Commission, no less — in their pathetic effort to stick it to a competitor using the law instead of using more marketplace innovation and competition. SHAME ON YOU MOZILLA!  I would dump your browser today if I didn’t love it so much! And thank you to all the brilliant, dedicated people behind the scenes who do keep innovating and making Firefox even better. I sincerely hope that the Mozilla Foundation doesn’t speak for you on this matter.

Over at Ars, Matt Lasar has a piece about the need for better FCC indecency complaint statistics. He has been monitoring the wild fluctuations in indecency complaint tallies in recent years and wonders:

whether the agency’s indecency/obscenity statistics reflect spontaneous viewer response to the level of erotic/linguistic friskiness on TV or solely on the power of coordinated campaigns launched by groups like the Parents Television Council.

Indeed, PTC is the primary culprit. As I noted in my big 2005 PFF report “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process”, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” The PTC has even taken credit for it themselves, as I noted in the paper.

How did the FCC’s indecency process get so screwy, and how did the PTC come to influence it so greatly? As I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), in recent years the FCC has quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints, both changes urged upon the FCC by a single advocacy group — the PTC — targeting broadcast indecency:

• On July 1, 2003, the agency began tallying each computer-generated complaint sent to the FCC by any advocacy group as an individual complaint, rather than as one complaint as had been done previously. The advocacy group benefiting from that change had challenged the FCC to make the change by June 30th and boasted later that it was responsible for the FCC’s redirection, citing reassurances of FCC commissioners.
• In the first quarter of 2004 — the time when the Super Bowl incident with Janet Jackson occurred — the FCC began counting complaints multiple times if the individual sent the complaint to more than one office within the FCC. This change, which had the capability of increasing by a factor of 5 or 6 or 7 the number of complaints recorded, was noted in a footnote of that quarter’s FCC Quarterly Report. The footnote acknowledged that “[t]he reported counts may also include duplicate complaints or contacts…”

For many years, the PTC has pressured the FCC to change their methodology to give greater weight to their computer-generated e-mail complaint campaigns. It appears their efforts paid off and now the PTC and other groups are essentially able to “stuff the ballot box” in terms of inflating indecency complaints at the FCC and potentially spurring increased regulatory activism as a result. In turn, these bogus numbers are cited in the press and in political statements by lawmakers when they are seeking to expand fines or regulations.

Unfortunately, even if Congress forced the FCC to fix these problems with the indecency complaint process, so long as the agency and that process exists there will be groups like PTC trying to use it to influence public policy and impose speech controls in this country. The millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with what they see on TV or hear on radio are never going to send a letter to the FCC saying as much. It’s only the hecklers that bombard the FCC with complaints and get them heard and acted upon, even if they only represent a minority viewpoint about video and audio programming.

Of course, these hecklers could just turn off those devices or use parental control tools and stratgies to deal with what their kids see and hear. Instead, those folks want to impose their will on ALL of us. Worse yet, they now are expanding their mission to include the Internet. Thankfully, we don’t have a Federal Computer Commission fielding bogus complaints about the Net.  At least not yet.

When people ask me why I do what I do for a living — and, more specifically, why I focus all my attention on digital media and technology policy — I often respond by showing them the new gadgets or software I am playing with at any given time.  I just love digital technology.  I am swimming in a sea of digital gadgets, consumer electronics, online applications, computing software, video games, and all sorts of cyber-stuff.

Anyway, even though this is a technology policy blog, I sometimes highlight new digital toys or applications that have changed my life for the better. As the year winds down, therefore, I thought I would share with you five technologies that improved my life and productivity in 2008. I’d also love to hear from all of you about the technologies that you fell in love with this year in case I might have missed them. Here’s my list:

#1) Naturally Speaking 10:

Thanks to Nate Anderson’s outstanding review over at Ars Technica, I finally made the plunge and bought Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 earlier this month.  Wow, what a life-changer. I had played around with an earlier version of this market-leading speech recognition technology and found it somewhat clunky and unreliable. But Ver. 10, has ironed out almost all the old problems and become an incredibly sophisticated piece of software in the process. I love the way I can use simple voice commands to navigate menus in Microsoft Word and in Firefox. Perhaps best of all, I can dictate random rants into a pocket recording device and then upload them to Naturally Speaking (via a USB connection) and have them instantly transcribed. I’m even composing blog entries like this using it! Only problem is inserting HTML code; that’s still a hassle. Also, I find that switching from one input device to another definitely affects the quality of the transcription. Once you “train” Naturally Speaking using one device, it makes sense to stick with it. It’s not just the quality of the microphone; it’s also the proximity to your mouth that makes a difference. Regardless, this is one great product and, best of all, it’s should help save my rapidly-aging hands from becoming prematurely arthritic! All those years of video games and keyboards have taken their toll. #2) Scribd:

Like many other policy wonks and academics, I’ve long been housing my papers and studies on SSRN to give them more widespread visibility or share them with others. But SSRN’s format is clunky and its functionality is extremely limited. Worst of all, it didn’t provide any embeddable code such that documents could be hosted directly within a blog post. Scribd solves all those problems for me. It’s a slick document-hosting service that is also highly searchable. It also offers up relevant documents as you are viewing others (the same way YouTube does for video). Very cool feature. Better yet, Scribd let’s you create groups for your organization or interests to collect related documents in one place. (For example, check out the PFF group page here.) Why couldn’t SSRN be more like this?!

#3) Ubiquity for Firefox:

“CTRL-SPACE BAR.” Thanks to Ubiquity, that keyboard shortcut has forever changed the way I use the Firefox web browser. I know this won’t seem like a big deal to some people, but for an old geek like me, I still prefer navigating some applications with keyboard shortcuts instead of using my mouse and drop-down menus. Ubiquity lets me do so in a browser environment. Basically, anytime I see something in my browser that I’d like more info about, I just run my cursor over that term, hit CTRL/SPACE and up pops a command prompt box that lets me run an inquiry of my choice. Once that box pops up, I can run a quick search about the term by just typing Google, MSN, or Yahoo and then hitting enter. Or I can map it instantly by typing “map.” Or search for an image or video related to it by typing “Flickr” or “YouTube.” Or “eBay” it. Or “Wiki” it. Or “Digg” it. And so on, and so on. Here’s lists of the command prompts at your disposal (1, 2, 3).

#4) HTC Touch (Verizon Wireless XV6900):

Screw the iPhone. This is little beauty can do everything the iPhone can do and do it in more compact package. This thing sits in my front shirt pocket and I often forget its there. It also has a stylus. Don’t understand how you iPhone zombies get along without one. It also has none of the silly restrictions that encumber the iPhone. I’ve downloaded more mods and apps to this thing than I know what to do with. While you iPhoners are salivating over the slim pickings at the iPhone apps store, I’m sitting on 10,000 choices to decide from over at Handango (and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the market for homebrew hacks). HTC’s TouchFlo navigation is very cool and works effortlessly with the flick of your thumb. The touchscreen keyboard wasn’t so hot, but who cares when dozens of aftermarket ones are available (I went with Resco). Same goes for the IE mobile browser, which is the weak spot of any Windows Mobile equipped device. But I solved that problem with my next choice…

#5) Skyfire mobile web browser:

The mobile version of Internet Explorer has just never cut it, and Skyfire capitalized on that fact to produce a very slick touchscreen browser for Windows Mobile smartphones. The early beta version had some bugs, but they’ve been working those out and producing a great product in the process. Is the iPhone Safari mobile browser better? Yes, it still is. Even an Apple-hater like me will admit it.  But Skyfire is catching up quickly.

Honorable mentions…

LinkedIn: Yes, I know LinkedIn has been around a couple of years, but it really took off in 2008 and made impressive improvements to become more than just the “Facebook for Old Farts” I once thought it was. I am a huge fan of the new applications they have worked into the site, especially the WordPress blog app and the Amazon books app.

Google Chrome: Although it won’t be displacing Firefox in my heart any time soon, I have come to really appreciate Chrome’s speed compared to my Firefox experience, which is now bogged down with waaaaaay too many add-ons. (So much so that it takes me well over a minute to even get Firefox to boot up!) So, I pull up Chrome and run it alongside Firefox to surf script-heavy or graphically-intensive sites (like ESPN.com) or to just keep my eMail accounts and LinkedIn page active on another screen.