This guest post is written by , Web Strategist and technology producer for . Matt focuses on the macro themes affecting the internet and the wider world.

In an intimate interview with Charlie Rose on PBS tonight, and available , Stanford professor reveals some profound views on copyright, remix culture, and the new hybrid economy that is emerging.

A reform of copyright is clearly overdue. We require a new form of regulation that takes into account the ease and speed of digital distribution and appropriation. Every week, books cross my desk clamoring for this change - some of which are . And as Lessig explains on the show, it’s counterproductive to continue to criminalize kids for file-sharing, remixing and recreating with content. Copyright was established to encourage creativity, not stifle it.

A lot of these remixes also come across my desk. In the spirit of research, here are a few of the best so far: , , . They’re all superb. And yes, we do encourage this. As Lessig says, Please do it. Hybrid Economy

Larry Lessig’s interview on Charlie Rose was first broadcast on Friday 11/21/08 on PBS, and is available in full or in clips: , . Matt Rutherford can be reached at matt@charlierose.com.

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When Apple started running the anti-Vista commercial (above) mocking Microsoft for spending $300 million on Vista’s own ad campaign instead of on fixing its problems, I called it hypocritical:

Apple’s advertising budget is also pretty massive. I mean, I see more Apple commercials on TV than ads for Barack Obama. Apple is on track to spend more than $3.5 billion on SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) for its fiscal year that ended September 30. How much of that was spent on advertising? I don’t know, but 10 percent doesn’t seem unreasonable.

It turns out that I underestimated Apple’s advertising budget. Lindsay Blakely at (a former Business 2.0 reporter) found the actual numbers in a subsequent SEC filing. In its 2008 fiscal year that just ended last September, Apple spent a whopping $486 million on advertising. (In fiscal year 2007, it spent $467 million, and in fiscal year 2006 it spent $338 million).

Update: Microsoft spends more on advertising across all of its combined businesses than Apple does, but its Windows business is what competes most directly with Apple. Microsoft’s total advertising budget across all of its businesses, including Windows, Office, Xbox, and all the enterprise stuff, was the following (from the ): “Advertising expense was $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion, and $1.2 billion in fiscal years 2008, 2007, and 2006, respectively.”

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Tomorrow, YouTube will be showcasing its first live stream as it broadcasts its celebration, which will bring together a host of celebrities, musicians, and notable YouTubers for a massive event in San Francisco. The show will be streamed on YouTube beginning at 5 PM PST, and will include performances from Katy Perry, will.i.am, Joe Satriani, Tay Zonday (the Chocolate Rain guy), and a number of other musicians. I’m personally looking forward to a special appearance from the Mythbusters team.

YouTube hasn’t yet made any announcements regarding a livestreaming service for regular users (which would pit it directly against services like ) but it won’t be surprising if we hear from them tomorrow about the company’s upcoming plans. We first heard about possible streaming functionality back in January, and later confirmed that it would be coming some time this year.

YouTube’s Chris Di Cesare that the event may be the first of a series of annual live-streamed get-togethers celebrating the year in viral videos. We’ll have another post tomorrow with some of the highlights.

Update: There have also been that the event will actually be powered by or another third party.

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A 17 year old named Eric Calisto is about to learn a valuable lesson in dealing with disappointment. He’s asking Google to use a on their site on December 2, his birthday, and he’s urging people to call, email and fax Google with their support.

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In partnership with the LeWeb conference, in Paris on December 9th and 10th, we are going to be giving away one ticket to the TechCrunch reader who leaves the best comment about why they want to go (and includes a contact e-mail address). We are also excited that LeWeb’s organizers are offering TechCrunch readers a Thank You LeWeb

a provider of managed hosting solutions

TechCrunch’s exclusive hosting provider, and a worldwide leader in managed hosting solutions across all major platforms

a webware meta instant messaging client with over seven million users

the world’s first fully automated dedicated managed hosting solution

the makers of PSD2HTML and other solutions to turn design documents into W3C compliant XHTML

a product design and engineering firm

the video micro-blogging service that powers video commenting on TechCrunch

, the makers of the , and other toolbars

the maker of GoGrid, the world’s first multi-server control panel that allows you to deploy cloud server networks in minutes

the makers of CrashPlanPro, an automatic backup solution

a hosted e-mail solutions provider

TechCrunch also is happy to announce two new sponsorship opportunities. First, is publishing a , which is the perfect way for your company to reach people as they research their purchases this holiday season. Second, we are now offering a full banner (468×60) on TechCrunch’s RSS feed, which has over 1.2 million subscribers. If you are interested in either of these opportunities, please e-mail Dan Kimerling

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Every time I scroll through my list of ‘Friends’ on Facebook, I inevitably come to the same (somewhat depressing) conclusion: I have absolutely no idea who many of these people are. This is mostly my fault - my standards have always been pretty low when it comes to accepting inbound requests, and I never kept up with assigning them to appropriate Friends Lists. But there’s also the fact that Facebook doesn’t do much to automatically differentiate between friends and acquaintances (while it does filter your News Feed based on who it thinks you’re interested in, there isn’t a way to automatically generate a list of “good friends” versus everyone else).

, an Israeli startup backed by veteran VC Yossi Vardi, is looking to help differentiate between acquaintances and close friends. Today the company has launched its own social network at that attempts to determine how strong the connections are between users by analyzing their relationships on other sites across the web (it also asks you to manually input your relationship with each friend, but this isn’t required). The site presents a number of “paths” connecting you with each friend in a manner similar to , that helps users determine the degree of “social trust” they have with each user. At this point it’s too early to tell how well the system works, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Other companies have tried to do similar social connection strength mapping, including .

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The elections were good to the , the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore (see chart below). In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.

As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the from Google Trends (above), it looks like traffic is at the very least plateauing so far in November, as you would expect.

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If you were intrigued by BitGravity’s Multiview product that allows viewers to choose from six different camera angles as they watch an event, check out episode 177 of Diggnation today at 3 pm PST.

The regular “director’s cut” will be shown at at . The customized version will be available on the Revision3 website.

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When most private companies reach 500 shareholders, they trigger an SEC rule which effectively treats them like a public company and requires them to some of the same reporting requirements. Google ran into this issue just before it went public. Now Facebook is quickly reaching that same threshold as it continues to hire and allows employees to sell shares to outside investors.

But in a letter dated October 13, 2008 (embedded below), Facebook’s lawyers argue that rule should not apply to Facebook because most of the shareholders are employees. The SEC

- Get more

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Yahoo has been rumored to be selling Paris-based comparative shopping site for some time now, and it appears that they have found a buyer. Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for €475 million.

The company has been sold to a UK-based private equity firm called Jamplant Ltd (update: is a profile of the fund) for something less than €100 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.

Ex-Kelkoo CEO announced the news on his blog (in french), and a copy of the internal email announcing the acquisition is below.

The company has lost much of its momentum since the Yahoo acquisition in the face of significant .

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Some apps wander around the wilderness for a while until they can find the perfect home. For , that home is the iPhone. The note-taking, picture-capturing, voice-recording, handwriting-recognizing universal memory service has been under development for years and launched last February in private beta on the PC. But it wasn’t until May 29 that it debuted on the iTunes store as an . That’s when it started to take off.

Here is Evernote’s Elevator Pitch:

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Color me impressed with this one: Prague-based , a network of ‘Virtual Reality’ photographers promoting high-resolution spherical imagery, has integrated its portfolio of stunning 360° panorama shots into the Featured Preview Layer for Google Earth.

A collection of the panoramas just became visible automatically to every user of the free 3D earth visualization software, and the rest of the 360cities database, which is nearly 10,000 spherical images strong, has been added to the Gallery in Google Earth as well. Some of these are breathtakingly beautiful: check out this shot of the , or the inside of this , or this , or the Cuban corner bar I embedded below.

I love seeing people outside of Google doing their best to enhance the Google Earth experience, although it must be said that the company is doing its part too. Recently, they made it possible to .

Note: this only works with the latest version of (4.2), which features the new PhotoOverlay format. You can download the KMZ file .

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We’ve received two reports tonight of users having their email notification settings on Facebook deleted. They were notified at login that there was a problem, and told to head over to the Notifications page to reset them.

At least one user is about it. The other (Simon from ), who sent the screenshot above, was more contemplative. He suggests someone simply forgot to back up a table before implementing an enhancement. I checked my account, and it’s fine.

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What are the social consequences when science allows us to see things that had previously been invisible?

Scientists have revealed microscopic life, nanoscale molecules and galaxies billions of light-years away. These images have revolutionized the disciplines in which they were made, but they also transformed the public's imagination, giving common people new things to think and dream about.

The intertwined social, scientific and artistic impacts of 19th century photography is the subject of a new exhibit, Brought to Light Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900, at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.

This gallery looks at some of the more astounding images and stories from the exhibit.

Left: Hermann Schnauss, Electrograph of a brass wire gauge, 1900 As the men of industry attempted to harness electricity for profit, the public — which knew electricity primarily as lightning — had to be persuaded that this powerful, invisible force was something to invite into their homes. Electrographs like this one, produced by exposing a photographic negative with electricity, helped the public visualize and understand the mysterious electromagnetic waves that scientists were discovered populating the air.

"This is a moment where [scientists] are trying to harness electricity for practical purposes, but the general public was kind of skeptical," said Corey Keller, curator of the Brought to Light exhibit. "Their experiences with electricity were generally through lighting, which they knew could burn things down and kill you, if you weren't careful. So a great deal of time and money was spent trying to make electricity understandable and approachable."

In the early history of photography, capturing motion was out of the question. The photographic negatives of the time were not sensitive enough to light to be exposed over the short time periods required to capture fast action.

"If you look at 19th century cityscapes, you would think that Armageddon had taken place. You don't see any people," Keller said. "It's not that they aren't there, it's just that they don't show up because they walked through too quickly."

But by the end of the 1870s, more sensitive negatives brought motion within reach. Edward Muybridge was one of the first photographers to take advantage of the new abilities.

In this photo, we see one of Muybridge's motion studies: two men boxing in jock straps. Historians note that despite the scientific trappings, Muybridge's work was just art; it did not produce good scientific evidence about bodies' movements.

The ability to capture motion in photography opened up a previously invisible source of scientific data. Etienne-Jules Marey was a scientist trying to understand biomechanics, or the motion of the body, and he used photography to acquire information he couldn't get any other way, as in this photograph of a man on a stationary bicycle.

"What happens in this picture is that each split second exposure is layered on top of each other, so you get the sense of the full arc of the motion," Keller said. "And he's put a piece of tape down the arm and torso and the leg where the joints articulated, so as the leg went around and around the whole pedal stroke is outlined."

This wasn't just to create beautiful pictures; Marey was on a committee in France to improve the ergonomics of the newly popular bicycle.

"So by studying the motion of the leg, he would have been able to improve the engineering of the bicycle," Keller concluded.

While forward-looking scientists like Marey were using photography to understand, for example, how animals moved, as in this photo, others were less enthused about this new technology.

In particular, photographers' ability to capture images beyond what the human eye could perceive called into question an important tenet of 19th century science.

"What's amazing is that this is a moment where empirical observation in science is the most important thing, that idea of objective observation. And this kind of photography proved how completely useless a human observer was," said Keller. "So you end up with this photographic data that cant' be corroborated in any other way. It exists independently of any kind of perceptual experience."

Technology's ability to capture detail and motion more accurately than our eyes has only accelerated, of course, as anyone who has seen incredible ultra-slow-motion YouTube videos can attest.

When William Roentgen announced his discovery of X-rays, a photo of his wife's hand accompanied his paper as it made its way into the scientific community.

Over the next few years, images like this one of a skeletal hand with the ring came to symbolize X-rays. Practically, the hand is relatively flat and therefore easy to X-ray, but it was the aesthetics and grim-reaper symbolism that Keller said hit a nerve with the upper classes.

"It became fashionable to have an X-ray portrait taken of your hand," she said, calling attention to x-ray hand portraits of the last tsar of Russia and his wife.

The discovery of X-rays also touched off a lower-brow commercial craze. Within three months, DIY X-ray kits were available on the market. Photographers, who had access to most of the tools needed to make the images, began to train this new form of light on just about anything that might be beautiful.

"They were X-raying everything just to see what it looked like," Keller said.

One stunning example is this X-ray of a foot in a shoe from 1897. In fact, the connection between X-rays and extremities has remained strong. Even into the 1960s, shoe stores kept X-ray machines in their lobbies, both as marketing tools and to help their salesmen fit their patrons' feet correctly.

Throughout the second-half of the 19th century, photographers strived to unite the camera with the telescope. The moon, in particular, held a lasting fascination for astronomers and artists alike.

Imaging the moon, after all, was an immensely difficult task. The Earth rotates and the moon is actually a relatively faint object. It wasn't until John Adams Whipple and George Phillips Bond figured out how to rotate their camera ever so slightly to cancel out Earth's movement that simple images of our only satellite became possible.

What's interesting is that despite the fascination with creating pictures of the moon, like this striking image created in Spain, the images didn't add much for science beyond what detailed drawings could already do.

If you wanted close-up photos of the moon any time before the Apollo missions, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them. And that's exactly what an engineer and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim.

James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.

"No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science," the reviewer wrote.

But what's really appealing about the images isn't their "truthfulness" but their "truthiness."

"Astronomers were perfectly aware of what they were looking at," Keller said. "But they felt that because they were photographed, it added a layer of authenticity to the undertaking that simple drawings didn't have."

At the other end of the scale of size from the moon, other photographers were pushing their discipline into the microscopic realm. They had to devise new emulsion chemistries and types of equipment to capture clear images of tiny things.

Leading the charge was Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, who worked to overcome any challenge that scientists threw at him. Unfortunately, he died during social unrest in France in 1871, and his images lay in a photographic archive until Keller brought them to the US for the exhibition.

Even as they solved technical challenges, the photomicrographers faced social resistance. The idea of representing a specific living thing instead of a generalized abstraction of an organism forced scientists to let go of long-held notions about their discipline.

"Prior to the 19th century, the scientific illustrations tend to represent a type, an ideal. So if you were going to do a picture of a flower, for example, the illustrator would look at 20 flowers and then take the common features and make an ideal flower," said Keller. "So, if that particular one happens to have a defective petal or something peculiar to it, you never really know: Does that photograph substitute then for that type of flower in general, or does it only represent that one specimen?"

While it may have posed a challenge for scientists of the 19th century, it's the unique nature of each photograph taken during this early period that wows us, even now.