It’s common knowledge that teens are all about getting textual, but there’s been a recent rash of coverage in the media dealing with how the under-21 set is misusing the technology. In short: while you used to steal away under the bleachers for a quick…you know…today’s kids are letting their fingers do the talking–on their iPhone keyboards.

Naturally, LG turned to Lipton — of Inside the Actors Studio fame — to remedy the problem via their Give it a Ponder campaign. The result is a hilarious, if not slightly creepy, video that is likely to have absolutely no effect on today’s youth, who have no idea who Lipton is.

via LG PSA Warns Teens: Don’t Text Pics of Your Junk [VIDEO].

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• James Lipton Teaches Teens to Think Before They Text [Sexting] (jezebel.com)
• LG: Give It A Ponder (viralblog.com)

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Meebo, provider of a popular instant messaging service, is unveiling a useful service tonight: File sharing.

The Mountain View company is letting users share files with each other, from office documents to photos to music.

Any file under ten megabytes is fair game, although each user is restricted to 30 megabytes per month, and Meebo stores files for only four hours after they’re sent.

As the school year gets going, this service could be a hit.

High school and college students are already some of the most active users of the service. It lets them IM with each other across IM protocols — including AOL’s AIM, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk — from its web browser. This useful when places like school libraries won’t let students download IM software to their desktop.

More than 6 million people use Meebo per month, and the median age is 21, the company says. Almost every user is between ages 14 and 29. More than 140 million messages are sent through Meebo daily, with about 20 million of those going through Meebo Rooms, its chat room service.

The file-sharing service works two different ways. If you’re using Meebo’s own chat protocol, simply click the file-sharing icon in the Meebo chat window, upload the file, and hit return to send. Your friend will see an icon of the file in their chat window that they click on to begin downloading it (screenshot to the left).

The company has a necessary but slightly less convenient solution for sharing files with people using Meebo to chat via other IM protocols. If you’re say, chatting with a friend on AIM, your friend will receive a web link to a Meebo page they can download the file from (screenshot below).

The service uses Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services for storing and retrieving files online. It is currently available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, although it plans to support Safari soon.

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The site says Mux is for personal, non-commercial use – I suppose to make it easier for people to share their own videos online – which is a service I personally could use. I just wonder a bit about what happens when people find a video that the owner doesn’t want shared and points this service to it.

The service also allows for you to convert and deliver any video to your cell phone. Just enter the url for the video, your cell phone number and Mux does the rest. Currently only available for subscribers of Cingular, T-mobile and Sprint in the US. Again a very interesting service for sending home video – but what about copywritten material that the owner wishes to exploit commerically?

There is a link to Amazon Web Services, the new service offering from Amazon that provides developers with direct access to Amazon’s robust technology platform. I’m not sure what type of due diligence is done when a company wants to use the platform or what the liability might be. Just speculating.

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A total of 32 million Americans aged 12 or above have downloaded a full-length movie sometime in the past, according to a new study.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek

Jan 24, 2007 07:02 PM

The majority of U.S. online consumers do not believe downloading movies illegally from the Web is a very serious offense, a research firm said Wednesday.

A survey by the Solutions Research Group found that most consumers suffered from the “Robin Hood effect,” when it came to stealing copyrighted movies from online peer-to-peer networks. “Most people perceive celebrities and studios to be rich already, and as a result don’t think of movie downloading as a big deal,” study director Kaan Yigit said in a statement.

Only four in 10 of the respondents believed downloading movies was a very serious offense, compared to nearly 60% who felt the same about parking in a fire lane. Compare that to the brick-and-mortar scenario where almost 80% of respondents rated stealing a DVD from a store as a very serious offense.

A total of 32 million Americans aged 12 or above, or 18% of the U.S. population, have downloaded a full-length movie sometime in the past, the study found. Nearly two-thirds of those consumers had downloaded a film in the last month.

Fully 80% of the “downloaders” used peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, Solutions Research said. Typical users were 29 years old and had 15 titles stored on their PCs. Fully, 63% were male, 37% female.

“The current crop of download-to-own movie services and the new ones coming into the market will need to offer greater flexibility of use, selection, and low prices to covert the current users to their services — otherwise file-sharing will continue to thrive,” Yigit said.

The Solutions Research Group’s Digital Life America trend study was based on telephone or online surveys of 2,600 Americans.

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Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/2ssbud (Hollywood Reporter)
http://googlewatch.eweek.com/index.html

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Digital media is changing the way students access classroom information in South Carolina’s Cherokee County School District. The district will soon support distance learning courses at two High Schools using a new media encoding system that captures and encodes broadcasts of the courses, which are then made available to students unable to attend those classes in person.

Using products from a company called Viewcast, the school district is now able to encode live streams and save them to local storage at Gaffney High. Students can access and view encoded files at their convenience and, in the future, will have the option of borrowing a mobile device, such as an iPod, and watching the selected class at home.

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