The New York Times Magazine today featured Google’s Gatekeepers - a look at the small unaccountable team within Google who decide whether and to what extent they will comply with the wishes of governments around the world who wish to regulate its operations. Encouragingly, Andrew McLaughlin, global public-policy director, is a Berkman Fellow, which is about as good a place as I can imagine to start from if you want to appreciate Internet regulation issues.

More disturbingly, Nicole Wong describes her role as finding an approach which “will allow our products to move forward in a country” (which should come as no surprise - as a publicly-held company it is legally obliged to maximise its profits).

NRDC: Lowering the Cost of Play.

Futures of Entertainment 3, an event sponsored by the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium is the third annual conference bringing together media industries professionals and media studies academics to discuss the current state and ongoing trends in media.  This year’s conference will include panels on how value is counted in the media industries, understanding audiences, social media, the comic book industry, franchising and transmedia, media distribution in a global marketplace, and the intersection of academia and the media industries.

Speakers at the conference include Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer; Alex McDowell, production designer for Watchmen; Gregg Hale, producer of The Blair Wtich Project and Seventh Moon; Lance Weiler, director of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma; and Tom Casiello, Daytime Emmy award-winning former writer for soap operas including As the World Turns, One Life to Live, Days of Our Lives, and The Young and the Restless; Peter Kim, a founder of the Dachis Corporation; as well as representatives from HBO Online, World Wrestling Entertainment, and other innovative media companies and projects.

The conference will also feature academics such as Henry Jenkins (MIT, founder of the Convergence Culture Consortium and author of Convergence Culture and Textual Poachers), Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School, author of The Wealth of Networks), John Caldwell (UCLA, author of Production Culture), Anita Elberse (Harvard Business School, author of “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?”), and Grant McCracken (author of Transformations).

More information on the conference, including the program and registration, is available at http://www.convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/

Please let me know via the comments if you have any trouble with it.

Technorati have commissioned a survey (see their methodology description) of random Technorati customers (already, one should note, a skewed sample since only a fairly engaged weblog user would be interested in the services Technorati uses). They had 1,290 responses from 66 countries but give no data on how many people were contacted, so lacking a response rate it’s hard to know how this might further skew their information.

This caveat aside, their survey does contain one piece of information that is new - at least to me - a picture of the mean and median income bloggers get from advertising. Well, they find that 46% of bloggers don’t have ads on their blogs. Of those remaining, it’s striking (if not surprising) that income is highly skewed. Among European bloggers for example, the mean income is $9,040 a year, while the median is just $200. Personally I am skeptical that the actual median income from blog ads is even that high but would be interested to learn if anyone had come up with more reliable figures.