Tama Leaver dot Net Tama’s thoughts about digital culture, whatever that might mean …

9Mar/10

Digital Culture Links: March 9th 2010

Links for March 9th 2010:

  • Mapping the growth of the internet [BBC News] - Useful flash-powered world map from the BBC visually demonstrating the growth in internet use across the globe from 1998 to 2008. (Quite a lot of growth to be seen!)
  • Return of the natives by Slavoj Zizek [New Statesman] - Slavoj Zizek gets stuck into Avatar: "So where is Cameron's film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself - the film substituting for reality."
  • Adventures in the Wild, Wild West: Media140 Perth [media140.org] - Official wrap-up post for Perth Media 140 (Feb 2010), including links to pretty much everyone involved and a snappy little video summarising some of the key themes (if you watch closely you can see what 10 seconds of my talking head looks like after presenting a talk in a room which is warmer that 40 degrees Celsius!).
  • Study: Ages of social network users [Royal Pingdom] - A really useful breakdown of social networking websites by age, including these stats:
    "* Bebo appeals to a much younger audience than the other sites with 44% of its users being aged 17 or less. For MySpace, this number is also large; 33%.
    * Classmates.com has the largest share of users being aged 65 or more, 8%, and 78% are 35 or older.
    * 64% of Twitter’s users are aged 35 or older.
    * 61% of Facebooks’s users are aged 35 or older. [...]
    * The average social network user is 37 years old.
    * LinkedIn, with its business focus, has a predictably high average user age; 44.
    * The average Twitter user is 39 years old.
    * The average Facebook user is 38 years old.
    * The average MySpace user is 31 years old.
    * Bebo has by far the youngest users, as witnessed earlier, with an average age of 28."
  • Twitter Hits 10 Billion Tweets [Mashable] - "It’s official: Twitter has surpassed 10 billion tweets. [...] you can tell by the actual tweet ID numbers that we have crossed the magical threshold. The milestone shows that Twitter’s still growing at a rapid pace: it broke 1 billion tweets in November 2008 and 5 billion tweets just four months ago."
27Feb/10

RepoMen

While I fear the upcoming film RepoMen is unlikely to live up the the dystopian promise of its premise (the repossession of artificial organs from people who’ve defaulted on their repayments in a not-too-distant-future), I love some of their promotional posters …

repomen1

repomen3

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27Jan/10

Digital Culture Links: January 27th 2010

Links for January 27th 2010:

  • Terms of (Ab)Use: US and UK Consumers Dance to Different iTunes [Electronic Frontier Foundation] - Further illustration of the insanity of different national licensing agreements: "For example, as with many TOS agreements, the iTunes U.S. Terms purport to allow Apple to terminate any part of the service, including access to any music or other content available through iTunes, at any time without warning. The U.K. Terms step back from that extreme position. In particular, the U.K. Terms do not allow Apple to affect a user's access to content already purchased. Furthermore, before terminating a user's access to iTunes, the U.K. Terms require there at least be "strong grounds," rather than mere "suspicion," to believe the user has violated the agreement, and also obligates iTunes to provide notice of any planned modification, suspension, or termination to the extent possible. In other words, the U.K. Terms provide customers at least some guidance as to the grounds for termination, rather than leave them to worry their access to iTunes can be terminated at any moment for any reason."
  • Australia Set to Introduce Internet Filter that Could Block Access to Thousands of Anime, Comics, Gaming (ACG) and Slash Fan Sites by Mark McLelland, University of Wollongong [Guest Post: Confessions of an Aca-Fan] - Guest post by Mark McLelland looking at the implications of the Australian government's forthcoming ISP-level internet filtering legislation on slash, anime, manga sites and thus fans in Australia. Outlook: poor.
  • After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site [The New York Observer] - So, how's that paywall going? "In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect? So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com? The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class. That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn't know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35."
  • Google Doodle For Australia Day Missing Aboriginal Flag [SMH] - "An Australia Day artwork by student Jessie Du will be viewed by millions on Google's home page today but one feature of her original design is conspicuously absent - the Aboriginal flag. Jessie's Australia-themed version of the Google logo beat thousands of other entrants in the search giant's Doodle 4 Google competition [...] Jessie, 11, is a student at Rydalmere East Public School. Her entry fashioned the letters in Google's logo out of native Australian animals, such as the kangaroo, koala and emu. The central "o" in the original design was the Aboriginal flag but this has been edited out of the final version that adorns Google's home page today. The discrepancy caused much consternation on Twitter, but a Google spokeswoman explained that the editing of Jessie's design was due to a copyright dispute. The designer of the flag, Harold Thomas, who owns the copyright to the flag, refused to give Google permission to reproduce the design on its website..."
  • Stop pining for life on Pandora and come back to planet Earth [Telegraph] - Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson on Avatar: "It is a feature of powerful military empires that they like to romanticise their victims and luxuriate guiltily in the pathos of their suffering. Think of the Roman crowds pleading for the lives of captured barbarians in the amphitheatre.[...] And I can't believe that many of these gloomy post-Avatar Westerners, when they really think about it, would want to up sticks to Pandora and take part in Na'vi society, with its obstinate illiteracy, undemocratic adherence to a monarchy based on male primogeniture and complete absence of restaurants. The final irony, of course, is that this entrancing vision of prelapsarian innocence is the product of the most ruthless and sophisticated money-machine the world has ever seen. With a budget of $237 million and with takings already at £1 billion, this exquisite capitalist guilt trip represents one of the great triumphs of capitalism."
4Jan/10

Digital Culture Links: January 4th 2010

Links for January 3rd 2010 through January 4th 2010:

  • Self-Proclaimed Social Media Gurus on Twitter Multiplying Like Rabbits [B.L. Ochman's blog] - There are now 15,740 self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter! Don't be one of them.
  • Ban This Game! - Silly but simple flash game exploring the "logic" of the Australian government's proposed internet censorship regime.
  • Talks from Media140 Sydney 2009 - Real-Time Web on Journalism and Media - A bunch of recorded talks from Media 140 in Sydney last November, from a great range of speakers as diverse as Jay Rosen and Malcolm Turnbull. I'll be speaking at Media 140 Perth on February 25, so I'm brushing up on past Media 140s to get a feel for the style.
  • 'Avatar' tops $1 billion at worldwide box office [Variety] - "Twentieth Century Fox and James Cameron's "Avatar" rang in the New Year with an estimated worldwide cume of $[US]1 billion through Sunday, becoming the fourth highest grosser of all time. Domestic cume was $352.1 million, including a weekend take of $68.3 million, the best gross ever for a film in its third weekend. Overseas, the pic's cume through Sunday was $670.2 million."
  • We All Live In Public Now. Get Used To It. [TechCrunch] - If we start from the premise that everything we do online is public, and then ask "how do I make this private" for specific bits and pieces, it's more likely privacy will actually exist: "As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it. But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. [...] Public is the new default."
  • Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again! - Sign out forever! - Had enough of being part of social media? Kill all your web 2.0 profiles here (disclaimer: this really does delete your profiles ... forever!).
6Dec/09

Digital Culture Links: December 6th 2009

Links for December 3rd 2009 through December 6th 2009:

  • Panic Attack and YouTube Discovery [The Chutry Experiment] - Great post from Chuck Tryon about Fede Alvarez's sudden appearance on the Hollywood radar thanks to his YouTube short “Ataque de Pánico,” (Panic Attack!), 4 minute special effects driven extravagnaza in which a city is destroyed and a career created: "One of the underlying narratives associated with Hollywood mythology is the “discovery story,” the idea that a talented newcomer emerges by chance, out of nowhere, to become a Hollywood “star.” Lana Turner was discovered, so the legend goes, on a barstool at Schwab’s drugstore. Now, as the tools of filmmaking and film distribution have been democratized, those discovery stories have expanded to filmmakers as well. And although it is the case that such stories can be read ideologically, it is also true that YouTube and other video sharing sites still offer us the opportunity to be astonished by the talents of an aspiring filmmaker."
  • Memories of a paywall pioneer | Media | guardian.co.uk - Scott Rosenberg reflects on Salon's experiments with a paywall, suggesting it's not the model for future news media: "I'm not hostile to the notion of people paying for online content. I do so myself. I'm glad people stepped up and paid for Salon. But the value of stuff online is usually tied to how deeply it is woven into the network. So locking your stuff away in order to charge for it means that you are usually making it less valuable at the moment that you are asking people to pay for it. And that's why people so often respond with: "No thanks.""
  • Vampire Politics by Lisa Nakamura et al [Flow TV, 11.03, 2009] - "True Blood is socially conservative, gesturing towards a radical politics (or any social movement based politics) that it cannot (or will not) deliver. Likewise, the form of the medium itself is conservative. Like its vampires, True Blood is a relic - it airs on television, not the Internet, and it is broadcast rather than streamed. Though HBO claims “it’s not television, it’s HBO,” we know better. Like the credit sequence’s time-delayed decayed foxes and possums, True Blood is a memento mori - to the Civil Rights South, to broadcast television, to civil rights organizing and “unsexy” rights-based movements. True Blood pursues vampire politics, which are all about sexy self fashioning. Were it not for the exquisite Godric’s self-immolation in season two, the program’s credo might be “survival of the sexiest.”"
  • Networking Families: Battlestar Galactica and the Values of Quality by Jordan Lavender-Smith [Flow TV, 11.03, 2009] - "Galactica’s interrogation of post-nuclear family mechanics and what it means to be human was potentially groundbreaking, but by the show’s end the reconstitution of the family breaks down, and a thick line is drawn between the natural and artificial, delivering an outmoded humanism through posthuman technologies."
  • Identity Wars: Google & Yahoo! Bow to Facebook & Twitter [RW Web] - "Yahoo! announced this morning that it is adding Facebook Connect across many of its properties. This afternoon Google Friend Connect announced the inclusion of Twitter as a top-level log-in option. These moves will be convenient for users, but may not be good for the future of the web." (This is a really interesting article looking at what happens when Facebook and Twitter become default identity authentication systems - so much power then resides in these systems, and what happens to attempts at standards like OpenID?)
2Dec/09

Digital Culture Links: December 2nd 2009

Links for November 27th 2009 through December 2nd 2009:

  • Seven’s FlashForward “leaked” to US [TV Tonight] - "Monday night’s episode of FlashForward was the last for the year on Seven, and screened before the US which took a broadcast break for Thanksgiving. That resulted in the episode being uploaded as a torrent and now “leaked” to America. The Hollywood Reporter notes that “Australians don’t care about our guilt-tinged empire-expanding holiday traditions and didn’t take a break. Whether the US-Aussie FlashForward schedule being jolted out-of-sync will result in future episodes also being leaked isn’t known.” Presumably the episode will be downloaded across the US complete with a Channel 7 watermark. It’s all rather ironic given Disney / ABC went to great lengths to make sure Aussie media didn’t reveal information on the series in the lead-up to the premiere, insisting they attend a cinema screening and sign confidentiality clauses." (US viewers, welcome to the other side of the tyranny of digital distance!)
  • The hits on iView [TV Tonight] - "Four Corners, United States of Tara, Good Game, Doctor Who, The Chaser’s War on Everything and Media Watch are the most popular titles on the ABC’s iView platform. The online catch-up service has been operating since July 2008. Since April this year there have been 6.2 million views of programs with an annual monthly average of 610,000 visits, up by 140% compared to last year. It averages 206,000 visitors per month, up by 60% compared to last year. In October 2009, ABC iView recorded its highest ever number of visitors and visits. 286,000 visitors and 1.054 million visits to ABC iView." (Finally, streaming timeshifted TV is making solid inroads in Australia.)
  • Moviegoers 2010 available for download [Marketing Strategy for Entertainment and Brand Clients – Stradella Road] - "Why does movie studio tracking and research so often surprise and disappoint us? The answer experienced movie marketers gave us in private conversations was this: We still don’t know our customers/audience as well as we should.
    Where do moviegoers really spend their time? What are the social dynamics of the decision-making process? How do we synthesize the sea changes taking place with digital technologies in order to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time in the right place? We designed the Moviegoers 2010 research study to answer these questions [...]
    • Moviegoers spend more time each week online (19.8 hours) than they do watching TV (14.3 hours)
    • 52% of moviegoers have digital video recorders (61% of the 30-39 demo) and, of those consumers, 71% fast-forward to skip commercials.
    [Download the full report - PDF]
  • Westfield Facebook application draws fire [mUmBRELLA] - Westfield has drawn criticism over a Facebook application that may be in breach of the social networking site’s terms and conditions, despite the two companies collaborating to develop it. The application updates a user’s status with a Westfield-branded message to promote its Gift Card. It requires the user to opt in so that their status is updated to “All I Want for Christmas is a Westfield Gift Card”, with extra copy stating that the user has now gone into the draw to win a $10,000 gift card. [...] But the promotion has also attracted a backlash from other users, complaining that the promotion is taking over the social networking site as friends’ status updates that feature the Westfield branding, clutter their screens. Facebook groups have also been created in opposition to it. One group, known as If All You Want For Christmas Is A Westfield Gift Card, I Don’t Want To Know, currently has over 3,300 fans." (Spam as a Facebook App ... great marketing!)
1Dec/09

The end of …

After Tony Abbott won the #spill, ensuring Australia will continue doing nothing about Climate Change in the immediate future, it would be fair to say that December has not begun on a peachy note.  This effort from the Goodie Bag showing the Hollywood penchant for destroying New York seems to fit the day nicely:

I’ve always been partial to Gershwin!

2Nov/09

Digital Culture Links: November 2nd 2009

Links for  November 2nd 2009:

  • How to Give Your Movie Away Free and Still Make Money [Jawbone.tv] - Some great ideas from Brian Newman about ways to both freely distribute and make money from feature films. (Thanks, Chuck.)
  • Teens Sue School Over Punishment For Racy MySpace Pics [Huffington Post] - "Two sophomore girls have sued their school district after they were punished for posting sexually suggestive photos on MySpace during their summer vacation. The American Civil Liberties Union, in a federal lawsuit filed last week on behalf of the girls, argues that Churubusco High School violated the girls' free speech rights when it banned them from extracurricular activities for a joke that didn't involve the school ... some legal experts say that in this digital era, schools must accept that students will engage in some questionable behavior in cyberspace and during off hours. "From the standpoint of young people, there's no real distinction between online life and offline life," said John Palfrey, a Harvard University law professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "It's just life."" (It's called MYspace for a reason, methinks!)
  • Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook [Facebook] - Facebook adds the ability to "memorialize" a Facebook page of someone who has passed away, but their loved ones wish their profile to remain online as a place for people to remember and reminisce about their lives. This feature has probably come along since Facebook got some bad press after suggesting people 'reconnect' with their deceased loved ones.[Via BBoing]
12Oct/09

Digital Culture Links: October 10th 2009

Links for October 9th 2009 through October 10th 2009:

  • Y,000,000,000uTube [YouTube Australia Blog] - YouTube Chad Hurley posts a rather self-congratulatory post about YouTube passing an daily average 1 billion views (he also compares YouTube to fast food - not the best metaphor for a CEO - and drops the expression 'open platform' into the mix despite the ability to download YouTube clips, or for creators to enable that option, being one of the most requested and never created functions on the platform. Hurley: "Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube."
  • Big bother: DVD Jon has Steve Jobs in a twist [SMH] - "...Jon Lech Johansen, who became known as DVD Jon after he cracked the encryption used on DVDs when he was 15, has released a new version of his doubleTwist software that allows iPod owners to completely bypass iTunes and iPhoto when buying and managing their music, videos and photos. [...] In a further slight, Johansen released a clip parodying Apple's famous "1984" ad for the Mac, which portrayed IBM as an Orwellian overlord and Apple as the leader of the rebellion. [...] In Johansen's version, made 25 years after the original, it is Jobs who is the oppressive Big Brother figure. The clip quickly went viral and has amassed hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. "No other choices shall detract from our glory," Jobs says in the clip, before a voiceover announces "on October 6, doubleTwist brings you ... choice."
  • TRUTH IN NUMBERS - Trailer for a new film about the building and running of Wikipedia, featuring both advocates and critics.
3Apr/09

Annotated Digital Culture Links: April 3rd 2009

Links for March 31st 2009 through April 3rd 2009:

  • Internet traffic in Sweden plummets on first day of law banning web piracy [Guardian] - Internet traffic in Sweden – previously a hotbed of illicit filesharing – has fallen dramatically in the first day of a new law banning online piracy. The country – home to the notorious Pirate Bay website, whose founders are awaiting a court judgment on whether they have broken the law by allowing people to find films, games and music for illicit downloads – has previously been seen as a haven for filesharing, in which people can get copyrighted content for free. As many as one in 10 Swedes is thought to use such peer-to-peer services. But the so-called IPRED law, which came into force on Wednesday, obliges internet service providers to turn over details about internet users who share such content to the owners of copyrighted material, if a court finds sufficient evidence that the user has broken the law. ... internet traffic in Sweden had fallen by about 30% compared with the previous day."
  • New Wolverine film leaked online [BBC NEWS | Entertainment] - "An almost finished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine starring Hugh Jackman has been leaked online a month before its cinema release. The high quality copy of the film has been uploaded to several file sharing and streaming video websites. The movie is incomplete, with some special effects still in need of fine tuning and green screens and wires attached to actors still visible." (It took less than 24 hours for this workprint to appear for sale in Jordan's pirate DVD markets and C20th Fox are on the warpath. While a leak like this might be good for publicity, given that a workprint - which means unfinished special effects more than anything else - tends to emphasise the quality of the plot and dialogue, this could really hurt the box office.)
  • Obama Depressed, Distant Since 'Battlestar Galactica' Series Finale [The Onion - America's Finest News Source] - "According to sources in the White House, President Barack Obama has been uncharacteristically distant and withdrawn ever since last month's two-hour series finale of Battlestar Galactica. "The president seems to be someplace else lately," said one high-level official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Yesterday we were all being briefed on the encroachment of Iranian drone planes into Iraq, when he just looked up from the table and blurted out, 'What am I supposed to watch on Fridays at 10 p.m. now? Numb3rs?'" "I haven't seen him this upset since Admiral Adama realized that Earth was actually an uninhabitable wasteland," the official continued. "Or at least that's what he told me. I don't actually watch the show. It's not really my thing.""
  • Victim Of Wikipedia: Microsoft To Shut Down Encarta [ paidContent.org] - "Microsoft will discontinue both its MSN Encarta reference Web sites as well as its Encarta software, which have both been surpassed by rising competitors, like Wikipedia. In a message posted on the MSN Encarta Web site, Microsoft says, “Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.""