youtube « Tama Leaver dot Net

1Mar/10

Digital Culture Links: March 1st 2010

Links for March 1st 2010:

YouTube mum wins mammoth music battle [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] - A win for US fair use: "A woman in California has won a partial victory in a lawsuit against a record company that forced her to remove a video she posted on YouTube. The woman posted a video of her young child dancing to the Prince song Let's Go Crazy. Universal Music, which owns the copyright, demanded YouTube remove the video - which it did. With help from a group of free speech activists, she filed a suit saying her video constituted a fair use of the song. A California judge has ruled in her favour, saying she is entitled to at least recover her legal fees. Observers say this is an important case in copyright-infringement law."
This week in search 2/28/10 (Google Adds Facebook Status Updates to Search) [Official Google Blog] - Google officially adds Facebook status updates to their real-time search function (with the implicit flow-on into 'normal' Google search, as with Twitter): "Facebook in real-time search: Starting this week we added Facebook content to real-time search in the U.S. Real-time search, which we launched in December, helps you tap into the most relevant, freshest search results on the web, many of which are just seconds old. With this latest addition, you can access the news, photos and blog posts that Facebook fan pages publish to the world. You can find the Facebook Pages updates in our real-time mode by clicking on "Show Options" and then "Latest" or "Updates." Example search: [facebook]"
Academic Author Sues Journal Editor For Criminal Defamation Over Negative Book Review [Techdirt] - After a book review she was unhappy with wasn't removed from publication at her request, Karin Calvo-Goller is suing the journal editor for criminal defamation (in the French courts). Apart from fundamentally misunderstanding how the culture of academic book reviewing works, I fear Calvo-Goller is rather unfamiliar with the Striesand Effect!
How to Deal With Twitter DM Spam [Mike Haydon] - "There is a lot of malware spam on twitter at the moment. I’m getting between 100-500 Direct Messages (DMs) a day from compromised accounts. They say things like: “i made $426.23 online today with” “I make money online with google. i learned how here” “this you here” “hey can you do me a favor? take this iq test. here” “hey. can you take this quiz thingy? here” “rofl this you???” “LOL, omg this you?” “hahah you should see this” “You’re on here…” [...] … all with links at the end. I just copy/pasted some of the ones I received today. DON’T CLICK THE LINK even if it’s from one of your friends. It seems the link takes you to a site where your twitter account gets hacked and sends the same sort of DMs to your followers."
If you did click the link don't panic, read this!

Tagged as: academic, fairuse, freedomofspeech, howto, law, music, realtime, socialsearch, spam, universal No Comments

26Feb/10

Digital Culture Links: February 26th 2010

Links for February 21st 2010 through February 26th 2010:

iTunes sells 10 billionth track [BBC News] - "Johnny Cash's Guess Things Happen That Way has become the 10 billionth track to be sold at the ITunes online store. Black Eyed Peas' I Gotta Feeling was officially named the site's most downloaded track, with their single Boom Boom Pow the third biggest seller. Lady Gaga's Poker Face took the number two slot, with hits Just Dance and Bad Romance also featuring in the top 25. Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia bought the 10 billionth track winning a$10,000 (£6,500) iTunes gift card." (I'm pretty sure this means 10 billion items sold, rather than 10 billion different tracks, but it's impressive nevertheless!)
Conan O’Brien Joins Twitter With a Humorous Plea: ‘Somebody Help Me’ [NYTimes.com] - I like my CoCo in 140 characters! "Conan O’Brien, the unemployed former host of “The Tonight Show,” has ventured into the twittersphere. His first message on Twitter, posted Wednesday evening, is a memorable one: “Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me.” In his Twitter bio, Mr. O’Brien describes himself thus: “I had a show. Then I had a different show. Now I have a Twitter account.”"
Google executives convicted over posted video [The Age] - Bye bye YouTube in Italy?? "A court in Milan on Wednesday convicted three Google Italy executives over an internet video showing a handicapped teenager being bullied - an unprecedented ruling that the US internet search giant vowed to appeal. Each executive was given a six-month suspended sentence for violation of privacy, while a fourth was acquitted. All four were acquitted on a charge of defamation. The mobile phone video, uploaded on Google Video where it remained for nearly two months in late 2006, showed four students bullying the teenager with Down's syndrome in front of more than a dozen others who did not intervene. Of the four executives on trial, David Drummond, chairman of the board of Google Italy at the time; George De Los Reyes, then a board member who has since left the firm; and Peter Fleischer, who was responsible for privacy issues, were convicted for violation of privacy."
Movie studios appeal against iiNet piracy ruling [The Age] - Here we go again ... (or still ...) "Hollywood film studios today lodged an appeal against a landmark legal judgment which found an Australian Internet provider was not responsible for illegal movie downloads by its customers. The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), representing a consortium of 34 studios, said the Federal Court's ruling was out of step with well-established copyright law. "The court found large scale copyright infringements (proven), that iiNet knew they were occurring, that iiNet had the contractual and technical capacity to stop them and iiNet did nothing about them," said Neil Gane, executive director of AFACT."
Is Twitter Overtaking Myspace [Richard Giles] - Purely in term of pages views (as tracked by Alexa) Twitter appears to be just overtaking global MySpace traffic (all the more impressive when you consider how much of Twitter's traffic isn't through pageviews).
WhoseTube? [NYTimes.com] - An insightful and balanced op-ed from Damian Kulash Jr.(lead singer of OK Go who made twhen their “Here It Goes Again” video went very viral in 2006) looking at why big music companies just don't get the internet: "In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late."

Tagged as: 2010, afact, googlevideo, humour, iinet, isp, Italy, itunes, mp3, music, myspace, okgo, stats, viral, web207 No Comments

7Feb/10

Digital Culture Links: February 7th 2010

Links for February 3rd 2010 through February 7th 2010:

Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly [Rough Type - Nicholas Carr's Blog] - LOL: "I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak. Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It's even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers - those over 30 - who are doing more blogging..."
Symbian phone operating system goes open source [BBC News] - This is a bit like Netscape going open source (and becoming Firefox) BEFORE they went broke! A good idea, if you ask me: "The group behind the world's most popular smartphone operating system - Symbian - is giving away "billions of dollars" worth of code for free. The Symbian Foundation's decision to make its code open source means that any organisation or individual can now use and modify it "for any purpose". Symbian has shipped in more than 330m mobile phones, the foundation says. It believes the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements."
Memes as Mechanisms: How Digital Subculture Informs the Real World [MIT Convergence Culture Consortium] - Alex Leavitt takes a look at memes (especially the Downfall meme), their mixed reception depending on context and familiarity, and gives a great overview of the many instances of the Hitler YouTube parodies, concluding: "Memes tend to be jokes, first, but they represent a valuable example of networked knowledge online. Although most memes do not escape the subcultural barriers of small Internet communities, a few do make an impact on the real world. Of course, many Internet memes are simply humor. But the evolutionary structure of some memes create a strong cultural value that acts as a grammar for information networks."

Tagged as: demographics, downfall, hitler, meme, mobilephone, nokia, os, pew, piracy, stats, symbian, youth No Comments

3Feb/10

Digital Culture Links: February 3rd 2010

Links for February 2nd 2010 through February 3rd 2010:

Technology Blamed For Bad Grammar Despite Total Lack Of Causal Evidence [Techdirt] - Sometimes, you just have to blame the journalism: "We were just recently reporting on yet another in a very long line of studies that showed that instant messaging and texting was actually helping kids have better writing skills. So, it was interesting to see an article published up in Canada (thanks to Marcus Carab for sending this in) that claimed a study "proving" that Twitter and texting was causing grammar and spelling problems for students. But, if you read the details of the article, they don't say that at all. It's entirely made up by the reporter."
Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News [YouTube] - An outstanding video which demonstrates how many tv news reports are put together. (Language warning!)
Tablet [The Chromium Projects] - Early visualisations of the proposed Google tablet (gPad?) driven by the Chrome OS. It's a long way from built, but the timing of these "visual explorations" is sure to irk Apple. And, to be honest, I'd prefer Chrome OS over Apple's locked-down App store options!
Attorney-General Michael Atkinson vows to repeal election internet censorship law amid reader furore [Adelaide Now] - An important backdown on censoring political speech online in South Australia: "Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has made a "humiliating" backdown and announced he will retrospectively repeal his law censoring internet comment on the state election. After a furious reaction on AdelaideNow to The Advertiser's exclusive report on the new laws, Mr Atkinson at 10pm released this statement: "From the feedback we've received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened. "I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively." Mr Atkinson said the law would not be enforced for comments posted on AdelaideNow during the upcoming election campaign, even though it was technically applicable. "It may be humiliating for me, but that's politics in a democracy and I'll take my lumps," he continued in the statement."
iPad Hardware Reveals Potential Slot for Camera - A built-in webcam would counter a lot of the initial iPad design bashing (and would make it a lot more attractive as a travel-device instead of a netbook): "Perhaps we haven’t learned everything about the iPad just yet. Could an iPad with a camera be in the near future? Mission Repair, a company that fixes broken Apple products, apparently got their hands on some iPad parts. Their pictures showed off the internal frame, which curiously enough has a small hole on the top of the frame. When the Mission Repair team took a camera out of a MacBook and placed it inside the iPad’s top hole, it fight right in."
Aussies play on through the gloom [Sydney Morning Herald Blogs] - "For the first time, Australians spent over $2 billion on video gaming in 2009, a new record for the industry. Publishers and distributors were ecstatic by the growth of 4 per cent given the much publicised financial crisis. The increase was in stark contrast to the declines seen in most other Western markets, which analysts have blamed on the music genre slump and a lack of innovation in the industry, as well as the GFC. Nintendo continued its dominance of the industry: two thirds of all hardware sold during 2009 in Australia was Nintendo-branded."

Tagged as: camera, censorship, chrome, games, gpad, hardware, ipad, journalism, parody, sms, southaustralia, txt No Comments

24Jan/10

Digital Culture Links: January 24th 2010

Links for January 24th 2010:

What Does China Censor Online? [Information Is Beautiful] - Provocative infographic illustrating some of what China blocks online.
The Director of Downfall Speaks Out on All Those Angry YouTube Hitlers [Vulture - New York Magazine] - "When the Conan-Leno debacle began, two things were certain: One, it would change the face of late night, and two, someone would apply it to the Downfall Hitler meme. When Oliver Hirschbiegel staged the famous bunker scene in his 2004 movie, with Bruno Ganz as Hitler, he wasn't expecting it to be appropriated for comedy; a dramatic recreation of Hitler's last stand is not exactly a laugh-out-loud subject. And yet the German filmmaker is pleased, nay, thrilled that YouTube enthusiasts have taken it upon themselves to reinterpret it to address anything from Hillary Clinton's loss to the Taylor Swift-Kanye West feud. "Someone sends me the links every time there's a new one," says the director ..."
Phone texting 'helps pupils to spell' [BBC News] - "Children who regularly use the abbreviated language of text messages are actually improving their ability to spell correctly, research suggests. A study of eight- to 12-year-olds found that rather than damaging reading and writing, "text speak" is associated with strong literacy skills. Researchers say text language uses word play and requires an awareness of how sounds relate to written English. This link between texting and literacy has proved a surprise, say researchers. These latest findings of an ongoing study at the University of Coventry contradict any expectation that prolonged exposure to texting will erode a child's ability to spell."
Serial Boxes [Just TV] - A draft of Jason Mittell's “Serial Boxes: The Cultural Values of Long-Form American Television” essay which gives a very clear account of the different ways viewers engage with television, especially long-form serial television, in light of the shifts from live viewing as the only (or primary) choice to a market where box-set DVDs and the like encourage quite different modes of reception. Mittell also looks at the 're-watch' projects and notes why they usually fail to sustain their initial enthusiasm and momentum.
Facebook sites inciting anti-Indian sentiment continue to flourish [The SMH] - "Facebook sites inciting anti-Indian sentiment continue to flourish despite protests from Indians in Australia. Groups such as I think Indian People Should Wear Deodorant, Stop Whinging Indians, and Australia: Indians, You Have a Right to Leave, have not been removed. Gautam Gupta, secretary of the Federation of Indian Students, said: "These sites must be shut down but, on the other hand, we must keep track of these hate groups being formed. They can be online or offline. When they're offline we call them gangs. These are essentially online gangs." More than half a dozen Australian groups that are specifically anti-Indian are still active on Facebook. On top of that, there are many broadly racist groups, including F--- Off – We're Full and Speak English or Piss Off!!!, which has 54,000 members and is growing at a rate of about 2000 people a week. "I don't think it's just a Facebook problem – it's a social problem, a problem in the society," Mr Gupta said."

Tagged as: censorship, china, conan, downfall, dvd, hitler, india, infographic, literacy, meme, mobilephone, racism, txt, visualization No Comments

21Jan/10

Digital Culture Links: January 21st 2010

Links for January 19th 2010 through January 21st 2010:

YouTube to test movie rental service [The Age] - "YouTube announced it will begin testing an online movie rental service on Friday to kick off the Sundance Film Festival in the US. Five independent films from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance festivals will be part of a "small collection of rental videos" to be available to US users of the popular video-sharing website in "the weeks ahead", according to YouTube. "Making content available for rent will give our partners unprecedented control over the distribution of their work - they can decide the price of their videos and the rental duration," YouTube said in a blog post. [...] The move represents another step for Google in generating revenue from YouTube, which it bought in 2006 in a deal valued at $US1.65 billion ($A1.82 billion). YouTube will also be stepping in as a potentially formidable contender in the growing market of online distribution of films that includes videogame consoles, Apple's iTunes shop and US DVD rental giant Netflix."
Open Letter From OK Go, regarding non-embeddable YouTube videos [OK Go] - Despite making their name on YouTube, OK Go's label (EMI) won't allow their new videos to be embeddable. This is silly, the band agrees, and tries to explain to fans: "The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards." [Via]
Rock Band opens to user-created songs [Music | guardian.co.uk] - Selling user-generated content is now possible using the Rock Band online store, but the process of preparing a song for the service is complex: "submitting music to the Rock Band Network Store isn't as easy as uploading an MP3. Acts must convert their recordings into the game's special format, compiling an array of sound files, lyrics and tablatures, as well as instructions for camera angles, lighting and choreography. This requires specialist programming expertise or the services of a contractor, many of whom charge about £300 per minute of music. Once the files are ready, they can be listed in the Rock Band store for anywhere from 99 cents (61p) to $2.99 (£1.83) per song. Currently, user-created songs are only available to Microsoft Xbox players while the developers, MTV Games, keep 70% of the sale price. "We expected this to be an initiative that would appeal to unsigned artists," [said] Paul DeGooyer, MTV's senior vice president for electronic games and music"
YouTube confirms worldwide deal for live Indian Premier League cricket [Media | guardian.co.uk] - "YouTube has confirmed its first live major sporting deal, announcing today that it will host live Indian Premier League cricket matches in the UK, and casting into doubt the value of British TV broadcast rights. The YouTube deal involves every country outside the US – a significantly larger scope than reports had suggested. It was thought that YouTube would only stream live matches to countries that did not have TV deals with the IPL. The two-year deal gives the Google-owned YouTube the exclusive rights to stream IPL matches online, with the two companies splitting revenue from sponsorship and advertising."
YouTube Search Accounts for Nearly 28% of All Google Searches [Reelseo] - Still wondering why Google purchased YouTube? "...YouTube not only had 50% more searches than Yahoo web search (3.918B vs 2.629B) and 180% more searches than Bing (3.918B vs 1.399B), but the number of searches at the online video giant made up almost 28% (27.95) of the total searches on Google sites for Dec. 2009."

Tagged as: cricket, games, ipl, monetize, mp3, music, okgo, produsage, search, sport, usergeneratedcontent, web207 No Comments

19Jan/10

Farmville.

The truth about Farmville …

Filed under: facebook, humour, youtube No Comments

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?)