The Australian Vs Julie Posetti (over a tweet!)
So, today’s big news is that Chris Mitchell, the editor-in-chief of The Australian, is going to sue journalism academic Julie Posetti for defamation over a twitter tweet in which she quoted a former The Australian journalist, Asa Walhquist, speaking at the Journalism Education Association Australia conference, as saying Mitchell had increasingly told her what to write with regard to environmental stories. Here’s the tweet in question:
Walhquist has reportedly denied that the Posetti quote is accurate, but it mustn’t be that hard to check with a conference full of journalists – surely someone was recording the conversation? Julie Posetti is a prolific twitter user and a journalism academic at the University of Canberra and I suspect she’d know a lot better than to misquote someone, even in a tweet. For the record, here’s a screenshot of the tweets surrounding the one that offended Mitchell:
Beyond the question of whether defamation has actually occured, the big story here is the recognition implicitly made by Chris Mitchell that commentary on Twitter is now a big deal!
Update: Andrew Dodd’s report covering the same talk in Crikey tells the same story and thus supports Posetti’s position.
Update 2 (Monday, 29 Nov 2010): An ABC story reports that audio recorded at the conference demonstrates that Posetti accurately quoted Walhquist in the contentious tweet! (You can follow developments via the #twitdef hashtag on Twitter. You can hear an mp3 recording here (on the ABC website).)
Update 3 (Tuesday, 30 Nov 2010): Jonathon Holmes has posted ‘140 characters of legal nightmare’ on The Drum at it’s well worth reading as it highlights some of the legal complications that come from Twitter, real-time ‘reporting’ and the challenges of context and the way contexts shift.
Digital Culture Links: November 24th 2010
Links for November 19th 2010 through November 24th 2010:
- Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality [Scientific American] – Inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in a passionate defense of the open web (and a few pointed jabs at Facebook): “The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected. […] If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the scientific community and the press must make sure the Web’s principles remain intact—not just to preserve what we have gained but to benefit from the great advances that are still to come.”
- Everything is a Remix – Part 1 [Vimeo] – Kirby Ferguson’s great video about remix, focusing on musical culture and the long history of remix as a core creative process (long before the web).
- The Attention-Span Myth [NYTimes.com] – A great read: “Whether the Web is making us smarter or dumber, isn’t there something just unconvincing about the idea that an occult “span” in the brain makes certain cultural objects more compelling than others? So a kid loves the drums but can hardly get through a chapter of “The Sun Also Rises”; and another aces algebra tests but can’t even understand how Call of Duty is played. The actions of these children may dismay or please adults, but anyone who has ever been bored by one practice and absorbed by another can explain the kids’ choices more persuasively than does the dominant model, which ignores the content of activities in favor of a wonky span thought vaguely to be in the brain. So how did we find ourselves with this unhappy attention-span conceit, and with the companion idea that a big attention span is humankind’s best moral and aesthetic asset? […] Instead, the problem with the attention-span discourse is that it’s founded on the phantom idea of an attention span.”
- New Facebook Messaging Continues to Block Some Links [Epicenter | Wired.com] – Facebook’s “not email” email system will block certain links. Definitely not email. “Facebook’s “modern messaging system” may make it convenient to seamlessly move between instant messaging and a Facebook.com e-mail account, but not if you are sharing a link to a file sharing site. Facebook began blocking BitTorrent link-sharing on Facebook walls and news feeds last spring, and also started blocking private messages between users that included a link to torrents on the Pirate Bay. Facebook says that content censorship policy isn’t changing, even as its new Facebook Messages service gives users e-mail accounts and encourages them to communicate even more through Facebook. “We have systems in place to prevent abuse on Facebook and prevent spam which we’ll continue to deploy with the new Messages,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a written statement. “We don’t share specifics on those systems.””
- Facebook credits go on sale in UK [guardian.co.uk] – This is Facebook’s answer to the app store; watch the money flow! “Online currency, with which Facebook users can purchase pixel-based virtual farm animals or pay to attend virtual events, might seem small beer. But now the online goods economy may be about to boom in the UK, as Tesco and the games retailer Game start selling Facebook credits in more than 1,000 high street stores. The UK’s 33 million Facebook users will be able to buy so-called “Facebook credits” in the non-pixellated world. The gift cards, costing £10 or £20, will only be redeemable on Facebook, where users can spend the converted currency on any number of nonexistent objects. The virtual goods economy, where money is spent on items that only exist on the internet, is expected to exceed £550m for social gaming such as Zynga’s Farmville by the end of this year, according to a recent Inside Virtual Goods report.”
Digital Culture Links: November 17th 2010
Links for November 11th 2010 through November 17th 2010:
- The Shadow Scholar [The Chronicle of Higher Education] – A truly fascinating, albeit hugely disheartening, piece describing the inner workings of a paid student essay mill from the inside. The pseudonymous author talks candidly about her/his range and rates, as well as the sort of relationships that can form with repeat customers, who use this sort of service to pass entire degrees. It’s a huge indictment of huge chunks of the global education system, but also contains some implicit points about how to write assignments that are much harder to plagiarise. Some of the comments are well worth reading, too, although many are more about name-calling than taking the issues raised seriously.
- Riding the tube [SMH] – Profile of Natalie Tran, Australia’s most successful YouTuber, with near to a million subscribers, making a healthy living off the advertising.
- Twitter + Ping = Discovering More Music [Twitter Blog] – Now Twitter can be integrated into Apple’s Ping proto-social network, so you can share your musical likes in your Twitter stream. Ping is still at a very early, underdeveloped stage … I’m not sure what this will add for Twitter except a bunch of musical likes. For Apple, it’s a huge win since those links are pointing back to the Apple store (with integration into the new twitter, so you can click directly on the songs to purchase).
- Fox.com joins NBC, ABC and CBS by blocking Google TV [Engadget] – Google have some deals to strike with the networks very soon if Google TV is actually going to have any TV on it: “Looks like Fox has finally made a decision, following the other major networks, Hulu and several cable channels by opting to block streaming video on its website from Google TV devices. Blocking by Flash ID is the order of the day and takes simple browser workarounds out of play, so unless users want to go the PlayOn route, there’s large swaths of legitimate video on the web that’s now inaccessible.”
The Social Inbox?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the greatly hyped launch of Facebook’s new messaging system which integrates with email. I’ll have more to say on this once I’ve actually tested the service, but I have to give kudos to Facebook, they’re getting a lot better at explaining and launching new features, as this video attests:
For a quick look at how the service will work, you can see some detail over at Mashable, and if you want to try it out before everyone else, you can request an earlier invitation on the Messages page.
To be honest, I can’t quite decide whether this will change the way I communicate, but for younger people for whom “I’ll Facebook You” has replaced “I’ll Email You”, this might mean that Facebook will become an even more utilised walled garden. Make of that what you will.
A Life on Facebook
A Life on Facebook. Simple concept, but beautifully executed.
Digital Culture Links: November 11th 2010
Links for November 9th 2010 through November 11th 2010:
- Great Scott! Over 35 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute to YouTube [YouTube Blog] – “… the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute. That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week. Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.”
- Hulu Brings in the Dough: $240M of Revenue in 2010 [NewTeeVee] – “Hulu is going to make more than $240 million in revenue in 2010, the company’s CEO Jason Kilar revealed at GigaOM’s NewTeeVee Live conference today. Kilar added that Hulu generated $108 million in revenue in 2009. Hulu had 30 million users in October 2010, who watched some 260 million content streams as well as 800 million ad streams during that month. Kilar said that Hulu now has 235 content partners. The company had 352 advertising clients in Q3. “The leading source of revenue is through advertising,” said Kilar, adding that more than 40 percent of money generated with content in this industry is generated through advertising. This has led Hulu to optimize its ad experience, and Kilar showed a few new features that the company will roll out in the future. Hulu will introduce personalized advertising, addressing users by name. “
- How Conan O’Brien Beat Leno And Letterman [Fast Company] – Team CoCo rides the social media wave to ratings success: “I know what you guys are thinking: ‘Hey, it’s the guy from Twitter,'” joked Conan O’Brien, before launching into a mock-impression of his Internet fans. “Why am I doing that!” he began laughing. “Those people saved my ass! Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.” Indeed, a strong Internet following fed Conan, who debuted his new show last night on TBS, very well. Bolstered by his almost 2 million Twitter followers, a first-of-its-kind social media strategy, and an innovative digital team, Conan soared on the late-night scene with huge ratings, besting both David Letterman and arch-nemesis Jay Leno with 4.2 million viewers […]“Conan’s audience has been very vocal online, and he clearly made a smooth transition from Twitter to TBS,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks.[…] Team Coco’s digital strategy a “brilliant launch campaign that incorporated social media better than I’ve ever seen.”
- BBC iPlayer going international next year, will be either fee- or ad-supported [Engadget] – “The BBC’s iPlayer video-on-demand service has been an unqualified success since its rollout back in 2007 and now it’s taking the next logical step in expanding its reach: it’s going global. Such is the word from John Smith, the generically named head of BBC Worldwide, who sees the international market for British shows as “under-exploited” and wants to see the iPlayer opened up beyond the Queen’s home isles. Of course, since continental Europeans and North Americans aren’t subject to the same backbreaking TV license fee, there’ll be a new commercial element to the service, though the Beeb’s bigwigs have yet to figure out if that means users will have to pay a levy or put up with some ads.”
- Ghoulish Facebook vandals mock Australian laws [SMH] – Tribute pages to young people who have died, being ‘defaced’, but is it illegal? “Also defaced was a tribute page to Chantelle Rowe, 16, who was found dead with her parents in their Adelaide home yesterday. Inappropriate messages and doctored photographs were posted to several tribute pages for Chantelle and her family, who police believe were killed in a triple murder. A cousin, Steven Rowe, wrote about the material on Facebook: “He even sent this shit to my inbox … thats my cousin and i honestly hope some [sic] kicks your head in!” But the user responsible for the messages replied: “I won’t go to jail … i’m not in Australia, therefore I cannot break the Australian law”. Victoria Police and South Australia Police both refused to comment, arguing no offence had been committed. However, Jesssica Chantelle Cook, 22, from Queensland, received a three-month suspended jail sentence in August for posting offensive material on a Facebook tribute page…”
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