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.”
Digital Culture Links: January 19th 2010
Links for January 18th 2010 through January 19th 2010:
- Android Karenina [Quirk] – What a great idea of a mashup novel! "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters co-author Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina—an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel."
- New law could block access to anime, manga and slash fan sites in Australia [fanthropology] – A look at what Australian’s proposed Internet Censorship laws could mean for slash, manga and anime fans: in short, not good!
- Call for study of threat from "offline" filesharing [The Guardian] – Anyone remember pre-internet “piracy”? Time to scan USBs and harddrives at customs 😛 "Policymakers urgently need better information on people’s attitudes to copyright law, according to a report out today warning that friends swapping hard drives and memory sticks could pose as great a piracy threat to media companies as online filesharers. The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (Sabip): "There’s a whole big question here around what is happening offline digitally, the swapping of discs and data in that world. There’s a lot of it going on," said Sabip board member Dame Lynne Brindley. Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, said existing research did not give a clear picture of consumer behaviour. While there was some data on the proportion of people buying counterfeit CDs, DVDs and video games – estimated at between 7% and 16% of the population – Sabip was concerned that more needed to be known about other copyright breaches, such as hard-drive swapping …"
- Seven launches online catch-up, PLUS7 [TV Tonight] – "Seven today launched its online catch-up portal, PLUS7. The site offers legal streaming of Seven shows including Grey’s Anatomy, Home and Away, FlashForward, Private Practice, Heroes, Castle, Better Homes and Gardens, Parks and Recreation and more. As with the ABC’s iView, the site does not require a show to finish downloading before being available to start play. The site includes “mid-roll advertising” to show advertisements mid programme, much like commercial television. A spokesperson previously told TV Tonight they expect around 3-4 ads per show. Titles will remain online for between 7 – 28 days depending on rights. So far no ISPs are yet on board for unmetered content. The site can be viewed at au.tv.yahoo.com/plus7." (As expected, Plus7 is geo-locked, so only visible inside Australia. Sorry Brits, you’ll have to wait for Home and Away!)
Farmville.
The truth about Farmville …
Digital Culture Links: January 13th 2010
Rather Google-centric links January 13th 2010:
- Google ‘may end China operations over Gmail breaches’ [BBC News] – “Internet search company Google says it may end operations in China over alleged breaches of the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. It said it had found a “sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China”. It did not specifically accuse China’s government but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese site’s results, as the government requires. Google said the decision may mean it has to shut the site, set up in 2006.” Google’s certainly showing some real guts; read their official statement.
- Google finally enters the online storage arena with a free 1GB [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – With the announcement that Google are now supporting online file storage of any file-type via Google Docs the fabled GDrive appears one step closer! Jack Schofield examines Google’s online storage foray: “First, as Google says, you will be able to share files that Google Docs can’t handle, presumably including avi and MP3. That is clearly useful. Second, Google Docs can be a problem for companies sharing Microsoft Office files, because the features you lose when you convert to Google’s formats you can never get back. Google Docs storage will now let people share those files. And third…. Google is planning to launch ChromeOS, where computers run a Chrome browser but have no permanent local storage: everything is done “in the cloud”. Google probably does not plan to tell those folks to go somewhere else to store their files, so at that point it will need an online storage offering.”
- Uni staff migrate to the cloud [The Australian] – “More universities are set to follow Macquarie and outsource staff email to parties such as Google’s Gmail, with Curtin University close to a deal with Microsoft. About 14 Australian universities have already outsourced their student email to Gmail or Microsoft’s Live@edu service, but this week Macquarie became the first to migrate staff to the so-called cloud in a deal with Gmail. The cloud is jargon for the outsourcing of email and data services to external providers that host the data on servers that can be located across the world. Concerns about the security of intellectual property and academic privacy had made universities cautious about moving staff to the cloud. But Macquarie’s chief information officer Marc Bailey said the likes of Google and Microsoft offered vastly superior security to a university.” (Given how frustrating current arrangements can be, I welcome a cloud-based email system for Curtin staff!)
- Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View [RW Web] – Google’s street view becomes a virtual advertising landscape! Inspired by Minority Report perhaps? “According to a new patent that was just granted to Google, the company could soon extend the reach of its advertising program in Google Maps to Street View. This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties. In Google’s example, the software could identify the marquis and individual window posters on a theater property and replace them with new information. Through this, a theater could promote a new play in Street View, even if the actual Street View image is completely out of date.”
FlashForward or FlashBack: Television Distribution in 2010?
My column ‘FlashForward or FlashBack: Television Distribution in 2010’ is now up as part of the latest edition of Flow TV. The article concludes thus:
Promotional campaigns and social media discussions ensure that global markets are primed; the only thing missing is the means for viewers and fans in many countries to legally access their favourite shows. Whether it’s the US-produced FlashForward, the BBC’s Doctor Who or the Australian soapie Neighbours, if distributors don’t have their own flash forward to new distribution models it is likely that more and more of the people formerly know as the audience will see the second decade of the twenty-first century as the time to take distribution into their own hands.
If you’re interested to know how I got there, go read the full column.
Digital Culture Links: January 7th 2010
Links for January 6th 2010 through January 7th 2010:
- New Video: Protecting Reputations Online in Plain English [Common Craft] – Great new Common Craft video looking at reputation management, especially in terms of thinking about what poeple share today and what that means tomorrow!
- Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook by Kate Raynes-Goldie [First Monday 15.1, Jan 2010] – Timely look at Facebook, privacy and young adults: “This paper explores how 20–something Facebook users understand and navigate privacy concerns. Based on a year–long ethnographic study in Toronto, Canada, this paper looks at how — contrary to many mainstream accounts — younger users do indeed care about protecting and controlling their personal information. However, their concerns revolve around what I call social privacy, rather than the more conventional institutional privacy. This paper also examines the somewhat subversive practices which users engaged in to enhance their own social privacy, and in some cases, violate that of others. Finally, this paper examines some of the reasons that users may continue using the site, despite privacy concerns.”
- Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook [Wired.com] – Another reason Facebook’s new privacy settings suck: “Got an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each — such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level? Facebook has just the free feature you’re looking for, thanks to its recent privacy changes. The hack, first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through e-mail addresses in their contact list. But as Klein points out, a marketer could take a list of 1,000 e-mail addresses, either legally or illegally collected — and upload those through a dummy account — which then lets the user see all the profiles created using those addresses. Given Facebook’s ubiquity and most people’s reliance on a single e-mail address, the harvest could be quite rich.”
- The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities [academhack] – An interesting follow-up to the social media prominence of Brian Croxall’s MLA paper: “two observations: 1. The fact that Brian’s making public of his paper was an oddity worth noticing means that we are far away from the rise of the digital humanities. 2. The fact that a prominent digital scholar like Brian doesn’t even get one interview at the MLA means more than the economy is bad, that tenure track jobs are not being offered, but rather that Universities are still valuing the wrong stuff. They are looking for “real somebodies” instead of “virtual somebodies.” Something which the digital humanities has the potential of changing (although I remain skeptical).” [Via Chuck]
- Pocohontar [Boing Boing] – Yes, James Cameron’s Avatar is very similar to Disney’s Pocahontas and here’s the script treatment to “prove” it.
- Apple’s App Store Downloads Top Three Billion – Just as Google unveils their Nexus One phone, Apple reminds everyone that their App store will be a hard one to beat: “Apple® today announced that more than three billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store by iPhone® and iPod touch® users worldwide. “Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”” 3 billions apps … wowzers!
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