Digital Culture Links: October 19th 2009
Links for October 14th 2009 through October 19th 2009:
- Judges have final decision after Twitter enters court [The Australian] – “The Federal Court will leave it up to individual judges to decide whether to allow cases to be covered from within their courtrooms on new media platforms such as Twitter. The issue arose after two technology journalists, Andrew Colley from The Australian, and Liam Tung from website ZDNet Australia, started using the microblogging site to publish running reports of the landmark iiNet copyright case being heard by judge Dennis Cowdroy in Sydney and which is big news in Hollywood. [… ] But the Twitter reporting is also a first for Australia, although court cases have been reported on Twitter overseas. The reporters published their “tweets”, which are limited to a maximum of 140 characters, using their personal Twitter feeds, on which they identify themselves as journalists and name their media organisations. Both used laptop computers. Mobile phones and recording devices are prohibited in court. Justice Cowdroy soon became aware of what was happening but opted not to stop them.” (While only being reported in relation to the iiNet case, this is actually quite a big deal about reporting technologies being allowed in Australian courtrooms.)
- Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices [Smashing Magazine] – Great examples of what makes (and breaks) a good Twitter background. (I really should do something about mine, one day …)
- Don’t Call Me a Slut [The Daily Beast] – Meghan McCain (John McCain’s daughter) calmly and sanely responds to a stupid Twitter-fueled minor media scandal: “On Wednesday, I posted a hastily taken self-portrait on Twitter—which I thought was funny and silly—and within a few hours I had caused a minor media scandal. I spent most of the next day thinking about what exactly was so shocking about the picture, why there was such an immediate and nasty overreaction. After all, it’s not like I was caught making a sex tape. I certainly didn’t pose nude for Playboy. And I hadn’t even exposed a nipple. So why all this Sturm und Drang? Could it be it’s because I have breasts? Because for those of you who didn’t know, I have two. They’re larger than some women’s and not as big as others. I don’t usually show off my cleavage—as I did in the photos I posted—which I will admit is not the smartest thing I have ever done. But it’s just not worth the drama it caused. To be honest, I don’t feel that I have anything to feel ashamed of.”
- Hey, showbiz folks: Check your contract before your next tweet [The Hollywood Reporter] – “Hollywood is coming down with the Twitter jitters. There’s a growing number of studio deals with new language aimed specifically at curbing usage of social-media outlets by actors, execs and other creatives. The goal: plugging leaks of disparaging or confidential information about productions via the likes of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. A recent talent contract from Disney includes a new clause forbidding confidentiality breaches via “interactive media such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other interactive social network or personal blog.”” (The dream factory just isn’t ready to share the candid reality …)
- Berners-Lee ‘sorry’ for slashes [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has confessed that the // in a web address were actually “unnecessary”. He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes. “There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. He admitted that when he devised the web, almost 30 years ago, he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause “so much hassle”. “
Digital Culture Links: October 14th 2009
Links for October 12th 2009 through October 14th 2009:
- MySpace Loses Market Share As Facebook, Twitter Gain [SMH] – “MySpace has lost more than half of its market share in the past year even though Australians have doubled the amount of time they spend on social networking sites in that period. New figures released by Nielsen this week revealed that Australians spent 1.6 million hours on social media sites in June this year, up from 800,000 hours a year earlier. The two major beneficiaries of the social media rush have been Facebook and Twitter, which, according to Nielsen, now have 8 million and 1.5 million unique Australian users, respectively. Conversely, MySpace has been hemorrhaging users in the past year, with its monthly Australian unique visitors reaching 2.381 million in August, Nielsen said. Separately, traffic monitoring company Experian Hitwise said the site’s Australian market share dropped by 54 per cent in the year to October 10.” (So … notMySpace?)
- Ajay Rochester threatens to sue Woman’s Day magazine [The Australian] – TV host Ajay Rochester has used microblogging site Twitter to threaten to sue ACP Magazines’ Woman’s Day over a story claiming she was planning “a raft of cosmetic procedures”. In a series of “tweets”, the first of which was posted at about 2am today Sydney time, LA-based Rochester writes: “Shame on you Woman’s Day! Photo’s are 7 months old and u didn’t have permisson to use! Shame Shame Shame!” Rochester also took aim at a Woman’s Day reporter, saying: “Phil Koch – better get a lawyer son, better get a reaaaal good one! You had every op to do this with respect, integrity and honesty.” However, this tweet was later deleted. […] “Thank You Twitter for giving people like us the op to shout back at the injustices the media think they can just take with our lives.” [she tweeted.] “Had many things said about me in the last year – mostly untrue twisted by people intent on hurting me. But this is THE WORST. No respect!”
- Australian social media use doubles [Media Hunter] – “The amount of time spent on social media sites has nearly doubled from around 800,000 hours per month in August 2008 to 1.6 million hours per month in June 2009. Online measurement company Nielsen has found time spent on social media sites was just behind entertainment, which had just over 1.6 million hours per month. The number of Australians accessing social media sites has continued to grow in the past year, with Facebook’s unique audience surpassing eight million for the first time in August 2009. Twitter was up 979% to 1.5 million in August 2009.”
- 4,000,000,000 [Flickr Blog] – Flickr just passed the 4 billion photos mark … that’s a lot!
- No Video for Twitter and No Twitter for Miley [New TeeVee] – “Elsewhere in the intersection of Twitter and video, teen queen Miley Cyrus posted a rap on YouTube about why she shut down her Twitter account. “The reasons are simple, I started Tweeting ’bout pimples; I stopped living for moments, and started living for people.” OK, so I’ll agree it’s ridiculous to consider this a news story, but I have to admire Cyrus’ chops; she executes a fantastically low-fi explanatory music video complete with back-up dancers in shower stalls. With YouTube partner ads on some 1,750,000 views over the weekend…” (Her rationale for leaving Twitter seems an entirely reasonable one and quite quotable when trying to capture some people’s concerns about Twitter as banal.)
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.
Creative Commons 2009 Fundraiser
The 2009 Annual Fundraising Campaign for Creative Commons has kicked off, so it’s an opportune time to consider giving if you possibly can. I’ve been a long time supporter, user and advocate of the Creative Commons so it will come as no surprise to hear that I’m encouraging you all to donate this year if you possibly can. Incidentally, to my fellow Australia CC supporters: the Australian dollar is particularly strong compared to the US at the moment, so it’s the perfect time to give and maximize the impact our dollar can have!
Most of my work online, from Flickr to this blog, are under Creative Commons licenses and I still firmly believe that the any legal system where copyright isn’t just a means of monopoly-building must incorporate the some rights reserved model which allows creators to specify what they do want others to be able to do with work they’ve created, not just what they can’t do (the ‘default’ of full copyright).
In addition, earlier this year I was able to repost my article: ‘The Creative Commons: An Overview for Educators’ (which was originally published in Screen Education, 50, Winter 2008, pp. 38-42 and is reproduced here with permission). The article was (and is) aimed at media teachers in Australia, but hopefully may be of use more broadly, too. It also outlines, I hope, why I believe the Creative Commons are a core tool for content creation and remix in education.
And just to prove I’ve put my money where my mouth is: 2009 / 2008 / 2007 / 2006 / 2005.
Digital Culture Links: October 8th 2009
Links for October 4th 2009 through October 8th 2009:
- Angry Outbursts on Twitter Prompt Lengthy Legal Discussions [NYTimes.com] – “Times are tough for the “tweet before you think” crowd. Courtney Love was sued by a fashion designer after she posted a series of inflammatory tweets, one calling the designer a liar and a thief. A landlord in Chicago sued a tenant for $50,000 after she tweeted about her moldy apartment. And Demi Moore slapped back at Perez Hilton over a revealing photograph of the actress’s daughter. A growing number of people have begun lashing out at their Twitter critics, challenging the not-quite rules of etiquette on a service where insults are lobbed in brief bursts, too short to include the social niceties. Some offended parties are suing.” (Yes, as with all social media, if you think things you post or tweet will ever go away … they won’t.)
- Hotmail users advised to change passwords following information theft [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – “Hotmail users are being advised to change their passwords, after thousands of account details were posted online. A list containing more than 10,000 apparently genuine account names and passwords was posted to a website last week, where it remained until being spotted over the weekend by Microsoft security researchers. The list, which has been seen by the Guardian, appears to be genuine. It only contains usernames beginning with the letters A and B, but covers accounts ending in @hotmail.com, @msn.com and @live.com – three services owned by Microsoft which have more than 280m users worldwide. Although the stolen details have since been taken offline, copies of the list are already available elsewhere on the web – meaning that the details are potentially in the hands of criminals.” (Putting the HOT back into hotmail …)
- Not a Nobel Headline [The Content Makers] – “What on earth is this shit? Australia gets its first female Nobel prize-winning scientist, and The Age runs with the following headline on the front page of its print edition: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing with a Nobel Prize? Perhaps its meant to be all very po-mo and “oh look we’re so not sexist that we can actually pretend we are sexist in an ironical kind of way, ho ho”. And it is written off the first para, which says that this was what Elizabeth Blackburn was once asked by a family friend. But as a front page splash, it demeans the story to the level of cute human interest, rather than serious breakthrough. It leaves me thinking: What Are Nice Boys Like You Doing With a Newspaper?” (I couldn’t agree more!)
- The life cycle of social networking sites. [Democratic Underground] – Amusing visualisation of the life-cycle of social networking sites, from the ‘New & Cool’ through to the inevitable ‘Cash Grabbing’ phase. Facebook is probably between steps three and four! 🙂
- Google Wave’s unproductive email metaphors [Scoblizer] – Robert Scoble on why Google Wave isn’t really like email at all (which is good, apparently, because email isn’t that productive!).
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.