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Talking about Facebook & Privacy with RTR FM
I was interviewed this morning on Perth’s RTR FM about privacy concerns raised in light of media reports that Facebook plans “to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150 million members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.” While the reports themselves might have overstated the case in this instance, I’m constantly surprised by how little thought most users of social networking sites give to their own privacy; I’m equally dismayed when it comes as a revelation to people that Facebook is actually about trying to make money – it’s a business, not philanthropy! That said, any chance to get people thinking a bit more about the digital footprints they leave is a good thing and I enjoyed the this morning’s chat on the air. If you want you can access ‘Facebook is evil now?’ on RTR’s website, on click here for an mp3 of the interview (10 minutes, around 9Mb).
Annotated Digital Culture Links: January 20th 2009
Links for January 19th 2009 through January 20th 2009:
- “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” by danah boyd (Phd Thesis, 2.1Mb PDF) – “Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.”
- Facebook irked by ‘burger for friends’ campaign [The Age] – “Burger King said Friday that pressure from Facebook has caused it to yank an application that gave members of the hot social networking website a Whopper for every 10 friends they dumped. Before the Whopper Sacrifice Campaign was halted, 233,906 friends were “sacrificed” by Facebook users more interested in relationships with the global fast-food chain’s specialty hamburgers, according to Burger King. … Changes sought by Facebook reportedly included ditching an application feature that sent deleted friends messages informing them that an online pal preferred a hamburger over them.”
- The Boxxy Story – From the 4chan meme factory, the story of Boxxy, whose hyperactive YouTube antics caused a hormone-driven civil war, taking her from a micro-meme to the Queen /b/
Selling Cinderella on YouTube
Sure, it’s a jacket, not a glass slipper, and this time the one that got away is a guy, but “Heidi’s” Cinderella story is clocking up hits rapidly on YouTube:
It’s a romantic tale, of one girl looking for the guy whole stole her heart after a brief exchange in a cafe … he left his jacket behind, but stole her heart. Now, using YouTube, she’s reaching out to try and find him. As stories go, it’s got pretty much everything, but it’s just a little too cute. Indeed, “Heidi” has already managed to cobble together a website to promote her quest and it’s a bit too professional; these photos are more about showing off Heidi and the jacket than about trying to genuinely connect with someone. In the post-LonelgGirl15 era, people that tend to be too good to be true tend to raise an eyebrow, and The Daily Telegraph seems to have found the likely viral marketing engine under the hood of this tale:
The Sydney protagonist is 24-year-old Elizabeth Bay shop assistant Heidi, who is adamant the incident was absolutely real and says she is desperate to find her mystery man with the laptop. With the help of a graphic-designer friend, she recorded a video for YouTube titled: "Are you my man in the jacket?” Within four days, more than 60,000 people had watched the pretty blonde put her heart on the line and plead for the handsome stranger to come forward. … The problem with this story is that the label on the jacket is linked to a mainstream fashion house. And it’s a label that doesn’t exist. At least not yet. The Sunday Telegraph has learned that the Australian company is on the verge of launching its first menswear line. Heidi swears she is not involved in a guerrilla marketing campaign. "I just picked up the jacket,” she insisted.
Could a new line of jackets called Heidi but about to hit the market? 😛
Update: It’s been confirmed that this was indeed a viral marketing video.
Annotated Digital Culture Links: January 8th 2009
Links for January 7th 2009 through January 8th 2009:
- How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR (Good advice.)
- Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes [NYTimes.com] – In moves that will help shape the online future of the music business, Apple said Tuesday that it would remove anticopying restrictions on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store and allow record companies to set a range of prices for them. Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, was already doing so. In return, Apple, whose dominance in online music sales gives it powerful leverage, agreed to a longstanding demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents. Instead, the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29. Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99″
- Raid Gaza! Editorial Games and Timeliness [News Games: Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project] – “Raid Gaza! is a new editorial game about the Gaza crisis. Like editorial games should, it takes a strong position. But unlike so many, it also offers coherent gameplay that is related to the conflict it critiques. … The game is headstrong, suffering somewhat from its one-sided treatment of the issue at hand. But as an editorial, it is a fairly effective one both as opinion text and as game. It is playable and requires strategy, the exercise of which carries the payload of commentary. It’s release on user-contributed animation and games portal Newgrounds came on 30 December 2008, only three days after the Israeli Defense Forces launched airstrikes as a part of “Operation Cast Lead.” The rapidness with which the game was developed, combined with its relatively sophisticated ability to mount commentary through gameplay, underscore one of the biggest issues with editorial games.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: December 16th 2008
Links for December 16th 2008:
- The writer’s guide to making a digital living [Australia Council for the Arts] – “The writer’s guide was developed through the Australia Council’s Story of the Future project to explore the craft and business of writing in the digital era. It includes case studies from Australia’s rising generation of poets, novelists, screenwriters, games writers and producers who are embracing new media and contains audio and video content from seminars and workshops, as well as extensive references to resouces in Australia and beyond.” (The online presentation is great, but you can also download the full guide as a PDF and watch the hilarious introductory video.)
- YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money [NYTimes.com] – Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living. Michael Buckley quit his day job in September. He says his online show is “silly,” but it helped pay off credit-card debt. One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.”
- A “Run” of William Gibson’s “Agrippa” Poem from a Copy of Original 1992 Agrippa Diskette [The Agrippa Files] – A video capture of William Gibson’s infamous self-destroying poem Agrippa – to read it, you had to erase it! Amazing stuff.
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2008 [TorrentFreak] – Surprising no one, The Dark Knight is the most pirated movie of 2008, but how did The Bank Job end up at #3 given it took less than $US 65 million at the box office? The match between downloads and box office figures seems vague, at best!
- News About the News Business, in 140 Characters [NYTimes.com] – “With staff changes and reductions across the media industry, even a blog post can be too time-consuming a way to announce who is in and out of a job. That is why a public relations employee turned to the instant-blogging platform Twitter to create The Media Is Dying, a Twitter feed that documents media hirings and firings in one-sentence bursts of text. “These sorts of layoffs are unheard-of,” said the stream’s founder, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his sources in the industry. “It’s gotten insane to keep up with who was moving around and changing beats.” Initially, The Media Is Dying was accessible only to select Twitter members, as the feed was intended to help those in the P.R. industry stay on top of the revolving entries in their address books. But requests to be included flooded the founder, who decided to go public three weeks ago.”
- Iran’s bloggers thrive despite blocks [BBC NEWS | World | Middle East] – “With much of the official media controlled by the government or hardline conservatives, the internet has become the favoured way of communicating for Iran’s well-educated and inquisitive younger generation. Go online in Iran and you will find blogs or websites covering every topic under the sun. Politics, of course, but also the arts, Hollywood cinema, women’s issues, women’s sport, pop music. Whisper it quietly, there is even an online dating scene in the Islamic Republic. Day-by-day there is an intriguing cyber-war, as the government wrestles for control of the internet, and Iran’s bloggers wrestle it back. Iran hosts around 65,000 bloggers, and has around 22 million internet users. Not bad for a country in which some remote areas do not yet have mains electricity.”
Annotated Links of Interest: October 26th 2008
Links of interest for October 24th 2008 through October 26th 2008:
- (SPOILER) What happened when the lights went out. [Whedonesque] – Joss Whedon talks straight to the fans about Dollhouse: “Sadly, this is not a naughty post. It’s just Joss nattering on again. I thought it was time to check in with you once again, gentle viewers. Or readers. Or pictures-looker-ats (that might be viewers). Also listeners, sniffers, haberdashers, Olympic hopefuls, the elderly, the youngerdly, and the mighty state of Oregon (go Oregon-based sports franchise!) Welcome all. Welcome… to me. What’s me up to? I’m glad me asked. Me’ve (I’m not doing that any more) been working on a little show called Dollhouse. Yes, perhaps you’ve read about how it’s blazing an untrammeled path to surefire success, with nary a hitch or a hiccup, just pure blazing blazery, comet-like and meteoresque. What’s that, you say? You’ve read other things? Dark, Yog-Sothothy rumors about shutdowns and delays? Poppycock! They’re true. But I never pass up a chance to say “poppycock”. “
- Flunking Spore – John Bohannon [Science, 322 (5901): 531b, October 2008] – Apparently Spore fails to live up to the expectations of scientists and the promotional material for Spore might have been a little disingenuous: “So over the past month, I’ve been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn’t just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong. I also tracked down the scientists who appeared on television in what seemed like an endorsement of Spore’s scientific content on the National Geographic channel. They said they had been led to believe that the interviews were for a straight documentary about “developmental evolutionary” science rather than a video promoting a computer game “
- The Medium – The Hitler Meme [NYTimes] – The New York Times on that Hitler (Downfall) meme: “On YouTube, we’re in a bunker, and the enemies are always, always closing in. The ceilings are low. The air is stifling. A disheveled leader is delusional. This is the premise of more than 100 videos on the Web — the work of satirists who for years have been snatching video and audio from “Downfall,” the 2004 German movie of Hitler’s demise, and doctoring it to tell a range of stories about personal travails and world politics. By adding new English-language subtitles, they transform the movie’s climactic scene, in which Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) rails against his enemies and reluctantly faces his defeat, into the generic story of a rabid blowhard brought low.”
- YouTube Enables Deep Linking Within Videos [TechCrunch] – “It’s not a big new feature but it’s certainly one that will come in handy: YouTube will now allow you to send users to a specific point in a video by appending a short tag to the end of a video’s URL. It’s pretty surprising that this functionality wasn’t available earlier, as Google Video introduced the same feature over two years ago. YouTube users have been forced to rely on third party services like Splicd to do the same thing. To specify a point, append a tag to the end of your video link with the following syntax: “#t=1m45s” (you can change the numbers before the ‘m’ and ’s’ to edit the minutes and seconds, respectively.”
- Woman in jail over virtual murder [BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific] – “A woman has been arrested in Japan after she allegedly killed her virtual husband in a popular video game. The 43-year-old was reportedly furious at finding herself suddenly divorced in the online game Maplestory. Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character. The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data.”
- Fan fury at Nine [TV Tonight] – Australian “Fans of Fringe who were unaware the show had been pulled from Nine’s current schedule got a rude shock last night and vented their anger in online messageboards. They were universally vehement in their displeasure with Nine’s programming. This site alone now totals 95 posts in one thread alone. Over on Nine’s own messageboard there were more furious comments: Fringe Dweller: C’mon channel 9, have some balls and tell the people why Fringe has been pulled! Oh I’m sorry, you don’t care about what people like. Maybe we could lose one of the four hundred different versions of CSI. God Bless ‘Two and a Half man’ where would you be without them. Maybe you can rename yourselves to Channel Two and a Half Men CSI Malibu!!! Why I’m at it, you pulled Fringe and we still have to put up with that The Strip crap.”
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