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Digital Culture Links: November 17th 2009
Links for November 15th 2009 through November 17th 2009:
- Nose, face, cut, spite: Blocking Google [BuzzMachine] – Jeff Jarvis has a neat little summary of what the research suggests would happen to Google is Murdoch stops letting the search engine index his news properties: in short, not much damage to Google, and whole world of loss-of-revenue pain for News Corps. Interestingly, pulling Wikipedia out of Google searches would do more damage!
- Social media focus [BBC – The Editors] – The BBC appoints a social media editor. (This is the shape of things to come …)
- I’m Belle de Jour [Times Online] – “Meet Belle de Jour, the anonymous blogger and former prostitute whose explicit, funny, articulate, eye-popping online Diary of a London Call Girl has fascinated millions of readers worldwide. Here she is: Belle, the famous tart, whose books became runaway bestsellers, who was played on screen by Billie Piper in the television series based on them, whose brand is instantly recognisable to anyone who uses the internet or bookshops and who has stirred up a considerable amount of controversy through her writing-as-a-whore career, not least because she has always refused to condemn prostitution as being necessarily bad or sad: our very own second-wave Happy Hooker. […] She’s real, all right, and I’m sitting on the bed next to her. Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health.”
Lessig’s Talk: Getting copyright right for education and science!
Lawrence Lessig gave an outstanding keynote speech for the Educause Conference, called ‘It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright’, delivered on 5 November 2009:
The talk is an hour long, but is well worth your time. There’s a few notes on the talk over at Inside Higher Ed. The guts of Lessig’s talk: we need to ensure that copyright doesn’t continue to be a mechanism which distances educators, researchers and scientists from sharing their thoughts, ideas and findings with the public and wider world. [Via D’Arcy Norman]
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!).
What is Google Wave?
Still confused about what Google Wave can do, or is intended to do. So are most people; they should watch this.
(Or, if you really prefer your explanations more technical, there’s O’Reilly’s fairly technical An Introduction to Google Wave – Google Wave: Up and Running.)
Digital Culture Links: October 1st 2009
Links for September 28th 2009 through October 1st 2009:
- Google Wave Overview [YouTube] – A nice and short (8 minute) explanation of Google Wave: it’s a hosted conversation, encouraging collaboration!
- MPs warned to avoid hasty blogs [BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics] – The next generation of [UK] Labour MPs have been warned to be careful about what they write on blogs and websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – as comments made in haste remain on the internet forever. At a packed fringe meeting hosted by Google at the Labour conference, activists, prospective and current MPs were told of the benefits of social networking sites – where politicians can get their message out without civil servants and special advisers getting in the way. Labour’s newly crowned “Twitter tsar”, MP Kerry McCarthy, made a bid to win over the sceptics by saying it did not have to be a burden […] But in a word of warning Adewale Oshineye, a Google engineer, advised prospective MPs to bear in mind they were publishing something that could be dug out years later. “When you are saying something amusing as a prospective parliamentary candidate, in four or five years’ time when you are a cabinet minister and someone digs that up…””
- Online advertising ‘overtakes TV’ [BBC NEWS | Business] – “Online advertising spending in the UK has overtaken television expenditure for the first time, a report has said. Outlay grew 4.6% to £1.752bn between January and July, according to the study by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The recession saw overall advertising slide by 16% in the period, according to the study. E-mail campaigns, classified adverts, display ads and search marketing are all classed as online advertising. The body representing UK commercial television broadcasters said that the comparison was unfair.” (Unfair … or harder to pitch against?)
- Aussies call an end to just phoning on mobiles [The Age] – “Using mobiles for just calls and texting is a thing of the past, as a third of Australians now check emails on their handsets and more than 70 per cent access mobile entertainment and information services. In spite of the global financial crisis, the use of mobile phone services has continued to grow in the past year as more Australians buy internet-enabled smartphones, the 2009 Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index reveals. Released today by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, the exhaustive survey of 3710 respondents found 36% used email on their mobiles in the past 12 months, and, of those, almost half used email daily – a growth rate of 80 per cent over the previous year. In last year’s survey, just 7 per cent of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets, but this figure has jumped this year to 32 per cent, with half of those accessing the sites daily.”
- Sarah Brown becomes Britain’s highest-profile Twitter user [Politics | guardian.co.uk] – “Sarah Brown [wife of UK PM] has overtaken Stephen Fry as Britain’s highest profile Twitter user, it emerged today. “SarahBrown10” has gained more than 775,000 followers since joining the social networking service in March, outstripping Fry’s 768,000. The number of fans keeping up with Brown’s tweets amounts to almost five times the entire Labour party membership. The prime minister’s wife steers clear of political controversy in her messages, instead giving followers glimpses into her day-to-day life and publicising her favourite charities. … Since joining Twitter, Brown has sent out 1,162 messages, each limited to 140 characters. Ross Furlong, an online public relations expert, said Brown’s tweets could help Labour despite the fact that she does not use them for campaigning purposes. “Although the content is deliberately not party political, she is effectively pressing voter flesh online, as she did in person at the Glenrothes byelection to great effect,” Furlong said .”
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