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Digital Culture Links: May 12th 2011

Links for April 29th 2011 through May 12th 2011:

  • Millions of Facebook users under 10 [The Age] – “Some 7.5 million of the 20 million US minors who used Facebook in the past year were younger than 13, and a million of them were bullied, harassed or threatened on the site, an American study shows. More than 5 million Facebook users were aged 10 or younger, and they were allowed to use Facebook largely without parental supervision, the State of the Net survey by Consumer Reports found.”
  • chrome-angry-birds [Nelson’s Weblog] – Angry Birds comes in HTML5, too! “One of Google’s big announcements this week was the launch of Chrome Angry Birds, a port of the hugely popular mobile game to Google’s browser. But calling it “Chrome Angry Birds” is missing the point because what’s really interesting is that it’s a real-time multimedia cross-platform HTML 5 app. It runs fine in MSIE 9 and Firefox on Windows (sound and save games included) and I’ve heard reports it works in Safari on Macs, too. And because the game is based on open browser technologies, we can easily pull it apart and see how it’s built just like we’ve been pulling apart web pages since 1993 via the magic of “view source”. [Play.]
  • Chromebook – Google partners to release Chromebooks, cloud-centric computers which boot amazingly fast are are designed to operate with everything in and from the cloud. Built upon the Chrome ‘browser’ (or OS) technology.
  • Introducing Music Beta by Google [YouTube] – Google introduces “Music Beta”, their entry into the cloud music services, allowing individuals to upload their music collection, then use Google or Android to stream that music to portable and fixed devices. (Currently invitation-only and US-only.)
  • Zynga goes Gaga! Lady Gaga and Zynga team up to celebrate new album “Born This Way” [Zynga] – Well, Zynga and Gaga get points for an original combination of media elements, at least: “Lady Gaga and Zynga today announced a partnership to launch the mega-artist’s new album “Born this Way.” Launching May 17, the first-of-its-kind program gives “little monsters” throughout the world a first listen to exclusive un-released songs from the upcoming when they visit GagaVille, a uniquely designed neighboring farm in FarmVille (There will be unicorns and crystals. Enough said.). The full album also comes bundled as a free download with the purchase of a special Zynga $25 game card, available exclusively at Best Buy. The program reaches across Zynga games and across platforms. Words With Friends, the popular mobile social game available iPhone, iPad, as well as Android devices, will feature a daily “Words with Gaga” contest …”
  • Google Launches Movie Rentals on Android Market: Online Video News [GigaOm] – Android rentals: “Google announced a new cloud movie service for Android that will be available as part of the Android Market. At its Google I/O developers conference Tuesday, the company said the service will have “thousands of movies available,” with titles including Inception, The King’s Speech and Despicable Me, and rentals starting at $1.99. Users will be able to rent titles on the Android Market’s website and then watch them on the web, stream them to Android devices and even download them to play on the go where no network connectivity is available.”
  • Watching Together: Twitter and TV [Twitter Blog] – “Last week, Twitter enjoyed its widest television integration to date via the live coverage of the royal wedding, as Chloe Sladden from our media team discusses on the Twitter Media blog. During the wedding, users interacted with ABC News’ coverage by using the hashtags #RoyalSuccess and #RoyalMess to voice their opinion about the events unfolding in London. They shared their thoughts with CNN by including the hashtag #CNNTV in their Tweets, causing #CNNTV to trend early in the event. And as audiences around the world watched the events live on TV, they posted millions of Tweets, peaking at 16,000 Tweets per minute between 5 and 6 a.m. EST. The royal wedding is just one example of how real-time Twitter integration can enhance TV coverage and help drive viewership …” [ Related YouTube clip: http://youtu.be/Jc8TQppzORE ]
  • Obi Wan Obama, Bin Laden’s Death, and Tumblr [Unmuzzled Thoughts] – Kelli Marshall looks at the memes and reactions emerging on Tumblr after US president Barack Obama announced that long saught terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden had been killed by US forces in Pakistan. (The post includes a useful archive of images.)
  • Corporate Rule of Cyberspace – Slavoj Žižek [ Inside Higher Ed] – Slavoj Žižek Vs Cloud Computing: “To put it simply, Steve Jobs is no better than Bill Gates: whether it be Apple or Microsoft, global access is increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access. The more an individual user is given access to universal public space, the more that space is privatized. Apologists present cloud computing as the next logical step in the “natural evolution” of the Internet, and while in an abstract-technological way this is true, there is nothing “natural” in the progressive privatization of global cyberspace. There is nothing “natural” in the fact that two or three companies in a quasi-monopolistic position can not only set prices at will but also filter the software they provide to give its “universality” a particular twist depending on commercial and ideological interests.”
  • South Korea bans youngsters from playing online games after midnight [News.com.au] – “Young South Koreans will be banned from playing online video games later than midnight after lawmakers passed a new curfew law. Yonhap news agency reported the new law – which bans anyone under 16 from playing online into the early hours – was passed by lawmakers worried about growing levels of addiction to gaming among youngsters. Gaming companies fiercely contested the legislation but the Youth Protection bill passed late Friday.”
  • Superman threatens to renounce US citizenship [Books | guardian.co.uk] – “After years of declaring he stood for “truth, justice and the American way,” Superman has provoked the ire of rightwingers by threatening to renounce his US citizenship. In the latest issue of Action Comics, which went on sale on Wednesday, the Man of Steel decides to take the step after he intervenes in a protest against the Iranian government. After the Islamic regime brands his non-violent protest as an act of war taken on behalf of the US president, the DC comic hero says he will renounce his citizenship before the United Nations. “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy,” he says. Although Superman never actually renounces his citizenship in the story, conservative commentators reacted with disgust.”
  • Instagram Spawns a Photo Ecosystem [NYTimes.com] – “Instagram, the social-meets-photos app for the iPhone that transforms plain cellphone pictures into vintage-looking works of art, has attracted millions of users. In recent months, it has also begun to draw entrepreneurs who are eager to capitalize on its growing popularity. In particular, people are creating services that revolve around bringing Instagram photos, typically viewed on a phone screen, into the real world. Keepsy lets people quickly build a photobook of their favorite Instagram pictures and share it on Facebook and Twitter. They can then print a hard copy of the photobook for about $30. There is also Postagram, which lets its users mail a postcard created from an Instagram photo to a recipient of their choice for 99 cents. And Hatchcraft will frame favorite Instagram pictures in hand-carved bamboo shadow boxes that can be hung on a wall.”
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Digital Culture Links: January 5th 2011

Links for January 5th 2011:

  • Billionaires take a turn at initiating ‘brand’ damage [SMH] – The Australian retail industry has jumped the shark. In an effort to ‘combat’ consumers getting better deals online, the retail giants have banded together to lobby the government to remove an exclusion that means purchases for overseas goods totally under $1000 don’t have the GST added. Customers, in turn, have pointed out very loudly that they shop online because of the terrible state of retail shops in Australia. Whoever thought up a PR campaign that basically tells consumers that the rich retail giants want consumers to be taxed more because they’re becoming too savvy and demanding better choice clearly failed Marketing 101!
  • How iTunes buyers are ripped off [Perth Now] – Australians are sick of the tyranny of digital distance: “Australian music fans are forging foreign iTunes accounts to make big savings on their purchases. The practice, which is a direct breach to iTunes terms and conditions, has exposed the inflated price that Australians pay to access songs off the popular music and entertainment site. By creating an American iTunes account through the use of a US credit card or gift card, users are saving up to 80c per song and $7 per album. The recently released Beatles box set collection can be bought with a saving of more than $A100. […] Numerous forums have surfaced on the net explaining the details of how to access the store which include creating a fake American billing address. Some have even used the address of the Apple corporation in the US to gain access.”
  • Facebook Users Uploaded A Record 750 Million Photos Over New Year’s [Tech Crunch] – “It doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s still staggering to think about: over the New Year’s weekend, Facebook saw 750 million photo uploads from its users. That’s a lot of celebrating, and it sets a new Facebook record. The stat was just tweeted by Facebook marketing director Randi Zuckerberg (who is also founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister). We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask what the last record was, but I’m guessing it was set over Halloween, which has historically been the biggest day for Facebook Photos. To give some context to that number, in July Facebook said that more than 100 million photos get uploaded every day (that average is higher now, obviously).”
  • Angry Birds launch for Sony’s Playstation 3 and PSP [BBC – Newsbeat] – Angry Birds makes the jump from mobile gaming to the consoles: “Sony has announced that Angry Birds is going to be released on its PlayStation 3 and PSP consoles. The game was originally developed for smart phones and proved a huge success with iPhone and Android users. Since being released in late 2009 it’s been downloaded nearly 40 million times. But with the Japanese entertainment giant now firmly on board developers Rovio have high hopes about bringing the game to a new audience. Released on January 5th it will be available to download for £2.49. “
  • What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011? [Center for the Study of the Public Domain] – “Waiting for . . . Waiting for Godot and Lord of the Flies, The Doors of Perception, Rear Window, Seven Samurai, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the first issues of Sports Illustrated, Horton Hears a Who! . . . . Current US law extends copyright protections for 70 years from the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1954 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2011. What might you be able to read or print online, quote as much as you want, or translate, republish or make a play or a movie from? How about William Golding’s Lord of the Flies?”
  • You might do a job on yourself [The Age] – Recruiters and interview panels are increasingly examining web presences: “Thank twice before uploading another photo or status update if you are about to have a job interview – employers are watching you. In an age of oversharing online, with a third of the Australian population on Facebook, many recruiters and companies cannot resist the temptation to screen potential candidates via social media. US employers have taken screening one step further, asking some job candidates to log in to their Facebook pages during the interview. There is no sign of this happening in Australia, recruiters say. But employers were interested in looking beyond a person’s resumé, said Kate Kendall, who specialises in recruitment via social media. “Companies are more interested in a holistic view of who they are hiring,” she said. “You can’t really try to hide.””
  • Instagram Quickly Passes 1 Million Users [NYTimes.com] – “Instagram, a social photo-sharing company that opened its shutters to iPhone owners just two months ago, announced Tuesday that it passed a major milestone of 1 million registered users. The company began offering its simple photo service in mid-October that allows people to share images from a mobile phone and then add unique and fun filters. Since then, Instagram has quickly become the talk of the tech community as people have flocked to the service even with stiff competition from a number of well-financed competitors, including PicPlz, Flickr and Path.”
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I Can Stalk U

I Can Stalk U is another one of those very simple websites which highlights how information already being shared by people everyday may be used in ways we’ve not necessarily thought through. In a similar vein to Please Rob Me, which highlighted tweets where people indicated they were leaving their home, I Can Stalk U illustrates how much information many people are inadvertently sharing via the geographic photo tagging in many smartphones (including iPhones). On the I Can Stalk U website, each tweet that includes geotagged photos is translated (ie the metadata is read, and presented), showing the approximate address, this address on a Google Map, the picture it was attached to, and a link to the original tweet.  All of this information is publicly accessible, the website is simply putting the geotag information up front, rather than the original tweet.  Here’s an screenshot from the website:

icanstalku

Often these sort of websites can be a bit confronting for people who’ve not thought about their privacy in relation to geotagged photos. The whole concept of metadata – literally, ‘data about data’ – which can so easily be embedded in photos, is a bit disconcerting for many people who may not have realised it was there. Thankfully, despite the initially confronting website, I Can Stalk U is set up as an educational tool, showing what data is unknowingly being shared, and telling you how to fix that if you don’t want this information out there on the web. On their ‘How’ page, the I Can Stalk U folks provide details on how to disable geotagging for iPhones, Blackberries and some other popular smartphones.  If you’ve got one and it’s not on the list, it’s worth disabling the geotagging unless you’re 100% comfortable with every photo you take (and share) embedding the where, when and on what that photo was taken.

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Darth History

Did you know Darth Vader attended the Yalta conference at the end of World War Two?

Darth Vader at the Yalta Conference

History makes such good raw material for the Photoshop-inclined. See the full set of wonderfully mashed up Superheroes in History from agan harahap. [Via io9]

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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.)
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Annotated Digital Culture Links: June 29th 2009

Links for June 13th 2009 through June 29th 2009:

  • Just Add Performance [Kiri Miller / Flow 10.02] – "… if you want to get involved in value-oriented debates about it, here’s a thought experiment: rather than concluding that Guitar Hero players are wasting the time that they would otherwise be putting into long hours of practice on a real guitar, consider the possibility that they might otherwise spend that time just listening to recorded music (or, of course, playing Grand Theft Auto). Anyone who has played Guitar Hero or Rock Band for more than five minutes will tell you that it requires a deeper level of musical engagement than listening to an iPod—intellectually, emotionally, physically, and often socially. Moreover, everyone I’ve interviewed for my research reports that the games have substantially changed the way they listen to popular music when they’re not playing. […] Guitar Hero and Rock Band let players put the performance back into recorded music, reanimating it with their physical engagement and performance adrenaline." (Great little article!)
  • Keeping News of David Rohde’s Kidnapping Off Wikipedia [NYTimes.com] – "For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia." The weird tale of trying to keep something (that was legitimate news) out of the Wikipedia.
  • Picasa With Creative Commons Search [Goole Blogoscoped] – Search Google's PicasaWeb for CC-licensed images: "Google’s photo album service, Picasa Web Albums, now allows you to show options during your search. As Ionut noticed, as part of these options you can tick the “Creative Commons” link, which will only return shareable pics. The amount of images is not all too bad either, at least for some queries: a CC-only search for the keyword google shows 276,529 pics, according to Picasa. A search for obama returns 43,510 pics right now. For comparison, the same CC-only obama search yields 127,858 results on Flickr."
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Annotated Digital Culture Links: January 18th 2009

Links for January 16th 2009 through January 18th 2009:

  • At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool [NYTimes.com] – YouTube as #2 search engine? Googlopoly clearly progressing according to plan: “The explosion of all types of video content on YouTube and other sites is quickly transforming online video from a medium strictly for entertainment and news into one that is also a reference tool. As a result, video search, on YouTube and across other sites, is rapidly morphing into a new entry point into the Web, one that could rival mainstream search for many types of queries. … And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. (Google, incidentally, owns YouTube.) In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.”
  • Hudson River plane crash [Kottke] – Detailed wrapu-up of the citizen journalist (and some mainstream media) responses to teh Hudson River plan crash. Twitter and Flickr excel. [Via BBoing]
  • U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work [Slicon Valley Insider] – Twitter as a citizen journalism platform: “Janis Krums from Sarasota, Florida posts the first photo of U.S. Airways flight 1549 on Twitter from his iPhone. Thirty-four minutes after Janis posted his photo, MSNBC interviewed him live on TV as a witness …”
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Annotated Digital Culture Links: January 11th 2009

Links for January 11th 2009:

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Tilt-Shift Photography

I’ve always found the idea of tilt-shift photography appealing, but I’ll never be able to justify the lens required. A combination of photoshop filters can have a similar effect, but I’ve never found the time, but I am enjoying playing with the simple but efficient Tilt Shift Maker, an online tool which does the processing work for you.  For those who don’t know tilt-shift photography (or, more specifically, tilt-shift miniature simulation) can make a photograph look like the contents are miniature-sized rather than realistic thanks to different depths of field.  Here are two examples of tilt-shifting my own photos:

[1] Luxury Boats docked along Venice:

Tiltshift I: Ships in Venice

[2] Pier 17 in New York:

Tiltshift II: Pier 17, New York

I’ve got a little way to go until I’m happy with these – I should really be using photoshop to refine them – but if you’re interested check out the example gallery at Tilt Shift Maker (all photos under a Creative Commons license) or the rapidly-growing Tilt Shift Maker Flickr group.

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