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The Day the Cupcake Stood Still
[Look Behind You! Run, Run for your Life! Nom, Nom, Nom all CC BY]
I turned 32 on the weekend, but with a 9-week old in the house we’re much more in tune with our inner children, too, so I was just blown away when Em made me these amazing Alien Invader cupcakes! There were lots of other highlights – a great lunch with family, some brilliant presents, watching my son giggle away, and an early Christmas party dinner with good friends – but I just had to share the cupcake pictures! 🙂
Annotated Digital Culture Links: December 13th 2008
Links for December 9th 2008 through December 13th 2008:
- The Rumor Bomb: On Convergence Culture and Politics by Jayson Harsin [Flow TV, 9.04, December 2008] – Jayson Harsin looks at everything from Obama’s “terrorist connections” to Steve Jobs’ “heart attack” to understand how rumours work in the age of convergence culture (and what a huge impact they can have in an instantaneous, online, connective culture).
- Library Releases Report on Flickr Pilot (Library of Congress) [Library of Congress Blog] – “Only nine months into the Library of Congress’ pilot project placing Library photos on the Web site Flickr, the photos have drawn more than 10 million views, 7,166 comments and more than 67,000 tags, according to a new report from the project team overseeing the lively project. “The popularity and impact of the pilot have been remarkable,” said Michelle Springer, project manager for digital initiatives in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, who said total views reached 10 million in October. The site is averaging 500,000 views a month, she said, adding that Flickr members have marked 79 percent of the photos as “favorites.” The report recommends that the Library of Congress continue to participate in The Commons and explore other Web 2.0 communities.” [Full Report PDF] (Short version: sharing public cultural goods via participatory culture platforms is a win for everyone!)
- Microsoft Office to debut online [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Microsoft is preparing web versions of some of its most popular programs. In 2009 web versions of Word, Excel and other programs in the Microsoft Office suite plus Exchange and Sharepoint will go online. Users will be able to get at the programs via a web browser rather than install them on a PC. Some versions of the programs are expected to be free to use provided users are happy to view adverts alongside the software.” (So, Microsoft are racing to reclaim some of the cloud computing presence which has become Google’s spare backbone … given how slowly Google Docs have evolved as a service, and how crude their slide presentation software is, if their offering is good enough there could be real Microsoft Vs Google competition in the clouds!)
Annotated Digital Culture Links: December 2nd 2008
Links for December 2nd 2008:
- Why defend freedom of icky speech? [Neil Gaiman’s Journal] – Neil Gaiman on defending freedom of speech: “If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said. The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made.”
- Iron Man and me [Adactio] – The story of how a CC BY Flickr photo ended up in the Iron Man film!
- ABC views year from on high [TV Tonight] – “The [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]ABC is hailing 2008 as its best ever result, improving 2% on its 2007 performance. With 7 of its top 10 shows being local productions, ABC is also buoyed by several brands hitting all time highs … The broadcaster also notes the popularity of its iView platform and the success of the relaunched ABC2 channel …
iView – Since iView’s launch on Wednesday 23rd July: ABC iView has recorded a total of 2.3 million page views. The most popular iView channel is Catch Up. (This data is up to midnight on Sunday 30th November 2008) (Source: WebTrends OnDemand)
VODCASTS (1 January – 16 November 2008)
• The total number of vodcast downloads this year to date is 14 million.
• Most downloaded vodcasts in 2008 to date include At The Movies, triple j tv (including jtv), Catalyst, ENOUGH ROPE segments, Bed of Roses, Not Quite Art, The Cook And The Chef, Gardening Australia, Lateline Business segments, Lateline segments. (Source: WebTrends, Akamai Mpeg Stats)”
Annotated Links of Interest: November 9th 2008
Links of interest for November 7th 2008 through November 9th 2008:
- Huffington: ‘Obama Not Elected Without Internet’ [InternetNews Realtime IT News] – “Obama campaign-related videos garnered 14.5 million hours of viewing on YouTube, according to Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi. He estimates that amount of time would have cost $47 million to buy on TV … “And to buy that time, you’re interrupting people watching football games and soap operas,” said Trippi. On the Web, “this is stuff people wanted to watch.” Just as the power of television, via televised debates, was credited with helping John Kennedy win the presidency over Richard Nixon in 1960, the panelists agreed with moderator John Heilemann that in 2008 the Web had at least as significant a role.”
- PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication – “Welcome to PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication, a biannual open-access online postgraduate publication. Founded by the Media and Communications Program, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, PLATFORM has just been launched in November 2008. This new postgraduate journal, PLATFORM, is refereed by an international board of established and emerging scholars working across diverse paradigms in Media and Communication. It is planned to develop it as an international journal.”
- Gwen and baby Zuma [Gwen Stefani : News] – I really hadn’t imagined Gwen Stefani to be a champion of copyright reform and the Creative Commons, but the termsunder which she released the first picture of herself and her baby are positively forward-thinking: “[(c) Mrs. Me, Inc., 2008.] This photo is licensed under aCreative Commons BY-NC-ND license. In addition to the permissions granted to the public under this license, this photograph may also be used in its original and unaltered form for commercial purposes by publishers in connection with the distribution of news or human interest stories, such as magazines, blogs, and newspapers. All other rights, including without limitation use of this photo in whole or in part or in connection with commercial posters, calendars, and other commercial products and services, are reserved exclusively by the copyright holder.” (The Obama campaign have been posting CC licensed photos since 2007, too!)
- Google Street View turned into artwork [The Age] – “Two American artists have made swooning for Google’s all-seeing eye an art form, creating what they term the first artistic intervention in Google Street View. After witnessing the immense online interest in quirky sightings on Google Maps, Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley approached Google with the idea of creating a series of staged tableaux along a street in Pittsburgh. The scenes, which were shot on May 3 this year and feature Pittsburgh’s Northside residents hamming it up along a nondescript lane called Sampsonia Way, went live on Google Maps this week.” Check out the result: http://www.streetwithaview.com/
Physical Photoshop
An amazing material layout which makes the photoshop interface a material reality! [Via]
Annotated Links of Interest: October 28th 2008
Links of interest for October 28th 2008:
- Putting Privacy Settings in the Context of Use (in Facebook and elsewhere) [apophenia] – danah boyd’s sensible and timely reminder about Facebook’s ridiculously complicated and confusing privacy settings: “Facebook’s privacy settings are the most flexible and the most confusing privacy settings in the industry. Over and over again, I interview teens (and adults) who think that they’ve set their privacy settings to do one thing and are shocked (and sometimes horrified) to learn that their privacy settings do something else. Furthermore, because of things like tagged photos, people are often unaware of the visibility of content that they did not directly contribute. People continue to get themselves into trouble because they lack the control that they think they have.” [Via Jill] (These, incidentally, are among the reasons why you won’t see any pictures of my son on Facebook! Flickr, where I retain copyright and can actually use meaningful privacy settings, is far preferable!)
- Google considers local centre [Australian IT] – “Google has quietly dispatched a team of experts from the US on a fact-finding mission to decide whether it should establish a data centre in Australia. In the past few weeks the team of about five Google US employees had been involved in high-level discussions with local data centre providers, sources said. The meetings are believed to have been led by Simon Tusha, who labels himself as “Google’s duke of data centres”. A Google-run data centre would be positive for the company’s operations in Australia as it sought to increase its penetration of the large education sector.”
- Microsoft to battle in the clouds [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service, in which data and applications will not be stored on individuals’ computers. The new platform, dubbed Windows Azure, was announced at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. The platform was described by Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie as “Windows for the cloud”. … The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software. The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.” [Check out Windows Azure; but Dave Winer’s not impressed.]
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.