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Digital Culture Links: November 2nd 2009
Links for November 2nd 2009:
- How to Give Your Movie Away Free and Still Make Money [Jawbone.tv] – Some great ideas from Brian Newman about ways to both freely distribute and make money from feature films. (Thanks, Chuck.)
- Teens Sue School Over Punishment For Racy MySpace Pics [Huffington Post] – “Two sophomore girls have sued their school district after they were punished for posting sexually suggestive photos on MySpace during their summer vacation. The American Civil Liberties Union, in a federal lawsuit filed last week on behalf of the girls, argues that Churubusco High School violated the girls’ free speech rights when it banned them from extracurricular activities for a joke that didn’t involve the school … some legal experts say that in this digital era, schools must accept that students will engage in some questionable behavior in cyberspace and during off hours. “From the standpoint of young people, there’s no real distinction between online life and offline life,” said John Palfrey, a Harvard University law professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “It’s just life.”” (It’s called MYspace for a reason, methinks!)
- Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook [Facebook] – Facebook adds the ability to “memorialize” a Facebook page of someone who has passed away, but their loved ones wish their profile to remain online as a place for people to remember and reminisce about their lives. This feature has probably come along since Facebook got some bad press after suggesting people ‘reconnect’ with their deceased loved ones.[Via BBoing]
Digital Culture Links: October 26th 2009
Links for October 20th 2009 through October 26th 2009:
- Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Users [NYTimes.com] – “”Companies big and small monitor Twitter to find out what their customers like and what they want changed. Twitter does the same. It started two years ago as a bare-bones service, offering little more than the ability to post 140-character messages. Then, it outsourced its idea generation to its users. The company watches how people use the service and which ideas catch on. Then its engineers turn the ideas into new features. In the next several weeks, Twitter users will discover two new features, Lists and Retweets, that had the same user-generated beginnings. “Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.” (Build less, watch more: it’s a good design philosophy! 🙂
- White House Website CMS Switches To Drupal [The Age] – “A programming overhaul of the White House’s website has set the tech world abuzz. The online-savvy administration switched to open-source code for www.whitehouse.gov — meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit. “We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site,” White House new media director Macon Phillips said hours before the new site went live on Saturday. “This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it.” White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure — and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future.” (Nice way to publicise open source platforms! 🙂
- Viewers turn away from TV in 2009 [ mUmBRELLA] – “Total prime time TV audiences have fallen below 5m in Australia, according to a new analysis of viewing data so far this year. This is despite the arrival of the new Freeview and subscription TV channels to tempt viewers. According to the analysis of figures across the prime 6pm to 10.30pm slot, the average audience has fallen from 5,027,868 in 2008 to 4,969,810 in 2009. This marks a decline of around 60,000 prime time viewers per evening – or a fall of just over 1%. This is despite the Australian population growing by more than 2% during the same period.” (I wonder how this compares to an increase in viewing shared video online … combine the YouTube and TV stats and I suspect overall engagement with broadcast and streamed video would be up.)
- Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets [Danger Room | Wired.com] – “America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day…” (The question isn’t are we paranoid; it’s: are we paranoid enough!) [Via BBoing]
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.
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