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Global Media Distribution and the Tyranny of Digital Distance

Here are the slides and audio from my paper ‘Global Media Distribution and the Tyranny of Digital Distance’ presented on Saturday, 20 October 2012 at Internet Research 13 in MediaCityUK, Salford:

The paper drifted somewhat from the original abstract, but in a nutshell asks why it is taking television networks so long to escape the tyranny of digital distance (in this instance embodied by the national delays in re-broadcasting overseas-produced television shows). I look at several examples, including the recent Olympics broadcasts, as well as the deep-seated resistance from commercial TV networks in Australia. I conclude following Mark Scott that the future is already here, in the visage of young viewers and Peppa Pig fans who will never know the broadcast schedule and that these are the viewers for whom networks should be preparing to entertain today.

Digital Culture Links: September 24th through September 25th

Links for September 24th through September 25th:

  • Disruptions and dividends: a fast broadband Australia [ABC] – A fantastic speech from the ABC's Managing Director Mark Scott, given in September 2012, highlighting the challenges and opportunities the public broadcaster faces in the era of broadband and digital distribution. Scott sees the huge amount of time-shifted streaming of children's television as a harbinger of a future driven by immediacy, while the recent move to make episodes of Doctor Who available online (on iView) the second they finish in the UK signals the only way to answer online piracy: provide a better and easier service.
  • Creepshots and revenge porn: how paparazzi culture affects women [The Guardian] – Disturbing but well-written piece on 'creepshots' and the broader cultural context in which they exist: "… we arguably all live in a paparazzi culture now. Cameras are ubiquitous, as is the technology to share and publicise pictures instantly. The throb of surveillance plays out in different ways. On the more benign side are the mild nerves many people feel when an email pops up to tell them they have been tagged in a Facebook photo, an image that could be from any moment in their life – recent or historical – now public, and open for comments. But it also plays out in more insidious ways. This includes the creepshot websites, and others where people collect images of ordinary women they have culled from around the internet."
  • Facebook Suspends Facial Recognition in Europe [Wall Street Journal] – "Facebook has voluntarily switched off its facial recognition service in Europe following a privacy audit by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). The company says it wants to reinstate the feature once a form of consent can be found that meets the guidelines."
  • Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation [The Atlantic] – "Park Jaesang is an unlikely poster boy for South Korea's youth-obsessed, highly lucrative, and famously vacuous pop music. Park, who performs as Psy (short for psycho), is a relatively ancient 34, has been busted for marijuana and for avoiding the country's mandatory military service, and is not particularly good-looking. His first album got him fined for "inappropriate content" and the second was banned. He's mainstream in the way that South Korea's monolithically corporate media demands of its stars, who typically appear regularly on TV variety and even game shows, but as a harlequin, a performer known for his parodies, outrageous costumes, and jokey concerts. Still, there's a long history of fools and court jesters as society's most cutting social critics, and he might be one of them. […] Gangnam is a tony Seoul neighborhood, and Park's "Gangnam Style" video lampoons its self-importance and ostentatious wealth, with Psy playing a clownish caricature of a Gangnam man."

Digital Culture Links: December 15th

Links, catching up through to December 15th:

  • What Louis CK knows that most media companies don’t — Tech News and Analysis – Good round up of Louis CK’s online non-DRMed release of “Live at the Beacon Theater”. While a direct plea to fans didn’t prevent pirate versions altogether, CK’s fantastic online sales and healthy profit within 4 days show that this is a huge success (and arguably the torrent versions may still be helping with publicity).
  • Facebook riot page: Danny Cook jailed for 30 months [BBC News] – “A man has been jailed for 30 months for creating a Facebook group page called “Letz start a riot”. Danny Cook, 22, of Marlpool Place, Kidderminster, admitted intentionally encouraging or assisting in the commission of theft or criminal damage. Worcester Crown Court heard he made the Facebook page during the August riots. The judge, Mr Justice Butterfield, said: “I would be failing in my public duty if I did not impose a substantial custodial sentence.””
  • Louis CK – Live at the Beacon Theater Statement – Comedian Louis CK released his new standup video “Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theater” online for $5 via PayPal, available anywhere in the world, which in his words has “No DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap. You can download this file, play it as much as you like, burn it to a DVD, whatever.” A bold experiment in doing away with any sort of rights restrictions or DRM, Louis CK has released a statement thanking his fans and showing that this experiment has been a huge success. After just 4 days of sales: “As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58).”
  • Google buys licensing firm RightsFlow‎ [guardian.co.uk] – “Google is getting serious about paying artists royalties for songs that are used as soundtracks or videos on YouTube. The company said on Friday that it has acquired RightsFlow, a New York-based company that will help it identify the owners of music that people use in videos they post. “YouTube has had a long-standing commitment to solving the really tough challenges around online copyright – how to manage content rights in a quickly evolving technology world,” said David King, YouTube’s product manager, in a blog post. “We’ve already invested tens of millions of dollars in content management technology such as Content ID. We want to keep pushing things forward.” The deal should help YouTube, part of Google, manage the complex relationship it has with content owners, who are rarely consulted when their work is put online for free.”
  • No Copyright Intended [Waxy.org] – Great post from Andy Baio on the immense confusion around copyright and remix: “These “no copyright infringement intended” messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you’re a cop. It’s like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits. How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. […] On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.”
  • (New) Twitter: Yours to discover – Twitter’s official announcement of the new interface. It’s a bit busier, with more of a nod towards larger social networking sites, shifting away from the focus on the trademark tweet brevity. Mashable has some useful notes on the new version.
  • Judge Hits Blogger with $2.5 Million Charge for Not Being a Journalist – In a case that’s sending a frightening message to the blogger community, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a blogger must pay $2.5 million to an investment firm she wrote about — because she isn’t a real journalist. As reported by, Judge Marco A. Hernandez said Crystal Cox, who runs several blogs, wasn’t entitled to the protections afforded to journalists — specifically, Oregon’s media shield law for sources — because she wasn’t “affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.” The Obsidian Finance Group sued Cox in January for $10 million for writing several blog posts critical of the company and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Obsidian argued that the writing was defamatory. Cox represented herself in court.”
  • H&M;’s New Lingerie Models Are Computer-Generated [The Cut – NY Mag] – “The models fronting H&M;’s new holiday lingerie campaign are unreal, literally. Jezebel translated an article from Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in which H&M; press officer Håcan Andersson confirms that their new lingerie-clad bodies are “completely virtual.” For H&M;’s website or catalogues, much of the store’s clothing is now shot on mannequins, which are then humanized via photo-editing software — which explains the eerily uniform pose now increasingly commonplace online.H&M; also shot real models for the campaign, but only to superimpose their heads on the standard body form. Aptly, H&M; calls them “facial models,” who are apparently aware of their abridged role in the finished catalogue shots.”
  • PS3: Delete Browser Cookies and Cache [Technipages] – Useful if iView is buggy on PS3 in Australia.
  • Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal [TorrentFreak] – “One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products. In Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy. In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented. […] The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result …”
  • Many Online Book Buyers First Shop Around in Stores [NYTimes.com] – “Bookstore owners everywhere have a lurking suspicion: that the customers who type into their smartphones while browsing in the store, and then leave, are planning to buy the books online later — probably at a steep discount from the bookstores’ archrival, Amazon.com. Now a survey has confirmed that the practice, known among booksellers as showrooming, is not a figment of their imaginations. According to the survey, conducted in October by the Codex Group, a book market research and consulting company, 24 percent of people who said they had bought books from an online retailer in the last month also said they had seen the book in a brick-and-mortar bookstore first. Thirty-nine percent of people who bought books from Amazon in the same period said they had looked at the book in a bookstore before buying it from Amazon, the survey said.”
  • Zynga Sets Offering Price at $8.50 to $10 a Share [NYTimes.com] – “Zynga set the price range for its initial public offering at $8.50 to $10 a share, a highly anticipated debut that could value the company at $7 billion. At the top end of that range, the company, a four-year-old online game maker, is on track to raise $1 billion, which would make it the largest United States-based Internet offering since Google in 2004. […] Zynga, unlike many of its peers, is churning out a profit, a crucial selling point as it starts its road show on Monday. It recorded earnings of $30.7 million for the first nine months of this year, on revenue of $828.9 million. The company, which makes the bulk of its money from the sale of virtual goods, is the top game maker on Facebook, with some 227 million monthly active users. Its latest franchise, Castleville, which started about two weeks ago, has already attracted about 20 million users on Facebook, according to AppData, a site that tracks online games.”
  • 9 In 10 Moms Are Facebook Friends With Their Kids [All Facebook] – “While 90 percent of mothers are friends with their children on Facebook, 46 percent of them restrict their kids’ access to their profiles, according to a study by the publisher of Parenting and Babytalk magazines. This percentage is significantly higher than what we’ve seen in a Kaplan survey of teens, about 65 percent of whom said they are Facebook friends with their parents. We wonder whether the moms have a more idealized view of things, but it’s possible that some of these mothers might have separate, made-up aliases for befriending their kids on Facebook. Meanwhile, other findings from the email survey of 1,146 mothers by The Parenting Group are: 33 percent of mothers allowed their children to create Facebook pages by age 12, despite the age limit of 13 set by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the social network’s own rules. 73 percent of moms who aren’t Facebook friends with their kids monitor their Facebook usage by accessing their pages as someone else.”
  • Facebook Extends Maximum Status Update 12-Fold [All Facebook] – “Facebook has extended the maximum length of status updates to 60,000 characters, 12 times what it used to be. Perhaps this move intends to offset the site’s recently announced plan to end support of RSS in the Notes application.The change might offer longer thoughts better visibility in the news feed than the old Notes had.  However, longer statuses don’t jibe with the ticker, which tends to clip posts after a period mark.”
  • PS3: Delete Browser Cookies and Cache [Technipages] – Useful if iView is buggy on PS3 in Australia.
  • Fail! Qantas red-faced after Twitter campaign backfires [Perth Now] – Social media #fail: “It probably seemed like a great idea in the marketing meeting. But a social media campaign in the midst of a bitter industrial battle spilling over to thousands of angry passengers has backfired for Qantas. The airline posted a seemingly innocent tweet this morning using the hashtag #qantasluxury asking for entries to a competition with suggestions for a dream in-flight experience: @QantasAirwaysTo enter tell us ‘What is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!) Answer must include #QantasLuxury. Little did they know just how “creative” – and angry – the responses would be as Twitter users seized the opportunity to have their say in their hundreds. While many of the tweets were sarcastic, most were from passengers unhappy with the state of the airline or who had experienced the disruption first-hand.  timwattsau#qantasluxury was being abandoned at Heathrow for 4 days in the snow with no customer support while trying to get home to 8mo pregnant wife!”

Digital Culture Links: August 26th 2010

Links for August 25th 2010 through August 26th 2010:

  • Gmail Offers Phone Service via Web [NYTimes.com] – “Google entered a new business beyond Internet search on Wednesday with a service within Gmail to make phone calls over the Web to landlines or cellphones. The service will thrust Google into direct competition with Skype, the Internet telephone company, and with telecommunications providers. It could also make Google a more ubiquitous part of people’s social interactions by uniting the service for phone calls with e-mail, text messages and video chats. “It’s one place where you can get in touch with the people that you care about, and how that happens from a network perspective is less important,” said Charles S. Golvin, a telecommunications analyst at Forrester Research. Gmail has offered voice and video chat for two years, but both parties must be at their computers.” (It works from Australia, too.)
  • Woman caught dumping cat in bin ‘profoundly sorry’ [The Age] – 4chan really love cats: “A woman caught on camera dumping a cat in a bin says she is “profoundly sorry for a split second of misjudgment”. Mary Bale, 44, of Coventry in England, was named and shamed by users of the online forum 4chan after footage of the incident was posted on Facebook and YouTube. She was caught dumping a family’s cat into a large green rubbish bin by the family’s CCTV camera. The cat, Lola, was trapped in the bin for 15 hours before its owners found her.”
  • Facebook censors website critical of it [jill/txt] – More Facebook censorship: Openbook is a website that lets you search public status messages on Facebook. Try searching for “hate my boss” or “playing hooky” for interesting results. Or, as Twitter posts keep mentioning today, search for “mosk” to see how many people who hate muslims don’t know how to spell mosque. I tried to send someone a message on Facebook including a link to Openbook, and was surprised when I couldn’t. Then I tried to post a link to Openbook to my profile. Nope. Of course I let Facebook know that I think this is an error. Because come ON – censoring a website so obviously critical of them? Not impressive. “
  • ABC presenter reprimanded over Twitter [SMH] – “Perth’s ABC morning radio presenter Geoff Hutchison has been reprimanded by the national broadcaster for his comments on Twitter attacking Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. While Mr Abbott appeared on the ABC’s Q and A program on Monday night, Hutchison used his Twitter account @hutchabc to unleash several tweets criticising the Liberal leader. Hutchison made fun of Mr Abbott on Twitter, saying: “I have gay Muslim friends says Tony. But I don’t really like them.” He also wrote that Mr Abbott had said homosexuals were “morally dubious, but big tobacco is all right by me”. The ABC ordered Hutchison to delete his Twitter account, saying it breached the broadcaster’s social media policy which states employees “should not mix professional and personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute”. “Geoff has been reminded of his obligations under the ABC’s social media guidelines and that any future use of Twitter should be in accordance with ABC policy,” an ABC spokesman said.”
  • Star Wars Uncut — Emmy Winner [Digits – WSJ]The Star Wars Uncut project, where fans re-shot 15-second sequences from Star Wars, in whichever style they liked, one an Emmy award for “creative achievement in interactive media – fiction” at the recent awards.

Digital Culture Links: April 20th 2010

Links for April 19th 2010 through April 20th 2010:

  • Media Watch: A Lesson in Facebook Friends (19/04/2010) [ABC TV] – Media Watch piece about two Warwich (QLD) teachers whose private Facebook photos of themselves dressed in supposedly suggestive school uniforms got them suspended from their jobs after the photos were posted in the local newspaper. It seems the photos were lifted from private Facebook accounts and that the journalists who ‘uncovered’ the story were actually Facebook friends with one of the two teachers they exposed. A suitable reminder that ‘friend’ isn’t always the best word for a social network connection! (The two teachers are now suing the journalists in question.)
  • Teens and Mobile Phones – Report April 2010 [Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project] – “Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008, to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And its not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day.”
  • Facebook Now Commands 41% of Social Media Traffic – STATS [Mashable] – “Facebook and YouTube are displacing rivals and taking over the social web, according to data we’ve just received from comScore. In addition to showing massive and continued traffic growth throughout 2009 and the beginning of 2010, Facebook and YouTube continued to capture the highest volume of social web traffic. Twitter also garnered a ton of mainstream attention, helping the company increase the number of visitors to its site by fivefold over the course of the year. […] Taking a look at the unique visitors charts, we see the widespread migration from MySpace to Facebook even more clearly. As of March 2010, Facebook traffic made up 41% of all traffic on a list of popular social destinations. MySpace was in second place, capturing around 24% of traffic. Gmail had 15%, and Twitter had 8%. However, during the same period in 2009, MySpace was in the lead with 38% of site visits over Facebook’s 33%.” (Original post has some useful graphs, albeit without a scale.)
  • How Tech Start-ups Like Foursquare and Meetup Are Tring to Overthrow Old Media and Build a Better New York [New York Magazine] – Long article from Doree Shafrir about the tech start-up culture that has gripped New York city. The featured start-up is definitely Foursquare, and there are plenty of quotes about the role of start-ups in relation to tech giants like Google and Yahoo. There is some sense that the realm of start-ups is moving toward a new tech bubble, but the dominant business model still seems to be: get popular, get the eyeballs, and then let Yahoo and Google (and maybe Microsoft) bid to buy your business.

Digital Culture Links: April 12th 2010

Links catching up, through to April 12th 2010:

  • Margaret Atwood – How I learned to love Twitter [The Guardian] – Margaret Atwood’s wonderful description of ending up on Twitter, and why that’s a rather good thing: “The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam? But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers – I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They’re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it’s immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly or tinyurl. They’ve sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.)”
  • The State of the Internet Operating System [O’Reilly Radar] – Tim O’Reilly takes a hard look at the ‘Internet Operating System’ and writes a manifesto-ish reflection-cum-future-roadmap reminiscent of his ‘What is Web 2.0’ work of half a decade ago.
  • Murdoch to limit Google, Microsoft [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – As News Corp disappears down the paid rabbit hole, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and BBC become even more important and influential! “News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says Google and Microsoft’s access to his newspapers could be limited to a “headline or a sentence or two” once he erects a pay wall around his titles’ websites. Mr Murdoch, in an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb for The Kalb Report, said he believed most US newspapers would eventually end up charging readers online, like he does with The Wall Street Journal and plans to do with his other properties, beginning with The Times of London. “You’ll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall,” he said. “Now how high does it go? Does it allow [visitors] to have the first couple of paragraphs or certain feature articles? We’ll see. We’re experimenting with it ourselves.””
  • David’s laughing after dentist [The Age] – “Fifteen months ago, David DeVore’s business was Orlando real estate. Now his business is his son, David. His six-figure business. By now you may have seen last year’s video ”David after dentist” 10 or 12 times and memorised the dialogue of David, then seven and fresh from a tooth removal, displaying the woozy effects of painkillers. ”I have two fingers,” he tells his father. ”You have four eyes.” Then, displaying the wisdom of stoners everywhere, David goes deep. ”Is this real life?” he asks. ”Why is this happening to me?” The video has been viewed 56 million times on YouTube, with 100,000 new views every day. In that time, David’s adventure has become a remarkable marketing story – it has made money from YouTube. ”I’m the dad who posted ‘David After Dentist,”’ said Mr DeVore, wearing a shirt emblazoned with his son’s face.”
  • Facebook slander mum hits back at son [The Age] – I can only imagine how this will go down if it reaches the courts – it should be about whether Facebook is a publication or not, but I can’t imagine that debate will be central: “The mother of a 16-year-old boy said she was only being a good mother when she locked him out of his Facebook account after reading he had driven home at 150km/h one night because he was mad at a girl. His response: a harassment complaint at the local courthouse. “If I’m found guilty on this it is going to be open season [on parents],” Denise New said. Ms New, of Arkadelphia, a small college town an hour south-west of Little Rock, said many of her son’s postings did not reflect well on him, so, after he failed to log off the social networking site one day last month, she posted her own items on his account and changed his password to keep him from using it again. But her son claims what she posted was not true, and that she was damaging his reputation.”
  • Son accuses mother of Facebook slander [The Age] – “A 16-year-old US boy is claiming in a criminal complaint that his mother slandered him on his Facebook page. Denise New is charged with harassment and her son – whose name has not been released – is asking that his mother be prohibited from contacting him. Authorities tell KATC-TV in the US that the boy lives with his grandmother, who has custodial rights. Denise New says she believes she has the legal right to monitor her son’s activities online and that she plans to fight the claims.”

On Privacy, Facebook & your Digital Footprints

Issues about privacy and Facebook have been in the news a great deal recently, but one of the implicit but less discussed issues is the notion of your digital footprint.  Your digital footpint simply means the unintended effects digital communication will have in the future since it’s simultaneously digital content (and thus potentially lasts forever).  Earlier this week I was interviewed by Jarrod Watt for ABC’s Heywire and you can listen to the what I said here.  If you prefer you go straight to the mp3 recording, or listen here …

[audio:http://blogs.abc.net.au/files/drtamaleaver_heywire.mp3]

Digital Culture Links: December 2nd 2009

Links for November 27th 2009 through December 2nd 2009:

  • Seven’s FlashForward “leaked” to US [TV Tonight] – “Monday night’s episode of FlashForward was the last for the year on Seven, and screened before the US which took a broadcast break for Thanksgiving. That resulted in the episode being uploaded as a torrent and now “leaked” to America. The Hollywood Reporter notes that “Australians don’t care about our guilt-tinged empire-expanding holiday traditions and didn’t take a break. Whether the US-Aussie FlashForward schedule being jolted out-of-sync will result in future episodes also being leaked isn’t known.” Presumably the episode will be downloaded across the US complete with a Channel 7 watermark. It’s all rather ironic given Disney / ABC went to great lengths to make sure Aussie media didn’t reveal information on the series in the lead-up to the premiere, insisting they attend a cinema screening and sign confidentiality clauses.” (US viewers, welcome to the other side of the tyranny of digital distance!)
  • The hits on iView [TV Tonight] – “Four Corners, United States of Tara, Good Game, Doctor Who, The Chaser’s War on Everything and Media Watch are the most popular titles on the ABC’s iView platform. The online catch-up service has been operating since July 2008. Since April this year there have been 6.2 million views of programs with an annual monthly average of 610,000 visits, up by 140% compared to last year. It averages 206,000 visitors per month, up by 60% compared to last year. In October 2009, ABC iView recorded its highest ever number of visitors and visits. 286,000 visitors and 1.054 million visits to ABC iView.” (Finally, streaming timeshifted TV is making solid inroads in Australia.)
  • Moviegoers 2010 available for download [Marketing Strategy for Entertainment and Brand Clients – Stradella Road] – “Why does movie studio tracking and research so often surprise and disappoint us? The answer experienced movie marketers gave us in private conversations was this: We still don’t know our customers/audience as well as we should.
    Where do moviegoers really spend their time? What are the social dynamics of the decision-making process? How do we synthesize the sea changes taking place with digital technologies in order to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time in the right place? We designed the Moviegoers 2010 research study to answer these questions […]
    • Moviegoers spend more time each week online (19.8 hours) than they do watching TV (14.3 hours)
    • 52% of moviegoers have digital video recorders (61% of the 30-39 demo) and, of those consumers, 71% fast-forward to skip commercials.
    [Download the full report – PDF]
  • Westfield Facebook application draws fire [mUmBRELLA] – Westfield has drawn criticism over a Facebook application that may be in breach of the social networking site’s terms and conditions, despite the two companies collaborating to develop it. The application updates a user’s status with a Westfield-branded message to promote its Gift Card. It requires the user to opt in so that their status is updated to “All I Want for Christmas is a Westfield Gift Card”, with extra copy stating that the user has now gone into the draw to win a $10,000 gift card. […] But the promotion has also attracted a backlash from other users, complaining that the promotion is taking over the social networking site as friends’ status updates that feature the Westfield branding, clutter their screens. Facebook groups have also been created in opposition to it. One group, known as If All You Want For Christmas Is A Westfield Gift Card, I Don’t Want To Know, currently has over 3,300 fans.” (Spam as a Facebook App … great marketing!)

Digital Culture Links: November 5th 2009

Links for November 3rd 2009 through November 5th 2009:

  • The ABC of social media use [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – How bizzare: social media use guidelines in a major corporation which actually make sense! “ABC managing director Mark Scott has announced new social media guidelines, which the national broadcaster’s journalists and staff must abide by. […] In an email sent to ABC staff this morning, the new Use of Social Media policy gives four standards which staff and contractors must follow when using both work and personal social media interaction:
    1. Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.
    2. Do not undermine your effectiveness at work.
    3. Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views.
    4. Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.”
  • The temporary web [BuzzMachine] – Jeff Jarvis articulates some important concerns about the way Twitter and other social services are contributing to a more temporary, less archivable (or, at least, less searchable in the long term) web: “…search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have). “
  • Internet piracy [Background Briefing – 1 November 2009] – Australia’s Radio National programme Backgroud Briefing takes a look at copyright in the digital age, featuring the big arguments and comments from everyone from AFACT to Lessig and Girl Talk. Segment by Oscar McLaren.

Digital Culture Links: September 3rd 2009

Links for September 2nd 2009 through September 3rd 2009:

  • Copyright protection without the court action [Blogs – Twisted Wire – ZDNet Australia] – An excellent little podcast looking at the challenges challenges to copyright in the digital age, but more importantly exploring alternative distribution models which could circumvent many of the current big media strategy of litigation against a few file-sharers. Comments from Nic Suzor (Australia's Electronic Frontiers Australia), Peter Coroneos (Internet Industry Association (IIA)) and Mike O'Donnell, (CEO of iCopyright in the US). Amazingly, the idea of having better, quicker, more efficient ways to buy movies over the web was one of the main ideas put forward! 🙂 (See also the previous week's show & podcast where AFACT argued with Suzor and Coroneos about the role of ISPs in policing the content viewed by Australian internet users.)
  • Web2.0 tools for Gov2.0 beginners: a practical guide [Centre for Policy Development] – A useful beginner's guide looking at web 2.0 tools and social media in relation to campaigning and building links and conversation between government and citizenry in particular ways. Gives a solid sense of the benefits and potential barriers with each platform mentioned. Written by Barry Saunders.
  • YouTube Said to Be in Talks on Pay Movies [NYTimes.com] – "YouTube, the largest video site, is in negotiations with major Hollywood studios for a deal that would let its visitors pay to watch full-length movies, according to two people briefed on the negotiations. If an agreement is reached, it would be a major change for YouTube, which has built a huge audience by offering an eclectic collection of free video clips and earns most of its revenue from advertising. It would also put YouTube, which is owned by Google, in direct competition with services from Netflix, Amazon and Apple, which allow users to buy or rent movies online." (YouTube's creep away from a primary focus on supporting user-generated content continues …)
  • Media favours Coalition, study finds [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – "Newspapers are left wing, television is right wing, and the media as a whole tends to favour the Coalition. And surprisingly, according to researchers from the Australian National University, the ABC Television news is the most pro-Coalition of them all. Former Liberal prime minister John Howard railed against the alleged left-wing bias of the ABC, but the researchers found Aunty was more likely to favour his side. Researchers pored over news stories from 1996 to 2007 to establish if the media was biased. The results, released today, point to the media being generally middle-of-the-road, with the coalition tending to win out."
  • Conroy urged to 'end net censorship farce' [The Age] – "The Federal Government's internet censorship trials have been repeatedly delayed over the past nine months, leading to claims from the Opposition that the Government is deliberately withholding the results to avoid embarrassment. The Opposition's communications spokesman, Nick Minchin, today called on the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, to "end this farce and produce his long overdue trial results for independent assessment". Live trials of the filtering policy, which is intended to block "prohibited content" for all Australians as determined by a secret Government blacklist, were initially slated to begin in December last year and take about six weeks. They were then pushed back until July, then September and, today, the Government is still unable to put a date on when it will release the results to the public."
  • TV facing 'iTunes moment' warns Microsoft's Ashley Highfield [Media | guardian.co.uk] – "The TV industry has as little as two years to create viable digital businesses or face a version of the "iTunes moment" that saw the music business cede the online future to Apple, according to Ashley Highfield. Highfield, the the managing director of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, said he believed the reluctance advertisers feel to advertise on sites such as Facebook will soon be a "non-issue", putting more pressure on broadcasters' advertising revenues. "Once this happens the shift of spending from TV to web will accelerate even more," he said, giving the Futureview address at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival today. "So realistically I think the industry has about two to three years to adapt or face its iTunes moment. And it will take at least that long for media brands to build credible, truly digital brands. But, importantly, I do believe TV does have a small two to three year window in which to respond.""

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