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Digital Culture Links: March 20th 2011

Links for March 16th 2011 through March 20th 2011:

  • Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation [Mashable] – “The folks who run the online galleries — the curators — aren’t asking permission or giving a revenue share, which means that content creators need to get comfortable with the idea that in the new world of the link economy, curating and creating aren’t mutually exclusive. Exhibit A: Seth Godin. He is one of the web’s best-known marketing wizards. […]. And he says that content creators can’t ignore curation any longer. “We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage,” Godin said. “There’s always someone who’s going to supply you with information that you’re going to curate. The Guggenheim doesn’t have a shortage of art. They don’t pay you to hang paintings for a show — in fact you have to pay for the insurance. […] As Godin sees it, power is shifting from content makers to content curators: “If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.””
  • Why Do We Hate Rebecca Black? [Brow Beat] – “It’s Fri-ee-day! Here in New York, where the long-awaited sunshine is making everyone slightly loopy, “Friday”—Rebecca Black’s so-awful-it’s-kind-of-genius viral sensation—makes for a highly appropriate soundtrack. Like her lyricists, I, too, can barely form coherent sentences, because we-we-we so excited about all the fun ahead of us tonight. A quick recap, for anyone who’s missed the frenzy: Rebecca Black, an eighth-grader from Orange County, recorded a song and produced a video with vanity label Ark Music Factory, which specializes in tweenybopper “artists.” Last week, Black’s video starting ricocheting around the Web, to the delight and horror of millions of viewers. No one, it seems, can believe that anything this terrible could possibly exist. […] So her parents paid $2,000 for her to pretend to be a star. […] and for an unexpected dose of media training.
  • xxx marks the spot [SMH] – “The group in charge of internet addresses has opened the door for adult-content websites ending with .xxx but delayed deciding whether to open the floodgates for other suffixes. The non-profit internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board voted to approve a petition to add .xxx to the list of “generic top-level domains” – endings that include .com, .net and .org. […] The request had been rejected about five years ago and was reconsidered after an appeal.”
  • Bullying Video’s “Little Zangief” A Hero Online [WA Today] – “It was inevitable. The Sydney boy who retaliated against a younger student at school after an apparent bullying attack has been transformed from a victim to an online hero. Since video of the incident at a western Sydney school this week was posted online, it immediately went viral. The 16-year-old “victim” has been dubbed “Little Zangief” – a character from the Street Fighter video game – and likened to the Incredible Hulk and The Punisher, with websites, mash-up videos and even a Twitter account set up in his honour. The video, which has since been featured on US and British news sites, shows a smaller 12-year-old boy punching the bigger boy. The bigger boy then picks up his tormentor and throws him to the ground. The issue dominated talkback radio after it happened.” [More at Know Your Meme] [More Remixes]
  • 40th anniversary of the computer virus [Net Security] – “1971: Creeper: catch me if you can. While theories on self-replicating automatas were developed by genius mathematician Von Neumann in the early 50s, the first real computer virus was released “in lab” in 1971 by an employee of a company working on building ARPANET, the Internet’s ancestor. Intriguing feature: Creeper looks for a machine on the network, transfers to it, displays the message “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” and starts over, thereby hoping from system to system. It was a pure proof of concept that ties the roots of computer viruses to those of the Internet.”
  • The Rise of Twitter Poetry [NYTimes.com] – “… there’s evidence that the literary flowering of Twitter may actually be taking place. The Twitter haiku movement — “twaiku” to its initiates — is well under way. Science fiction and mystery enthusiasts especially have gravitated to its communal immediacy. And even litterateurs, with a capital L, seem to be warming to it. For two years, John Wray, the author of the well-regarded novel “Lowboy,” has been spinning out a Twitter story based on a character named Citizen that he cut from the novel, a contemporary version of the serialization that Dickens and other fiction writers once enjoyed. “I don’t view the constraints of the format as in any way necessarily precluding literary quality,” he said. “It’s just a different form. And it’s still early days, so people are still really trying to figure out how to communicate with it, beyond just reporting that their Cheerios are soggy.””

Digital Culture Links: November 10th 2009

Links for November 5th 2009 through November 10th 2009:

  • Murdoch may block Google searches [BBC NEWS | Business] – Murdoch plans to pull News Corps stories from Google. And apparently he thinks he can do away with fair dealing, too. I fear the old tiger is roaring his last roars: “Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies. The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google’s search indexes, including Google News. Mr Murdoch’s News Corp had previously said it would start charging online customers across all its websites. He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results. “There’s a doctrine called ‘fair use’, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,” Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. “But we’ll take that slowly.””
  • Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media [bronwen clune] – Bronwen Clune’s Media 140 talk in which she makes some very sensible noises about journalists on Twitter: “Participatory media doesn’t mean you letting your audience participate in the creation of news, it about acknowledging that you participate in news creation along with your audience. … We’ve heard Jay Rosen’s quote here a few times today about “the people formerly known as the audience.” To which I’d like to add: Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media.”
  • Iran, Twitter and the new media world. [Off Air] – Mark Colvin’s thoughtful and detailed look at the Twitter Revolution in Iran, looking at the ethics and practice of getting information via Twitter, some sensible methods for gauging accuracy of tweets, the danger in distorting figures on both sides, and the fact that, at the end of the day, Iran’s Twitter Revolution failed … but there were seeds of hope: “The first victory is that for millions of people around the world, Iranians were not faceless Middle Easterners …You cannot bomb a regime without bombing its people … The second victory is that they saw themselves as we saw them, and they saw us cheering them on. They saw ordinary people in countries like America – which the ayatollahs call The Great Satan – and Britain – The Little Satan – coming out in support of their hopes and fears. For once that couldn’t be censored by State media.”

Annotated Digital Culture Links: July 5th 2009

Links for June 30th 2009 through July 5th 2009:

  • Tories 'distressed' Facebook blew MI6 cover [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – "Opposition politicians in Britain have raised concerns about security after a newspaper revealed that personal information about the newly-appointed head of Foreign Intelligence Service MI6 had been posted on Facebook. Sir John Sawers' wife's Facebook page had no privacy protection, allowing anyone to see photos of him playing frisbee on a beach or posing dressed as Santa. Also exposed was information about the couple's children, their flat and high profile-friendships." (Could their be a more timely reminder about the importance of using privacy settings carefully, even with Facebook's immensely confusing privacy controls?)
  • Twitter your Flickr [Flickr Blog] – You can now Twitter your Flickr pictures with one click. Really, is there anything you can't put in your Twitterstream these days?
  • China cracks down on virtual cash [BBC NEWS | Technology] – "Cash earned in games in China can no longer be spent on real world goods. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce policy aims to limit the impact of game currencies on real-world markets. In the future, any cash earned by Chinese gamers can only be spent to acquire items or equipment in that particular game. The move is widely seen as a crackdown on so-called "gold farming" in which players amass virtual money and then sell it to other players for real cash."

Annotated Digital Culture Links: April 21st 2009

Links for April 17th 2009 through April 21st 2009:

  • Courts throw Facebook at digital navel gazers [WA Today] – “Const Robert Hogan claimed he was just playing around outside a nightclub when an off-duty military commando bit his face so hard that he drew blood and a five-centimetre gash. A judge ultimately punished his assailant with a suspended jail sentence but not before Constable Hogan’s private life was tendered to court as evidence, courtesy of his Facebook site. … These digital collections are so convincing to a jury, fed a constant diet of television forensics, that a Sydney University law professor, Mark Findlay, believes it is leading to cases being increasingly won on circumstantial evidence. “You are going to see a trend in trials away from oral evidence to documentary trials,” Professor Findlay said. Such a trend was concerning because documentary evidence was easier to fabricate than that provided by a witness, he said. Juries were also less likely to doubt the quality of the information. For example, they do not doubt that a text belongs to the owner of the mobile phone.”
  • Telstra cracks down on Twitter, Facebook mischief [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Telstra is the first major Australian company to tell its employees how to behave on social media like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace …. there’s a decidedly old-fashioned flavour to its “3 Rs” document. It’s not reading, writing and arithmetic in this case though – Telstra employees are implored to observe responsibility, respect and representation. The guidelines tell employees who are using social media for personal use – a far more common and risky situation for the company – to include a disclaimer if they talk about Telstra. They say if someone plans to comment regularly about the company then they should post a permanent disclaimer but if they post infrequently they should use one on a case-by-case basis. A disclaimer would be similar to those attached to company emails, with words to the effect of “the views in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Telstra”. The guidelines are backed up with the threat of disciplinary action.”
  • With Oprah Onboard, Twitter Grows [NYTimes.com] – “One small message from Oprah, one giant leap for Twitter. On Friday morning, Twitter received the blessing of Oprah Winfrey, one of Middle America’s most influential tastemakers, when Ms. Winfrey tapped out her inaugural message using the microblogging service as the cameras of her talk show cameras rolled. “HI TWITTERS,” Ms. Winfrey wrote, using all capital letters in the Internet equivalent of shouting. “THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.”” (Good to see Shaq calling her out for using caps! And how can Twitter remain kewl now? :P)
  • House, FB: A Consideration of Convergence Marketing [Jacqueline Vickery / Flow 9.11] – Fascinating look at how the death of a character on House in the US was followed by a seemingly real commemoration page on Facebook. After a thoughtful article, Vickery notes: “Once users were on Facebook however, Fox was provided with an instant demographic snapshot of House viewers – their gender, age, location, sexuality, and probably even their political and religious affiliations (since all of this information is privileged as “basic demographics” at the top of a Facebook profile). It is important to note that this snapshot is of course limiting and limited (by those with computers, internet access, and maybe a higher level of fan motivation), but nonetheless extremely valuable to Fox.”

Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 18th 2009

Links for March 13th 2009 through March 18th 2009:

  • Fake Stephen Conroy lashes out at Telstra [SMH] – “Telstra’s attempts to cover up the fact that it tried to silence Fake Stephen Conroy have backfired spectacularly. The Telstra employee who created the satirical Twitter profile has told his bosses not to “throw me under the f—ing bus just to make Telstra look social-media savvy”. After it was revealed that the popular Twitter profile impersonating Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was written by senior Telstra employee Leslie Nassar, the postings stopped. Nassar refused to speak to media, saying he was told to direct all comment requests to Telstra’s public relations unit. The Fake Stephen Conroy profile was also disabled for a period before reopening late yesterday. Telstra’s social media adviser Mike Hickinbotham came out to declare that Telstra did not try to shut Nassar up nor tell him to cease making the Fake Stephen Conroy posts. This directly contradicted earlier comments by Nassar, who said he was told by Telstra to stop.”
  • Telstra man behind Fake Stephen Conroy [SMH] – “A web prankster impersonating Communications Minister Stephen Conroy on Twitter has been outed as a Telstra staff member. The staffer has now been silenced by the telecommunications giant, perhaps out of fear that the revelations will further increase tensions between Telstra and the Government, which has excluded Telstra from the bidding process to build a $10 billion-plus national broadband network. The satirical “Fake Stephen Conroy” profile, which has now been wiped, sparked almost as much discussion online as Senator Conroy himself. It primarily lampoons the Government’s proposed mandatory internet filtering scheme. Following an online manhunt that turned up a long list of suspects, Fake Stephen Conroy decided to turn himself in before he could be outed.
    “OK, so here it is; Fake Stephen Conroy = Leslie Nassar,” he wrote yesterday.” (‘Twas fun while he lasted! 🙂
  • Journalism students ‘don’t read papers’ [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “The journalists of the future are rapidly moving away from traditional news services, saying they are impractical compared to new media. A survey of Australian journalism students found 90 per cent of students do not like reading the newspaper, preferring to source news from commercial television or online media. Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at the Queensland University of Technology, Alan Knight, conducted the survey and says despite an aversion to newspapers, 95 per cent of students are very interested in following the news. “At this stage commercial television is still the favoured source, but online is rising pretty rapidly,” he said.” (I read most of my newspapers online, too. That said, i really hope some of the journalism students of today and thinking of ways to ensure that quality journalism is economically viable in the future!)
  • Gervais + Elmo = Hilarity on ‘Sesame Street’ [YouTube] – The funniest thing you’ll see today – Ricky Gervais and Elmo taking an interview to a place Sesame Street realyl shouldn’t go! And, as Waxy says, they have the same laugh!

Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 11th 2009

Links for March 10th 2009 through March 11th 2009:

  • Video: Truly Uncut – A Complete Common Craft Video Shoot [Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English] – How many stop-motion shots goes into the average Common Craft ‘in plain English’ video … an awful lot, it seems!
  • Bangladesh imposes YouTube block [BBC NEWS | South Asia] – “The video-sharing web site YouTube has been blocked by Bangladesh after a recording of a meeting between the PM and army officers was posted. The meeting took place two days after a mutiny by border guards in Dhaka that left more than 70 people dead. The recordings cover about 40 minutes of a three-hour meeting and reveal how angry many in the military were at the government’s handling of the crisis. YouTube had been blocked in the “national interest”, officials said.”
  • Know Your Meme: Boxxy [Rocketboom] – Rocketboom take a detailed look at the Boxxy meme and 4chan’s micro-civil war. Good stuff on memes in general.
  • Ewan McGregor twitchy over fake Twitter site [The Guardian] – “Spare a thought for the 19,639 subscribers to Ewan McGregor’s Twitter feed. For the past four months they have been treated to regular updates of the actor’s daily routine. When McGregor was “about to enjoy banana pancakes”, they were kept informed. When he “needed some Tylenol extra strength”, they were told about that too. Now comes the most alarming revelation of all: representatives of the actor claim that the Twitter site and its related MySpace profile are actually run by impostors. “Ewan McGregor does not have a Twitter site or one on MySpace either,” insisted a spokesperson for the Trainspotting star. “Someone is just making it all up.”” (Which would, I’d imagine, be easy enough to do!)

Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 10th 2009

Links for March 10th 2009:

  • Failed Negotiations – YouTube Will Block Music Videos in the UK [NYTimes.com] – “YouTube just announced that it wasn’t able to reach a new deal with the UK’s Performing Rights Society (PRS for Music), which collects licensing fees for musicians and labels in the UK. Because of this, YouTube will now block access to all premium music videos for users in the UK. According to YouTube, the licensing fees that PRS was looking for were “simply prohibitive” and Google would lose a “significant amount of money with every playback.” YouTube also bemoans that PRS was unwilling to provide it with a comprehensive list of songs that were actually included in the license. … YouTube goes out of its way to state that this move has nothing to do with the record labels. Patrick Walker, YouTube’s Director of Video Partnerships, Europe, Middle East and Africa, lays the full blame on PRS for Music – and PRS, of course, blames Google for being too greedy.”
  • THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube – Remix culture hard at work – music videos created entirely out of YouTube videos – lots of samples – nicely done.
  • Australians refused insurance because of poor genes [WA Today] – “Australians have been refused insurance protection because of their genetic make-up, researchers have shown in the first study in the world to provide proof of genetic discrimination. Most cases were found to relate to life insurance. In one instance, a man with a faulty gene linked to a greater risk of breast and prostate cancer was denied income protection and trauma insurance that would have let him claim if he developed other forms of cancer. The findings have led to renewed calls by experts for policies to ensure the appropriate use of genetic test results by the insurance industry.” (Gattaca!)
  • Baby swinging video case warning [The Age] – “The lawyer representing an Australian charged for republishing, on a video-sharing site, a video of a man swinging a baby around like a rag doll says that if the case proceeds every Australian who surfs the net could be vulnerable to police prosecution. Chelsea Emery, of Ryan and Bosscher Lawyers in Maroochydore, represents Chris Illingworth, who was charged with accessing and uploading child abuse material. Illingworth, 61, published the three-minute clip on Liveleak, a site similar to YouTube but focused on news and current events. Illingworth has uploaded hundreds of videos to the website. The one he was charged over, thought to have been created by a Russian circus performer, had already been published widely across the internet and shown on US TV news shows. The clip can still be found online and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.” (I’m staggered that this case is still moving forward!)

Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 6th 2009

Links for February 26th 2009 through March 6th 2009:

  • Australians spend much more time online | Australian IT – “The Nielsen Online Internet and Technology Report surveyed more than 2000 Australians and found the average Aussie spent 89.2 hours a week consuming media last year or almost 80 per cent of their waking hours. … this was an increase of almost five hours on 2007 and an extra 17.8 hours from 2006. “Given the average Australian is only awake for around 112 hours per week, it’s surprisingly just how many of those waking hours are dedicated to media consumption… We’ve seen some pretty extraordinary increases in the past few years, however we would anticipate a levelling out in consumption hours of the next few years as Australians simply run out of hours in the day.” … people aged over 16 spent an average of 16.1 hours on the internet each week, 12.9 hours watching TV, 8.8 hours listening to the radio, 3.7 hours on a mobile phone and 2.8 hours reading newspapers. Some users also used more than one form of media at once, with more than three in five internet surfers [also]watching TV”
  • RED MARS For Free [Warren Ellis] – “Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant sf novel RED MARS is now available as a free PDF download from its US publisher. [Direct link to PDF], and their Free Library page listing it and other available free downloads. Be warned: RED MARS is first of a trilogy, and there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself craving the others (GREEN MARS and BLUE MARS).” (If you”ve not read Red Mars, you’ve missed out on the best hard SF in years, go read it. As Ellis says, once you’ve gone Red, you won’t be able to stop yourself rushing to buy Green and Blue, too!)
  • Virtual Worlds – Detailed timeline of the emergence of Virtual Worlds – encompasses many recognisable and a few more abstract elements (do virtual worlds really start in the 1700s?) (Thanks, Jill)
  • Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end [The Age] – “The Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator’s decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started. The Opposition’s communications spokesman Nick Minchin has this week obtained independent legal advice saying that if the Government is to pursue a mandatory filtering regime “legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required”. Senator Nick Xenophon previously indicated he may support a filter that blocks online gambling websites but in a phone interview today he withdrew all support, saying “the more evidence that’s come out, the more questions there are on this”. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online.”

Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 24th 2009

Links for February 24th 2009:

  • Twittering celebs tell all from Oscars parties [The Age] – Forget the gossip mags – celebrities attending the Oscars and associated after-parties gave fans backstage passes by publishing messages, videos and pictures on their Twitter accounts throughout the evening. After years of dealing with the media mangling their words, stars are now creating a direct dialogue with fans. The combination of Twitter, which allows people to post short messages directly from their mobile phones, and alcohol, led to surprisingly candid postings from the Oscar festivities. Ashton Kutcher and wife Demi Moore were by far the most prolific Oscar Twitterers. They didn’t attend the awards ceremony but hosted an Oscars after-party attended by some of the biggest stars. Kutcher posted an image of rapper Sean “P Diddy” Combs clutching an Oscar alongside the message “Diddy throws up Oscars”. He also published an image of himself with Penelope Cruz’s Oscar. (Whatever will the paparazzi do when the celebrities are all happily photo-stalking each other?)
  • Twitter and Futurism Week5 Participation Literacy [Slideshare] – Slides from a great lecture by Trebor Scholz in his Participation Literacy course, looking at twitter and microblogging, giving a solid explanation for it, a rationale, and a pretty good origin story! (And for a less kind reminder about how people, not advertisers, use Twitter, read Richard Giles’ grumpy post Basic Twitter Etiquette.)
  • Rick astley ==[FRENCH]==interview about Rickroll internet phenomenon [YouTube ] – “Rick astley (french) interview about Rickroll’D internet phenomenon ,barack roll.,Himself For Governor Of Illinois and MTV Award Hacked.” (The talkshow is in French, but Astley replies in English … it’s worth watching just to see how the subject of a meme can enjoy it so much!)

Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 16th 2009

Links for February 9th 2009 through February 16th 2009:

  • Vigilantes publish alleged arsonist’s image online [The Age] – “Facebook vigilantes, frustrated at a court order protecting a man charged with lighting one of the deadly Victorian bushfires, which killed at least 11 people, have published his photograph and address on the social networking site and threatened his life. The move potentially breaches an order suppressing his image and address amid fears of a violent backlash by angry victims. Victoria Police has contacted Facebook seeking the removal of the details and urged people to let police do their job. This morning the suppression order on naming the man, Brendan Sokaluk, 39, was lifted, but the order remains in place on publishing his street address or his image. At least two Facebook groups have been created to name and shame the alleged arsonist, and thousands of Facebook users have joined them. Membership is growing rapidly as word spreads.” (While I completely understand people’s anger, this sort of social networking lynch mob mentality is really quite dangerous.)
  • Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney [Just TV] – Jason Mittell’s tale of how aquiring copyright permission from ABC/Disney for a cover image for his new book, Television and American Cuture, became a debacle with Disney refusing to license the cover image unless the publishers licensed every internal Disney image – something that should be covered by fair use – but with the book already at the printers, the publishers gave into Disney’s demands. As Mittell notes, Disney are legally able to do this, but it’s a bit of a slap in the face for fair and educational uses.
  • Murdoch looks for new ways to monetise MySpace traffic [The Age] – “”Rupert Murodch has delivered a sobering assessment about the internet as a growth engine, revealing search and advertising revenues at News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media division – which houses the popular MySpace networking site – have stalled. The new-media unit, which has invested heavily to expand MySpace, contributed just $US7 million ($10.4 million) to News Corp’s $US818 million second-quarter operating income, the company said on Friday. There was a “slight downturn” in revenue at the social networking site, Mr Murdoch said. That compares to $US179 million News Corp made from newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and information services such as the Dow Jones news wire. Asked about his views on the long-term viability of the internet, Mr Murdoch said generating a return on investment for assets such as MySpace, which News Corp bought for $US580 million in 2005, was still a challenge. “I think we have to find new ways to monetise our huge audiences,” he told analysts.”

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