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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.)
Digital Culture Links: September 1st 2009
Links for August 25th 2009 through September 1st 2009:
- Twitter is Now Bigger than MySpace in the UK [Mashable] – "According to Hitwise UK, Twitter has overtaken MySpace for the first time on the list of most visited UK websites. Last week, Twitter was the 27th most visited website in the UK, while MySpace was 28th. Looking at social networks alone, Facebook was the biggest UK site, followed by YouTube (YouTube) and Bebo, with Twitter in the 4th place and MySpace in the 5th. And that doesn’t even take into account all the visitors that used one of the many 3rd party Twitter applications such as TweetDeck (TweetDeck) or Seesmic Desktop (Seesmic Desktop). "
- Bad news for newspapers, great news for journalism [bronwen clune] – Bronwen looks beyond the paywall: "Of course the argument for paid content is about defending commercial news organisations and not journalism. Problem is the two aren’t mutually exclusive anymore. For starters, it excludes the competition from government subsidised media – SBS and ABC – who probably can’t wait for News Corp and Fairfax to start charging for their content. A senior news person at SBS told me just yesterday that he “WANTS those sites to charge!” – not because he believes in paid content, he doesn’t, but because it certainly brightens his future."
- ABC most reliable network, Nine worst -readers [TV Tonight] – "The ABC is the most reliable network -according to readers of TV Tonight- and Nine the least. In the Audience Inventory, the public broadcaster was a clear winner in the key question of starting TV programmes on time by a huge 55% win. It was followed by Foxtel (22%), SBS (11%), TEN (7%), Seven (3%) and Nine (2%). The question was completed by 99% of the survey respondents, which totalled over 800." (That certainly matches with my thoughts!)
- Murdoch attack on 'dominant' BBC [BBC NEWS | Business] – "News Corporation's James Murdoch has said that a "dominant" BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK. The chairman of the media giant in Europe, which owns the Times and Sun, also blamed the UK government for regulating the media "with relish". "The expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision," he told the Edinburgh Television Festival. The scope of the BBC's activities and ambitions was "chilling", he added. Organisations like the BBC, funded by the licence fee, as well as Channel 4 and Ofcom, made it harder for other broadcasters to survive, he argued." (Or: if the BBC stays free and Newscorp puts everything they create behind a paywall, James is rightly concerned people will just read the free BBC stuff instead!)
- Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People [NYTimes.com] – "… as the English-language version of Wikipedia has just surpassed three million articles, that freewheeling ethos is about to be curbed. Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people. The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version. The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable." (With great power comes great(er) responsibility?)
Digital Culture Links: August 14th 2009
Links for August 6th 2009 through August 14th 2009:
- Gaiman and Doctorow Discuss Giving It Away [Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy] – A few short questions with Doctorow and Gaimain about the usefulness (and profitability) of giving books away for free online. This quote from Neil Gaiman about giving away American Gods for a month is probably the most important: “It’s been really fun in my own slow way nudging HarperCollins out of the stone ages and into the dark ages. As far as I’m concerned the entire argument [of the validity of giving digital books away] was won at the point where I got them to put American Gods online…we gave it away for free for a month, and during the course of that month and for about four weeks after, the number of copies of all of my books…went up three hundred percent. As far as I’m concerned, that answered that question.”
- Bringing the power of Creative Commons to Google Books [Inside Google Books] – Google Books now supports Creative Commons licenses: “Rightsholders who want to distribute their CC-licensed books more widely can choose to allow readers around the world to download, use, and share their work via Google Books. Creative Commons licenses make it easier for authors and publishers to tell readers whether and how they can use copyrighted books. You can grant your readers the right to share the work or to modify and remix it. You can decide whether commercial use is okay. There’s even a license to dedicate your book to the public domain. If you’re a rightsholder interested in distributing your CC-licensed book on Google Books, you have a few different options. If you’re already part of our Partner Program, you can make your book available under CC by updating account settings. If not, you can sign up as a partner. You can select from one of seven Creative Commons licenses, and usage permissions will vary depending on the license.”
- apophenia: Teens Don’t Tweet… Or Do They? – danah boyd unpacks the claim that teens don’t tweet and finds the data lacking and misinterpreted.
- Murdoch signals end of free news [BBC NEWS | Business] – “News Corp is set to start charging online customers for news content across all its websites. The media giant is looking for additional revenue streams after announcing big losses. Mr Murdoch said he was “satisfied” that the company could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution,” he added. “But it has not made content free. Accordingly, we intend to charge for all our news websites. I believe that if we are successful, we will be followed by other media. “Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” he said.” (It’s far too late to put the free genie back in the bottle … this plan could easily materialise as the move which killed NewsCorp!)
- News Corp records £2bn loss [guardian.co.uk] – “Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, News Corporation, slumped to a [US] $3.4bn (£2bn) net loss for the 12 months to June as a combination of plunging advertising revenue, impairment charges and online losses contributed to the company’s worst year in recent memory. The group suffered hefty accounting charges related to a drop in the value of its assets. After stripping out these one-off items, its full-year operating profit dropped by 32% to $3.6bn, with growth in revenue at the group’s cable television networks failing to make up for a slump in income from films, newspapers, books, magazines and online offerings. … n the final quarter of the year, News Corp made a $203m loss, compared to a $1.1bn profit for the same period in 2008, hit by a $680m impairment charge at Fox Interactive Media – the division that includes the social networking website MySpace, which recently shed 400 staff as it struggles to compete with larger rival Facebook.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: June 8th 2009
Links for June 5th 2009 through June 8th 2009:
- 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know [All Facebook] – Some useful advice and further evidence that Facebook’s privacy settings are far too complicated!
- A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance [TechCrunch] – Facebook planet cometh … “Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. The map above created by Vincenzo Cosenza resembles more a game of Risk, with Facebook sweeping across the globe from the West.”
- Thomson Reuters Lawsuit Dismissed [The Quintessence of Ham] – “I’m delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters. … It’s worth noting that even while the lawsuit was underway over the last nine months, Zotero geniuses completed the implementation of such radical new functionality as cloud-based synchronization, shared group libraries, PDF metadata detection, automatic proxy support, live CVs, and much more. And our amazing community performed this heavy lifting all while supporting a user base that has grown into the millions. I can only imagine what the Zotero project will be able to achieve unimpeded!”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: April 17th 2009
Links for April 14th 2009 through April 17th 2009:
- Digging up dirt: Facebook spies for hire [The Age] – “Large companies and government departments are employing a new Sydney-based company to dig up dirt on staff by spying on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube posts. SR7 specialises in “online risk and reputation management” and claims to be the only company in Australia that actively monitors social networking sites on behalf of companies. It was formed about eight months ago in response to the growing trend for people to take conversations they would have traditionally had with mates at the pub on to their social network profiles. Few people realise these seemingly private sites are still public spaces. If controversial posts leak to the media, it can lead to brands suffering immense damage to their reputations. SR7 director James Griffin said business was booming following recent public relations disasters sparked by the stupid social network behaviour of a few rogue employees.” (The golden rule: if it’s online, presume it’s public!)
- Twitter activist goes into hiding [The Age] – “The woman behind the mass protests which rocked the capital of Moldova last week has gone into hiding after the so-called “Twitter Revolution” forced a recount of the general election. Natalia Morar, 25, a Moldovan who has already been banned from Russia for opposing the Kremlin, feared arrest after organising a flash mob which ended with 20,000 people storming the parliament building. Protests began after a conversation between Ms Morar and six friends in a cafe in Chisinau, Moldova’s tiny capital, on Monday, April 6, the day after the parliamentary elections. The elections brought a larger-than-expected victory for the incumbent Communist Party. Suspecting vote-rigging, “we decided to organise a flash mob for the same day using Twitter, as well as networking sites and SMS,” …With no recent history of mass protests in Moldova, “we expected at the most a couple of hundred friends, friends of friends, and colleagues”, she said. “When we went to the square, there were 20,000 people””
- Twitter Gets the Oprah Treatment [Bits Blog – NYTimes.com] – “It is the universal sign of a new idea going mainstream: Oprah Winfrey is bestowing her endorsement on Twitter. The woman who can single-handedly send a new product or book flying off the shelves has just joined Twitter.” I can’t wait for Oprah’s tweet of the month … 😛
- Disney Templates is Today’s BIG Thing – APR 07, 2009 [Video] – “Looks like the Disney Vault has a purpose after all – to keep us from realizing how similar our favorite classic Disney movies truly are. According to this video, Disney only ever made one movie, and they’ve been tracing it ever since.” [Via]
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.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 8th 2009
Links for February 5th 2009 through February 8th 2009:
- Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community [Center for Citizen Media] – Dan Gillmor, on the challenge for journalism educators in the C21st: “Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.
In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.
For media consumers:
• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media TechniquesFor media creators (after incorporating the above):
• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency” - Stimulus package Facebook activism [Larvatus Prodeo] – “Thanks to commenter Bird of paradox on a previous thread for drawing my attention to the creation of a Facebook group “Come on Turnbull, don’t take away my $950 bucks !”. As of this morning, it was the largest political Facebook group in Australia with 5000 members and a goal of 8000 by 9pm tonight. They’ll easily reach that. When I checked in five minutes ago, there were 7887 members. Another 60 have joined now. The group creator describes his motivation this way: ‘We are sending a clear message that Australians need this boost. As a uni student I need help to buy my text books, my mother is a single parent who needs help and my brother is heading into year 12 and he needs it… Think about how much difference this bonus will make to you and your families…’ The group page also provides information on how to lobby Senators. Very interesting indeed.” (Checking today there were more than 34,000 members!)
- Australians desert MySpace for Facebook [The Age] – “Facebook celebrates its fifth birthday this week and the company has much to crow about, as new figures reveal the social network has twice as many monthly users in Australia as its nearest competitor, MySpace. According to web traffic monitor Nielsen Online, Facebook attracted 4,682,000 unique visitors in December, compared with just 2,362,000 for MySpace. Furthermore, each Facebook user viewed 381 pages on Facebook but MySpace users looked at only 252 pages.
The figures show Australians appear to be deserting MySpace for Facebook … In Britain, the BBC reports, Facebook has 17 million users or three times as many as MySpace. Globally, ComScore released figures late last month showing 222 million people visited Facebook in December, versus 125 million for MySpace.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 4th 2009
Links for February 2nd 2009 through February 4th 2009:
- How Natalie became Australia’s queen of YouTube [The Age] – “From her parents’ home in western Sydney, Natalie Tran, Australia’s queen of YouTube, has proven time and again that titillation is not a prerequisite to internet fame. With more than 150,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, Tran, 22, is easily the most subscribed YouTube user in Australia, while globally she ranks 37th. The 118 videos she’s created over two years have amassed 64 million views, making her also the most viewed Australian YouTube user of all time – more popular on the site than even AC/DC, whose videos have attracted 53 million views. But while some female web stars such as Obama Girl have used their sexuality to amass scores of drooling fanboys, Tran has eschewed titillation in favour of comedic skits about her everyday life.” (She’s very funny and has impressive production values for this sort of talking-from-my-bedroom cam style.)
- MySpace purges 90,000 sex offenders [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “MySpace has identified and barred some 90,000 registered sex offenders from using the site over the last two years, the online networking site revealed to a US investigative task force on Tuesday. The “shocking” number was 40,000 more than MySpace had previously acknowledged, according to Connecticut Attorney-General Richard Blumenthal, a co-chairman of the task force of state attorneys-general looking into sex offenders’ use of social networking. MySpace disclosed the figures to the task force in response to a subpoena. “This shocking revelation, resulting from our subpoena, provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators,” Mr Blumenthal said in a statement.” (Blumenthal sees this figure as evidence that MySpace should only allow “real” identities and use age-verification; I see this as evidence that we should be educating young people from an early age about how to deal with unwanted attention, predators and so forth, whatever the medium!)
- Virtual gold broker “sells” for $10 million [Boing Boing] – Cory Doctorow: “My MMO Inc., has purchased MyMMOShop.com for $10,000,000 — MyMMOShop being a company that buys and sells virtual gold, prestige items, and other virtual wealth. My MMO is a privately held company, so it’s impossible to say whether 10 million actual dollars left one bank account and entered another (as opposed to a stock swap or other “sale”), but this is still pretty whacky news. I’m working on a novel about gold farming and I spent most of the last year talking to farmers, brokers, players, academics, game-runners, moderators and others who follow the field, and I’ve concluded that it’s possibly the weirdest grey market in the world.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: January 20th 2009
Links for January 19th 2009 through January 20th 2009:
- “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” by danah boyd (Phd Thesis, 2.1Mb PDF) – “Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.”
- Facebook irked by ‘burger for friends’ campaign [The Age] – “Burger King said Friday that pressure from Facebook has caused it to yank an application that gave members of the hot social networking website a Whopper for every 10 friends they dumped. Before the Whopper Sacrifice Campaign was halted, 233,906 friends were “sacrificed” by Facebook users more interested in relationships with the global fast-food chain’s specialty hamburgers, according to Burger King. … Changes sought by Facebook reportedly included ditching an application feature that sent deleted friends messages informing them that an online pal preferred a hamburger over them.”
- The Boxxy Story – From the 4chan meme factory, the story of Boxxy, whose hyperactive YouTube antics caused a hormone-driven civil war, taking her from a micro-meme to the Queen /b/
Annotated Digital Culture Links: November 22nd 2008
Links of interest for November 21st 2008 through November 22nd 2008:
- EFA concerned about movie industry lawsuit against iiNet [Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA)] – “Electronic Frontiers Australa (EFA) today expressed concern about a lawsuit filed against Internet Service Provider iiNet in the Federal Court. A consortium of media companies have sued the ISP for allegedly allowing its users to download infringing movies and TV shows by failing to terminate their accounts after allegations of infringement by the copyright industry. “This lawsuit is the latest attempt by the movie industry to bully Internet Service Providers into becoming copyright police,” said EFA spokesperson Nicolas Suzor. “ISPs are not in a position to monitor and terminate internet access to users based upon unsubstantiated threats from copyright owners, and should not be asked to do so.””
- Kraftwerk sample case overturned [BBC NEWS | Entertainment] – “A court in Germany has told electronic band Kraftwerk that a producer who sampled one of their songs was not violating copyright. The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Moses Pelham’s use of a short sample from Metal on Metal. Judges in Berlin said the two second extract did not infringe copyright, as his song was substantially different. The move will come as a blow to artists who object to rivals using samples of their work to create new songs. ” (Bring on the legal remixes and mashups!)
- Immersion [The New York Times – Video Library] – A fascinating video by Robbie Cooper which captures the faces of young people as they play videogames – watch that concentration! (There are photos, too.)
- ‘The Dark Knight’ Conquers BitTorrent [TorrentFreak] – This week, in another round of leaks, DVD-rips of ‘The Dark Knight’ found their way to BitTorrent. Unsurprisingly, given the commercial success of the movie, <em>these were downloaded well over a million times in just a few days</em>. From the looks of it, Batman will crush Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Transformers, as it will easily become this year’s most pirated movie.
- Star Trek [Apple – Trailers] – Young James T Kirk … the beginnings of the Enterprise … angry Spock … and sex in outer space. The Star Trek reboot will either be amazing or utterly wrong!
- 19-Year-Old Lifecaster Commits Suicide on Justin.TV [smcb] – “In a tragic story from NewTeeVee, we learn that a 19-year-old user of the online live-streaming video service Justin.TV has apparently commit suicide in front of an audience of fellow forum dwellers egging him on during the process. The death has been confirmed with the Broward County medical examiner and the timeline has been pieced together from several different forums that have chronicled the unfortunate series of events.”
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