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Digital Culture Links: July 5th 2010
Links for July 5th 2010:
- Facebook bans doll nipples [The Age] – Prudebook? “Facebook’s prude police are out in force yet again, this time threatening action against a Sydney jeweller for posting pictures of an exquisite nude porcelain doll posing with her works. Victoria Buckley, who owns a high-end jewellery store in the Strand Arcade on George Street, has long used dolls as inspiration for her pieces and hasn’t had one complaint about the A3 posters of the nudes in her shop window. But over the weekend she received six warnings from Facebook saying the pictures of the doll, which show little more than nipples, constituted “inappropriate content” and breached the site’s terms of service.The warnings said Facebook would remove the images and Buckley is worried she will be banned from the site if she posts them again.”
- 4Chan hackers blamed for redirecting Justin Bieber fans to porn websites [News.com.au] – 4chan Vs Bieber: “Hackers wreaked havoc with a series of Justin Bieber YouTube pages today – redirecting users to pornography websites and videos saying the Canadian pop star had died in a car accident. The first YouTube spoof sent fans of the 16-year-old singer into a panic after hackers changed the sound of a video falsely reporting that Bieber died in a car accident, Mashable social media blog reported. Other YouTube pages featured pop up windows of pornography websites and videos exposing underage Bieber fans to explicit content. Internet forum 4Chan was blamed for the attacks but it is believed others joined in once the hack was discovered. YouTube said it was working to fix the problem as soon as possible. The stunt came just days after Bieber took to his Twitter account to dispel rumours regarding the identity of his father, claims that he was dead and reports his mother was offered a hefty sum to pose topless for Playboy magazine.”
- Guardian Takes Next Step in Open Content Strategy With Blog Plugin [Giga OM] – As many other newspapers try and lock their content behind paywalls and paid apps, the Guardian is moving boldly in the opposite direction, releasing a free WordPress application to embed full articles from the Guardian in any WordPress blog. The Guardian makes money by keeping their advertising intact, but gives bloggers the full right to re-post Guardian content (not just snippets). It’s not a perfect app – nor that easy to install – but it’s definitely a move in the right direction, and evidence for a very sensible business plan for the Guardian group – sharing content further, not restricting it! Take notes, Rupert Murdoch!
Digital Culture Links: July 2nd 2010
Links for July 2nd 2010:
- Google to Add Pay to Cover a Tax for Same-Sex Benefits [NYTimes.com] – On this front, at least, Google have got their ‘Don’t be Evil’ stance right: “On Thursday, Google is going to begin covering a cost that gay and lesbian employees must pay when their partners receive domestic partner health benefits, largely to compensate them for an extra tax that heterosexual married couples do not pay. The increase will be retroactive to the beginning of the year. “It’s a fairly cutting edge thing to do,” said Todd A. Solomon, a partner in the employee benefits department of McDermott Will & Emery, a law firm in Chicago, and author of “Domestic Partner Benefits: An Employer’s Guide.” Google is not the first company to make up for the extra tax. At least a few large employers already do. But benefits experts say Google’s move could inspire its Silicon Valley competitors to follow suit, because they compete for the same talent.”
- Don’t buy The Australian iPad app [Refined Geek – Blog] – A detailed look at the shortcomings of The Australian’s iPad application (almost all text is presented as images, for example, which is silly to start with …)
- [Media] Cognitive surplus, the soma of television and being on Newsnight with Clay Shirky [Aleks Krotoski] – Aleks Krotoski outlines her disagreements with Clay Shirky’s ‘cognitive surplus’ argument: basically, she suggests Shirky makes too sweeping an argument, which encompasses too many people, and devalues the participatory nature of earlier media forms, especially television, in ways less visible to contemporary social media forms.
- Foursquare Puts Money Before Privacy [Threat Level | Wired.com] – Foursquare demonstrates they really don’t care about users’ privacy, when they take a long time to fix one privacy flaw, fail to fix two more, don’t disclose any of this to users, and spend most of their energies pursuing more funding.
- Apple introduces iHand: the right way to hold your iPhone [Scoopertino] – Yes, it’s a parody: “Responding to complaints that the new iPhone 4 loses signal when held by a human hand, Apple today launched iHand — a synthetic appendage that makes it easy for anyone to “get a grip” on iPhone and remain connected. iHand is so easy to use, it doesn’t require a manual. Simply insert iPhone 4 into iHand’s adjustable fingers, raise it to your ear and start talking. With iHand, you get all the functionality of the human hand, without the signal-sucking biology that encumbers most iPhone owners.”
Digital Culture Links: June 10th 2010
Links for June 4th 2010 through June 10th 2010:
- Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club – Christina Mulligan [Balkinization] – Great post from Christina Mulligan about copyright and the (fantasy of) Glee: “The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines. […] Defenders of modern copyright law will argue Congress has struck “the right balance” between copyright holders’ interests and the public good. They’ll suggest the current law is an appropriate compromise among interest groups. But by claiming the law strikes “the right balance,” what they’re really saying is that the Glee kids deserve to be on the losing side of a lawsuit. Does that sound like the right balance to you?”
- Second Life in second incarnation [The Age] – “Linden Lab, creator of the online virtual world Second Life, is laying off 30 per cent of its staff and restructing it to make the once popular online world more relevant to social networking times. The San Francisco company did not reveal how many people it was letting go as part of what it called a “strategic restructuring,” but it is understood it has more than 300 employees. […] Chief executive Mark Kingdon, known inworld as M Linden, said the company plans to create an internet browser-based virtual world experience, eliminating the need to download software, and extend Second Life into social networks. […] Second Life was an online sensation after Linden Lab launched the virtual world in 2003 as a place for people to play, socialise and do business but its popularity has faded in recent years.”
- Ashton Kutcher: ‘Bruce Willis? At first it was difficult. He’s the guy who used to sleep with my wife…but it got easier’ [Mail Online] – Ashton Kutcher on how he used Twitter to escape the paparazzi: “There used to be five or six cars full of paparazzi following us – I stopped that with Twitter. Except for rare occasions, they don’t follow us any more. I definitely try to lead the long tail of the press, so if I’m going to an event I break the story myself – I don’t need somebody making money from breaking a story about me. If I’m going to be in a zoo, I want the keys to the cage – I saturate the market with images of myself, so their images won’t have any value.” (5th June 2010)
- The ‘Star Wars Kid’: Where is he now? [The Age] – “Today, Canadian law student Ghyslain Raza is president of a nonprofit organisation dedicated to preserving the heritage, culture and history of a riverside French-Canadian town called Trois-Rivières. But before that, the world knew him by a different title: The “Star Wars Kid.” Raza is now a law student at Montreal’s McGill University. In February of this year, he took control of the Patrimoine Trois-Rivières (formerly called the Society for Conservation and Promotion of Cultural Heritage), which was founded more than 30 years ago. […] Is that where you expected the Star Wars kid to be today? The short attention spans of viral video viewers prevent the subjects of the videos from fully and accurately presenting themselves. Few people would want to be entirely defined by one minute and 48 seconds of fame, but that’s the hand Raza was dealt in his youth. Hardly anyone would recognise him these days, though.”
- Court uses Facebook to serve paternity test order [The Age] – Australian courts allow Facebook to be used as a communication platform for serving legal papers: “In a case which highlights the difficulties of keeping a low profile when you have a Facebook account, a court has ordered that the social networking site be used to serve legal documents on an elusive father in a child support dispute. The federal magistrate who made the order, Stewart Brown, said the Adelaide case was unusual but ”demonstrative of social movements and the currency of the times”.”
Digital Culture Links: June 3rd 2010
Links for May 31st 2010 through June 3rd 2010:
- Anatomy of an Unpublished Chapter [Just TV] – Jason Mittell’s insightful post about academic publishing in general, and the challenges of balancing copyright, readership and academic reputation. I admire Jason’s decision to give up publishing a chapter in a collected edition due to the inflexible copyright demands of the publisher (including a requirement for him to remove a pre-print version on his blog); that said, at this stage of my academic career, I’m definitely not established enough to be this brave!
- Did Twitter censor the #flotilla hashtag following the Israel attack? [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – The #flotilla hashtag disappeared from Twitter’s trending topics briefly – cries of censorship erupted – but it soon returned and it appears that the disappearance was due to automated spam filtering (the hashtag had been active earlier in the week relating to another story).
- Terminating employees for their conduct on social media sites – Malcolm Burrows (B.Bus.,MBA.,LL.B.,GDLP.,MQLS Associate) offers some useful advice and tips about social media and the law in Australia, especially as to whether it’s legal to fire someone for social media comments made outside of work time (short answer: mostly no, but with some important exceptions).
- When Facebook Says – You Have Too Many Friends [NYTimes.com] – 5000 Facebook friends: that’s your limit.
“anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150. Facebook begs to differ. […] Facebook famously co-opted the word “friend” and created a new verb. Friending “sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial attention,” said Roger Fransecky, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in New York (2,894 friends). “We get captured by Facebook’s algorithms. […] Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold, at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That’s enough.” - Facebook, you’ve been sent a message . . . Angry users quit over privacy fears [The Australian] – “Tens of thousands of other disaffected former Facebook fans are also due to commit mass account suicide today, which has been declared “Quit Facebook Day” in a grassroots campaign started by two tech guys, Joseph Dee and Matthew Milan. Motivating them in part are the increasing privacy concerns surrounding the world’s most popular networking site. As of yesterday afternoon, about 24,000 Facebook users had committed to leaving, according to the tally on QuitFacebookDay.com. That’s about 0.006 per cent of the site’s approximately 400 million active users. However, surveys show growing dissatisfaction with the site, with users complaining settings make it too hard to restrict who can view their personal information and too easy for them to inadvertently share details with third-party websites, which mainly use the information to better target them for advertising.”
Digital Culture Links: May 28th 2010
Links for May 26th 2010 through May 28th 2010:
- CHART OF THE DAY: The Half-Life Of A YouTube Video Is 6 Days [Business Insider] – “A video on YouTube gets 50% of its views in the first 6 days it is on the site, according to data from analytics firm TubeMogul. After 20 days, a YouTube video has had 75% of its total views. That’s a really short life span for YouTube videos, and it’s probably getting shorter. In 2008, it took 14 days for a video to get 50% of its views and 44 days to get 75% of its views. Why? In the last two years, YouTube has improved its user interface, which helps videos get seen early on. Also, the world has gotten more adept at embedding and sharing videos in real-time via Twitter and Facebook. (And there’s probably more video to choose from.)”
- “Transparency Is Not Enough.” [danah boyd] – danah boyd making the important point that data transparency is only useful if we are also teaching the information literacy to responsibly employ that transparent data: “This is a country built on a mantra that “all [people] are created equal.” Those who are working towards transparency are doing so with this mission in mind. We desperately need an informed citizenry. But getting there is two pronged. We need information transparency and we also need to help people develop the skills to leverage that information to their advantage. And to help society writ large. The Internet radically increases the opportunities for information to be made available which is why we’re all here celebrating Gov2.0. But the Internet does not magically give people the skills they need to interpret the information they see. That’s why I need you. I need you to fight for information literacy alongside information transparency. Both are essential to creating an informed citizenry.”
- Twitter faux pas: 20 dreadful types of tweet [Telegraph] – Yes, this is silly, but there is some insight in there, too: “Twitter is frequently ridiculed by people who have never used the service. But fans of the micro-blogging site are more aware than anyone just how annoying some tweets can be. Below are 20 types of tweet that make our toes curl, from exchanges between celebrities who only engage with each other, to people who will type anything to win an Apple gadget.”
- Facebook to draw local police guidelines [The Age] – “Facebook appears to have bowed to police pressure to draw up a local law enforcement policy but will stop short of installing a police liaison officer in Australia as asked. In a telephone interview yesterday, Facebook US-based director of communications and public affairs Debbie Frost said a liaison team visited Australian authorities including the Attorney-General’s department last week and “was working on local guidelines”.”
- Facebook reveals ‘simplified’ privacy changes [BBC News] – A genuine response to widespread desire for better and more transparent privacy controls, or a half-way measure to ward off a tide of people leaving Facebook and stemming talk of government intervention in the way privacy is managed online? We’ll have to see once the new settings roll out: “Social network Facebook has said it will offer a one-stop shop for privacy settings in response to user concerns. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted the settings had “gotten complex” for users. It follows a storm of protest from users over a series of changes on the site that left its members unsure about how public their information had become. “We needed to simplify controls,” he told a press conference. “We want people to be able to share information in the way that they want,” he told BBC News. “Our goal is not to make your information more private or more open.””
- BBC iPlayer integrates Twitter and Facebook [BBC News] – The BBC’s online video service, iPlayer, goes social: “The BBC iPlayer has launched a trial service inviting users to share favourite programmes via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. People can now choose to log-on to the revamped video player, allowing them to personalise the service and see recommendations based on prior viewing. It will also aggregate content from other broadcasters including Channel 4. Users will also soon be able to chat using Microsoft’s Messenger service while watching live TV streams. “We spent more time designing [the new interface] than building it,” said the BBC’s Anthony Rose, chief technology officer for Project Canvas, a new online broadcast initiative currently under development. “It’s a complete social ecosystem.””
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.