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Digital Culture Links: September 15th 2010

Links for September 10th 2010 through September 15th 2010:

  • Myths of the NBN myths [ABC The Drum Unleashed] – Stilgherrian rebukes the common myths associated with the National Broadband Network, showing their false logic and short-sightedness. A good read.
  • The Rise of Apps Culture [Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project] – New Pew study shows Apps are emerging, but far from ubiquitous just yet: “Some 35% of U.S. adults have software applications or “apps” on their phones, yet only 24% of adults use those apps. Many adults who have apps on their phones, particularly older adults, do not use them, and 11% of cell owners are not sure if their phone is equipped with apps. Among cell phone owners, 29% have downloaded apps to their phone and 13% have paid to download apps. “An apps culture is clearly emerging among some cell phone users, particularly men and young adults,” said Kristen Purcell, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet Project. “Still, it is clear that this is the early stage of adoption when many cell owners do not know what their phone can do. The apps market seems somewhat ahead of a majority of adult cell phone users.””
  • The Agnostic Cartographer – John Gravois [Washington Monthly] – Interesting article looking at the politics behind all maps, but especially Google Maps – trying to create one definitive map for the world, when so many maps are bound to particular nations, politics and cultures, means a lot of diplomacy or a lot of disputes (both are currently happening).
  • musing on child naming and the Internet [danah boyd | apophenia] – (Unborn) kids and digital footprints: “I am of the age where many of my friends are having kids and so I’ve been exposed to more conversations about what to name one’s child than I ever could’ve imagined. I’m sure people have always had long contested discussions with their partners and friends about naming, but I can’t help but laugh at the role that the Internet is playing in these conversations today. I clearly live in a tech-centric world so it shouldn’t be surprising that SEO and domain name availability are part of the conversation. But I’m intrigued by the implicit assumption in all of this… namely, that it’s beneficial for all individuals to be easily findable online and, thus, securing a fetus’ unique digital identity is a tremendous gift.”
  • ‘That is so gay!’ [ABC The Drum Unleashed] – Matthew Sini on Stephanie Rice’s recent Twitter controversy: “A certain tweeting swimmer used the word faggot recently in a haphazard, inelegant and wholly unconscious way the other day. As many Rice-lovers have vocally pointed out, the intention behind the word choice was clearly not to insult. But that is the point. When you can use this sort of language in such a casual way, you have displayed an ignorance of very material prejudice and a history of oppression and suffering. Both Stephanie Rice, and me and my friends, make light of this history of suffering, but the difference is Rice does not acknowledge it when making light. She can only be accused of ignorance. In the same way that many ‘kids today’ use the phrase ‘that’s so gay’ or some cognate of it to describe something that is undesirable.”
  • FarmVille – Facebook application metrics from AppData Facebook Application Metrics [AppData] – Statistics for Farmville use in terms of the Facebook plugin. 83,755,953 all-time high for monthly users to date.
  • App Store Review Guidelines [Apple – App Store Resource Center] – Apple releases their guidelines for reviewing Apps for the Apple App store. Finally, developers can figure out exactly what they need to do to ensure their Apps are accepted, and critics can evaluate how Apple wield their power in policing the iWalled Garden.

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 19th 2010

Links for April 19th 2010:

  • Why the Library of Congress cares about archiving our tweets [Ars Technica] – Interesting look at the motivations behind the US Library of Congress twitter archive – and their perspective on how Twitter has changed communication – and why Facebook hasn’t. Some of the challenges the Library of Congress archive will face are important issues for researchers, including dealing with shortened urls through third parties such as bit.ly and tinyurl; and whether or not to archive photos on twitter specific photos (eg twitpic) – this one seems unlikely.
  • Twitter Chirp Conference – Videos [Justin.tv ] – A video archive of Twitter’s first official conference – Chirp – in April 2010.
  • Facebook Ads Will Use Your Web History [Mashable] – “Facebook will soon use your activity on other web pages to target ads based on your interests, Financial Times reports. That’s potentially a big boon for advertisers, but it won’t sit well with privacy advocates. Note that Facebook already targets ads using information from your profile, and this new system will not track all of your browsing. Rather, Facebook will offer sharing buttons to interested websites. Readers will be able to click on them to share the links with their Facebook friends via Facebook Connect […] Once the user shares a link with his friends, Facebook will assume that person shared it because he or she liked it, so the company will include content from that web page in the data it uses to target ads based on user interest. The ads will appear whenever the user visits the Facebook website.”
  • Internet dating [SMH] – “Australians are changing the way they date and mate, a survey shows. A Nielsen poll found one in four adults have used the internet to find a partner and another 38 per cent are considering using online dating. The other 37 per cent – many presumably in relationships – said they would never go online to meet someone. Of those who had used online dating, 33.6 per cent reported a short-term relationship, 16.2 per cent said they had a long-term relationship, 8.9 per cent said they had married or were in a defacto relationship, and 2.7 per cent had children. […] The survey shows that:
    * Of those who had used online dating, 62 per cent had dated someone they met online;
    * Men were slightly more likely than women to use online dating services; and
    * Most of those polled (72 per cent) were seeking a serious relationship, but many were looking for friendship or just sex.
    Nielsen polled 3057 people online in November and 3764 in January, with the data weighted to the general population.”

Digital Culture Links: March 18th 2010

Links for March 18th 2010:

  • Oops Pow Surprise…24 hours of video all up in your eyes! [YouTube Blog] – YouTube has 24 hours worth of video uploaded every minutes!
  • AAP puts ‘strict curb’ on tweeting reporters [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Australian Associated Press is cracking down on its journalists who use social networking sites while on the job. AAP reporter Sandra O’Malley wrote from her Twitter account yesterday morning that “work’s put a strict curb on tweeting”. The agency’s editor-in-chief, Tony Gillies, says this is because reporters have been posting their thoughts online while on assignment. He says he is trying to protect AAP’s brand. “I’m talking about people who work for AAP tweeting and blogging while on assignment for AAP,” he said. “If they are tweeting during those assignments – and let’s leave aside for one moment what they’re doing rather than paying attention to the story that’s unfolding in front of them – whatever they’re tweeting may reflect on AAP.”
  • Networks, Crowds, and Markets: A Book by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg – Full book pre-print version; looks like a really useful read: “Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected. […] The book will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.”
  • Flickr Short URL Generator – URLkr – Useful tool to create flic.kr links, using Flickr’s own URL shortening service.
  • Why short links can take a long time to get you around the web [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – Some URL shorteners are slowing down the web: “URL shorteners have become a fact of life, given the proliferation of short messaging services (and also the demands of print, which finds URL shorteners mean you can link to long URLs in a few characters). But they’re sometimes a roadblock – at least, the one from Facebook is.”
  • 25 years of .com domain names [SF Gate] – Happy Birthday dot com: “On March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer systems firm registered the first .com Internet domain name. Although Symbolics.com didn’t spark an instant gold rush, the event planted the first seed of a transformation that has changed the world into a Web-fueled digital river of news, commerce and social interaction. Today, exactly 25 years later, life B.C – Before .Com – is already a distant memory, especially in the tech-centric Bay Area. […] In 1985, only six entities registered a .com, one of six top-level domain names created a year earlier in a reorganization of the early Internet’s naming bureaucracy. At the time, .cor (short for corporate) almost beat .com as the designation for commercial Internet addresses.”
  • Facebook passes Google as most-viewed site in US in past week [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – “Is that Google in Facebook’s rear-view mirror? Why, yes, it is, at least in the US, according to the latest figures from Hitwise. The statistics will be worrying for Google, principally because that won’t be traffic heading downstream from Google to Facebook; it will be people logging directly into the social networking site. And pause to consider: if the problem of search – what Google aims to do – is solved not by building the most fantastic search engine, but by building the biggest social network, what does that tell us? That we’re not actually looking for that much? Heather Hopkins notes that Facebook was the most visited site in the US last Christmas eve, Christmas day and New Year’s day – but also on the weekend of March 6th and 7th. That starts to look like a trend. Compared to the same week in 2009, Google’s visits were up 9% – but Facebook’s were up 185%. So now Facebook was 7.07% of visits, while Google was put in the shade – just – at 7.03%.”

Digital Culture Links: March 15th 2010

Links for March 12th 2010 through March 15th 2010:

  • 9 Million Australians Use Social Networks [Nielsen] – “Nielsen Online released their “Nielsen 2010 Social Media Report” today which has a wealth of statisitcs on the social media landscape here in Australia. Among the findings:
    * 9 million Australians now interact via social networks
    * content sharing is the most popular activity
    * 4 in 5 Australian Internet users have shared a photo
    * Twitter usage grew by 400% in 2009
    * Nearly 3/4 of Australians read a wiki
    * 2 in 5 Australians interact with companies via social networks”
    Read a PDF of their press release.
  • “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity” by danah boyd [danah.org] – danah boyd tackles the issues of privacy and social media head on, arguing privacy is far from dead, but that the world is a bit different, the rules are a bit different, and the way privacy, publicity and openess operate can be different but neither absolute nor gone.
  • What’s Happening—and Where? [Twitter Blog] – Twitter now officially supports geotagging but quite sensibly you have to OPT IN to use it: “Every day, millions of tweets are created. These little bursts of information are about anything and everything—they make Twitter a hub for discovering what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world. A recent burst of interest in location sharing applications, games, and services has many Twitter users excited about appending geographic data to some of their tweets. Not everyone wants to add their current location to a tweet so this feature is off by default and must be activated to use. Check out How To Tweet with Your Location to learn how you can turn it on.”People who choose to add this additional layer of context help make Twitter a richer information network for all of us—location data can make tweets more useful.
  • Reuters to Journalists: Don’t Break News on Twitter [Mashable] – “Last night, Reuters released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to “scoop the wire” by breaking stories on Twitter. The strict instruction makes it clear that even though news continually breaks on Twitter first — especially in disaster scenarios — Reuters journalists are to break their stories first via the wire and not on Twitter. The social media policy in question also addresses a number of other Twitter, Facebook, and online concerns, offering up instructions and recommendations whenever possible.”
  • Conan O’Brien Embraces Team Coco – Poster and All – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com – Conan knows his fans! “With Thursday’s announcement of Conan O’Brien’s 30-city tour, the former late-night comedian is fully embracing his online fan base, “Team Coco.” The official poster for the tour re-uses the image made famous on the Internet of a heroic Mr. O’Brien, orange hair aflame, in front of an American flag. The image was produced by Mike Mitchell, an artist in Los Angeles, as a show of support for Mr. O’Brien when NBC tried in January to move “The Tonight Show” to 12:05 a.m. Within days the image and its message, “I’m With Coco,” was a viral sensation, inspiring dozens of pro-Conan groups on Facebook. Several of Mr. O’Brien’s employees even made the image their Facebook profile photo. Now they have formally adopted the image as their own. Days after Mr. O’Brien signed off of “The Tonight Show” on Jan. 22, one of the comedian’s producers contacted Mr. Mitchell and said that they wanted the “Coco” illustration to be the emblem of a nationwide tour they were planning. “
  • “I’m With CoCo” Artist Makes Big Bucks From Conan’s Tour [Mashable] – “Mike Mitchell, the artist who created the now-iconic “I’m With CoCo” image of Conan O’Brien that has circulated through Facebook profile pictures and blogs since NBC’s The Tonight Show scheduling controversy, told TMZ that he’s been paid by Conan’s producers for the right to use the image during Conan’s impending “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.” TMZ reports that the producers paid him well enough that he can “take a very, very long vacation.” Mitchell originally posted the image to TwitPic, but it achieved meme status when it became the profile image for the huge “I’m With CoCo” Facebook (Facebook) group that was used to promote the real-world pro-Conan rallies. “

Digital Culture Links: March 9th 2010

Links for March 9th 2010:

  • Mapping the growth of the internet [BBC News] – Useful flash-powered world map from the BBC visually demonstrating the growth in internet use across the globe from 1998 to 2008. (Quite a lot of growth to be seen!)
  • Return of the natives by Slavoj Zizek [New Statesman] – Slavoj Zizek gets stuck into Avatar: “So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the film substituting for reality.”
  • Adventures in the Wild, Wild West: Media140 Perth [media140.org] – Official wrap-up post for Perth Media 140 (Feb 2010), including links to pretty much everyone involved and a snappy little video summarising some of the key themes (if you watch closely you can see what 10 seconds of my talking head looks like after presenting a talk in a room which is warmer that 40 degrees Celsius!).
  • Study: Ages of social network users [Royal Pingdom] – A really useful breakdown of social networking websites by age, including these stats:
    “* Bebo appeals to a much younger audience than the other sites with 44% of its users being aged 17 or less. For MySpace, this number is also large; 33%.
    * Classmates.com has the largest share of users being aged 65 or more, 8%, and 78% are 35 or older.
    * 64% of Twitter’s users are aged 35 or older.
    * 61% of Facebooks’s users are aged 35 or older. […]
    * The average social network user is 37 years old.
    * LinkedIn, with its business focus, has a predictably high average user age; 44.
    * The average Twitter user is 39 years old.
    * The average Facebook user is 38 years old.
    * The average MySpace user is 31 years old.
    * Bebo has by far the youngest users, as witnessed earlier, with an average age of 28.”
  • Twitter Hits 10 Billion Tweets [Mashable] – “It’s official: Twitter has surpassed 10 billion tweets. […] you can tell by the actual tweet ID numbers that we have crossed the magical threshold. The milestone shows that Twitter’s still growing at a rapid pace: it broke 1 billion tweets in November 2008 and 5 billion tweets just four months ago.”

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