Takk til @benteka, @idaaa, @jeanburgess, @andemann og @carlchristian for tilbakemeldinger underveis!

Her er noen lenker fra foredraget og steder å begynne:

• Everyblock.com gir datagenererte nyheter om amerikanske nabolag. Er det et eksempel på “asosiale medier”? Her hjemme kan vi bl.a. søke i norske solgte boliger - men informasjonen er foreløpig ikke samlet. Outside.in bruker i stedet brukerskapt innhold for å lage lokale nyheter.
• About the Norwegian “drittunge” scandal
• Jack Schafer: In Praise of Insensitive Reporters
• Washington Post: Faces of the Fallen
• Bloggurat, Sonitus.org, Google bloggsøk, valgprat.no, Norske hageblogger
• Avansert Twittersøk (prøv f.eks. å søk etter alle twitters fra Bergen)
• Mashable: The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
• NONA: Personer journalister bør følge på Twitter, fra NONA: Nettverket for oss som jobber med nettmedier (mye om journalistikk på nettet)
• Carl Christian Grøndahl om journalister og sosiale medier
• Tvitre.no

Om det er noe jeg har glemt, skriv det gjerne inn i kommentarene!

For instance, the core of my article is probably my sorting out of different ways in which social media organise our data into stories or patterns. Here they are (and I would love feedback on this!)

1. Patterns that show TIME
• A Documented Life (this is hand-crafted, not generated)
• Flickr organises your photo archives as a calendar - for instance, here are Elin Sjursen’s public photos from September 2005
• daily pic videos (here there’s a handcrafted original: Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years - you can generate your own at dailybooth.com.
• Trixietracker (the baby sleep tracker I wrote about a few months ago)
2. Patterns that show RELATIONSHIPS (and popularity?)
• tag clouds (see tagcloud-generator.com or tagcrowd.com)
• twitterfriends
• technorati rank
• Facebook friend visualiser
3. Patterns that show CONTEXT (is this a subset of relationships? (or vice versa)
• Friendfeed.com – gathers your data from several sources, shows your friends’ data from several sources
• Dagbladet profile (I blogged about this)
• Spock.com (same idea as Friendfeed)
• Tumblr.com – creates a public site for your gathering your info from Twitter, blogs, Flickr, etc.
4. Patterns that show GEOGRAPHY
brightkite.com (check in with GPS-enabled device)
• dopplr.com (logs travels, creates visualisations for individual users, like this one it made for me)
• Google maps – the customised/hand-crafted ones
• Flickr map view – see photos on map
• Nike’s running logs, using data from Nike/iPod running shoe thing-me-gig and allowing you to add geo-data (these also show time, development of runs over time)

I’ve received a few comments on this - I’m wondering how to present it, whether the division of categories makes sense, and what to do with it. Here’s how people responded:

I’ll be getting feedback on the draft from my colleagues in my research group too, but while they’re all very savvy about digital culture in general, none of them really specialise on social media - and so I’m very grateful to all extra feedback I can get. And of course, I’ve also asked Scott for feedback, and as always, his feedback is thorough and extremely useful. And maybe more customised than most - Scott knows my writing and can remind me of what I do well and gently suggest stripping away some of the blah blah (he wants more examples and less of the general and not-very-revealing references - and I think he’s right). Here’s one of his comments on the categories:

So do you think my categories of generated stories in user data make sense? Or do you have other good examples for me? Do share, please!

Mikkel continued by using the same strategy on various other issues, arguing that it was a protest against a capitalist media empire acting as a megaphone for the rich and powerful and then additionally profiting from the words of the masses, simply assuming that of course any of us plebs on Twitter would be eternally grateful to be re-published in the newspaper and that of course they needn’t ask permission and of course we wouldn’t mind having our words republished as eye-catching cool stuff that would help the newspaper sell more ads.

Personally I tweet in public and I’m happy for my words to be reused, re-tweeted, and generally used as people wish. Preferably not against me, I suppose, but even that I’ll take. But Mikkel does have a point. Twitter’s terms of service state that users retain copyright of their tweets:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

So technically, Dagbladet’s republishing tweets is a breach of copyright. Worse yet, Mikkel writes, they’re making money off it - there are ads placed right beside the tweets.

On the other hand, as @osol has pointed out, Mikkel had deliberately used a hashtag - #aker - and hashtags on Twitter have come to mean that you’re sending a tweet to a “channel”, or allowing your tweet to be syndicated along with other tweets using that hashtag. The question is whether users really know this, and whether they’ve considered that it means newspapers and political parties may republish your content without your knowledge or explicit permission - and earn money or voters from it.

Further, the Twitter terms of service go on to say:

The Twitter service makes it possible to post images and text hosted on Twitter to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display data hosted on Twitter.com must provide a link back to Twitter.

I think Twitter needs to offer users several licenses. I’d choose a CC attribution license, allowing people to use my tweets in any way so long as they’re attributed to me, whereas Mikkel might want either a non-commercial license so newspapers can’t make money off his tweets, or perhaps an old-fashioned copyright license, so the tweets can’t be republished at all. That way, Dagbladet and other sites can simply suck in the tweets that have a license allowing that kind of republishing. Problem solved. Other sites, like Flickr, offer this - and perhaps the reason Twitter hasn’t yet is simply that they haven’t thought of commercial newspapers and so forth using tweets in this way.

Actually, there’s an external service that lets you license your Tweets as you wish: tweetCC lets you send a tweet to them that states your chosen license, and they’ll archive it and make it easy for people to know. Only 2000 or so people have done so, and this really is a service that should be offered by Twitter itself, but at least this is a start.

Companies re-using tweets like Dagbladet have a larger problem of course. You need some kind of moderation of tweets - or there are going to be more and more trolls or “terrorists” like Mikkel. And it’s not just newspapers. The political party Høyre is having their annual meeting
and are embedding live tweets that use the hashtag #hlm (Høyres landsmøte). Mikkel attacked them too - classic troll behaviour, I suppose - and complained when they tried to ask him politely, on Twitter, not to sabotage their attempts at an open discussion. Interestingly, Høyre then felt the need to write a long apology for blocking him on their blog, painstakingly arguing that it wasn’t censorship but blocking a troll. (This post seems to have been deleted, but there’s a screenshot on Mikkel’s blog.)

I don’t think Høyre really needs to apologise for that. But I’m quite sure Mikkel won’t be the last troll using Twitter to get embedded on other websites. It’s a wonder spammers aren’t using it already to get their viagra ads on Dagbladet and Høyre’s websites. The utopic harmony of the early days of Twittering, where spammers and trolls hadn’t quite discovered it, is hardly going to last.

I found one discussion of a similar issue internationally, where the sports network ESPN republished tweets by Mark Cuban, a “dot.com billionaire” who made his fortune on webcasting basketball in the late nineties and who’s heavily involved in NBA sports and owns a competing cable channel to ESPN. Obviously this is very different from Dagbladet’s “theft of the words of the powerless”, to paraphrase Mikkel Grüner, but the issues of copyright are similar. There’s quite a long discussion about it in the comments on his blog post.

Are the other cases of Twitter “terrorism” internationally?

Update, May 31: Kottke posts a comment from a lawyer on this issue.

Stuff I’d particularly like feedback on includes: are there more than the three ways of researching social media that I identify in the fourth paragraph and on? What do you think of the patterns/templates I identify in the visualisations? Are there more dark sides (towards the end of the paper)? Who should I cite and how should I make the argument that we use narratives to understand our lives and construct our identities, and that often these narratives build on cultural templates/norms that define what is important?

The paper’s in Google docs and the link above lets you be a collaborator. I’d appreciate it if you simply add comments (using the insert –> comment tool or using a different text colour) at relevant places in the text - or write a comment here, or whatever.

This is a fabulous example of how different the public sphere is today - and how out of control it can get. PR people often talk about how social media give them direct access to their audiences, allowing them to bypass the journalists who have their own agendas and of course the journalistic desire to emphasise conflicts and problems. This is an example of the opposite: if the record company exec had been talking to a journalist rather than firing off 140 characters from his sofa he would almost certainly not have called a would-be customer a brat. He would have moderated his tone and choice of words according to his awareness that he would be quoted.

I don’t really know that the record company exec was sitting in his sofa when he wrote those words, but I sort of assume so. It was 7:30 in the evening, after all, and the tone he uses is very informal. He shows no awareness of speaking in the public sphere - he’s writing directly to Even Sandvold Roland but the irony, one assumes, must be largely for the benefit of his friends.

He quickly saw his mistake. His next tweets attempt to modify what he said, and within three hours he’s written a lengthy apology for using such derogatory language, with explanations for why the music isn’t available in Norway - rights are complicated and Warner Brothers isn’t trying to aggravate people, he says.

And yet the damage is done. His apology is unlikely to receive as many Diggs as the intitial blunder. Perhaps we’ll simply all have to get used to a world where our mistakes are public. More and more young people simply say they don’t care that their future employers will see photos of them at parties or making fools of themselves. Everyone will have such embarrassments in the future; not having them would make you more suspect. Even in old media this may be the way to go. While previous US presidents pretended they hadn’t smoked marihuana (or claimed not to have inhaled), Obama published an autobiography admitting to his experimentation with drugs. And so nobody bother’s to kick up a fuss about it.

I’m not sure that will make the record company exec feel any better though.

* The original is drittunge, which is untranslatable, literally meaning “shit-kid” but in practice a word most often used scathingly by kids or teenagers to refer to annoying, grubby, younger kids.

Update: I like how Dagbladet has inserted a live Twitter feed of Norwegian tweets mentioning the word “Warner” in their article about the topic. Cool.

Update 2: I’m reading The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet and I’m feeling pretty bad for the record company guy - the internet can be so harsh. Not that it’ll make much difference, but I took his name out of the post. It’s available plenty of other places but at least I’m not adding to it quite so badly.

Anyway, this wonderful cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody has been flying around the intertubes. It’s played entirely on vintage computers and oscillators and such - and “what you see is what you hear”. Amazing.

The surroundings were splendid - Padua is one of the world’s oldest universities, and the seminar room was glorious, as you can see from Mark Deuze’s photo above (thanks Mark for documenting us!) Three hours in Venice en route to the seminar was also a fabulous experience - all the better for meeting there my Norwegian colleague Gunn Enli from Oslo (whose paper is about audience voting in shows like the Eurovision Song Contest and Dance with the Stars) and the intriguing and energetic EJC editor wrote about some examples here on my blog a while ago. I need to finish the paper by May 20, before I go to the E-Poetry conference in Barcelona, so I’ll be working hard on it over the next few weeks - and intend to blog about it as I go.

Right now, I want to finish reading José van Dijck’s Mediated Memories in the Digital Age and skim through a paper I just found - On the Design of Digital Heirlooms by David Kirk and Richard Banks. And think about the ways in which I want to organise the paper and my examples.

It was really inspiring to be invited to this workshop - it got me thinking again after being on leave, and I’m relishing the excitement of researching and writing about new ideas. And it was an honour to be invited to such an exclusive gathering. And now to work!

Yesterday, after the book presentation, I met two of these studetns. Kristine Ludvigsen is studying pedagogy and finishing her Master’s degree on learning in Second Life. She had lots of questions about how to think about ethics in an online environment - she had permission from all her informants, but as the interviews had taken place in Second Life, sometimes other people had turned up in the middle of an interview - or someone simply walked past in the background. Her final paper is going to be a video paper, so she was wondering whether she could use material in the video paper despite there being someone in the background of the image who had’t formally given permission? I think it depends on the situation - but it does show the trickiness of online work. Kristine has already looked at the AoIR’s ethics guidelines: I think she’d find Charles Ess’s new book Digital Media Ethics useful - I only just saw it this morning and will certainly buy a copy. Charles Ess has worked on ethics on the internet for years.

I also met Carl Christian Grøndahl, who left a comment here the other day and just finished his master’s degree at the Department of Administration and Organization Theory. He’s put the thesis online - it’s titled Om nye mediers betydning for politisk aktivitet og deltagelse - en teoretisk drøfting og et casestudium. I haven’t read it yet but it’s certainly about an interesting topic.

It’s great that there are more and more students writing about the web and about social media - and at such diverse departments too. I’m thinking it’d be great to gather all these masters students together - both Kristine and Carl Christian mentioned that not many people in their departments are really very interested in social media and they missed having more people working on it around them. I’m sure our students doing their masters’ in Digital Culture would also benefit from seeing how people in other fields are approaching digital culture and social media. My plan is simply to have people meet up for an informal lunch at one of the campus cafeterias - say once a month - and have a chance to exchange ideas, brainstorm problems and so on. We could do more formal feedback groups if there were interest in it.

I’m planning on contacting the professors in various departments to ask them to let me know about social media/web/digital culture students - but if you are or know of a University of Bergen student working on these areas, leave a comment here or send me an email (jill.walker.rettberg@uib.no) so I can get in touch with them!