Links for July 21st 2010 through July 28th 2010:

• How Twitter Is Being Used In The Election Campaign [National Times] - Axel Bruns offers a quick look at how Twitter is being used in the Australian politician election campaigning to date: short version, the candidates aren't doing brilliantly well and #ausvotes is the real hashtag, while #ozvotes is all about electing wizards!
• Julia Gillard Impersonators On The Rise [National Times] - There are a lot more fake Julia Gillards on Twitter than the real one (currently our PM); most of the fake ones are much funnier, and all of them get that Twitter isn't just a broadcast platform (the real one hasn't figured this out, yet).
• Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign [Mashable] - Apparently social media + charismatic actor + great scripts = advertising gold: "You know those YouTube videos with that manly Old Spice guy and his hilarious responses to Twitter fans? Of course you do. So does everybody, it seems, because Old Spice body wash sales have increased 107% in the past month thanks to that social media marketing campaign. We already published stats from video analytics company Visible Measures that made it clear that the Old Spice guy was a hugely successful initiative from marketing firm Wieden + Kennedy, achieving millions of viral video views quicker than past hits like Susan Boyle and U.S. President Barack Obama’s election victory speech. The statistic of the 107% sales increase over the past month comes from Nielsen..."
• Amazon's ebook milestone: digital sales outstrip hardbacks for first time in US [The Guardian] - "In what could be a watershed for the publishing industry, Amazon said sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website for the first time. Amazon claims to have sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating."
• Skin Whitening, Tanning, and Vaseline’s Controversial Facebook Ad Campaign [danah boyd | apophenia] - An insightful look at a controversy that has sprung up about a Vaseline ad on Facebook, aimed at India, for a skin whitening cream which offers a preview of a whitened face. boyd does a great job of showing how racism is often culturally and historically specific, and that Americans who are deeply offended by the ads really need to engage with how the ads are read by the Indian internet users who are targeted. boyd stresses that most histories of racism and the meaning of skin-colour are deeply problematic, but the main point is that these operate quite differently in different places and cultures, and that these contexts need to be taken into consideration.
• Gay zombie porn gets festival flick [The Age] - Film censorship returns to Australia - gay zombie film in peril: "The Australian censor has banned a film from screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival for the first time in seven years - a work described as ''gay zombie porn''. Festival director Richard Moore received a letter yesterday from the Film Classification Board director Donald McDonald, stating that L.A. Zombie, the latest offering from Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce, could not be screened as it would in his opinion be refused classification. The festival is not generally required to submit films for classification, but after reading a synopsis of the plot of L.A. Zombie, which features wound penetration and implied sex with corpses, the Classification Board requested a DVD to watch, and then refused to issue an exemption. It is the first film to be banned from the festival circuit since Larry Clark's Ken Park in 2003."

Links for July 20th 2010:

• Jessi Slaughter ("You dun goof'd" / "The consquences will never be the same") [Know Your Meme] - Know Your Meme's (still being researched) page on the 4chan Vs "Jessi Slaughter" debacle.
• How The Internet Beat Up An 11-Year-Old Girl [Defamer Australia] - 4chan and /b/ collectively turn on self-styled tween micro-celeb "Jessi Slaughter", a very foul-mouthed video poster whose antics and anti-"hater" video got their undivided attention. The young girl in question is certainly provoking people, but SHE'S ONLY 11 YEARS OLD!
  As Defamer note "here are some important lessons from this tale:
  1. What are your kids doing on the internet? Normally we find fears about kids on the Internet the product of technophobic hysteria. But this case is a very good argument for why parents should at least be vaguely aware of what their kids are up to on the internet. [...]
  2. Tumblr is becoming a home for trolls. [...]
  3. Don’t pick on 11-year-old girls. Seriously. No matter dumb they seem – no matter how much it seems like they deserve it – they are, at the end of the day, 11-year-old girls. You wouldn’t make an 11-year-old girl cry in real life; why do it on the internet?"
• The Art Of Trolling: Inside A 4chan Smear Campaign [Defamer Australia] - 4chan go after Dahvie Vanity, the lead singer of "the terrible electro-pop MySpace band Blood on the Dance Floor", who has supposedly been linked to 11-year-old 4chan victim Jessi Slaugher (he's been rumoured to be a paedophile, but these are by now means substantiated - to my knowledge, no police action has been taken). /b/'s actions are citizen justice at its worst.
• 4Chan’s Sad War To Silence Gawker [Defamer Australia] - 4Chan go after Gawker media (Defamer's parent company) to try and stop them writing about 4Chan; their efforts are not successful.
• Jessi Slaughter and the 4chan trolls - the case for censoring the internet [News.com.au] - Peter Farquhar uses the 4chan Vs Jessi Slaughter debacle as an excuse to promote the notion of an internet filter in Australia. While there is some token disagreement towards the end of the article, it's still an example of terrible writing since it implies that (if she was in Australia, presumably) the proposed filter would have helped the situation. For the record, even the most extreme version of the filter Conroy mooted, would have made absolutely no difference in this case whatsoever. What WOULD make a difference for young people in Australia is more money and resources put into education about social media and online interactions across the national curriculum; the sort of money being spent developing and arguing about a useless mandatory filter would be exactly the put of money that could make a real difference in the eduction, awareness and thus safety of young Australians online.
• NB: No spoiler warning for MasterChef evictees! [TV Tonight] - Australian TV blog TV Tonight reminds those of us in the West that the interwebs will be filled with spoilers since Masterchef will go to air AEST! (Yes, we know: AEST is an anagram of EAST after all ...)
• Why this is NOT the Twitter election [mUmBRELLA] - Quick post pointing out that while the upcoming Australia election will certainly be influenced by Twitter and social media, it certainly won't be driven by it given the paucity of social media use and awareness of the two newbie leaders of the big parties.
• Google Discontinues the Nexus One Android Phone [Mashable] - Google's experiment as a smartphone distributor come to a swift end: "Google has pulled the plug on the Nexus One, its once highly anticipated smartphone. The last shipment has arrived at Google HQ, and once those are gone there will be no more Nexus Ones for U.S. consumers. The handset will still be sold through Vodafone in Europe and some Asian carriers, and developers will still be able to get their hands on one, but it looks like the Droid phones on Verizon will carry the mantle for Google’s (Google) Android (Android) mobile operating system. This is the end the company’s grand experiment with an unlocked handset. Following disappointing sales, Google had already closed the Nexus One web store two months ago, so this final nail in the coffin was already overdue."

Links for July 15th 2010 through July 18th 2010:

• As Older Users Join Facebook, Network Grapples With Death [NYTimes.com] - How Facebook does (and doesn't) deal with death: "For a site the size of Facebook, automation is “key to social media success,” said Josh Bernoff, [...] “The way to make this work in cases where machines can’t make decisions is to tap into the members,” he said, pointing to Facebook’s buttons that allow users to flag material they find inappropriate. “One way to automate the ‘Is he dead’ problem is to have a place where people can report it.” That’s just what Facebook does. To memorialize a profile, a family member or friend must fill out a form on the site and provide proof of the death, like a link to an obituary or news article, which a staff member at Facebook will then review. But this option is not well publicized, so many profiles of dead members never are converted to tribute pages. Those people continue to appear on other members’ pages as friend suggestions, or in features like the “reconnect” box ..."
• Facebook Breaks All Bit.ly Links, Marks Them as Abusive [Mashable] - For a period of time, all bit.ly links were blocked on Facebook; clicking on them returned a 'reported as abusive' page from Facebook. I'm sure this will be resolved relatively quickly, but it does underscore the danger of URL shorteners as platforms (not just Facebook) battle phishing and spam. Blocking a whole domain is overkill, of course, but it's going to happen and it's worth asking about the extra burden that one extra (shortened) step brings to the internet at large. (It's fixed now.)
• New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar [YouTube] - Definitely my favourite parody of the Old Spice guy so far: "Do you want to be a scholar? Then study at the Harold B. Lee Library. Do your research here, study here, and be a scholar!" I'm on a cart ...
  
• Everything you need to know about the internet [Technology | The Observer] - Nine 'big picture' notions about what the internet is and isn't from John Naughton (Professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University). Useful as a primer for Web Communications 101.
• The Trouble at Twitter Inc. [Gawker] - Gawker's rumour-ridden piece suggesting that Evan Williams may be losing the reigns as CEO of Twitter.
• World Vision I Old Spice [YouTube] - Tim Costello from World Vision makes his own Old Spice guy (parody) reply, pitching World Vision as the charity of the future. It's actually quite funny.
• O'Farrell lays low after Twitter gaffe [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] - "New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell is laying low after posting an embarrassing message this morning on the social networking site Twitter. Believing he was sending a private message to journalist Latika Bourke's Twitter account, Mr O'Farrell opened up on his thoughts about the delay on candidate selection. [...] "Deeply off the record - I think the timetable and struggle to get candidates reflects internal poll - pre and post the ranga," he tweeted, a reference to Prime Minister Julia Gillard."

Continuing from yesterday’s post about the impressive Old Spice replies social media campaign, I just wanted to highlight two more examples since they replies have continued into day two of the campaign. The first, a reply to knitmeapony’s request of an answering machine message shows just how clever the script writers are on these clips: the Old Spice guy carefully delivers a clip with can so easily be remixed into any number of customised answering machine replies, with strategic pauses between audio bites of numbers and phrases, making this a really easy clip to remix! Like so:

Or the equivalent for a man’s man’s answering machine:

The other clip which I really liked was to Isaiah Mustafa’s daughter, Hayley, who wondered why the Old Spice man looks so much like her dad:

It’s worth noting that while this clip is public, it’s unlisted, so not visible on the main YouTube channel; initially, it was only found by those who saw the tweet. Having some clips only available via specific media platforms gives Old Spice reply fans even more reason to join all the Old Spice social media forms!

Meanwhile, Marshall Kirkpatrick over at Read Write Web has a look behind the curtain at How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made; Kirkpatrick gets a certain amount of access to the production team, so it’s worth having a read. Also, Boing Boing note that there’s already been some ‘competition’ for the Old Spice man, but that’s a little generous.

I do wonder if there will be any more of these clips.  There are still some gems in the second day’s replies, but they also seem to be running out of steam here and there, repeating their jokes a bit.  Perhaps the Old Spice man needs to rest after a job well done, leaving the tantalizing promise of a repeat performance weeks or months down the track?

Update: It’s done; I must ride my jetski/lion into the sunset …

Links for July 11th 2010 through July 14th 2010:

• Recycle, Remix and Re-use with Creative Commons on Vimeo Staff Blog [Vimeo Staff Blog] - Video-sharing website Vimeo adds support for Creative Commons licenses. Yay!
• Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Tool [NYTimes.com] - Nifty: "Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones. The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (appinventor.googlelabs.com/about), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors. The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves. "
• Facebook ClickCeop app to offer optional 'panic button' [Technology | The Guardian] - "After months of pressure to improve its online safety features, Facebook has reached an agreement to provide an application not dissimilar to the "panic button" critics have called for, which users can add to their homepage and links to the UK's online child protection watchdog. [...] Now Facebook UK is to launch a new initiative with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, one of its harshest critics, to give all users the potential to access the organisation's advice and reporting centre. The service, accessible via a ClickCeop button, includes a dedicated facility for reporting instances of suspected grooming or inappropriate sexual behaviour. Facebook said that it marks the first time in the UK that all users, and especially the target demographic of 13-to-18-year-olds, will be able to have direct access to CEOP's services. However, the new system is opt-in, meaning that Facebook users will have to actively choose to download, add, or bookmark the new button ..."
• Facebook relents on doll nipples ban [The Age] - Not so prudebook (just bad management): "A Sydney jeweller has castigated Facebook for its "opaque" and "arbitrary" moderation system after the site apologised for censoring her images of a nude porcelain doll posing with her works. The social networking site admitted this morning that it made a "mistake" in removing Victoria Buckley's photos, after last week sending her several warning notices for publishing "inappropriate content" and erasing both censored and uncensored versions of the image from Facebook. "We've investigated this further and determined that we made a mistake in removing these photos," Facebook said in a statement."
• iChatr: Chatroulette For the iPhone [TechCrunch] - "Oh, Internet, is there anything you can’t do? iChatr, a new app for the iPhone, is essentially Chatroulette for the iPhone. It’s pretty barren right now – I saw the same people once or twice – but the quality is pretty good ..."

When Old Spice is mentioned, if anything comes to mind at all, it’s … old. And not old in a dignified or wise way. That’s all changed for me today, as I’ve just seen evidence that their current marketing campaign is one of the cleverest commercial use of social media I’ve ever seen (thanks to a post from mUmbrella). The story begins with this well-produced, amusing advertisement for Old Spice:

Apparently it won some awards and so forth, but it’s still just a normal tv spot. 

Then, today, things started to get interesting on the Old Spice YouTube channel (with links on Twitter, Facebook and even Reddit) as Isaiah Mustafa, in his Old Spice role, started replying to comments from people online.  First off, a big media nod to Ellen DeGeneres, and it seemed like there might be a series of carefully scripted replies to recognisable celebrities and media platforms (all amplifying the Old Space brand, of course).  But then the Old Spice marketers did something really clever: the replies in the videos shifted aim, towards non-celebrity, ‘ordinary’ internet users who’ve made comments somewhere (YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc) about the Old Spice ads. Suddenly, that netherworld of social media comments, which so often feels like screaming into the wind, brought a deluge of replies from the Old Spice guy. Over one hundred Old Spice replies were uploaded in 24 hours, the vast majority of which are in reply to comments made today. Just as impressive, the writing team have obviously enjoyed their energy drinks, because the scripts were hilarious, endearing, ironic and certainly every single reply is worth watching. 

No doubt the most notable Old Spice reply will be one done in reply to jsbeals’s request to pass on his marriage proposal; the story ends well as she apparently said yes! However, what really impressed me is that the masculinity of the Old Spice ads, while driving the marketing pitch, is also deeply ironic (which rather suits the a brand of this vintage), poking particular fun at its own notion of ‘being a man’:

The Old Spice replies are also littered with internet-driven humour, with a particular take on the age old pirates vs ninjas debate, a good poke at stupid YouTube handles in the form of a decent robot joke, an hilarious jab (and brave) jab at 4chan, /b/, and anonymous,  and lots of other references to please us all.  My favourite quirky video, though, was this seemingly innocuous reply to a tweet that came from Isaiah Mustafa …

and got this reply:

The funny thing, of course, is that Isaiah Mustafa is the guy in the ads, in the bathroom … in a towel (and I guess we know what’s under that towel now: the iPhone from which he’s tweeting to his own account!). Indeed, Mustafa has been a great sport, going along with some very quirky scripts that he’s obviously delivered very quickly. When the boundary between a game, a conversation and an advertising campaign becomes so thin, it’s everyone who wins. Old Spice 2.0 has certainly made me laugh today and I’m sure I’ll be reading about the Old Spice replies in pretty much every news media I go near tomorrow!

Links through July 10th 2010:

• Regarding real names in forums [World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums] - Blizzard backtracks, deciding against mandatory use of real names in their forums - fans applaud.
• RealID and WoW Forums: Classic Identity Design Mistake [Habitat Chronicles] - As Blizzard shift to a 'real names' model for their forums, including all official World of Warcraft forums, many folks are unhappy. Blizzard are trying to get some users to be more responsible for their posts, but as Randy Farmer argues Blizzard haven't learnt from many, many identity-related mistakes in online fora of the past!
• Ridley Scott and YouTube Want You To Film One Day in Your Life [Mashable] - "YouTube has announced a project called Life in a Day, which attempts to document one day, July 24, seen through the camera lens of people around the world. The project will be executive produced by Ridley Scott [...] edited by Kevin Macdonald, best known for directing films such as The Last King of Scotland and One Day in September. The film will premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival; if your footage makes the final cut, you’ll be credited as a co-director, and 20 contributors will be selected to attend the premiere. If you’re hoping for financial gain, however, you’ll be disappointed; for this one, glory is your only reward. To contribute to the project, you need to capture July 24, 2010, on camera, and upload the footage to the Life in the Day channel sometime before July 31. As for what your footage should consist of, YouTube (YouTube) wants you to have no limits, to be personal, to film anyone you like..."
• Prank leaves Justin Bieber facing tour of North Korea [BBC News] - LOL: "Justin Bieber's Twitter page has become the target of an internet joke. A public vote on the Canadian singer's My World Tour page asked users which country he should tour next, with no restrictions on the nations that could be voted on. This spurred users of imageboard website 4Chan to nominate North Korea, with the vote now turning viral. There are now almost half a million votes to send Bieber to the secretive communist nation. The contest, which ends at 1800 on 7 July, saw North Korea move from 24th to 1st place in less than two days, several thousand votes ahead of Israel."

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!

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."

Links through June 28th 2010 (catching up on the last week!):

• Fairfax and content theft - mUmBRELLA - Mumbrella asks if Fairfax media is copying YouTube videos and placing them onlive via a Fairfax media player, then using them on Fairfax online properties: is this "piracy"? Aren't Fairfax ripping off YouTube creators who are relying on advertising (on their YouTube clips) to make a little money? I've no idea if Fairfax has some sort of license to do this (or if it might be legal under fair dealing - although using the whole clip can't be) but it's an important question given the rhetoric of piracy being a problem with individuals, rather than corporations, downloading "illegally".
• Google’s mismanagement of the Android Market [Jon Lech Johansen's blog] - Jon Lech Johansen’s critique of the current Android marketplace. While it's preferable to the closed Apple App store, the Android Marketplace clearly needs a lot more work on its centralised architecture to sell and distribute apps effectively.
• Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature [Android Developers Blog] - Android centrally nukes their first app from the marketplace and all phones using it; from the Android blog: "The remote application removal feature is one of many security controls Android possesses to help protect users from malicious applications. In case of an emergency, a dangerous application could be removed from active circulation in a rapid and scalable manner to prevent further exposure to users. While we hope to not have to use it, we know that we have the capability to take swift action on behalf of users’ safety when needed. This remote removal functionality — along with Android’s unique Application Sandbox and Permissions model, Over-The-Air update system, centralized Market, developer registrations, user-submitted ratings, and application flagging — provides a powerful security advantage to help protect Android users in our open environment."
• Pakistan to monitor Google and Yahoo for 'blasphemy' [BBC News] - "Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, for content it deems offensive to Muslims. YouTube, Amazon, MSN, Hotmail and Bing will also come under scrutiny, while 17 less well-known sites will be blocked. Officials will monitor the sites and block links deemed inappropriate. In May, Pakistan banned access to Facebook after the social network hosted a "blasphemous" competition to draw the prophet Muhammad. The new action will see Pakistani authorities monitor content published on the seven sites, blocking individual pages if content is judged to be offensive. Telecoms official Khurram Mehran said links would be blocked without disturbing the main website."
• ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups [Threat Level | Wired.com] - ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) tries to rally against alternative copyright licensing, even those which actually assist creators to license clearly! "ASCAP’s attack on EFF and Public Knowledge are farfetched. Those groups do not suggest music should be free, although they push for the liberalization of copyright law. But the attack on Creative Commons is more laughable than ASCAP’s stance against EFF and Public Knowledge. While lobby groups EFF and Public Knowledge advocate for liberal copyright laws, Creative Commons actually creates licenses to protect content creators. [...] The licenses allow the works in the public domain, with various rules regarding attribution, commercial use and remixing. The group’s creative director, Eric Steuer, said nobody forces anybody to adopt the Creative Commons credo. “I think it’s false to claim that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s an opt-in system.”"
• dev:wordpress [Zotero Documentation] - Plugins to make the COins data on blogs visible from WordPress (ie makes Zotero recognise WordPress blog metadata).
• Sex domain gets official approval [BBC News] - .xxx is coming: "Official approval has been given for the creation of an internet domain dedicated to pornography. The board of net overseer Icann gave initial approval for the creation of the .xxx domain at its conference in Brussels. Icann's approval will kick off a fast-track process to get the porn-only domain set up. ICM Registry, which is backing the domain, said .xxx would make it easier to filter out inappropriate content. The decision ends a long campaign by ICM Registry to win approval. Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM, welcomed the decision and said it was "great news for those that wish to consume, or avoid, adult content"."
• Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review [danah boyd | apophenia] - "I’m pleased to announce a rough draft of Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review for public feedback. This Literature Review was produced for Harvard Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, co-directed by John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and myself and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This Literature Review builds on the 2008 LitReview that Andrew Schrock and I crafted for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. This document is not finalized, but we want to make our draft available broadly so that scholars working in this area can inform us of anything that we might be missing. Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review."
• Twitter has a bad day: FTC tells it off and the site's not running well [Technology | guardian.co.uk] - "Twitter's having a bad day. First it got told off by the US Federal Trade Commission for incidents in January and May last year when 33 accounts, including Barack Obama's, were hacked using the company's own internal support tools. And then it's having to scale back on its API in order to get the site in order, according to its status page. The FTC settlement is "the agency's first such case against a social networking site" over flawed data security. According to the FTC's complaint, between January and May 2009, hackers who gained administrative control of Twitter were able to view nonpublic user information, gain access to direct messages and protected tweets, and reset any user's password and send authorized tweets from any user account."
• 1 in 5 Android Apps Pose Potential Privacy Threat [REPORT] [Mashable] - Further fuel for Steve Jobs decision to police the Apple App store so tightly: "Mobile security company SMobile has looked into the potential privacy and security issues in more than 48,000 apps in the Android Market. The company’s findings are alarming for Android owners, since approximately 20% of Android apps request permission to access private or sensitive information.[...]. By contrast, the Android (Android) market is open, meaning that Google (Google) doesn’t minutely examine apps for approval (it did, however, ban certain apps from the Market) and Android apps don’t have to be acquired from the Market; users can obtain them from other sources, like a developer’s website. Google’s approach makes it easier on the developers, but it can also result in a security nightmare for consumers. According to the report, one out of every 20 apps can place a call to any number without approval from the user; 3% of apps can send an SMS to any number..."
• HUGE: Twitter Lets You Automatically Follow Your Facebook Friends [UPDATED] [Mashable] - "Twitter has announced that it is launching major upgrades to its Facebook and LinkedIn (LinkedIn) applications, bringing added functionality and integration between Twitter and two of the world’s largest social networks. The new Twitter app for Facebook, which is now available here, not only allows you to syndicate your tweets to the world’s largest social network, but now has a feature that allow users to see which of their Facebook friends are also on Twitter and choose which ones they want to follow. The new feature could be huge: it brings existing Facebook connections into the Twitterverse, which is likely to spur new levels of engagement and growth."
• Judge Sides With Google in Viacom Suit Over Videos [NYTimes.com] - "In a major victory for Google in its battle with media companies, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement against YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google. The judge granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, saying that the company was shielded from Viacom’s copyright claims by “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law generally protects user-generated sites from liability for copyrighted material uploaded by users as long as the operator of the site takes down the material when notified by its rightful owner that it was uploaded without permission. The dispute is over videos owned by Viacom that others had posted to YouTube. Viacom, which sued Google in 2007 for copyright infringement, had argued that Google was not entitled to the copyright act’s protections because Google deliberately turned a blind eye and profited from to the rampant piracy on YouTube."
• YouTube Video Editor [Google OS] - Useful for only the very basics, but still a useful on-the-fly tool: "YouTube has a new video editor that lets you create videos using excerpts from the videos you've already uploaded. You can also add a music file from the AudioSwap library, but YouTube mentions that it might display ads if you use some of the audio files."
• Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King [Business Insider] - ""Content is King" -- no longer. Today, the world has changed. "Curation Is King." Ok, I hear all the content-makers sharpening their knives to take me on. I'm ready. First, why content is dead: Content used to be the high quality media that came out of the very pointed end of the funnel. Articles in the New York Times. Movies from Miramax. Thursday night comedy from NBC. Books published by Simon and Schuster. Creative folks wrote pitches, treatments, sample chapters, pilots, but only the best of the best got published. Then, the web came along and blew that up. Kaboom! Now content has gone from being scarce to being ubiquitous. [...] We've arrived in a world where everyone is a content creator. And quality content is determined by context. Finding, Sorting, Endorsing, Sharing - it's the beginning of a new chapter [...] The emergence of a new King -- a Curation King, reflects the rise of the new Aggregation Economy. It is an exciting time to be in content, and the best is yet to come."

Links for June 10th 2010 through June 14th 2010:

• Pollies 'twitspit' in not-so-social media [The Australian] - NSW's political twits: "Not content with their offline stoushing, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally (@KKeneally) and Liberal leader Barry O'Farrell (@barryofarrell), both keen tweeters, have now taken to using the social media site for slinging digital barbs. Last week's exchange was triggered by Keneally making fun of O'Farrell's claim that the fact he had walked the Kokoda Track proved he was a strong leader, commenting: "Well, so did Miss Australia, so congratulations, Barry." O'Farrell took to Twitter to retort that Keneally, having seen her quip "blow up in her face", "now tries to politicise Kokoda". Keneally responded that it was O'Farrell "who uses Kokoda as political football". O'Farrell struck back with a couple of obscure digs at Keneally for her "keen interest" in his tweets about his coffee meetings. He also taunted the Premier by calling her by her full initials, "KKK", although in more recent tweets he has reverted to using "KK"."
• I Can Has Cheezburger Blog Leads to a Web Empire [NYTimes.com] - "Three years ago Ben Huh visited a blog devoted to silly cat pictures — and saw vast potential. Mr. Huh, a 32-year-old entrepreneur, first became aware of I Can Has Cheezburger, which pairs photos of cats with quirky captions, after it linked to his own pet blog. [...] Sensing an Internet phenomenon, Mr. Huh solicited financing from investors and forked over $10,000 of his own savings to buy the Web site from the two Hawaiian bloggers who started it. “It was a white-knuckle decision,” he said. “I knew that the first site was funny, but could we duplicate that success?” Mr. Huh has since found that the appetite for oddball Internet humor is insatiable. Traffic to the Cheezburger blog has ballooned over the last three years, encouraging Mr. Huh to expand his unlikely Web empire to include 53 sites, all fueled by submissions from readers. In May, what is now known as the Cheezburger Network attracted a record 16 million unique visitors..."
• Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! [Roger Ebert's Journal] - Roger Ebert on finding his voice, and many conversations, on Twitter: "I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi. I said I feared I would become addicted. I was correct. Twitter is now a part of my daystream. I check in first thing every morning, and return at least once an hour until bedtime. I'm offline, of course, during movies ..."
• Inglis racial slur is unacceptable | Herald Sun - My complete respect to Tahu; it's this level of dedication to stamping out racism that's absolutely needed: "Andrew Johns last night quit the NSW Origin team after he admitted a racist sledge towards Queensland superstar Greg Inglis was behind Blues winger Timana Tahu walking out of the side. After one of Origin's most dramatic days - with NSW team management at first trying to cover up the scandal - Johns said he had no choice but to resign as assistant coach after it emerged he had sledged Tahu's long-time friend at a bonding session at a Kingscliff hotel on Wednesday night. The Sunday Telegraph can reveal Johns told Blues centre Beau Scott: "You must shut that black c... down.""
• “for the lolz”: 4chan is hacking the attention economy [danah boyd | apophenia] - 4chan as the hackers of the attention economy? I'm not sure I'm 100% convinced by boyd here, but it's certainly an idea worth thinking about: "I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy. While the security hackers were attacking the security economy at the center of power and authority in the pre-web days, these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are. They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side)."
• Govt wants ISPs to record browsing history [Zdnet] - Is Conroy TRYING to lose the next election? "Companies who provide customers with a connection to the internet may soon have to retain subscriber's private web browsing history for law enforcement to examine when requested, a move which has been widely criticised by industry insiders. The Attorney-General's Department yesterday confirmed to ZDNet Australia that it had been in discussions with industry on implementing a data retention regime in Australia. Such a regime would require companies providing internet access to log and retain customer's private web browsing history for a certain period of time for law enforcement to access when needed. Currently, companies that provide customers with a connection to the internet don't retain or log subscriber's private web browsing history unless they are given an interception warrant by law enforcement, usually approved by a judge. It is only then that companies can legally begin tapping a customer's internet connection."
• Augmented Reality - Explained by Common Craft - [Common Craft] - Useful basic explanation of augmented reality using a smartphone. (It combines the 'real' world and information in a seemingly seamless manner on your screen.)
• In Hong Kong, Eternity Goes Online [NYTimes.com] - Hong Kong, one of the most wired societies in the world, is taking the Internet to a higher level. Bereaved users in this city of seven million got a new way of honoring and commemorating their loved ones Thursday: A Web site that enables them to set up online profiles for the dead, www.memorial.gov.hk. The creator of the site is not some Internet-savvy, 20-something college graduate, but the Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department [...] Hong Kong culture takes death very seriously. Elaborate ceremonies twice a year honor not just recently deceased relatives and friends, but also generations of ancestors before them. [...] The Web site is free, but the site is restricted to individuals who were buried or cremated in facilities operated by the Hong Kong government.

Last year Vincenzo Cosenza, produced a very useful visualisation highlighting the dominant social networking service by country; this month he has re-done the figures (current June 2010) and the results, while not surprising, really hit home how big Facebook has become; it’s the dominant network in most countries, with a few exceptions like QQ in China and Orkut in Brazil. 

(Click to interact with the map.)

Also of interest in this table, showing the three most popular social networking services in a number of countries.  Here in Australia, Facebook dominates, with Twitter in second place, with MySpace hanging on in third; it’s interesting that, despite the hype and media visibility, MySpace still remains number two in the US, while LinkedIN ranks higher in the UK and Canada.

[Source; Via Read Write Web]

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''."

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."

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.""

Today the Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life Project released their report Reputation Management and Social Media (2010) which is based on research undertaken late 2009. There is a great deal of important and topical information in the survey, with the US results likely to be slightly higher but certainly  comparable to trends in Australia.  I want to really draw attention to the way that younger adults are using social media according to this report, using three of Pew’s graphs to talk about their findings.

The first graph indicates how many internet users search for their own name online:

This result is particularly interesting for two reasons: firstly, it shows that across the board, interest in our own web presences has increased dramatically across the last decade; and secondly, it highlights that younger adults (those 18-29) appear to be the most concerned with their online reputation. As danah boyd celebrated earlier today, this result really undermines the cultural myth that younger people are the least interested with online privacy. Obviously this survey excludes people under-18, but it’s fair to assume that part of the process of growing up these days includes becoming sensitised to the importance of being aware of our web presence.

Similarly, the Pew report also highlights the face that younger people are the most active in controlling their presence online, insomuch as they are most likely to have changed their privacy settings on social networks, they are the most likely to untag a photo of themselves, and so forth:

Here we see that younger people are also the most conscious of shaping their web presence, by editing who can see what they share online, and which elements of the digital artefacts linked to them remain visible, and remain linked to their names.

The last Pew graph shows how much information people are seeking about others online:

Everything from contact details to photos are being sought online, which similarly highlights how important it is that everyone be aware of what their web presence really ‘says’ about them. 

Since I teach in the Internet Studies department here at Curtin, it’s hardly a surprise that all of this information is vital to consider when we design the learning experiences our students encounter.  In the first-year unit Web Communications 101, the notion of web presence is our central organising theme.  However, one of the distinctions we make, which Pew does not, is the difference between digital traces we leave purposefully, and maintain control over, versus those we don’t.  In Web Comms 101, as Pew does, we talk about footprints, but we also talk about digital shadows, those bits of digital media that are somehow attached to our names, or chosen identities, which we have minimal, if any, control over.  Given how much people search for each other, and how much thought is going into how we appear online for the average internet user, it’s probably how we address and deal with those shadows which will be one of the most important topics to seriously consider in the coming years.

Links for May 24th 2010 through May 26th 2010:

• Facebook 'hindering the police' [WA Today] - The Australian Federal Police take on Facebook: "Facebook's woeful relationship with law enforcement bodies is hampering police investigations and putting lives at risk, the Australian Federal Police says. The AFP's assistant commissioner and head of high tech crime operations, Neil Gaughan, will fly to Washington DC today for a meeting convened by the US Department of Justice in which senior law enforcement officials from around the world will discuss their concerns with the social networking website. State and federal police have told the Herald's sister paper, the Age, the company has been unwilling to provide police with the intelligence they need for investigations. They want Facebook to appoint a dedicated law enforcement liaison in Australia who can, for example, match user accounts to physical internet addresses."
• Facebook told to set up warning system after new sex scam [The Age] - Just what Facebook needs, its own viruses: "A major computer security firm urged Facebook to set up an early-warning system after hundreds of thousands of users were hit by a new wave of fake sex-video attacks. British-based virus fighter Sophos warned users of the world's biggest social networking site to be on guard against any posting entitled "distracting beach babes", which contains a movie thumbnail of a bikini-clad woman. In a press statement, Sophos said the malicious posts appear as if they are coming from Facebook users' friends, but it urged recipients not to click on the thumbnail. By clicking on it, users are taken to a rogue Facebook application informing them that they do not have the right player software installed, Sophos said. It tricks users into installing adware, a software package that automatically plays, displays or downloads advertisements to their computer, and the video link is spread further across the network."
• Lady Gaga Says No Problem If People Download Her Music; The Money Is In Touring [Techdirt] - "... Lady Gaga admits she's fine with people downloading her music in unauthorized forms because she makes it up in touring revenue:
  

  She explains she doesn't mind about people downloading her music for free, "because you know how much you can earn off touring, right? Big artists can make anywhere from $40 million [£28 million] for one cycle of two years' touring. Giant artists make upwards of $100 million. Make music -- then tour. It's just the way it is today."

  Similarly, she knocks bands that don't really try to work hard to please the fans, and who just expect them to automatically buy each album:

  "I hate big acts that just throw an album out against the wall, like 'BUY IT! F*** YOU!' It's mean to fans. You should go out and tour it to your fans in India, Japan, the UK. I don't believe in how the music industry is today. I believe in how it was in 1982."

• The Twitter Platform [Twitter Blog] - Twitter makes clear, that they will control advertising on Twitter, and no one else will: " ... aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly." (Their logic, while motivated by finances as much as anything else, does actually make sense in terms of user experience.)
• How The Australian fell in love with the iPad [mUmBRELLA] - Is The Australian an Apple customer or commentator? "While it’s fair to say that the world’s media has been pretty excited about Apple’s iPad, The Australian appears to be on the verge of spontaneously combusting over the device’s official arrival Down Under this Friday. Clearly the newspaper’s plans to launch its own paid-for iPad app are unrelated to that. Indeed, if it sells as many apps as it has written stories about the iPad, it will be well on the way to securing a digital future for itself. [...] I’d love to bring you every article The Australian’s carried about the iPad. But Google tells me there are 4,790 of them. So I’d better stop there. Did I mention that The Australian’s got an iPad app?"
• Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not [danah boyd | apophenia] - boyd's discussion points:
  "1. I do not believe that people will (or should) leave Facebook because of privacy issues.
  2. I do not believe that the tech elites who are publicly leaving Facebook will affect on the company’s numbers; they are unrepresentative and were not central users in the first place.
  3. I do not believe that an alternative will emerge in the next 2-5 years that will “replace” Facebook in any meaningful sense.
  4. I believe that Facebook will get regulated and I would like to see an open discussion of what this means and what form this takes.
  5. I believe that a significant minority of users are at risk because of decisions Facebook has made and I think that those of us who aren’t owe it to those who are to work through these issues.
  6. I believe that Facebook needs to start a public dialogue with users and those who are concerned ASAP (and Elliot Schrage’s Q&A doesn’t count)."

[Image via NewTeeVee]

There were more than 400,000 tweets during the Lost season finale; I didn’t make any of them, or read any of them in real-time, but not for a lack of interest. Rather, as I write this post (on Tuesday, 25 May) Australia has still not screened the Lost finale; it’s scheduled for Wednesday night on Seven. While Seven have reduced the delay between US screenings and Australian broadcast times, as was noted in yesterday’s links, the finale was simulcast live in the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Turkey, and Canada but that was not the case down under. To add insult to injury, Seven couched this decision as service to Australian Lost fans:

Channel Seven will not screen the 2½-hour finale until 8.30pm Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the station said a Monday afternoon simulcast was considered, but it was felt fans would find the show more easily in its current timeslot - although the finale has been upgraded from digital channel 7TWO to Seven. […] 'Ridiculous,'' says comedian Wil Anderson, a Lost die-hard. ''If I was going to watch it on Wednesday, I could not go on the internet at all for two days. I will definitely have watched it by Wednesday.''

Better to have said nothing, or spoken plainly that they’ve decided the ratings boost from the Lost finale would be insufficient to justify tinkering with their Monday line-up, but to have Seven claim that the delay is to make things easier for Lost fans in Australia is really pretty offensive.

On the 400,000+ tweets made during the Lost finale by those who could see it live:

“And that is a conservative estimate,” said Mark Ghuneim, chief executive [of WiredSet]. That beat the show’s average of 27,000 tweets during the season, but was still a smaller volume overall than an event like the Oscars, said Mr. Ghuneim. “We tracked about 780,000 tweets during the Oscars,” Mr. Ghuneim said. “But it’s still an impressive number.” In addition, he said, tweets about the show peaked during commercials. “Instead of running to the fridge during commercial breaks, people were running to their laptops and phones,” he said.

From those comments, Twitter is a boon to commercial television: a social media tool which encourages real-time viewing, which actually justifies the ad breaks as times to reflect, comment and connect with other fans (with the ads still blaring away rather than risk missing the opening of next act), rather than skipping the commercials altogether. For so many Lost fans, that sense of shared viewing made the finale much more meaningful event television, whether you loved it, or hated it. Spreading that conversation across North America and sizable chunk of Europe made it even richer, but those riches were denied Australians. What Seven fails to understand, is that a delay of just over two days may as well be two decades; most people I know in Australia have already seen Lost via means which aren’t legal, be that a peer to peer download, or circumventing the geographic restrictions for an online replay-service like Hulu. Lost succeeded admirably in creating dedicated fans across the web; Seven succeeded admirably in forcing them to look elsewhere.

Perhaps the greatest irony, and the surest sign that Seven doesn’t understand social media, is the fact that there will be a “Live Blog” on the official Seven Lost pages on Wednesday night. On the web, live means live globally, not live in an arbitrary national sales region bounded by water. Besides which, I live in Perth, on the west coast of Australia, and the live blog wouldn’t even be live here anyway; were I watching Lost in Australia, it’d still be one giant spoiler thanks to Perth being 2-hours behind the East coast.

I’ve written about the tyranny of digital distance before which, in a nut-shell, occurs when the real-time nature of digital information sharing isn’t fulfilled due to historical, political and commercial boundaries which were largely established before the internet, before the web. Not being able to participate in the Lost finale’s global commentary is a poignant example of the tyranny of digital distance in action, and has done nothing for my relationship with commercial broadcasting in Australia. In an era where the immediacy and real-time nature of commentary can add so much to the shared viewing experience, the boundaries which prevent that fan experience can be all the more disappointing and distancing.

For the record: I’ve now seen the finale, and I loved it.

Largely Lost-centric links for May 24th 2010:

• Lost Finale: What the Web Wasn’t Made For [Mashable] - Why I'll be off most social media today: "Those two wonderful facets of the web — on-demand viewing and instant communication between fans — tonight become a double-edged sword. The Lost Finale will be shown at 9pm ET on the East Coast, and 9pm PT on the West Coast. These time zone delays are the antithesis of what the web is about: Instant communication. The web is the perfect platform for the spread of breaking news, rumor, and those facts that corporations and politicians would rather keep quiet. In short: blogs, Facebook and Twitter make the spread of information immediate. But the web doesn’t understand the concept of the “spoiler”: The kind of information you’d like to avoid until a specific date or time. A TV blog can’t set its RSS feeds to be delivered later to the West Coast than the East. A Facebook update doesn’t get held back until you’ve watched the finale on your DVR. Your phone doesn’t know to block all Lost-related Tweets until you’ve watched the final episode."
• Final episode Lost in transmission [WA Today] - Australian broadcasting is indeed, Lost, but not in a good way: "AT 2PM AEST today the final episode of supernatural drama Lost will be broadcast simultaneously in eight countries. Fans in the US, Canada, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel and Turkey will sit down as one to discover how the big questions in one of television's most diabolically complicated shows are resolved. The international simulcast aims to stave off piracy, while attracting viewers worldwide before spoilers hit the web. But not in Australia. Channel Seven will not screen the 2½-hour finale until 8.30pm Wednesday. [...] 'Ridiculous,'' says comedian Wil Anderson, a Lost die-hard. ''If I was going to watch it on Wednesday, I could not go on the internet at all for two days. I will definitely have watched it by Wednesday.'' Many Australian Lost fans have left free-to-air television for an alternate viewing reality, downloading, to join in discussions online..."
• Ahead of ‘Lost’ Finale, Fans Shut Off Virtual Hints [NYTimes.com] - "Erin Farley has her plans for Sunday all laid out. Two hours before the last episode of “Lost” is broadcast three time zones away, she will shut down her home Internet connection. TweetDeck? Off. Facebook? Off. Her cellphone? Stashed out of reach. “I’ll turn off the whole Internet just to avoid having anything spoiled,” said Ms. Farley, a 31-year-old freelance writer in Portland, Ore. “I don’t want to ruin the surprise.” The Internet in general, and social media like Twitter in particular, can be a minefield for those who are trying to keep themselves in the dark about an event or show so they can enjoy it later. When the Olympics and Grammy Awards are time-delayed, for example, armchair critics chattering about the wins and losses online can destroy the suspense in an instant. [...] people who don’t live on the East Coast, where Lost is shown first, are especially at risk for online spoilers. Overseas fans may have to wait days for a local broadcast - several years in Internet time"
• Lost bows out – after 121 baffling episodes – with 5am TV simulcast to beat plot spoilers [Television & radio | The Guardian] - Closer to non-sporting global television events: "Early on Monday morning [UK time] , millions of Lost fans will be hoping that the mysteries of the US drama's fictional island accumulated over five years are finally revealed when the show closes in a unique broadcasting event. The finale will be simulcast on ABC in the US and by seven broadcasters around the world. Lost fans in the UK will be switching on Sky1 at 5am on Monday for the two-and-a-half-hour climax to six series, and 121 episodes, of baffling TV. Fans in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Turkey, Canada, as well as the UK, will see the show at the same time it is aired by ABC on America's west coast. The time lag between broadcast in America and in the UK used to be six months or more, but has been narrowing for the most popular imports to counter DVD piracy and illegal downloads. Sky1 has been broadcasting this year's final series of Lost on Friday nights — five days after its US Sunday evening premiere on ABC."
• LOST re-enacted by Cats in 1 minute.
• Fan-made Lost Finale Trailer
• Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole [WSJ.com] - "Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. Advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation." [Also see Benjamin Edelman's analysis.]
• PAC-MAN rules! [Official Google Blog] - After their first interactive logo, celebrating Pac-Man's 30th birthday, Google makes their homage game available permanently: "We've been overwhelmed — but not surprised — by the success of our 30th anniversary PAC-MAN doodle. Due to popular demand, we’re making the game permanently available at www.google.com/pacman. Thanks to NAMCO for helping to make this wonderful collaboration happen. Enjoy!"
• Watching for Iron Sky [The Chutry Experiment ] - Useful introduction to the crowd-sourced film Iron Sky (coming some time 2011) for Web 207.

Links for May 13th 2010 through May 14th 2010:

• Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems [Business Insider] - "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his company are suddenly facing a big new round of scrutiny and criticism about their cavalier attitude toward user privacy. An early instant messenger exchange Mark had with a college friend won't help put these concerns to rest. According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
  Zuck: Just ask.
  Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
  [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
  Zuck: People just submitted it.
  Zuck: I don't know why.
  Zuck: They "trust me"
  Zuck: Dumb fucks.
  Brutal. Could Mark have been completely joking? Sure. But the exchange does reveal that Facebook's aggressive attitude toward privacy may have begun early on."
• Why, despite myself, I am not leaving Facebook. Yet. [Online Fandom] - "... Using Facebook with the rules I signed on for makes me a subversive user. That’s wrong. What I want is a Facebook that is premised on a belief that first and foremost human relationships are valuable and sacred, not the ground on which money trees grow, but that if the value of relationships is genuinely nurtured, there will be ways to earn money. I want a Facebook that really believes that people have a right to select how their information will be shared, instead of a belief that they’re too dumb to figure it out if the settings are too confusing so it’s okay to dupe them. I want a Facebook that can find creative ways to make a profit using the rules they originally set for their own game. I want an ethical Facebook. That shouldn’t be too much to ask."
• Social networks and the end of privacy [ABC The Drum Unleashed] - Pesce on wanting to let go: "I want to quit. Like Michael Corleone, every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in! No, I'm not talking about the Mafia, though I am Sicilian. I'm talking about an organisation that's more pervasive, and more insidious - Facebook. [...] For now, I've cut back on Facebook. I'm not accepting new friend requests, or joining new groups. I'm still using Facebook to share interesting information - particularly if that information is about the problems with Facebook. It is possible that we can use Facebook to accelerate the transition to an alternative to Facebook. That would be the most appropriate end to a fun but unwholesome chapter in the Web's history."
• Apple 'digital locker' to allow online music stream [The Australian] - Apple iCloud: "The move could pose a significant threat to existing music operations such as Spotify and We7. According to music industry insiders, iTunes customers will be given access to a "digital locker" that will automatically store songs bought through Apple's music store. At present, songs downloaded from iTunes can be stored only on a computer or iPod. Under the digital locker system, customers will also be able to access the tracks they have purchased by logging on to a website -- expected to be called iTunes.com -- where the songs could be streamed over the internet to any computer. Spotify and We7 are fledgeling services giving access to millions of songs that can be heard over the web and paid for through monthly subscriptions or advertising. Analysts have long expected Apple -- acting before Google or Amazon -- to create a system allowing people to store and access their music collections "in the cloud" on the internet."

Ever since Facebook deployed their ‘instant personalisation’ tools (ie putting a ‘Like’ button on pretty much everything online), the backlash against the resulting privacy losses has been loud and clear; Facebook look to be going into PR damage control, as Read Write Web notes, they’re circling the wagons.  Despite providing Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, a platform to directly engage with public concerns about Facebook earlier this week, the New York Times has seemingly turned on the social networking goliath today.  First off the ranks, their article ‘Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking’ does a really good job at showing the huge problems with Facebook’s privacy settings, from the privacy policies massive (and growing) length, to a brilliant (and dumbfounding) infographic which illustrates the more than 170 privacy options users need to navigate and understand to have any ownership of your privacy on Facebook.

At the same time, the New York Times are asking ‘Is There Life After Facebook?’, in which they talk about the problems of social media evangelists who feel Facebook has crossed a line, and want to delete their own profiles. Yet the strongest critique of Facebook’s recent changes comes from the showcase ‘Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook’ which introduces the founders of Diaspora, a yet-to-be-released social network which will attempt to replicate the social elements of Facebook while providing clear privacy controls using an open-source framework. While it’s far too early to judge whether Diaspora will be successful, the fact that they’ve already raised more than $US60,000 via Kickstarter (with pledges from more than 1700 people!) shows that a lot of people are looking for a change.

At first glance, Diaspora’s aims might seem a little utopian (and thus technically quite hard to achieve):

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data.

A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.

If Diaspora tells us anything, it’s that Facebook’s dominance is under threat, and the next Mark Zuckerberg (or Zuckerbergs in Diaspora’s case) might start with firmer principles in place. Privacy is one of the great bugbears of social media, we want to share, but we want at least a modicum of control over that.  Facebook might roll back some of its worst ‘personalisation’ changes of recent weeks, but even then, many people have lost the will to trust Facebook; that loss might be their most expensive mistake ever.

Links for May 10th 2010 through May 12th 2010:

• Show us the money! Oz Budget under CC [Creative Commons Australia] - Perhaps the only outstanding thing about the Australian budget was the licensing of it (congrats to CC Australia!): "In the debate over the merits of last night's conservative budget, there's one thing we'd argue Swan did get right - the licensing. The entire budget has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means the material it contains - the deficit strategy, the fiscal aggregates, the government's responses to the economic crisis - is all available for free reuse, by anyone, for any purpose, as long as the source is attributed. A single document, even one that's 350 pages long, may not seem like that big a deal compared to some of the other open government initiatives over the last few years - like the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistic's entire store of census data under CC. But as a public endorsement of CC as the licence of choice for the Australian Federal Government, it's huge."
• Roulette Russian: The teen-ager behind Chatroulette [The New Yorker] - A really odd feature from Julia Ioffe which is based on interviews with Andrey Ternovskiy, the Russian teenager who invented Chatroulette. Ioffe's story is more about Ternovskiy leaving Russia for the US than anything else and it paints Chatroulette as a website built with equal parts of skill and naivete. It ends of a rather hollow note, implying that relationships built online are substantially less than 'real'.
• Confusing *a* public with *the* public « BuzzMachine - Jeff Jarvis thinks 'a public' is a small group, while 'the public' is everyone; he think Facebook needs to think this, too: "I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain…. [...] That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private."
• Obama stresses education over iPod, Xbox [Reuters] - "President Barack Obama told college graduates on Sunday the era of the iPod and the Xbox has not always been good for the cause of a strong education. Obama said today's college graduates are coming of age at a time of great difficulty for the United States. They face a tough economy for jobs, two wars and a 24/7 media environment not always dedicated to the truth, he said. Added to the mix are the distractions offered by popular electronic devices that entertain millions of Americans. "With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said."

By now everyone in Australia knows who Catherine Deveny is thanks to some particularly tasteless and provocative tweets during the Logies ceremony which proved the straw that broke the camels back; she was ‘dropped as a columnist for The Age after a storm of controversy’ with Editor-In-Chief, Paul Ramadge declaring that ‘the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age’. Deveny defended her tweets claiming that Twitter is about “passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context” but this defense seems naive at best so it was hardly a surprise they The Age’s technology editor Gordon Farrer wrote a piece explaining just how public (and useful) Twitter is.

In a New Matilda piece, Jason Wilson points out that there is a lot more to the story and while many people won’t miss Deveny’s columns, the way in which she was dismissed has left a bad taste in many mouths:

Although her MO consists of antagonising people, there was something that reeked of mob justice in the way she was dismissed. Social media can be about sharing, conversation, and positive forms of activism — but they can also be a venue for a kind of outrage porn. This can be quickly satiated without effecting any lasting change, and any one of us might stir it up with an ill-advised tweet or two. There but for the Grace of God, etc.

Last week I had a chance to share some of my views on RTRFM as well, which you can listen to online here.

In this maelstrom, conservative columnist Miranda Devine wrote a rambling column which started like a sympathy-piece for Deveny, but ended with a wrap on the knuckles:

In a chaotic world of aggregators, of Google and Twitter and specialist web feeds, a newspaper is a "credible one-stop shop" of local news where all the hard choices have been made for the reader. Which is why not trashing the brand is more important than ever. Sorry, Catherine.

Devine’s position was unsurprising, but she clearly didn’t understand her own point when just a few days later she responded to criticism on Twitter by telling her critic that “you’ve had enough of rogering gerbils I see”. Devine may have realised she’d crossed a line, and deleted her tweet, only to be reminded that there is no delete button on the internet as screenshots of the exchange were rapidly circulated, but there appear to have been no reprimands for Devine (although she has spring cleaned and deleted a few more tweets, I think).

Last night on the ABC’s Q&A the panel touched on Deveny’s case and concluded, in a very round-about way, we need to remember that (unless you’ve got a private account) tweets are always public; in the first instance you might be talking with a smaller group, but once something is public, your readership is uncertain but is potentially very wide indeed. Jonathan Holmes probably made this point most clearly last week, noting of Deveny:

She also claimed she was taken out of context. I'm not the first to remark that Twitter has no context. Each tweet must stand alone, 140 characters max. Hard to convey irony, or amusement, or hate. Hard to convey that when you say you hope Bindi gets laid, you're using satire "to expose celebrity raunch culture and the sexual objectification of women". Twitter is a treacherous medium. So fast, so simple, so easy to get wrong.

Thanks the ABC, Deveny has now provided the context she had in mind, and despite something of an explanation, and sort of a bit of an apology, she stands by what she wrote which, ultimately, will probably increase her stock as a comedian celebrity provocateur. For everyone else, we do need to remember that most social media is public (or can easily be copied and become public), whilst still making the most of the many uses of social media platforms like Twitter, and not just following Helen Razer and becoming a Twitter Quitter. Twitter is a powerful tool, but you should, of course, think before you tweet.

Links for May 7th 2010 through May 10th 2010:

• An Early Look At Twitter Annotations Or, “Twannotations” [TechCrunch] - Twitter are adding annotations, or twannotataions, in the near future; it'll let specific 'things' be identified. It's a bit like turning Twitter into a semantic communication tool. Richard Giles asks if this will make Twitter (a privately owned) internet protocol be default, but either way annotations should make Twitter even more of a cultural barometer.
• The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online [NYTimes.com] - Privacy concerns online cross all generational barrier, despite the myth of the millennial mindset: "The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud. While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry. They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves."
• Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative [Wired.com] - Ryan Singel takes Facebook to task for the continual failings in respecting user privacy both in terms of their architecture (so many things simply can't be turned off now) and their policies (basically, screwing with privacy one step at a time, while using a raft of lawyers to ensure it's not illegal ... but maybe unethical). Singel argues that everything Facebook currently provides could be achieved by a series of open tools and protocols which provide real and clear choices about what we do and don't share with the world. Singel argues we need to make these choices now because Facebook, for many, has almost become our online identity.
• Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing [NYTimes.com] - From November 6, 2008: "On stage at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, was cheerfully unruffled. Mr. Zuckerberg pinned his optimism on a change in behavior among Internet users: that they are ever more willing to tell others what they are doing, who their friends are, and even what they look like as they crawl home from the fraternity party. “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.” Call it Zuckerberg’s Law." The great thing about controlling the privacy settings for more than 400 million people, is it's pretty easy to change things so more and more and their information is shared ... even if many users don't understand how and don't think this is what they signed up for!
• The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook [mattmckeon.com] - A really useful inforgraphic by Matt McKeon which demonstrates five stages of Facebook's default settings and how much information is public by default at each stage (short version: 2005 - not much; 2010 - almost everything!)
• Most pirates say they'd pay for legal downloads [News.com.au] - Peer-topeer sharers want legal options in Australia: "Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent. That's the finding of the most comprehensive look yet at people who illegally download TV shows, movies and music in Australia, conducted by news.com.au and market research firm CoreData. The survey canvassed the attitudes of more than 7000 people who admitted to streaming or downloading media from illegitimate sources in the past 12 months. It found accessibility was as much or more of a motivator than money for those who illegally download media using services like BitTorrent. More respondents said they turned to illegal downloads because they were convenient than because they were free ... [More results here.]
• What Happens When You Deactivate Your Facebook Account [Read Write Web] - Facebook is a big part of millions and millions of peoples' lives, but what happens when you pull the plug? Last night I met a man who walked to the edge of the cliff and nearly deactivated his Facebook account. He took a screenshot of what he saw after clicking the "deactivate my account" link on his account page - and it is pretty far-out. That man considered quitting Facebook because it was having an adverse emotional impact on him and I'll spare him and his contacts from posting the screenshot he shared with me. I have posted below though a shot of the screen I saw when I clicked that button myself. Check it out. I bet you haven't seen this screen before, have you? [...] Can you believe that? How incredibly manipulative! And what claims to make. Facebook has undoubtedly made it easier to keep in touch with people than almost any other technology on the planet, but to say that leaving Facebook means your friends "will no longer be able to keep in touch with you" is just wrong."

After all of the recent privacy debacles, a growing band of Facebook users have had enough and are banding together to say goodbye to the social networking behemoth once and for all; here are the details …

Leave Facebook Day

I’ve had it up to here with Facebook, and their constant distancing from issues of privacy and the concerns of their users.  The benefits of being able to connect and get information about my social network no longer outweigh the costs of FB using and abusing my social graph.

So I’ve decided to leave Facebook.  It’s not going to be easy.  Facebook make sure that deleting your account is somewhat akin to leaving a cult with lots of ‘but we’ll miss you and we love you and come back to us’ style of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But I’m committed. I’m climbing the wall around the Facebook compound and making a break for freedom. Start humming “The Great Escape” theme, guys, because I want you to come with me

I want to declare May 21st Leave Facebook Day. On that day, let’s all leave Facebook. Let’s hit that radio button that says “I’m leaving because of privacy issues” and let Facebook know that we won’t be folded, spindled or mutilated, that we are human beings, not social data to be sold. Let’s all climb the wall together.

Tell your friends. Use the #LeaveFBday hash tag on twitter. Blog about it. Heck, update your Facebook status.

Let’s just get out while we still can.

UPDATE #1: twitter user @thesixthbaron notes that, even after requesting a complete account deletion, Facebook still holds your data ‘in case of reactivation.’

Links for May 5th 2010 through May 6th 2010:

• Glitch Brings New Worries About Facebook’s Privacy [NYTimes.com] - Privacy concerns = declining trust! "For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations. On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether. Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information."
• Facebook Burning Through Its Most Valuable Asset [The NewsCloud Blog] - Why trust still matters: "Venture investors often focus on the burn rate of a startup to determine how long a company can operate before it becomes profitable. After last week, investors in Facebook should be asking how long the company can continue its phenomenal growth as it quickly burns through the trust of users that expected the company to protect their privacy. [...] Now, I've even more amazed that after Google's Buzz debacle, Facebook has drawn a line in the sand against common sense and the basic privacy expectations of its growing user base with its new social graph. Just as Microsoft employees, incredibly, seemed to think they could surreptitiously market exploitative sexting ads to teens by using a male rather than a female, Facebook thinks that it can sustain its growth while essentially pimping the private lives of its users to the highest bidder. There seems to be no adult supervision at either company."
• Catherine Deveny Fired From The Age [The Age] - Yes, controversial/provocative comedian Catherine Deveny has been fired from The Age for tweets made during the Logies, including the now infamous "I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid". Her humour is generally in poor taste, but is it worth sacking someone for, especially in their own time? Deveny certainly seems well within her rights to ask if there is actually a policy about social media at The Age. There probably should be. That aside, this little controversy has probably given Deveny - and the Logies - more free press than they've enjoyed in years. I'd suggest this "sacking" makes her more commercially viable as a personality, not less employable. I guess we'll see.

Links for May 4th 2010 through May 5th 2010:

• Twitter is the New CNN | Lance Ulanoff [PCMag.com] - A pretty solid argument about why Twitter is better at sharing news and information than being a social network as such. The inequality of links (ie you don't agree with a twitter contact to mutually interact, you can follow without being followed) is one of the strongest arguments against SNS use although, ultimately, I think is still depends on how individuals use the platform.
• Keeping Your Photos Off Facebook & Other Privacy Concerns [The Age] - Stock-standard piece reminding everyone that stuff on Facebook and other social networks often isn't private (and you should check if you think it is). I'm not sure quoting a "Cyber psychologist" talking about young people having a yet-to-mature frontal cortex is really the winning argument, though! Equally, the advice at the end (basically: be aware and check your Facebook settings) would be a little more genuine if it linked to something which actually illustrated HOW to make those changes (the complexity of Facebook's privacy settings is one of the biggest privacy challenges today!)
• Viacom v YouTube is a microcosm of the entertainment industry [guardian.co.uk] - Cory Doctorow's fighting words about Viacom Vs YouTube: "From the Digital Economy Act to the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, Big Content's top brass are looking for ways to increase the liability borne by "intermediaries" – the companies that host and transmit user-uploaded material – in order to give them the footing from which to put pressure on tech firms to pay them off and go into bankruptcy. The lawmakers who say that they favour these draconian copyright powers are not on the side of creators. The creators are the ones busily shovelling their creative works on to YouTube. These laws are designed to provide full employment for the litigation industry, and to encourage the moral hazard that has TV and record companies turning into lawsuit factories."
• 'One Book, One Twitter' launches worldwide book club with Neil Gaiman | Books [guardian.co.uk] - Twitter as global book club: "The brainchild of Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing and a contributing editor at Wired magazine, the One Book, One Twitter scheme launches tomorrow. Readers have been voting for the book which they'll be tackling for the past month, with Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel American Gods eventually triumphing [...] "The aim with One Book, One Twitter is – like the one city, one book programme which inspired it – to get a zillion people all reading and talking about a single book. It is not, for instance, an attempt to gather a more selective crew of book lovers to read a series of books and meet at established times to discuss," explained Howe at Wired.com. "Usually such 'Big Read' programs are organised around geography. [...] This Big Read is organised around Twitter, and says to hell with physical limitations.""
• Choose Privacy Week Video [Vimeo] - Fast-paced largely talking-head style video advocating better attention to privacy online. The video is US-based and features lots of candid interviews along with notable privacy advocates including Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman. Launched as part of the first US Privacy Week, 2-8 May, 2010. (Downloadable as 1280x720, 344.57MB Quicktime movie.) [Via BBoing]
  

  Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.

Ever wished you could copy a tweet outside of the Twitter web interface, but keep the context (ie not turn it into just unlinked text or a static image)?  Well, Twitter thinks you’d like that choice, so they’ve revealed Blackbird Pie, a simple tool to turn any public tweet into an embeddable file, like a YouTube clip or Scribd document.  Here’s an example (with a message worth reading):

Blackbird Pie is clearly still under development (the embed code is insanely long), but it’s a useful tool and its further development will provide a way of keeping the context of tweets more visible and linkable.

I've been meaning to share this document for a while; it unpacks a standard tweet (post on Twitter) and shows you how much data is actually contained in each and everyone one of those seemingly fleeting moments of sharing:

[Via RWW] If you’re interested in what sort of information can be included within a standard tweet, you might find this interesting, too.

Links for April 25th 2010 through April 29th 2010:

• Thoughts on Flash [Steve Jobs - Apple] - Steve Jobs nails down Flash's coffin with his post from on high about why the iRange don't (and won't) support Flash: "Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short. The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games. New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."
• Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline [Electronic Frontier Foundation] - Useful, albeit disappointing, timeline: "Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads. [...] Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information."
• O'Hara, Kieron (2010) Intimacy 2.0: Privacy Rights and Privacy Responsibilities on the World Wide Web. In: Proceedings of the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US. (In Press) - Abstract: "This paper examines the idea of privacy in the world of ‘intimacy 2.0’, the use of Web 2.0 social networking technologies and multimedia for the routine posting of intimate details of users’ lives. It will argue that, although privacy is often conceived as a right with benefits that accrue to the individual, it is better seen as a public good, whose benefits accrue to the community in general. In that case, the costs of allowing invasions of one’s privacy do not solely fall on the individual who is unwise enough to do so, but also on wider society." [PDF]
• Noticed - College Applicants Hide Behind Facebook Aliases [NYTimes.com] - Are colleges in the US checking the digital footprints on applicants? Well, the number of aspiring college applicants changing their Facebook names because that's their suspicion is definitely growing!

You’ve probably heard that many of those wonderful YouTube parodies using the clips from Downfall are disappearing due to copyright claims.  Well, to help combat that tragedy, Rocketboom/Know Your Meme have put together this useful Public Service Announcement ‘Challenging a YouTube Take Down with Fair Use’:

Facebook-centric links April 23rd 2010:

• Facebook Instant Personalization Opt OUT [YouTube] - Quick YouTube video from EFF showing how to opt out of Facebook's 'Instant Personalisation' (which is turned ON by default).
• Facebook "Likes" World Domination [Mashable] - Previous social networks, you’ll remember, were destinations. As soon as Friendster became slow and unreliable, an exodus to MySpace began. Once MySpace pages became bloated and unwieldy, the crowd hopped over to Facebook. Zuckerberg is well aware of the threat: If you build a destination site, users will hop over to the next cool hangout in no time at all. That’s why Facebook longs to become a sturdy platform. The more businesses rely on Facebook, the less likely it is to fail. [...] and thousands of websites now use Facebook Connect for their login systems. The toolbar and web-wide “like” button are the next phase; by providing more distributed services, Facebook becomes invaluable. Credits, Connect, toolbars — these are all distributed plays that try to weave Facebook’s social graph throughout the fabric of the web. Rather than aiming to be the coolest bar in town — and losing its clientele when they leave for a hipper spot — Facebook plans to become the Starbucks of the web ..."
• Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy [Mashable] - Sensible thoughts on the privacy implications of Facebook's new web plugins: "... it is imperative that users who have concerns about privacy make sure they read and understand what information they are making available to applications before using them. Users need to be aware that when they “Like” an article on CNN, that “Like” may show up on a customized view that their friends see. Public no longer means “public on Facebook,” it means “public in the Facebook ecosystem.” Some companies, like Pandora, are going to go to great lengths to allow users to separate or opt out of linking their Pandora and Facebook accounts together, but users can’t expect all apps and sites to take that approach. My advice to you: Be aware of your privacy settings."
• Facebook introduces Docs, based on Microsoft Web Office [Technology | guardian.co.uk] - A good at the differences between Google and Microosft/Facebook's cloud office tools: "Facebook Docs is still in beta, so it's not clear how many features it will offer. However, Microsoft's Web Apps suite is more powerful than Google Docs, and has the advantage of maintaining compatibility with the desktop version of Microsoft Office. With Google Docs, by contrast, what you get out of it is worse than what you put into it, so trying to "round trip" complex documents is basically a waste of time. Of course, Microsoft Office Web Apps will be available to everyone whether they are a member of Facebook or not. Facebook is providing the social features, such as documents appearing on walls and in profiles so that friends can comment on them, and so on. For some users, the combination will be worthwhile."
• Introducing Docs… for Facebook [Docs.com Blog] - Microsoft's online office 2010 offering 'Docs' partners with Facebook, allowing Facebook users to sign in, share and collaborate on documents. Clearly a direct challenge to Google's emerging Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
• Breaking: Android – Now On The iPhone [App Advice] - One way around iPhone love but no wanting to be locked into Apple's AppStore is simple: hack it and install Android instead!

Facebook’s annual developer’s conference, f8, has resulted in a deluge of news about new Facebook changes and tools which will keep commentators and analysts busy for days to come, but the most significant is clearly the redevelopment of the tools which connect Facebook and other websites according to the social activities of Facebook’s more than 400 million users. In a post with a deceptively philanthropic tone, Building the Social Web Together, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reinforces his company’s vision of making the web more meaningful to users (and advertisers):

People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about. This flow of social information has profound benefits—from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily—and we're really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online. […] Three years ago […] I introduced the concept of the social graph, which is the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together. Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships. At the same time, other sites and services have been mapping out other parts of the graph so you can get relevant information about different types of things. For example, Yelp maps out the best local businesses and Pandora maps out which songs are related to each other. All of these connections are important parts of the social graph, but until now it hasn't been possible to easily share the connections

So, in an attempt to create your total ‘social graph’ and link up all of your social data, Facebook’s has a raft of new social plugins and personal integration tools which will allow any website, news story or media item, to become something you can ‘Like’. More to the point, through Facebook you can share every single thing you ‘Like’ with all of your Facebook friends (or the entire world if you happen to have a public profile!).

The simplest explanation of ‘Like’ generated by these tools: you go to a website, you like that website, you click the Facebook ‘Like’ button and two things happen: (1) a message appears on your Facebook profile telling your friends you liked that website; and (2) on the website in question a picture of you (from your Facebook profile image) appears on the website you liked, saying you liked this website, along with pictures of any of your Facebook friends who also liked that website (importantly this personalised list is only visible to you and only if logged in to Facebook). Mashable also has a good overview, noting how very simple it is to integrate Facebook’s ‘Like' into other websites and services. Facebook’s own explanation of the social plugins and the Like buttons is here, but it’s noteworthy that from the very beginning they are try to stress that Facebook is not giving your private Facebook data to other people:

It's important to note that none of your personal data is shared with a site when you view these new features, and they will only be visible to you when you're logged in to Facebook. Also, none of these features impact or change Facebook's advertising programs or policies.

However, it is of course true that every little ‘Like’ you click deepens the profile of you that Facebook owns, and that richer information becomes more and more valuable it is to advertisers – even when that information has specific personal identifiers removed. While I do think Facebook are showing a healthier concern for people’s privacy, I’m far from convinced sharing all of this information with Facebook is a good thing. Personalisation can be incredibly useful (I find Amazon’s suggestions quite useful, for example, and that’s only possible because they cleverly mine my Amazon purchase history) but it always has some cost and that’s worth keeping in mind. Most of all, what really makes me nervous is how terribly excited marketing folks are by Facebook’s new tools; for them privacy is usually an obstacle, not a right. And, of course, privacy advocates are doing some very sensible flag-waving, asking people think before they ‘Like’. With Zuckerberg boasting that he expects a billion ‘Like’ buttons on the web within 24hours, it’s probably time for everyone to think through exactly how much information they’re willing to share, and what you’ll like Facebook to know, and remember, about you.

Links for April 21st 2010:

• Hitler Is Very Upset That Constantin Film Is Taking Down Hitler Parodies [TechCrunch] - It looks like the Hitler Gets Upset About [Whatever] meme might be drawing to an end thanks to copyright issues. Constantin Film, the production company behind Downfall (Der Untergang in German) have asserted their copyright over the Downfall footage and YouTube's automated system appears to be pulling the clips down all over their service. I'd like to think everyone will be filing counter-claims since this is clearly Fair Use according to US copyright law (how could this not be parody or satire?) but we'll have to see what happens. (An Open Video Alliance post notes that the"videos were blocked by YouTube’s Content ID system, not taken down via DMCA notices"). Meanwhile, until it disappears, here's Hitler's thoughts on the Downfall videos disappearing.
• Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information [Electronic Frontier Foundation] - EFA on Facebook's advertiser-orientated, privacy-diminishing strategies: "Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them. [...] The new connections features benefit Facebook and its business partners, with little benefit to you. But what are you going to do about it? Facebook has consistently ignored demands from its users to create an easy "exit plan" for migrating their personal data to another social networking website, even as it has continued — one small privacy policy update after another — to reduce its users' control over their information. The answer: Let Facebook hear your frustration."
• More Changes to Facebook Privacy, and More to Come [Social Hacking] - "... Facebook is changing the “Become a Fan” buttons to “Like” buttons. If you want to connect with a page for something you’re interested in, you now will simply “like” the page. In a blog post, Facebook spun the connections as an exciting improvement: “Instead of just boring text, these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you.” I can see three main reasons why Facebook would make this change, and none of them involve text being boring. [...] First, this helps software more easily process your interests. [...] Second, the shift to “liking” reduces friction. The semantics may be subtle, but I’m sure Facebook has done research on this. “Liking” implies a simple, casual gesture [...] Third, this increases the useful data Facebook can offer to others."

Also, since a few people asked, I've used Feedburner to allow email subscriptions here, so if you want an email each time this blog is updated, click here and pop your email address in the 'Subscribe by email …' widget on the right.

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.

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."

Links for April 13th 2010 through April 16th 2010:

• No Free Lunch for Ning Users; Still Plenty of Bargains Elsewhere [Read Write Web] - "The social networking platform Ning announced today that it was making some substantial changes to the company. The news, coming just one month after Jason Rosenthal replaced Gina Bianchini as CEO, was sour for both employees and for many users of the service. Ning will cut 70 jobs and will end free subscriptions to the site. Rosenthal writes in the press release, "We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning." According to the release, paying subscribers account for 75% of the service's traffic. These fees have ranged from $4.95 per month to use your own domain name, to $24.95 per month to remove Ning's promotional links, although it's unclear if those fees will change. But the service has long been used by many small groups and organization, many of which are in a tail-spin over today's announcement."
• Youth, Privacy and Reputation (Literature Review) - April 12, 2010 Authored by Alice E. Marwick, Diego Murgia Diaz, John Palfrey, Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative [Berkman Center] - Fantastically useful overview of youth & privacy writing & research: "The scope of this literature review is to map out what is currently understood about the intersections of youth, reputation, and privacy online, focusing on youth attitudes and practices. We summarize both key empirical studies from quantitative and qualitative perspectives and the legal issues involved in regulating privacy and reputation. This project includes studies of children, teenagers, and younger college students. For the purposes of this document, we use “teenagers” or “adolescents” to refer to young people ages 13-19; children are considered to be 0-12 years old. However, due to a lack of large-scale empirical research on this topic, and the prevalence of empirical studies on college students, we selectively included studies that discussed age or included age as a variable. Due to language issues, the majority of this literature covers the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada."
• Murdoch hails iPad as saviour of news [The Age] - "Rupert Murdoch has launched a spirited defence of putting up paywalls around his newspaper websites, while embracing the game-changing potential of Apple's iPad. The News Corporation chairman hailed the device as a possible saviour of the newspaper industry.Advocates of free newspaper websites often accuse Murdoch of being a technophobe but the Australian media mogul was happy to embrace the technology of Apple's iPad tablet device, launched in the US on April 3. [...] During an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb, Murdoch sat with an iPad and even picked it up to demonstrate how to navigate The Wall Street Journal's website. He said the iPad could be the saviour of newspaper journalism - in electronic form, not print. ''I got a glimpse of the future … with the Apple iPad,'' Murdoch said. ''It is a wonderful thing. If you have [fewer] newspapers and more of these … it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry.''"
• Internet Filter Not Needed, Says US Ambassador to Australia [The Age] - US to Australia: don't screw up the internet! "The US ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich has criticised the Rudd government's plan to filter the internet, saying the same goals can be achieved without censorship. The federal government's $128.8 million Cyber Safety policy includes forcing ISPs to block access to certain websites and blacklist offensive material. Legislation to enable the scheme is set to be introduced this year. On ABC's Q&A program last night, Mr Bleich said the "internet has to be free" and that there were other means of combating nasty content such as child pornography. "We have been able to accomplish the goals that Australia has described, which is to capture and prosecute child pornographers ... without having to use internet filters," he said. "We have other means and we are willing to share our efforts with them ... it's an ongoing conversation.""

As one of the NY Times blogs reports, there are now quite a few Twitter users, and quite a lot of Tweets every day:

It has 106 million registered users who write 55 million posts a day.
Seventy-five percent of that traffic comes from outside Twitter, using third-party applications, like TweetDeck.
The site gets 180 million visits a month.

While one significant implication is, of course, that a lot of people with accounts don’t tweet every day (especially as those people who write dozens or even hundreds of tweets per day clearly make that average number a bit misleading), 55 million tweets a day is still an awful lots of bits of information being shared. Given the sheer size of Twitter’s operation, it’s no surprise that they’re moving on from their first revenue model (selling a license to Microsoft and Google to index tweets) to an advertising model (called promoted tweets) which will see advertising placed in certain twitter search results.  Personally, I skim Twitter pretty quickly, so I can’t imagine this advertising strategy will worry me too much – as long as the percentage of advertising remains small, I’d guess most people will barely notice. Perhaps more significantly, Twitter will be launching their own URL-shortening service and it’s unclear how this will change the relationship between Twitter and current popular shorteners like bit.ly whose entire business is, in essence, based on Twitter.

Twitter also announced that the US Library of Congress will include an entire historical copy of all public tweets:

Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.
It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

At the same time Google, who already pay a license to index all public tweets, announced a far more refined Twitter element of their real-time search tool called Google Replay which is a graphical tool allowing you to easily find the tweets on a specific topic from a specific day. Both of these developments further shift the sense of Twitter as just real-time to a permanent digital archive.  Public tweets always were archived, of course, but the relative difficulty in finding them meant most people didn’t treat Twitter as an archive, more as a conversation.  These shifts remind us that every tweet is both a moment of dialogue and the creation of digital media that will last, potentially, forever.

Links catching up, through to April 12th 2010:

• Margaret Atwood - How I learned to love Twitter [The Guardian] - Margaret Atwood's wonderful description of ending up on Twitter, and why that's a rather good thing: "The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It's something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam? But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I'm well pleased with my followers – I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They're a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it's immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly or tinyurl. They've sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.)"
• The State of the Internet Operating System [O'Reilly Radar] - Tim O'Reilly takes a hard look at the 'Internet Operating System' and writes a manifesto-ish reflection-cum-future-roadmap reminiscent of his 'What is Web 2.0' work of half a decade ago.
• Murdoch to limit Google, Microsoft [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] - As News Corp disappears down the paid rabbit hole, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and BBC become even more important and influential! "News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says Google and Microsoft's access to his newspapers could be limited to a "headline or a sentence or two" once he erects a pay wall around his titles' websites. Mr Murdoch, in an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb for The Kalb Report, said he believed most US newspapers would eventually end up charging readers online, like he does with The Wall Street Journal and plans to do with his other properties, beginning with The Times of London. "You'll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall," he said. "Now how high does it go? Does it allow [visitors] to have the first couple of paragraphs or certain feature articles? We'll see. We're experimenting with it ourselves.""
• David's laughing after dentist [The Age] - "Fifteen months ago, David DeVore's business was Orlando real estate. Now his business is his son, David. His six-figure business. By now you may have seen last year's video ''David after dentist'' 10 or 12 times and memorised the dialogue of David, then seven and fresh from a tooth removal, displaying the woozy effects of painkillers. ''I have two fingers,'' he tells his father. ''You have four eyes.'' Then, displaying the wisdom of stoners everywhere, David goes deep. ''Is this real life?'' he asks. ''Why is this happening to me?'' The video has been viewed 56 million times on YouTube, with 100,000 new views every day. In that time, David's adventure has become a remarkable marketing story - it has made money from YouTube. ''I'm the dad who posted 'David After Dentist,''' said Mr DeVore, wearing a shirt emblazoned with his son's face."
• Facebook slander mum hits back at son [The Age] - I can only imagine how this will go down if it reaches the courts - it should be about whether Facebook is a publication or not, but I can't imagine that debate will be central: "The mother of a 16-year-old boy said she was only being a good mother when she locked him out of his Facebook account after reading he had driven home at 150km/h one night because he was mad at a girl. His response: a harassment complaint at the local courthouse. "If I'm found guilty on this it is going to be open season [on parents]," Denise New said. Ms New, of Arkadelphia, a small college town an hour south-west of Little Rock, said many of her son's postings did not reflect well on him, so, after he failed to log off the social networking site one day last month, she posted her own items on his account and changed his password to keep him from using it again. But her son claims what she posted was not true, and that she was damaging his reputation."
• Son accuses mother of Facebook slander [The Age] - "A 16-year-old US boy is claiming in a criminal complaint that his mother slandered him on his Facebook page. Denise New is charged with harassment and her son - whose name has not been released - is asking that his mother be prohibited from contacting him. Authorities tell KATC-TV in the US that the boy lives with his grandmother, who has custodial rights. Denise New says she believes she has the legal right to monitor her son's activities online and that she plans to fight the claims."

Links through April 5th 2010:

• Google Buzz Privacy Reset Coming Tomorrow [Mashable] - "In an effort to address mounting criticism of the privacy issues surrounding Google Buzz, the search giant is going to ask all Buzz users to confirm or change their privacy settings. In an announcement that will be coming soon, Google will admit that they “didn’t get everything right,” which has resulted in serious privacy tweaks since its launch. However, many users weren’t affected by these changes because they had activated Google Buzz before the privacy updates. Now in a renewed effort to correct its gaffs, the search company is going to ask all Google Buzz users to confirm (or change) their Buzz settings. This will be gradually rolled out tomorrow, but the result will be that every user will be prompted with a confirmation page the next time they click the Buzz tab. [...] The page isn’t anything new — it’s really just the Google Buzz settings page. However, Google’s taking a step in the right direction by giving every user a big opportunity to change their privacy settings."
• When office affairs take over the bedroom, the lounge ... [The Age] - "Many workers are caught in an insidious technology trap of being permanently online. Some people are checking emails around the clock – to the detriment of their private lives – and never feel they have left the virtual office, research suggests. Melissa Gregg, of Sydney University's department of gender and cultural studies, conducted interviews with 26 employees in information industries who did at least some work from home. "This study was designed to pick up all that extra work that goes on outside the office, which is generally sold to us as this new freedom to be in touch with work when it suits us," Ms Gregg said. The participants believed checking and sending emails from home did not constitute work. Yet emails were constantly invading evenings and weekends, potentially affecting family relationships. The study showed that workers were checking email at night in bed and as early as 6am before children woke so they could focus on "real work" in office hours."
• Chatroulette Piano Improv’s Merton on YouTube Takedowns, Ben Folds and What’s Under That Hoodie [NewTeeVee] - A new interview with 'Merton', the guy behind the Chatroulette PianoChatImprov videos. I found it particularly interesting how people gave (or refused) permission to be recorded: "NewTeeVee: How do you now go about the process of getting people’s permission to use them for videos?
  Merton: What I do is as soon as they come on the screen, I very quickly paste a little message into the text area that says “I may be recording this. If I have your permission to possibly post this video online, please say yes and give me a thumbs up.” We consulted an attorney about how to word it. And if people say no, I assure them that I’m not going to put them on YouTube and we then both relax and I still play music for them. That’s some of the purest interactions I have because we’re both off stage all of a sudden and we just relax and have a really nice time with it."
• Results From Dungeons & Dragons Online Going Free: Revenue Up 500% [Techdirt] - A freemium success: "Last year, we wrote about the decision by Turbine to turn its formerly fee-based Dungeons & Dragons Online MMO into a free offering, that had reasons to buy built into the game. At the time, we noted that the early results looked good, but over time they're looking even better. Reader Murdock alerts us to the news that DDO was able to get 1 million more users and boost revenue 500%... all by going free."
• Government goes to war with Google over net censorship [The Age] - "The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has launched a stinging attack on Google and its credibility in response to the search giant's campaign against the government's internet filtering policy. In an interview on ABC Radio last night, Senator Conroy also said he was unaware of complaints the Obama administration said it had raised with the government over the policy. The government intends to introduce legislation within weeks forcing all ISPs to block a blacklist of "refused classification" websites for all Australians. Senator Conroy has said the blacklist will largely include deplorable content such as child pornography, bestiality material and instructions on crime, but a large and growing group of academics, technology companies and lobby groups say the scope of the filters is too broad and will not make a meaningful impact on internet safety for children."

I gave a short seminar today on the topic of developing a web presence during candidature.  Honours, masters and doctoral students increasingly need to be aware of the tools and conventions that most directly allow them to be part of their scholarly field online.  Hopefully this presentation gave some students here at Curtin some beginning ideas. I fear the slides are somewhat less useful without the presenter, but on the off chance they’re useful to anyone, here you go:

As always, comments are most welcome.

I fear I might be showing my age given I like this mashup of Lady Gaga Vs Sesame Street far more than the uber-expensive clip it’s parodying:

Links for March 25th 2010 through March 29th 2010:

• Stephen Conroy and US at odds on net filter[Perth Now] - "The Obama administration has questioned the Rudd government's plan to introduce an internet filter, saying it runs contrary to the US's foreign policy of encouraging an open internet to spread economic growth and global security. Officials from the State Department have raised the issue with Australian counterparts as the US mounts a diplomatic assault on internet censorship by governments worldwide."
• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on YouTube [Boing Boing] - For a period of time (and seems fixed now): "Sony Entertainment has shut down Beyonce's official YouTube site. Congrats to Sony Entertainment for wisely spending its legal dollars and working on behalf of its artists. Truly, you deserve many laws and secret treaties passed to protect your "business model" (how else could such a delicate flower survive the harsh realities of the real world?)." This really does show how amazingly complicated and messed up the policing of copyright can be online.
• Privacy battle looms for Google and Facebook [The Age] - A battle with wide implications for online privacy: "You have been tagged in 12 photos — even if you're not signed up to the Web site. European regulators are investigating whether the practice of posting photos, videos and other information about people on sites such as Facebook without their consent is a breach of privacy laws. The Swiss and German probes go to the heart of a debate that has gained momentum in Europe amid high-profile privacy cases: To what extent are social networking platforms responsible for the content their members upload? The actions set the stage for a fresh battle between American Web giants and European authorities a month after an Italian court held three Google executives criminally responsible for a user-posted video."
• MediaShift . The #Spill Effect: Twitter Hashtag Upends Australian Political Journalism [PBS] - Great summary of Julie Posetti's work looking at the use of Twitter in Australia political reporting today, centred on the #spill hashtag and its use in the Turnbull ousting.

Here’s the first paragraph of my new column ‘How Chatroulette Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About the Internet’ for Flow TV:

Genetic scientists love the humble Fruit Fly (Drosophila melanogaster) because it has such a short life-cycle; several generations can live, reproduce, pass on genetic material, and die within a month. In this column, I’d like to suggest that Chatroulette is the current fruit fly of the internet, by which I mean, Chatroulette, its users, and the responses to it, evoke many of the big issues facing internet users today, and do so in a far faster and more immediate way than on the internet at large. On the off chance you’re unfamiliar, Chatroulette does exactly what the name implies: the website randomly connects two users with webcams and chat functionality; there are no log-ins, no registration pages and very few rules, none of which appear to be enforced.¹ Notably, Chatroulette was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17 year old Russian student who, legally, would be considered a child himself in many countries. With that context in mind, I want to address Chatroulette in terms of search, ‘Sex!’, privacy, copyright and creativity.

If I’ve sparked your interest, please head over to Flow TV to read the rest.

Issues about privacy and Facebook have been in the news a great deal recently, but one of the implicit but less discussed issues is the notion of your digital footprint.  Your digital footpint simply means the unintended effects digital communication will have in the future since it’s simultaneously digital content (and thus potentially lasts forever).  Earlier this week I was interviewed by Jarrod Watt for ABC’s Heywire and you can listen to the what I said here.  If you prefer you go straight to the mp3 recording, or listen here …

Links for March 25th 2010:

• The bosses who snoop on Facebook | Maxine Frances Roper [The Guardian] - I'm not sure I agree with this article, but the tensions between public and private spaces versus public and private as a technological setting are well articulated: "The practice of employers running internet searches on employees is now so widespread that employment agencies offer advice on "online reputation management". As one such site puts it: "Even a family recipe for picked gherkins can influence an employer's opinion of you." But just because it's possible for employers to unearth background information that once would have been the preserve of the most diligent East German spy, does that mean they should? There is a common belief that people who share information online are deliberately seeking attention, and therefore have it coming. Yet thinking that anyone with an online presence is out for publicity is as boneheaded as the idea that anyone who dresses up nicely is out to have indiscriminate sex."
• How the internet will turn the world upside down [mUmBRELLA] - The *very* near future: "Talk about demonstrating the scary power of the internet. In this near-future science fiction story, blogger Tom Scott shares a scenario that could very easily become a reality. It centres around how one short video clip uploaded onto the web spreads across the world like wildfire. It results in a flash mob, which turns into a riot and then ultimately, several deaths. Now, keep in mind this is not a real story. But the incidences Scott mentions in his story have all occurred – just not at the same time. At least not yet."
  
  (This clip would give Cory Doctorow a run for this money.)
• Nestle's Facebook meltdown [Thought Gadgets] - A Nestle public relations disaster using social media. A good how NOT to guide.
• Social Networking Rants Against Exes Turning Up In Court [Techdirt] - Another reminder that the web never forgets: "For many people, it's natural to treat social networking platforms as being the equivalent of just talking -- rather than being any sort of formal written communication. Of course, the big difference is that everything you type can be accurately saved forever -- and, potentially, used against you in court. Obviously what people say out loud can also be used in court, but in an argument between, say, a broken up couple, a yelling fight just becomes a screaming match. In the social networking world, it can become evidence. Two recent stories highlight this. The first, from Eric Goldman, is the "disturbingly humorous" transcript from the court concerning a blog post about a woman's ex-husband ..."

Mashable have managed to track down and interview the mysterious Merton, the guy behind that wonderful Chatroulette Piano Improv video:

Merton seems like a nice enough guy, who genuinely seems taken aback with how viral the video went. This interview also reminds me about the perils of writing about things happening today on the web; in the next issue of Flow I’ll have a column called ‘How Chatroulette Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About the Internet’ which discusses the Merton and Ben Folds, but already be a little out-of-date since it doesn’t refer to this interview.  *hmph*

Links for March 23rd 2010:

• Conroy's internet censorship agenda slammed by tech giants [WA Today] - "Australia's biggest technology companies, communications academics and many lobby groups have delivered a withering critique of the government's plans to censor the internet. The government today published most of the 174 submissions it received relating to improving the transparency and accountability measures of its internet filtering policy. [...] Most of the submissions called for full transparency surrounding the operation of the list and for all sites placed on the list by bureaucrats at the Australian Communications and Media Authority first to be examined by the Classification Board. They supported a regular review of the list by an independent expert and the ability for blacklisted sites to appeal. But many reiterated their concerns that the policy is fundamentally unsound and would do little to make the internet a safer place for children."
• Google stops censoring search results in China [BBC News ] - There is some semantic differences between stopping censorship and closing one service and re-directing to another, but the effect on the ground, if the Hong Kong site is accessible in China, should be the same: "Google has stopped censoring its search results in China, ignoring warnings by the country's authorities. The US company said its Chinese users would be redirected to the uncensored pages of its Hong Kong website."
• R18+ Rating For Games A Step Closer In Australia [The Age] - The future of an R18+ video games rating in Australia is looking more and more hopeful! "The long-awaited introduction of an adults-only rating for video games in Australia could be a step closer after South Australia's Michael Atkinson yesterday resigned from his position as Attorney-General. Mr Atkinson has been the South Australian Attorney-General since 2002 and has frustrated attempts to introduce an R18+ rating for games because its introduction requires unanimous support from all state and federal classification ministers. [...] Australia is the only democracy in the western world not to have an adults-only rating for video games. Last year six games were refused classification for exceeding the limits of the MA15+ rating, effectively banning their sale in Australia."
• Facebook settles privacy class action for $10.3m [The Age] - "A San Jose federal judge has approved the $US 9.5 million ($10.3 million) settlement of a class-action lawsuit over the social networking site Facebook's program, Beacon, which published data on what users were buying. Facebook denied any wrongdoing but agreed to end the Beacon program last November. As part of the settlement, Facebook will fund a ''digital trust fund'' that will issue more than $6 million in grants to organisations that study online privacy."
• How To Use An Apostrophe [The Oatmeal] - Useful visual guide to apostrophe use. Many people should print this out or buy the poster. Many.

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%."

I submit this video as evidence (a) the Chatroulette is not the work of the devil and (b) it’s probably the heart of cool R&D on the web today:

Go on, watch, it’'ll make you smile and is 100% free of visible genitals.