Accept no substitutes

Category: Virtual Communities (Page 19 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

Smart People say Dumb things (and Smart Things)

Bill Gates gets caught with a confused message about copyright in an interview with CNet and ends up calling people who want to share “Communists.” This is certain to throw the mostly Libertarian minded Free Software and Creative Commons folks into chaos — not. See boingboing for the best on this. And the /. responses.
He also has a lot to say about:

  • blogging (“I’ve toyed with doing one myself, but I don’t want to be one of those people who start and then don’t finish it, and again I’m thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks–something like that. I’d kind of like to, but I’ve got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.” and later “E-mail is inefficient today with seeing stuff that’s less relevant and how you organize it–bringing in the blog-type capabilities is very important there.”)
  • his beloved Xbox (“And Xbox Live is really talking to your friends, doing things with your friends”)
  • security (“Well, no one invests more in security of their browser than what we do on IE”)
  • FireFox vs IE (“In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.”)
  • Google (” We’ve been in the search business even before Google was around. The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board”)
  • and the future (“the tools around Windows and Office are not even half of what they will be.”)

Feb 12 – TriBlogCon – Wiki, Location, better URL

The Triangle Bloggers Conference for 2005 has a home for its meeting on the morning of Saturday February 12. We’ll meet in the Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall on the UNC Campus. Thanks to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication for making this possible. ibiblio is also a sponsor of the Conference.
And we have a better URL to get to the Conference Wiki http://mistersugar.com/triblogs.html .
All of this really made possible by the hard work of Anton Zuiker.

Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Freedom Forum Conference Room, Carroll Hall (j-school)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE

Local media consolidations

One issue I want to address at the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 is the place of blogs as local media and in local media. We can start here if you like. Are we up for being We, the Media?
What’s making me think about this more often and, I hope, more deeply in the last few months are a few local media changes: WCHL as was noticed on Orange Politics went from very very local to mostly syndicated national shows after a visit from a consultant. The Herald-Sun‘s purchase by Paxton and today’s firing of what WRAL says is 20% of the Herald-Sun staff including four of the paper’s senior officers (Thanks to Phil Meyer for the alert on that one). Potential changes at the Chapel Hill News.
And nationally Pulitzer may be up for sale. With rumors that McClatchy, owner of the News and Observer and others, may be one of the next on the line.
Phil Meyer’s new book is the Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age. It’s a good read for bloggers and for journalists.

Pew on Blogs

The Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project just released one of their more or less well-formed studies (one problem: they often use telephone surveys and those surveys have inherent difficulties in that they don’t often reach cell phone only people or people who are not at home much etc) — this one on the state of blogs. The paper is only in PDF format, but is worth a read.

The abstract says:

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Who are bloggers (according to Pew):

  • Men: 57% are male
  • Young: 48% are under age 30
  • Broadband users: 70% have broadband at home
  • Internet veterans: 82% have been online for six years or more
  • Relatively well off financially: 42% live in households earning over $50,000
  • Well educated: 39% have college or graduate degrees

Growth in blog-readers far outpaced the growth in blogs themselves. “Still, since [Pew’s] survey in February, there has been greater-than-average growth in blog readership among women, minorities, those between the ages of 30 and 49, and those with home dialup connection.” There is a nice chart that is difficult to extract from the PDF that shows the reader and blogger trends from July 02 to November 04.

2004 of ibiblio

A few selected highlights from the past year of ibiblio.org

Grants and contracts: We received contracts for streaming video in support of the NASA education site. We also received an IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services) grant in support of digitizing films for the Folkstreams project. We’re up for a much needed server refresh via an IBM SUR Grant which will be reported in January.

Radio on the net: We celebrated the 10th anniversary of Internet radio with WXYC with music, panels and interviews as well as a free CD for download (from ibiblio of course). We now stream 6 stations and will likely add two more early in 2005. We also participated in the first IPv6 continuous streaming of radio on Internet2 with WXYC and WCPE.

Speakers and visitors: ibiblio visitors and speakers for 2004 included Cory Doctorow, Doc Searls, John Hood (of John Locke Foundation), NC Senator Eric Reeves, bloggers Eric Muller and Corey Dauber, and others. Many ibiblio speakings are available for watching online including the WXYC panel.

Press. We’ve collected our press information including recent articles on ibiblio as well as technical information in an online press kit. One important new item there is Jessamyn West’s article from OCLC Systems and Services: International Digital Library Perspectives. Vol. 20. Number 2 (2004) “Free as in Tibet: ibiblio’s cultural cultivation and community creation”

We have two maturing free software projects. Lyceum is an open source blogsphere and Osprey is a peer-to-peer enabled content distribution system using Bittorrent. An very early version of Osprey is already in use for the WXYC CD downloads and a few other selected offerings.

Bandwidth: We still have to shape our bandwidth use and have with very good results. Even so we regularly use 300 – 400 Mbs. That’s a 100% increase from last year. We’re looking forward to an increase in 2005.

Storage: We’ve just added a NetApp filer which will provide highspeed file access that we desperately need, This is an additional 5+ terabyes of storage.

Management: We have a new CIO for UNC, Dan Reed, who comes to us from UIUC and NCSA. He’s very supportive of ibiblio and I expect we’ll have some opportunities arising from his RENCI projects soon.
We also have a new Dean of Information and Library Science, Jose-Maria Grifiths.
The search for a new Dean of Journalism and Mass Communication is underway as I type with campus visits by the finalists scheduled for very early 2005.

Staff: John Reuning and Fred Stutzman are our two full time employees, sysdamins and project leaders. Nancy Wilson, Josh Myer, Sean Slovney, Max Gustashaw, Patrick Herron, TJ Ward, Bret Dougherty and Adi Unnithan are with us as student employees. Sean and Max have just graduated. Nancy is expecting her first child in January.

Conferences: John and Nancy presented at the Libre Software conference in Bordeaux in the spring. Paul and Fred were among the select invitees to Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp. Fred was a presenter at the American Library Association’s Information Commons Summit. Paul was among the invitees to the Wired/Creative Commons’ benefit concert by Gilberto Gil and David Byrne. Paul and Dr. Helen Tibbo presented at the Imaging Science and Technology conference. Paul was a speaker at IBM University Day and among the 3 UNC faculty invited to meet with selected members of the IBM Academy. Fred was a panelist on the Future of Music in the Triangle. Paul spoke to visiting Jordanian journalists.

Other honors and milestones: Contributor Jessamyn West of Librarian.net was an offical blogger for the Democratic National Convention and was featured in many news stories.
Contributor Pamela Jones (and company) at Groklaw won the Linux Journal’s Editors’ Choice Award for Best Non-Technical or Community site.

Collections: we continue to add important collections of all kinds from video tutorials to health care to poetry festivals to software to Tibetan culture. No slowing down there.

G’boro bloggers get more attention

Jay Rosen’s PressThink site has a nice longer article on the Greensboro News and Record‘s blogsphere vision and a bit about the Piedmont Bloggers Conference, Ed Cone, Lex Alexander, David Hoggard and others. Rosen praises G’boro’s paper for being on the leading edge of citizen and journalistic blogging. It’s no surprise to me that the News and Record is on the forefront; the paper is owned by Landmark Communications whose Virginia Pilot had the first live blogging reporter at the John Malvo trial.
He also makes mention of Anton Zuiker’s organizing the Triangle Bloggers Conference for February 12 — in case you weren’t paying attention ;->

The Evil that is out there (computer version)

No Comment: First, we get comment-spammed to death on every variety of blog on ibiblio. I set up authimage and all is happy (except you guys quit commenting) for me. The Moveable Type comment-spam drove the load on our servers through the roof. Fred and John were on top of that and we are undercontrol there.

Santy: Yesterday and last night, we, like every place that has anyone running phpBB, were attacked by the NeverEverNoSanity worm (aka Santy). Only a few sites were hit, but it was not pretty. John spent the evening before his travels patching all 30 or so of the not updated phpBB sites that we could find on ibiblio. Like many ISPs and universities, we’re still finding defaced sites and instances of the worm.
UPDATE We had more hits and defacings than we first realized, but Fred, Josh and John are far along on the clean-up. The final toll may be as much as 30 sites at least partially defaced. Luckily, the restoration of those sites has mostly gone quickly.

Background Reading: I’m at the same time reviewing a chapter for an upcoming computer security book on spam. One line sticks in my mind: research shows that there are only about 200 active spammers in the world at one time, but they generate more spam than three times the population of the earth every 24 hours.

Anton Zuiker and Vanuatu

Anton Zuiker returned to school after some time in the Peace Corps spent on a tropical Pacific island in Vanuatu. Luckily for me, he came to UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication to study Medical Journalismand to get evangelize for blogging.
Anton was in my first Virtual Communities class where he presented the work he had done on his family blog/website the Zuiker Chronicles.

All of that is a lead-in to saying that Anton has a nice article on paper in this week’s Independent in the Front Porch feature about Survivor and Surviving in Vanuatu.

Blogging Ethics: an oxymoron?

Martin Kuhn wants your opinions and your help.

I am a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I have recently started a project that seeks to determine what ethic (if any) is at work in the blogosphere. Also, I am trying to uncover any “duties” bloggers think they may or may not have and to whom.

Please consider visiting blogethics2004.blogspot.com and sharing your opinion by commenting on some questions I have posted there.

I will be posting a completed research paper on the site in January for your open comment. I may use quotes from the site in that paper.

Many thanks,
Martin

Martin Kuhn
Roy H. Park Fellow, Ph.D. Student
Journalism & Mass Communication
University of North Carolina
CB#3365
384 Carroll Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3365
919-843-5859

Meme, Virus, Bzz, Loose Ties?

Today’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders,” by Rob Walker is mostly about the Boston-based BzzAgent, a company that organizes the word-of-mouth marketing equal to astroturf. Although Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovation is mentioned and described, this article and the company seem to owe more to Douglass Ruskoff’s “Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture” and the concept of meme than to Rogers. If nothing else, the success of BzzAgent, if this article is more than just bzz itself, is to show that early adaptors need not be ‘cool people’ or ‘trend setters’ or even successful models. They just need to get the bzz or, as Doug would say, meme out and get it out to a lot of people. This is more Mark Granovetter than Rogers, if you asked me (and since I’m writing this I asked myself).
Both Rushkoff’s media virus/meme and Granovetter’s strength of weak ties [Granovetter, M. (1973), “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6): 1360-1380.] speak more directly to the way memes make their way through a culture or, dare I say it, a market.

I am also trying to see how the various parts of Ronald Burt‘s work on Structural Holes and creativity and information dissimination fit in here. It looks like Burt’s new book [downloadable at least in part in pdf] “Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction of Social Capital” might contain the answer and/or his paper, “Bandwidth and Echo: Trust, Information, and Gossip in Social Networks [pdf],” [Pre-print of a chapter in Networks and Markets, edited by Alessandra Casella and James E. Rauch. Russell Sage Foundation, 2001].

In or Of every day life?

I was at Duke yesterday for a discussion about topics for a year (at least) project with the Interdisciplinary Studies and John Hope Franklin Center. Among the topics arising were many of the issues discussed and mulled over in our class (and by Rheingold et al). That is: trust, identity, community, and human-computer interactions (not necessarily of the mechanical type but of the psychological and even spiritual type).
I ended up wondering what it would be like to import (or channel) Barry Wellman into the discussion (Note: I did bring up social capital and Nan Lin which were entirely on the point, but on to this point). That is to say that all the theory and approaches seemed to be looking a cyberspace as a new place rather than as a newish place imbedded and framed by its relationship to every day life.
Rheingold came to this earlier than he admits in Wellman’s “Internet in Everyday Life” collection. He talks, when he talks about the Well, about the importance of the potlucks and of the death of a Well poster (even a problematic one) as some of the things that made the Well a community by creating communion.
After writing this, I think the person from Art and/or English, who suggested that one topic be the “historical concept of the face in European culture” as a way to understand new ways of building face to face communication environments or of simulating such environments, might have been the wisest person in the room.

Political Bloggers in NYTimes Mag

A wistful almost sad close up look at political bloggers is in today’s NYTimes mag. Among the revelations: Wonkette used to write for suck.com when it didn’t suck and she was hired to be the character wonkette. Bloggers like other writers are often not-so-social creatures with axes of various kinds to grind.

But the other thing worth noticing is that the article focuses entirely on Democratic bloggers. The article is pre-Republican convention and definitely pre-Memogate. It shows a blogger-triumphalism of a different kind. Already blogs are being touted as a Conservative tool instead of Liberal one. Did things change so quickly or is our polar political drift going to show more wild swings between left and right as each organizing tool or media outlet gets a moment in the ink or electrons?

orangepolitics.org is one year old

The group political blog started by Ruby Sinreich, orangepolitics.org, celebrated its one year anniversary tonight with buy your own beers at the Orange County Social Club. The event was well attended by local politicos — some of whom are regular contributors — and other amusing people. I have no pictures, but the Daily Tar Heel camera guy was very busy taking photos and the reporter was taking names etc. Look for a story on Monday there.

Ruby has won awards from all over — Independent, WCHL, and others in the past year for her work creating and managing the blog.

Blogger at the National Newspaper Association

My beloved wife, Sally Greene, is in Denver blogging about the National Newspaper Association meeting there. She has discovered ethernet connections in the hotel and discovered that community papers don’t care for bloggers anymore than they like buggers. News flash: they can’t see a profit in blogging or even putting information on the web.
The most important part of the entire Convention is this: my mother-in-law and Gilmer Mirror publisher Sarah L. Greene will receive the Emma C. McKinney Award.

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