Antonella asks Where did you get your news today? and explains how, after the 7/7 bombings in London, the truly visceral understanding of the news was to be found on the greater ‘net rather than in ‘official’ news channels like CNN.
You are currently browsing articles tagged Net Culture.
I just found this (again, running my requisite year or so behind everybody else). Terrific trove of quotations — a wiki-based commonplace book!
The Buzz Report: Five reasons social networking doesn’t work – CNET.com
I think this article kind of misses the point. Sure, social network websites as distinct businesses are dying off — I’m surprised anybody thought they’d make money doing it to begin with. It’s like selling ice in the Arctic.
The phenomenon of Social Networking isn’t dying — it’s thriving. It’s just that the whole Internet is a social network.
Once people start realizing that, and the tools for connecting people outside of proprietary “sites” have become more useful and widespread, then there’s just no need for “social networking sites” like Friendster.
The only kind that will survive are specialty sites, like dating/matchmaking services or ones where people already share something like a career discipline or hobby.
Otherwise, the Internet already links everybody.
It does make the astute observation, though, that the problem with a lot of artificial social network sites is that they don’t have anything happening once you get there. That’s why things like LiveJournal (which I’ve basically given up on, but it’s still growing like mad) and RSS aggregators linking people’s blogs are thriving.
Social networks as a money-making business plan are, though, mostly kaput.
Evidently the two book reviews I’ve written for Boxes and Arrows have been rated as “Good” here:
EServer TC Library: Authors: Hinton, Andrew
I never got reviews before!
Even though, really, these are reviews of reviews … which is kind of meta-ish. Fitting, I suppose.
This is my experiment in coining a Technorati tag.
We’ll see if this works.
I like this term “metafatigue” — it started out as “metaexhaustion” in a previous post, but I like ‘fatigue’ better, and it kind of sounds like “metal fatigue” which fits somehow.
I’ll define it here as “the feeling of enervation and frustration achieved through impossibly trying to control and track floods of information with metadata.” That’s sloppy but it’ll do.
Technorati Tag: metafatigue
Edited to add, about 10 hours later: And it worked!! Just hop over to that link and check it out. Neato.
I’ve been trying to tweak my weblog to make use of all the various meta resources that seem to be cropping up like chickweed. And I have a confession to make … I’m sick of it.
I know that in order to be a part of the true enlightened blogigarchy, I should have RSS feeds in every conceivable format running smoothly on all cylinders.
But even after several hours last week, I was unable to figure out what the heck Technorati actually does with tags and how it finds them. Apparently if you just post something using WordPress and use categories, the categories should automatically end up as Technorati-compatible tags. But according to Technorati, it gets these from your “Atom” RSS feed. Evidently I actually publish one of these, but when I look at it, I don’t see my categories showing up in the format Technorati specifies.
That’s just one example.
Then it occurred to me that I was burning hours just trying to be sure that I was contributing correctly to some kind of grand schema, when all I really wanted to do was write and push “Publish” and be DONE with it.
Honestly, I don’t give a flying fubar about thorough and relentless meta-tagging of all of my content. I realize that it’s the greatest thing since giving blood to the Red Cross, and that I’d be truly revolutionized if I had everything running through del.icio.us, and if I could only be a fully engaged denizen in the groundswell that is folksonomy.
But maybe I’m too lazy. I want the web to just work.
Or maybe I’m just in a crummy mood today?
Likely it’s some of each.
Technorati Tag: metafatigue ;-)
Edited to Add:
Later, I decided to change this post to “Metafatigue” … it started out as “metaexhaustion” which is too much of a mouthful. Then I posted a new post about it and watched Technorati and sure enough it came up there. This is fun. (6/23/05)
The Internet: Past, Present and Future – Internet & WWW History — an excellent history of the birth of the Internet.
Also see this timeline.
Article in Business Week, The Power Of Us, explains how Skype is the latest major example of how the vast organism of humanity that is the Internet can rise up and form emergent systems and infrastructures.
I like the language used here — it’s appropriate, I think, to the magnitude of the phenomenon. It’s evolutionary, a massive natural shift, and even super-corporations are puny in its wake.
Says Skype CEO Niklas Zennström: “It’s almost like an organism.” A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide — along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more — are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. “There’s a fundamental shift in power happening,” says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) “Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they’re involved in.”
You may or may not have already heard of PostSecret, but I only just learned of it.
It’s fascinating to me both because of its function and its format. The function isn’t that different from many blogs where people post their secret thoughts, exhibiting them anonymously… some journal communities do this on LiveJournal and elsewhere.
But this place has rules about how things get posted. People have to take the time to make a physical artifact and mail it in. It strikes me as almost religious — an enforced ritual around confession. The artifact created and mailed and then displayed — is it a kind of penance? Does it cleanse? I wonder if the people who make them come back and look at it on occasion once it’s posted, the way they might visit a loved one’s grave?
They range from the humorous to the devastating.
Many-to-Many: Yossi Vardi on Social Software
Yossi Vardi, the founding investor of the company that created ICQ (which is now up to over 400 million users) spoke at the Les Blogs conference in Paris. He made the point that there are three to four major forces on the Internet: self expression; communication; sharing; collaboration.
Notice none of these is “commerce” or “storage” or “reference.”
For a long time I’ve believed the Internet’s real power is social. What made AOL so huge was its chat rooms. And now that it’s on the ‘net — one of the few reasons anybody still uses AOL after they get broadband from another ISP is that they don’t want to give up the social milieu of the AOL domain.
People will put up with horrible usability to be a part of a community. Or to express themselves or share information or ideas or files. One of the real killer-app features of Napster that people underestimated was the ability to see what other people who liked one song you were looking for had on their hard drives, because they might have things you like that you don’t even know about yet. Or at least that’s how it worked last I used Napster, before it was shut down.
Vardi seems to agree. At least according to the paraphrase posted at Many2Many, he says that “the killer app on the Internet is people” and talks about social cues and how the most desired feature on Yahoo Instant Messenger is to see what songs their friends are listening to while online.
People say porn is the main driver of the growth of the Internet, but I wonder. I mean, the assertion does have a kind of cynical fun to it — much like the old saw that what grew VCR usage was porn rentals. But in the case of the ‘net, it may be overlooking the real nature of the beast. For one thing, porn is for broadcast and consumption. It’s not two-way, not social inherently. Of those kinds of things online, it’s likely the biggest. But of *all* kinds of content and interaction online, it has a lot more competition.
Plus, “Porn” is a pretty easy category, not very splintered — so it’s easier to track it in aggregate. But if you say “social interaction” or even “community” is a similar category, and added up the aggregate of just the money spent by users on all the various journal sites, dating sites, etc, plus the advertising dollars going into things like MySpace and Friendster, my guess is it would dwarf “porn” as a category of commerce online.
Has anybody done this kind of comparison?
For a net-head, I’m pretty slow at discovering and adopting new Internet stuff … one thing that’s taken me forever to get around to is to set up any knd of aggregator for RSS feeds of favorite blogs and such. But now I’m totally digging Bloglines.
I can’t wait to play with some of its more advanced features.
One feed that I subscribed to that I’m already completely addicted to is the Audible free programs feed here. I’ve grabbed several hours’ worth of programming just from the last month — geeky stuff like Charlie Rose interviews and Library of Congress speeches.
In fact, there’s a shortcut for adding my blog here to Bloglines … but I haven’t taken the time to add it in here yet.
I upgraded Movable Type to their stellar new version, and reactivated comments, now that the engine enables me to review them before they post. (It also has a nifty feature that allows anyone who’s registered at TypeKey.)
Read all about the lovely new engine here:
Movable Type Publishing Platform
Installation isn’t for the novice, however. If you just want to crank up a blog without having to worry about cgi scripts and web hosting, try the excellent TypePad a Movable Type spinoff. Or the venerable (and gloriously now-owned-by Google) Blogger
About this blog
Welcome to inkblurt, the online home of Andrew Hinton. Read something, drop a comment, or say hello!
BTW I also tweet at @inkblurt.
