To wrap the blog up, here are some lose ends I’ve had sitting around in unfinished drafts. These articles are some of the ones that I found which inspired me, and helped inform my understanding of the issues I’ve addressed in this blog. They and the sites they’re hosted on will serve you well if you’d like to extend or further explore some of the themes I didn’t get to talk about as thoroughly as you may have liked. Beyond that, I’m sure you will find them both interesting and relevant.

Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV

Audiences are technically savvy these days; they can and will find a way to get any television programming they desire. They don’t want to pay for it, they don’t want it artificially crippled with any digital rights management technologies – they just want to watch it. Now. This is the way that half a century of television and a decade of the Web has conditioned them to behave … We all understand that this piracy is technically illegal, technically a violation of copyright; but we’re in a hell of a bind if we’re telling the audience to “sit down, shut up and do as you’re told” when it comes to television viewing. The audience won’t do as they’re told: they’ll do as they’ve been taught, and that is another story entirely.

[By Mark Pesce, the much accomplished father of VRML.]

I linked to this one in my ‘copywrong‘ and ‘IP & CC‘ entries, but in case you missed it; a really interesting explorations on the causes and effects of mass internet piracy of television shows, and where it all may lead.

See Also:
Piracy is Good? The New Laws of Television

The Amorality of Web 2.0

Web 1.0 may have turned out to be spiritual vaporware, but now we have the hyper-hyped upgrade: Web 2.0. In a profile of Internet savant Tim O’Reilly in the current issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes that “the idea of collective consciousness is becoming manifest in the Internet.” He quotes O’Reilly: “The Internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at [New Age HQ] Esalen in the ’70s – except we didn’t know it would be technology-mediated.” Levy then asks, “Could it be that the Internet – or what O’Reilly calls Web 2.0 – is really the successor to the human potential movement?”

[By Nicholas Carr, outspoken IT writer and speaker.]

A thought-provoking critique on the resurgence of a spiritual meta-existentialist view of the internet cum cutting attack on wikipedia, blogs, and their glorification in new-media circles.

Cities Without Borders: Digital Culture and Decentralisation

In an era of increasing globalization and telecommunications, while most pundits laud the opportunities for decentralization, Sassen’s observations suggest that economic production is centralizing away from national economies to an emerging network of “global cities.” Because these global cities have closer ties to each other than to their surrounding regions or national economies, they mark a fundamental change in the nature of production. Or so the theory goes.

But what of digital culture?

[By Paul Hartzog]

Hartzog provides a fantastic extension (and far more sophistocated expression) of some of the concepts that I explored in an article linked to previously, Virtual Clusters: Creative Industries in the Digital Realm. He also writes about issues of network governance and the internet’s “generative contradiction” as described by Galloway’s ‘Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization‘ [View relevant chapter draft]

See also:
Governance Without Governance
Panarchy – Governance in the Network Age [PDF]

Google Sued

Property law since time immemorial had held that your land reached from the ground to the heavens. Then airplanes were invented — a technology oblivious to this ancient law. A couple of farmers sued to enforce their ancient rights — insisting airplanes can’t fly over land without their permission. And thus the Supreme Court had to decide whether this ancient law — much older than the law of copyright — should prevail over this new technology.

The Supreme Court’s answer was perfectly clear: Absolutely not. “Common sense revolts at the idea,” Justice Douglas wrote. And with that sentence, hundreds of years of property law was gone, and the world was a much wealthier place.

So too should common sense revolt at the claims of this law suit. I’m an academic, so this is a bit biased, but: Google Print could be the most important contribution to the spread of knowledge since Jefferson dreamed of national libraries.

[by Laurence Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project and outspoken opponent of "interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."]

An impassioned and interesting statement on how restrictive copyrights are holding back the progress and threatening the future of Google Books

See Also:
Fantastic Lessons From Canada
The Spread of CC

In my opinion, blogging is not simply publishing on a more effective content management system, however. Blogs aren’t defined by the format of reverse chronologically listed posts, comment capabilities or a pension for linking; rather, they are a new genre of published media that is as much about how they’re written as they are about what format they take or what subjects they address. A hybrid of website, media-filter and journal; they’re the conscience of the Internet and the zeitgeist of an age.

On the other hand, I understand why blogs are often defined based on the common blog structure or features. As a new media form still heavily populated by the geekorati that gave it birth, it’s often easier for the technically minded to think of them in this way. However doing so misses the subtler characteristics of the medium that have made blogging so widely successful. You can write a short essay each week and publish it in reverse chronology on a website – hell you can include comments, trackbacks and all the trimmings too, but it won’t make it a blog in my mind, any more than this is. Similarly, you can type out your journal and post it online, but chances are it will just end up a digital journal in the end, not a blog.

Because there is a sensibility or ‘voice’ to blogging, and a format of writing that’s far more important than the system you use to host it. Whether you’re blog is a place for technology reviews, link featuring, or rants about life; your writing must be both engaging, and accessible. There’s simply no point in publishing to the world but then speaking above everyones’ heads or boring them half to death. While a private journal can be excused for laboriously wander from one point to the next, anything one publishes must be interesting and creative in order to be successful, and although quite forgiving, the blogosphere is a highly competitive environment in which to publish. For myself, these requirements meant finding practical examples or freely available articles to discuss in relation to the issues, rather than quoting lectures and readings which were not as directly relevant to my audience, and which no-one outside the university would be privy to.

The ‘voice’ or characteristic writing style I mention also acts as an important distinction between blog-writing and journal-writing (amongst others.) It is my experience that bloggers will often write in a tone of voice more intimate than a regular website – in first person certainly and with a casual tone suitable for speaking to an individual or small group of people – but more organised and polished than they would in a diary or journal. The establishment of this fine balance is one of the most significant steps towards writing blog content in my mind, and one I believe that is vital to the success of a blogger.

One of my classmates summed this up nicely in a comment on a previous post, saying that when it comes to blogging there are some who have it, and some who don’t; “[There are] those who are successful [and] manage to turn the mundane things that happen in their life into thrilling reading, [and] those who arent quite successful [but] insist instead on grandoise interpretations of the “real things everyone should be talking about”.” Essentialy what she describes is the difference between creative anecdote and self-important blather in diary blogs, but the same can be said of any subgenre.

As someone who has read/suffered numerous blogs from both categories, I sincerely hope that this blog will fall towards the former. As with the blogosphere itself, however, entertainment is only a lesser (albeit important) part of why this blog was developed. In truth, the blogging revolution is as much about conversation as it is about publication. Just as producing a blog encourages one to think further on the themes they are addressing, reading similar publications and exchanging comments and other correspondences opens up new doors in one’s own understanding of issues, promoting a decentralised discourse across those websites.

While such exchanges had to some extent occurred previously on messageboards and mailing lists, the advent of blogging technologies has seen these collaborative conversations opened up and democratised like never before; forming what Axel Bruns refers to as “a loose and ad hoc extra- or metastructure which ties together individual blogging efforts and facilitates true exchange both between blog authors as well as between authors and audiences.” This progressive formation of inclusive networks for related discussion is the true strength of blogging, and something that I am proud to contribute to through this site and others.

In fact I believe society – and particularly media content producers (including musicians) – owe file-sharers (or Internet ‘pirates’ if you prefer) an enormous debt of gratitude. Contrary to being the evil, selfish and destructive force record and movie industry moguls would have you believe, file-sharing and related technologies have done more for the creative arts than those media conglomerates ever did. In a world of free, click-to-access media, musicians and the like are judged on their talents and creativity, not on the amount of ass they show on MTV. Internet piracy has levelled the playing field like never before for content producers, stepping outside the media distribution model and allowing everyone to effectively promote and distribute whatever they like – not what they’re told to like every time they step outside or turn on the tv. In doing so, file-sharers have produced the means to completely erase almost every advantage major labels have built up for themselves over the years, throwing out strategies for creating artificial demand and turning instead to a grass-roots, word-of-mouth system of promotion and distribution based on the quality of the content itself.

While the RIAA and MPAA preach ‘Holier than thou’, the fact of the matter is these piracy-protégés have done us all an enormous favour by donating their time and expertise towards the development of highly creative, super-effective data-transfer protocols. Protocols – it should be noted – that are now being used (and profited from) as a cheap distribution method by a range of organisations, including at least one company that has previously sued and attacked the very people who gave their time to develop these technologies. Unfortunately one has grown to expect such hypocrisy in issues of file-sharing and digital copyright laws, but despite being run over roughshod at every turn, Internet pirates continue to develop some of the most revolutionary networking techniques since the birth of the Internet itself. [Which is why I thrust my tongue firmly in cheek, and refer to them not as 'Internet pirates' but rather as the 'cluster cowboys' of the digital frontier.]

Arguable one of the most ingenious of these networking protocols is Bram Cohen‘s BitTorrent. The reason Cohen’s protocol is so effective is because it uses a co-operative, collaborative ‘swarm’ of users to distribute data amongst themselves in pieces, rather than accessing whole files from a single location. Or as Mark Pesce describes it;

Unlike older forms of internet downloading, where too many requests for the same data can clog up internet links and send servers crashing. BitTorrent distributes files more and more efficiently, as more people join the hunt for the data. Everyone looking for bits of a file – say, an episode of Battlestar Galactica – shares the pieces they’ve already located with anyone else who doesn’t already have that piece. Since the pieces are scattered randomly among all the users who want the data, there’s a lot of to-and-fro between the users; rather than being a request for one copy of one file on one server, it’s as though many hundreds of hands are copying and exchanging playing cards. You may start out holding only the Ace of Hearts, but soon enough you’ll have a full deck.

To give you a hands-on look of how it all works, I took the liberty to track down (after some considerable difficulty) a BitTorrent swarm simulation I found about a year ago. In this simulation, you can add any number of file-sharers (both would-be sharers and recipients) and see how they interact, with the data that they’re disseminating being represented as the colour spectrum. [I recommend hitting '+' about 8 or 9 times to create a few downloaders or 'leeches', and 's' once for an uploader (or 'seeder'). It may seem a bit slow at first but it should be clear after a minute or so how the system works, and what makes it so very effective.]

Unfortunately, for all its appearance of superior decentralisation and network-independance, BitTorrent is still restricted by a reliance on IP address as a means of identifying peers within the network (part of the same governed protocol that has people worried about ICANN and the notion of a national regulatory body having such control over the Internet.) This reliance compromises the privacy of BitTorrent users, as (by virtue of the protocol) anyone can join a torrent swarm – including undesirables looking to copy down IP addresses in order to intimidate file-sharers into stopping their activities.

While media conglomerates continue to do so, however, I’m confident that internet pirates cluster cowboys will continue to work towards perfecting the fine art of network construction and protocol obfuscation; thus creating systems of safe and reliable data-transfer to pave the way for a new generation of independent, discerning, DIY consumers, and giving lie to their stereotype as selfish cyber-criminals.

Related:

The former was intended as an on-air advertisement, but was also released onto the Sky One website as an experiment in viral brand-building. Within days of being released, it spread throughout the net – on link exchanges, blogs and video-sites. In a uniquely post-modern spectacle now becoming commonplace with such developments, the mainstream media soon reported on the growing media buzz surrounding the clip, adding to it further [and in doing so literally realising the adage that the media is the message]. Ultimately this seemingly innocuous decision to make the advertisement available online has seen the advertisement mentioned on tens of millions of websites and viewed well over 9 and a half million times on YouTube alone, not to mention being shown or reported on in any number of mainstream media broadcasts and publications. Undoubtedly the quality and appeal of the advertisement itself has helped this viral spread, but even the most clever and appealing of UK ads rarely end up on Australia’s national prime time news!

Now look at the situation of NBC and its treatment of Saturday Night Live sketches, in particular ‘Lazy Sunday’. Up until February of this year short video clips from SNL regularly ended up on YouTube and a host of other video-sharing and comedy websites, recorded by tech-savvy users and shared freely on these sites. On Feburary 16 this changed as YouTube announced they had been hit with a C&D for showing ‘Lazy Sundays’ and a reported 500 other NBC videos. Incidentally it should be noted that this notice was delivered in response to a YouTube marketing director making contact with the company to offer a content-featuring deal with YouTube. In other words you could be entirely forgiven for believing that despite its attesting a “long and careful” view towards copyright protection online, NBC had NO idea that portions of its content was being distributed online by fans in this matter. Indeed, ‘Lazy Sunday’ wasn’t removed from Google Video for a full week after YouTube removed its copies and considering a NBC spokesperson stated that most infringements were removed within 24-36 hours, one could also be forgiven for thinking that perhaps NBC hadn’t heard of Google Video either!

As one can attest from the fact that I’ve [quite deliberately] provided a link to the Lazy Sunday sketch at a non-NBC-affiliated site, this hard-line approach to digital copyright protection has enjoyed as much success as the one employed the RIAA. Similarly, this exercise has cost NBC a great deal of goodwill amongst its fans as it protests to have “taken your viral favourites and gathered them into one convenient location” when in actual fact it has banned the content from the most highly accessible and successful video content viewing websites ever seen, in favour of an appallingly inaccessible and poorly created site of their own making and control; swapping open democratic sharing for a corporately controlled walled garden despite the interests of the user.

Of course I’m not here to say its legally or even morally questionable to do so – it is after all, their content and intellectual property – but I do question the benefit of their actions (both for themselves and their market), and I’m not the only one. As seen in the ‘creative archive’ initiative of the BBC I mentioned earlier, and the way in which other broadcasters have embraced YouTube and similar services as content disseminators and valuable partners (Paramount, Fox, Dimension Films and a host of others all use YouTube to freely feature content online); it’s evident that at least some mainstream media entities are exploring a relaxation of controlling copyright clauses to give themselves and their users the freedom to explore and share content. Sky One’s success with its unguided viral campaign of the Simpsons clip is certainly a clear and obvious example of the great gain which can be reaped from such an approach, and I dare say one which has been noted by any broadcaster not so firmly in the dark as NBC has proven itself to be!

Related:

Technorati Stats on Blogs – was this shown in a lecture? If so, excuse the repetition; I can never remember where or when I find these things

NeoBinaries Community Website list – A small but growing list of community websites – interesting to look beyond the pretty logos [I wonder if that style will become taboo after .com crash 2.0] and observe which websites actually bother to put down the CSS and invest in proven community-building strategies.
[Related: The Museum of Modern Betas]

CSS Reboot – A broad community of webdesigners gather once a year to refresh their websites, show their wears and pat each other on the backs piss on each others’ parades [someone seems to have cheated the voting system this year]

Google Zeitgeist 2005 – All the most searched terms of 2005 and interesting trivia about it [odd to see a brochure of empirical data on global interests]

Hear Pi – and here I thought creative mathematics applications simply didn’t exist

The Great Taco Hunt – Free expression: be careful what you wish for…

Ryan vs Dorkman – fan creation at its geeky finest, creating content that matches if not bests the original inspiration.

Reading through the article I felt pangs of irritation, eventually swallowed by a malicious glee that any debater would recognise as that feeling one gets when one’s opposition puts both feet – and one of the ajudicators’ – in their mouth.

Unfortunately the strict copyright conditions of Fairfax digital prohibit me from copying the article in full on this page to annotate into tatters, so I’ll have to settle for a few choice quotes and brief commentary.

So to The Age, here’s your article back — with interest!

“If you believe the internet is the fount of all wisdom, giving free rein to bloggers to exercise their vocal cords, think again.”

Punny, but misleading and entirely irrelevant to the article. One could forgive this kind of cheap hook on a ‘dog rides bicycle’ special interest story, but even then you’d expect some semblance of significance – a high-school student knows better.

Your four paragraphs outlining common mistakes as investigated by “Oxford Dictionary Lexicographers” would have been laughable if they were not so pathetic. Don’t get me wrong – the statistics are interesting, it’s just that if one wanted to know how many more people say “Just Desserts” instead of “Just Deserts”, one could simply compare google result numbers for the terms. Not only is that information more up to date and publicly accessible, it is also far more targeted for your woeful attempt at a news article, as if refers only to content online; not other publications. You can keep your Oxford English Corpus, database of a billion english words (only 150 million of which are from the web [read:relevant]), I’m using Google; database of over 8.7 billion english webpages.

“It has become so widely used that the wrong version is now included in Oxford dictionaries alongside the right one.”

Oh you mean kind of like colour/color? Perhaps if you payed more attention to the quote you used from one Catherine Soanes, you’d realise this is a totally redundant point to make and a sensationalist waste of your readers’ time.

…but then, you did realise that anyway didn’t you? You just didn’t care.

But maybe you should care. Maybe the fact that you don’t care if why you’re bleeding market-share like a stuck pig (I do hope that I as a ‘copy and paste’, ‘unchecked’ writer got that english clique right!).

Perhaps you don’t care about this either, but it seems people can (and will) make do with a little less polish on their articles in favour of a lot more content – and when I say only a little polish; I mean it! When you use two consecutive paragraphs, both starting with “‘clique’ is used % per cent of the time…” then later “Other mistakes…” followed by “Other examples of common mistakes…” it smacks of a high-school essay draft – not a piece of professional, published journalism.

So next time you feel the pinch as subscription numbers continue to drop or when those important advertising agents go online instead; think back to this article and ask yourself – who’s weaved the bigger tangle for themselves?

Regards,
A humble blogger.

This morning I’ve been using this ‘me-time’ to intrude on the trials and tribulations of another human being – one greatly distanced from myself yet with whom I have developed a wonderfully one-way relationship. By relationship, I don’t mean that in a weird stalkerly kind of way; rather it’s a situation where I spend some time out of my life reading about hers.

Blogs are fascinating to me, both on a personal and [sigh] academic level, (I sigh to admit an academic interest simply because a good deal of the people who consider blogs academically are wankers on the ‘new media’ bandwagon and have never even read one, much less reduced themselves to produce one) and the blog I’ve been reading this morning is particularly so.

I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t done drugs or anything self-destructive for the longest period of time, or the incredibly dry yet hilarious way she journals her life – like a ‘sex and the city’ for ‘misanthropes, agoraphobes, depressives, alcoholics, pill poppers, pot smokers, losers, outsiders, and chronic masturbators’ [to quote the author's supposition of her audience] – but Miss Forksplit really floats my boat, hauls my oars and any number of other passing-related naval metaphors.

There’s just something so wonderful about mixing voyeurism and journalism – like seeing Anderson Cooper get his rocks off in a dirty half-way house; it’s something we can all enjoy.

So without further adu, Miss Forksplit. [This post was selected as it's a pretty good introduction into to the Forksplit format and humour, plus I could use it without censoring every second word to comply with my University's assessment MA-rating policy]

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Heading For My Ass Cheeks

This Friday, I have go to an all-day corporate retreat. Ostensibly designed to build team spirit, all it’s good for is the open bar that immediately follows a day of doing “trust falls” into the reluctant arms of co-workers who secretly hate you.

This year’s shit fiesta has been named, “Heading For the Light.”

I’m not sure who’s responsible for coming up with this year’s moniker abomination, but isn’t “Heading For The Light” what happens right after your body has finished twitching in its last death throes? Why would you name a company retreat this? And why would you force fledgling sociopaths like me to attend it? Don’t they realize how easy fire arms are to obtain these days?

If they make us use Play Doh to mold the animal which best describes who we are again this year, I can’t be held responsible for what happens. Last year, I molded mine into a cock and balls and pushed it across the table to my friend Aaron. He started laughing. Later, our boss cornered us and told us that we weren’t team players and that this was all about consensus building. This year, who knows? I carry mace in my handbag, so my group leader may get a full round in the face.

Last year, the pep squad organizer of my floor hounded me for two weeks, about filming or photographing me for the opening video.

Why don’t you take a picture of my middle finger and use that? I was tempted to say. Or how about I part my ass cheeks and give you a nice close up? Should go great with Sheryl Crowe’s “Every Day Is A Winding Road,” which is the song you —-wads always seem to use for the video montages.

Instead, I ducked into the bathroom every time I saw her coming down the hall. If the PA who’s doing the video this year knocks on my door one more time and asks me to pose with my next door office mate, I’m shoving a Scripto pen into his jugular.

To deal with this event, I have two options. I can take several Xanax and hope I don’t completely pass out in my seat.

Or, I can do as my friend Karen suggested.

“Go get sushi from Food Emporium for lunch the day before,” she offered. “And make sure EVERYONE sees you eating it. The next day, just call in saying you have food poisoning. You probably won’t be lying.”

Right now, I’m leaning toward the three day old, Food Emporium tekka roll option. I’ll be sick all weekend. But at least I won’t have to mold a rat out of Play Doh.

Reading through such a vibrant and hilarious blog, it’s hard to factor Forksplit into the dull and dusty definitions often attributed to the blogosphere. But then perhaps it’s inevitable that academia will have to allocate such a constricting lexicon on this colourful media expression – after all, the literati couldn’t very well praise a self-confessed “lazy sack of shit with a significant pot problem and possible Attention Deficit Disorder” as a pioneer of online literature and virtual cultures. It just wouldn’t do!

Forksplit proves for me that there is nothing boring or irrelevant about ‘diary blogging’ – the blogging sub-genre mentioned in Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs‘ forthcoming book “Use of Blogs” (and in this case at least, the academics are genuinely immersed in the blogging movement). Here is an online journal that belies the mundane names of the genre it inhabits and rejects the notion that diary blogging is merely a “banal minutiae of an individual bloggers life” (Jacobs, 2003); instead one sees a synergy between personal narrative and creative expression that reaches far beyond the bounds of geographic and cultural contexts to emote, inform and entertain.

Perhaps Forksplit is not for you, with its still-curdling mix of personal pain and hilarious social commentary, but as more and more people publish their own journals online – revelling in the anonymity of the virtual realm – this is one blogging genre which is almost guaranteed to have something for everyone.

Visit Forksplit [Not safe for sensitive eyes]

I’ve been a member of the deviantART community for over four and a half years now, so when I had to choose a virtual community to participate in and write about for this blog, it was the logical choice.

To give an introduction into what deviantART is about, it’s a wholly user-driven community based around the submission and critiquing of members’ art, writing and application skins (called ‘deviations’). Driving this core functionality of sharing and commentary, is a vast community of over 2 million users (or ‘deviants’) who each have a member page at username.deviantart.com featuring their unique gallery of deviations, a public journal, and other information about their community interactions.

Over the five and a half years it has been online, deviantART has seen the submission over over 21 million deviations across a huge range of categories [warning: I meant it when I said huge], and has enjoyed a substantial amount of interactions between members both on their userpages and in the community forums. It’s these member-interactions more than the deviations and critiques themselves that keep the deviantART community running with a healthy buzz (and the servers choking with an unhealthy cough).

As someone who’s been at the site for as long as I have, I’ve seen several generations of users come and go*, and have observed some few people staying on from each generation (as I have). These long-term members generally don’t submit or critique as much art as they once did, but they stay instead for the network of friendships they have established across the site. This network is where deviantART’s lasting value is for its users. While having people offer critiques on one’s work is helpful, it doesn’t mean nearly so much coming from just anyone as it does from someone you respect and who’s work you admire. Thus as people find their feet in the often overwhelming bustle of the community, they tend to build around themselves a mini network of friends and fans to offer each other support and guidance; both creatively and on the website itself.

deviantART is a warren of such networks, each belonging to or spanning sub-communities, such as those that specialise in a certain style or subject for writing and/or art creation. These distributed yet centralised, multi-layered sub-communities are what gives deviantART its vibrant diversity and helps to encourage collaboration and creativity within the community (with the aid of site-sponsored competitions and features.)

*It may seem strange to the uninitiated (probably not you, unless this has been printed out) to say that in less than 5 years you’ve seen several generations pass through a site, but time moves differently on the net; a lot faster for the most part, and certainly 5 years on the net would equate to at least five times that in real life.

More:
deviantART statistics
Wikipedia on deviantART
My deviantART userpage and recent activity.

Some time ago (but long enough for me to have lost the link, annoyingly) I ran across an interactive applet that allowed an extensible map of Internet links via google’s database. This applet was originally created by TouchGraph, and while it can be a little buggy (on my system at least), it’s also an extremely intuitive and interesting tool for exploring links between websites via google’s ‘Related:’ algorithm. View TouchGraph GoogleBrowser.

Happily, this technology was released under an open source license therefore allowing others to use the applet engine for their own data-mapping applications!

Hybrid TouchGraphs

Blogosphere: Literally! – Uses Technorati to search for related blogs, then displays them laid out across a virtual sphere. Unfortunately the part of the applet that queries technorati seems to be broken on this one; check the screenshot for what it should look like.

TouchGraph for Google Scholar – A system for visually following a chain of references to find related academic papers via Google Scholar. (Very cool application!)

Last.fm Friends (warning: direct link) – Explore friendship networks on Last.fm! I had a heap of fun with this one since I could use my own network as a base for exploration. [Note: Remember how I said in the past how positive it was that Last.fm released it's data under a creative commons license? Now you see why!]

AudioScrobbler Browser – Another unfortunately broken applet, this one found related artists though Last.fm’s ‘similar artists’ recommendations. Ah well, unless you are a java programmer, content yourself with drooling at the screenshot instead.

Other ToughGraph Hybrids by Alf Eaton of HubMed.

There are a number of reason I believe digg has risen above the rest in terms of the size of it’s userbase and the livelihood of it’s member participation (which in this case can be equated from the rapid turnover of news and number of ‘diggs’ and comments each article gets). Perhaps the most obvious reason for its success is the fact that digg got in early (opening its doors in late 2004) and thus achieved critical mass before competitors could cement their own market position. The explicit way in which digg shows the involvement of the community behind it (as opposed to a more implicit approach as taken by del.icio.us for example) is another major contributor to its success in my mind; encouraging users to view and contribute to the discussion about a post by presenting each one similarly to a common internet forum thread, and including information about who ‘dugg’ what stories throughout the site.

This leads to the site having a two-fold appeal; both a simple but effective peer-filtered content output, and a lively network of discussion and friendship between members. Of course a lot of the discussion eventually observes Godwin’s Law being enacted, but that’s inevitable for any site which allows for such easy debate about current issues on the internet.

On a related note; I had the good fortune of stumbling across a fantastic website as it was just getting underway in early March (this year). It’s called PopUrls and it provides a one-stop-shop for viewing all the internet buzz as outputted by digg and its competitors. How this kind of website will change the face of peer-mediated news, I don’t think anyone could say at this stage – but I believe it will be something that may cause head-aches for digg and the rest before long.

When offered the choice of more content via PopUrls, I wonder will people contribute to mediating the content themselves through the individual sites or simply browse the results of others’ contributions? Perhaps sites such as PopUrls will ultimately unite the news mediation sites behind the one with the strongest market share – they’re already displaying largely the same content, it would make sense for people to pool their votes all into the one site. Then again, mergers on the net have never been simple – just as likely a unifying movement will force flagging competitors to turn to more targeted, niche content. Either way, I believe the user will win out in the end (which just goes to show how dissimilar mergers offline and online are!)