infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

• Myspace Books: Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture
  There are so many things wrong with this, starting with “Myspace Books.”
  (del.icio.us tags: books myspace)
• Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?
  danah boyd offers some advice for educators negotiating the social impacts of Social Networking Systems.
  (del.icio.us tags: yasns myspace privacy education)
• xkcd: Map of Online Communities
  I’m really behind the curve posting this, but it was a hit in one of my presentations last week.
  (del.icio.us tags: Web2.0 yasns map awesome)

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• Magazine covers: good contrarian indicators
  Lunch over IP points to research that suggests companies are peaking when they appear on the covers of business magazines.
  (del.icio.us tags: magazine business journalism)
• Growth of Twitter vs. Blogger
  Jason Kottke graphs the number of messages between Blogger and Twitter early in their growth, and concludes that Twitter’s growth far surpasses Blogger’s. I’m not sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison.
  (del.icio.us tags: Twitter Web2.0 blog)

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• Why the 09ers Are So Upset
  Ed Felten does a great job of explaining the resistance that has sprung from the current encryption brouhaha.
  (del.icio.us tags: freeculture DRM DVD)
• Forbes: Can You Hear Me Now?
  Sherry Turkle outlines five psychosocial problems that could emerge from widespread social networking and ubicomp.
  (del.icio.us tags: ubicomp chat telephony yasns)
• techPresident: The Battle to Control Obama’s Myspace
  I’m late posting this excellent account of how the Obama campaign wrestled control of a MySpace profile from a committed volunteer.
  (del.icio.us tags: myspace UGC politics politics2.0)

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I didn’t see this news until now, but I have a few thoughts on Yahoo!’s decision to shut down the Yahoo! Photos service and migrate users to Flickr. The TechCrunch post has an interesting line graph charting the relative traffic of the two sites. Yahoo! Photos has been on a downward trend, while Flickr’s traffic has grown, exceeding Y!P in March. While I would agree that Flickr is certainly a more pleasant and interesting service, I wonder if this difference in traffic has more to do with the affordances of Flickr, rather than raw traffic. Flickr is designed as a social, public-facing site. Bloggers can use the site to host photos, and users are encouraged to explore friends’ and strangers’ photos through tags, search, and “interestingness.” In contrast, Y!P seems to be largely designed to host personal, not public, photos. The article says Y!P has over two billion hosted photos, while Flickr has about 500 million. The relative ages of the sites could account for this, but I think the kinds of traffic are different as well. If I were, for example, a parent who primarily wanted to share photos of children and daily life, I’m not sure Flickr would be an appropriate solution for me. While Flickr is not MySpace, the purpose of Flickr seems to be public identity construction, whether you’re a serious amateur photographer, a wannabe a-list blogger, or a hipster.

I’ve talked about this in school, but I don’t think I’ve shared this idea here. I think Web 2.0 applications depend on particular kinds of cultural capital for their functioning. In particular, tagging sites like Flickr and del.icio.us require the user to understand how tagging works if photos or links to be discoverable. One only needs to look at the misapplication of tags on YouTube to see how a lack of user knowledge can break a system. (I’m not saying YouTube is unsuccessful, but I think the tag system is useless.) I wonder how proficient the n00bs from Y!P will be in tagging, or if misapplied tags will pollute the folksonomy. Moreover, I do think knowing how to use the privacy settings (setting photos Friends-only for example) requires a cultural capital not all users are aware of and may only learn after a distasteful experience.

It should be interesting to see how this transition plays out. I don’t imagine that Y!P users are the kind of sophisticated Web users who will blog their experiences with the transition, but watching a qualitative sense of “tag quality” might reveal an awkward transition from Y!P.

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• LAPD attacked journalists and protesters at immigration rallly
  It appears the LAPD failed to give the largely Spanish-speaking crowd orders to disperse in Spanish before shooting rubber bullets into a crowd with children present.
  (del.icio.us tags: lawenforcement journalism stupid immigration)
• Rough Type: The YouTube elite
  YouTube has announced it will begin compensating a handful of top contributors. Nick Carr argues that the injection of cash into the YouTube will change the dynamics of the site, away from a commons model.
  (del.icio.us tags: YouTube Web2.0 economics UGC)
• The Buried 1957 Plymouth
  A time-capsule containing a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere will be unearthed in Tulsa on June 15th.
  (del.icio.us tags: tulsa history futurism transportation)

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• PEW Report: Teens Getting Smart about Online Privacy
  Josh Porter has the overview.
  (del.icio.us tags: youth privacy statistics)
• LATimes: The Internet sure loves its outlaws
  This profile of bittorrent evangelists The Pirate Bay mentions how Sweden’s Pirate Party rivals its Green Party in size.
  (del.icio.us tags: bittorrent intellectualproperty copyright)
• fortuitous
  Matt Haughey’s new blog has business information for Webby freelancers and entrepreneurs. I dig the fixed-gradient thing at the bottom.
  (del.icio.us tags: Web2.0 business blog)

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