Citizen Media Sites

I'm posting the information I gathered for the current status of the sites mentioned in the citizen media article on here because I have been trying for weeks to post it on the wiki but I am having difficulties.
Northwest Voice: This site is still up and active. There are postings but the site lacks a lot of interaction. The most recent postings have no responses or comments and also have a low number of viewings.

Newwest.net: The site is active. There are little comments in response to the articles. The site does not appear to be a successful social community.

an informal survey

I think by this point of the course, it is more than established that virtual communities do form and count by classical terms as communities (Geimenshaft) I wonder, though, how through the ethos of these communities (which are invariably, recent) a rudimentary moral code could form. Is virtual morality an extension of real-world morality, or does it follow a different pattern in permissibility? I would think it important to consider the cross-cultural hybrid communities that form. Maybe the fact that actual (i use actual to mean real-world) societies' differ in their concepts of moral vs. conventional rules a renegotiation of what the filter is for morality is necessary.
Can virtual communities be, in a sense, liminal spaces for morality? Does a moral code necessarily arise from a community? Does the lack of physical presence limit the need for a moral code (limited ability to produce physical harm etc)

I just want to know what others think.

Facebook steals first base from Myspace

I thought this article was interesting because I've always assumed Myspace was more popular than facebook because it appears to have alot more members. Even after Facebook opened its social network up for users not in the college network, and added several application features that will allow users to mimick myspace sites in a sense, I still am surprised. Although I prefer facebook over myspace, I have experienced many inquiries on whether I have a myspace account, and I can't say the same for facebook. My guess, based on our discussions in class is that facebook must have a stronger social community which is not surprising at all. Myspace seems to lack the idea of community and ends up looking like a type of advertising device for those seeking "celebrity status", at least as far as the internet goes. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=137

Journalism 2.0

What should come up in my RSS reader this afternoon but a post from Warren Ellis linking back to a new J-Lab study on citizen media - Journalism 2.0 (pdf) -written by Mark Briggs and with an introduction by Phil Meyer. Haven't read through it yet but seems - timely.

What's with the link-weighted searching, anyway?

Well, I am finally a little satisfied. I have my own (relatively) new blog and no real readership (which is actually fine with me, since I'm just co-dependent enough that I would feel responsible for blogging very regularly if I had a more regular readership). However, I do have Sitemeter and am able to track the referrals that lead to my blog.

So far they have been totally ho-hum and mostly related to a post I wrote on nature vs. technology: the lead-in apparently occurs when people search for "nature vs. nurture," which is in the text of the post. Another person searched for "documentation strategy." Someone else for Derrida.

I'm pleased to see that today, however, a search worthy of being called odd led to my blog. I can't even begin to explain what did it. The search was for "energy feeding aliens."

Radiohead to Smother Music Industry with Pillow

As has been noted in several places, Radiohead today announced their plans for distribution of their forthcoming album, In Rainbows. I've been speculating on this for a while, as I noted a year or so back that they were without record contract, and didn't really need one. And I'm not in the least surprised by what they're doing - letting fans decide how much to pay:

This weekend the band announced that its new album, called "In Rainbows," will go on sale on Oct. 10. They still haven't signed with a label, and the album won't be available in record stores nor on iTunes or any other online music shop. You'll find it only on the band's site, and if you're looking for a digital version, the price is very attractive: Whatever you'd like to pay.

You can pre-order the new album here. Click to purchase the download and you're presented with a simple screen at which you've got two boxes to fill in, quantity and price (in pounds). "It's up to you," the site says.

This makes me incredibly happy. Not just that there's a new Radiohead album dropping two days after my birthday, and not just that it'll be as free as I want it to be, but that they're doing their part to bring to a close the current structure of the corrupt, extortionist record industry:

Radiohead completed their contract with the EMI label with their last album, "Hail to the Thief," and since then have not kept their antipathy toward record companies very secret. In this clip a fan pleads, "Tell us about the new album!" Yorke answers, "Who says there's an album?" And when the New York Times asked him about it last year, Yorke drew a picture of a band deeply disillusioned with the state of the music industry today. "We were having endless debates, spending entire afternoons talking about, 'Well, if we do something, how do we put it out?' ... It just became this endless and pointless discussion. Because in our dreams, it would be really nice to just let off this enormous stink bomb in the industry."

...

For every $1 song sold on iTunes, according to reports, Apple keeps about 30 cents, giving about 70 to the record label. But activists say artists typically get just 8 to 14 cents per song from the deal -- or about $0.80 to $1.40 per album sold digitally.

So that's the main test here; in order for the band to come out ahead, Radiohead needs to clear only more than a buck-50 per sale. Easy.

And that's supposing that they even care about making money from the album (as opposed to their sold-out-in-perpetuity tours) which, millionaires many times over, they don't really need to worry about.

Yet another emergent model for how to make money online for creative efforts, and one that bears watching both for its own success (highly likely) or further adoption (also likely).

Is MySpace Really That Popular?

It's a little bit of an old article but I thought it had some things that supported our thoughts on how some social networks can look huge and extremely interactive but in reality their users do not use the site that often. It also touched on the idea we talked about with the coffee cards and how it's more attractive before it starts to go mainstream. Mainly I just like the article cause I've never been a fan of MySpace and now I know someone else out there agrees with me that it's huge numbers of registered users doesn't really mean much!

Enjoy!