My soup

French Twitter users to defy election embargo

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:34:43 GMT

Al Jazeera :: Twitter users in France are expected to break an embargo on publishing partial voting results in Sunday’s presidential runoff vote, challenging a decades-old law and risking fines of up to $99,000. Swiss and Belgian media have also vowed to break the law, which prohibits individuals, media and polling institutes from publishing voting results or estimates before the closure of all polling stations on mainland France at 8pm on election day.

Continue to read Cajsa Wikstrom, www.aljazeera.com

Catherine Bennett: Ms Mensch, Internet hatred goes far beyond sexism

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:26:34 GMT

Guardian :: Given the vast numbers of people who are still, reportedly, unacquainted with all aspects of the fast developing world of social media, one or two definitions may be necessary. Twitter, for example, is a popular forum for exchanging 140-character comments about this or that. Polcyb is the society for the policing of cyberspace.

Louise Mensch may be the web's most complex, least easily defined manifestation to date, a kind of multi-platform, self-replicating entity of seemingly unlimited reach that combines the latest in artificial intelligence with, some fear, a virus-like tendency to spread, uncontrollably, across every aspect of the media, 24/7, from publishing to print to social media to radio to television.

[Catherine Bennett:] Louise, you don't know the half of online cruelty

Continue to read Catherine Bennett, www.guardian.co.uk

The Carthage Declaration: Social media has brought 'unprecedented freedom of expression'

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:31:15 GMT

DOHA :: After three days of deliberation, press freedom advocates gathered in post-revolutionary Tunisia have issued a wide-ranging declaration recognising the role social media has played in bringing about “unprecedented freedom of expression and democratic transformation.” The Carthage Declaration, issued on Saturday (May 5) at the close of UNESCO’s annual summit to mark World Press Freedom Day, called on all concerned parties to “promote user-generated content and citizen participation in media.”

Continue to read www.dc4mf.org

Twitter said to have considered buying mobile photo app Camera+ but ...

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:19:20 GMT

Bloomberg :: Soon after Facebook agreed to pay $1 billion for Instagram, social networking rival Twitter considered acquiring a mobile photo-sharing application called Camera+, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said. Twitter executives held several meetings with Camera+ developer Tap Tap Tap, but talks broke down before Twitter could make an offer.

Continue to read Mark Milian, go.bloomberg.com

Boston Globe and a fundamental change: 'Yesterday’s gone' (true for today, tomorrow)

Sun, 06 May 2012 09:42:04 GMT

Boston Globe :: For what seemed like forever, copy editors embraced the routine task of changing the days of the week in stories to “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow.” The duty was virtually second nature -- as rang clear at another newspaper on a long-ago Easter weekend when an editor transformed Holy Saturday to “Holy yesterday.”

But today articles are no longer written only for the newspaper alone ...

HT: Mark Little, Storyful, here:

Good riddance RT @DJBentley: The Boston Globe kills today, tomorrow and yesterday. ow.ly/aIXZv
— mark little (@marklittlenews) May 6, 2012

Continue to read [needs registration] Charles F. Mansbach, www.bostonglobe.com

Discussed here - Continue to read Justin Ellis, www.niemanlab.org

Capture daily life: On May 15th we ask you to photograph what is close to you

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:58:20 GMT

aDay.org :: On May 15th we ask you to photograph what is close to you. Upload a photo, share it, compare it and join others all around the world doing the same. Let a part of your life inspire generations to come.

[Archbishop Desmond Tutu:] Take this unique opportunity with me, and thousands of others around the world, to create a priceless collection of images, to boost understanding and enhance research and education.

HT: Christian Dumont and The Next Web

RT @TheNextWeb: This project is capturing the world in photographs in one day vsb.li/VBVy7T by @nfm
— christian dumont (@dumontchristian) May 6, 2012

Continue to read www.aday.org

BBC Radio 3: Composer Jonathan Dove invites suggestions for subject of music piece

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:46:59 GMT

Engage your audience ...

Guardian :: On Monday the leading British composer Jonathan Dove, acclaimed for operas such as Flight and Tobias and the Angel, will offer BBC Radio 3 listeners the chance to commission a similar short orchestral portrait – this time of a public figure – to be composed by him by the end of the year. As the station's "composer in residence" for the day, Dove is to ask his audience for suggestions to inspire him and will announce his decision on Tuesday.

Continue to read Vanessa Thorpe, www.guardian.co.uk

Data journalism Guardian: WikiLeaks Iraq war logs, every death mapped

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:15:26 GMT

Another great visual data journalism example. The Guardian team used Google Fusion tables. A text-numbers only version wouldn't reveal how many have died.

Guardian :: The Wikileaks Iraq war logs provide us with a unique picture of every death in Iraq. These are those events mapped using Google Fusion tables (Fusion tables are downloadable).

Clipped from: www.guardian.co.uk (share this clip)

Continue to read Simon Rogers, www.guardian.co.uk

Data journalism: Four ways to slice Obama’s 2013 budget proposal

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:57:55 GMT

A great example of how data journalism can help to get excited about "boring" issues.

New York Times :: "How $3.7 Trillion is Spent" - Explore every nook and cranny of President Obama's federal budget proposal.

Clipped from: www.nytimes.com (share this clip)

Explore the interactive graphic Shan Carter, www.nytimes.com

'Journalism in the Age of Data': A 54min video documentary online

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:49:17 GMT

Perfect for rainy Sundays (and other similar days): a 54 minutes video documentary.

Stanford :: A video report on data visualization as a storytelling medium. Produced during a 2009-2010 Knight Journalism Fellowship. Total running time: 54 min with related information and links.

Clipped from: datajournalism.stanford.edu (share this clip)

Watch it here datajournalism.stanford.edu

Data journalism at the Guardian: What is it and how do we do it?

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:38:28 GMT

It is an "older" article in a fast growing field, but I recommend to read it if you like to find your way into data journalism.

Guardian :: Has data journalism become curation? - Sometimes. There's now so much data out there in the world that we try to provide the key facts for each story - and finding the right information can be as much of a lengthy journalistic task as finding the right interviewee for an article. We've started providing searches into world government data and international development data.

Our 10 point guide to data journalism - Continue to read Simon Rogers, www.guardian.co.uk

Why journalists should use data? Data journalism at a glance, handbook for free online

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:24:40 GMT

Data Journalism Handbook :: What This (free) Book Is (And What It Isn’t): The Data Journalism Handbook is intended to be a useful resource for anyone who thinks that they might be interested in becoming a data journalist, or dabbling in data journalism. Lots of people have contributed to writing it, and through our editorial we have tried to let their different voices and views shine through. We hope that it reads like a rich and informative conversation about what data journalism is, why it is important, and how to do it.

Download here - Continue to read datajournalismhandbook.org

YouTubers bring audience to Ford-sponsored NBC reality series

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:11:20 GMT

GigaOM :: Think reality TV is saturated with product placement? Meet Escape Routes, just finishing its run on NBC Saturday nights at 8 PM (as well as on Hulu), and using large amounts of screen time to sell you Zynga games, iPads and, above all else, the Ford Escape. Despite the level of salesmanship involved, though, there are some interesting digital innovations in the structure of the show and in the casting.

Continue to read Liz Shannon Miller, gigaom.com

Warren Buffett to CNBC: Mark Zuckerberg right to keep tight control

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:03:06 GMT

CNBC :: Warren Buffett has no plans to buy into the upcoming Facebook IPO, but tells CNBC's Becky Quick he has spoken for a few hours with founder Mark Zuckerberg and thinks he's doing the right thing by maintaining tight control of the company, even after it goes public.

HT: Henry Blodget, Business Insider

Buffett just told me he spoke to Mark Zuckerberg for hours about taking Facebook public. Offered advice. #BuffettWatch #BRK2012
— Becky Quick (@beckyquickcnbc) May 5, 2012

Continue to read Alex Crippen, BuffetWatch.cnbc.com

Media for Participatory Democracy: (Evil) practices of Nepali media

Sun, 06 May 2012 05:24:57 GMT

The Himalayan Times | Nepal :: Is the media sector, which point outs others’ wrongdoings and ill practices, away from such evil things? It is a question that the general people, media and non-media fraternity generally think about. Although, the media do raise their fingers against ill practices of different organisations, persons and areas, the Fourth Estate is also not away from such practices. Media critiques, researchers and academicians point out the flaws of the media and make recommendations for improvements.

deals the evil practices of Nepali media, state of the media democratisation and influence of the Fourth Estate in society. Kharel, a senior media critique, makes valuable recommenda

Continue to read Prakash Acharya, www.thehimalayantimes.com

Warren Buffett says Berkshire Hathaway may buy more newspapers

Sun, 06 May 2012 05:17:14 GMT

Yahoo News :: Billionaire Warren Buffett says his company's purchase of his hometown newspaper last year may not be the last one even though newspapers face significant challenges. A Berkshire Hathaway shareholder questioned whether last year's purchase of the Omaha World-Herald in Buffett's hometown was a personal indulgence.

HT: Jim Romenesko

Buffett defends purchase of hometown paper. yhoo.it/IUOTQ3 | That paper's coverage of BH meeting: bit.ly/JAVaxc
— Romenesko (@romenesko) May 5, 2012

Continue to read Associated Press, news.yahoo.com

Brazil: Fashion retailer C&A plays Facebook ‘likes’ for items in its real-world stores

Sun, 06 May 2012 05:07:52 GMT

Springwise :: Bridging the gap between the online and offline worlds is a challenge for any brand, but Brazilian fashion retailer C&A has come up with an innovative solution. Much the way both Renault and Bacardi have found ways to translate between real-world approval and Facebook “likes”, so C&A has found a way to bring customers’ Facebook approval into full view in its real-world stores.

Screenshot: C&A video on YouTube, at 00:23, uploaded by cea

Spotted by: Paula Rizzo

HT: Prismatic via Mathew Ingram, GigaOM:

Brazilian fashion retailer displays Facebook ‘likes’ for items in its real-world stores prsm.tc/3kftvW via @prismatic
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) May 6, 2012

Continue to read www.springwise.com

Storytelling: Why memes matter

Sun, 06 May 2012 04:34:30 GMT

What is a meme? The Daily Meme's understanding of "a meme" here. An additional interpretation in this piece:

GigaOM :: Memes say a lot about us as a culture and as such bear serious examination. For example, even though you can hide your identity on the Internet (where nobody knows you’re a dog) the fact is the web is just as segregated as the rest of the world, said ROFLCon 2012 panelist Latoya Peterson, owner and editor of Racialicious. Memes, oddly enough, are one way to address that separation.

"Meme" - Continue to read here Barb Darrow, gigaom.com

Apple said to have discussed Epix movie app for Apple TV

Sun, 06 May 2012 04:20:33 GMT

Consumer market:

Washington Post :: Apple held talks to let subscribers of the Epix movie channel watch films on its $99 set-top box, according to an executive familiar with the matter. The sides discussed allowing Apple to stream films to existing Epix subscribers through an app that would be installed on Apple TV,

Continue to read Edmund Lee | Cliff Edwards, www.washingtonpost.com

Ben Huh on Copyright and Making the Meme Ecosystem Better

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:21:27 GMT

Thanks to Erhardt Graeff for all his help with taking livenotes for this panel!

Ben Huh, ROFLcon organizer and I Can Haz Cheezburger founder introduces us to the topic of his talk: Copyright and Making the Meme Ecosystem Better. He asks the audience, “More people are trying to use old models in the new system. How do we defend against that?”

Ben compares the SOPA debates to a debate on abortion. With SOPA and even now with other cybersecurity bills, the Internet and traditional media are talking about two different things entirely—the former concerned with freedom of speech and creativity, the latter focused on profit. But the politicians only respond to jobs, Ben points out.

“It is clear that we were unable to educate Congress,” says Ben, “on how the Internet works and the importance of creative content.” He refers to how much of US soft power is exported as culture—not just the film Hot Tub Time Machine, but all kinds of creative exports.

Ben argues that in the whole scheme of content creation, it is actually the things you don’t consider to be highbrow that tend to make the most social impact. Our current copyright model in the US ensures that the copyright holder can reap profits for the author’s lifetime plus 90 years. However, the Internet turns that model upside down by putting into question what constitutes quality content.

Things like poorly-drawn rage comics may not seem like quality content at first, but when they’re picked up as a meme, begin to have actual value. “It’s like today’s Seinfeld,” explains Ben. “It’s about the most mundane shit. This content is not particularly funny, it’s more about the commonality of experience.”

Ben proceeds to give us a quick picture of the history of intellectual property. He explains that copyright was only meant to incentivize creation enough to make a little profit, and then content would be released into the commons. While patents have remained more or less the same, the term length of copyrights has since increased dramatically. When did we move from copyright as a creative incentive to “how do I get paid back for Hot Tub Time Machine?”

“Nobody owns a meme,” says Ben. He’s preaching to the choir, of course. “By definition, a meme is about the transfer of an idea between multiple people. If you cannot pass an idea virally today, it has no value.” Ben says that’s why you need companies like Cheezburger, whose job it is to transmit those ideas. He asserts that memes are replaceable—they are commodities, thus the need for differentiation through proliferation.

Many of the original works making up our most popular memes are virtually meaningless until they are re-packaged as cultural moments. Take for example, Keyboard Cat or Blake Boston (Scumbag Steve). Ben says we are biologically wired to visually identify the subject of the image macros with their respective meme, even if they did not participate in the creation of it.

After making these points, Ben opens the floor for questions. He is asked about the relationship between the Internet and so-called “old media.” Ben responds, “Remixing is part of the marketing chain of the Internet, that’s something that old media doesn’t understand.” He brings up the “Hitler Reacts” meme, which led to increased interest in its source film Downfall, previously a relatively obscure movie.

However, just a couple of questions in, Ben is interrupted by a heckler in the crowd, who yells, “Why are you raping the Internet?” There’s a clear subset of conference attendees upset with companies like Cheezburger, and Ben, personally, for appropriating content. Ben refers to this as community loss aversion. One by one the hecklers are asked to leave the auditorium. On his way out, the last heckler tells the audience: “He’s making money off all of your hard work.”

Undeterred, Ben continues to answer questions from the audience. When asked about why Cheezburger adds a watermark to user-submitted content, he replied, “We had a debate early on when we couldn’t pay our bandwidth bill of whether or not to allow hotlinking of our images, and this was our compromise.”

Ben proposes that we allow people to play with and remix content, even if the original content is an expensive advertising campaign like Wieden+Kennedy’s Old Spice Guy. However, he says that the current copyright paradigm restricts this freedom. If the only available content for remixing is from 150+ years ago, only certain people—academics—can appreciate that content. Ben believes the biggest gains for remixing are not derived from the classics. “We need to make available content that people are used to seeing every day.”

The Cheezburger CEO recalls talking to a member of one of the artistic guilds in Hollywood. He says that most of the guildmembers did not support SOPA and did not want to participate in the machine of copyright, but lacked the funds to oppose it. These were Hollywood’s creatives— actors, writers, videographers, and more.

Ben contrasts the copyright situation in the US to that of countries overseas, some with oppressive governments, including China. In many of those places, despite censorship of political content, there exists considerable freedom to remix commercial content. As Ben puts it, “It’s the Wild West over there, and their media and creative companies are growing very, very fast.”

Ben rounds out his point by drawing on an example from one of the more prominent audience members—writer and entrepreneur Andy Baio of Waxy.org. One of Andy’s projects, Kind of Bloop, was an 8-bit rendition of Miles Davis’ album Kind of Blue. For the cover, Andy created a pixel art version of the original album art in the spirit of transformation. However, threatened with a lawsuit from the original photographer, he was forced to settle out of court, even though fifty years had passed. Ben cites this example to show that we can’t hide behind fair use forever, and calls upon us to reevaluate copyright and the content ecosystem that it supports.

Workshopping NewsJack with Press Pass TV

Sat, 05 May 2012 23:48:38 GMT

Members of Press Pass TV (Press Pass, http://presspasstv.org/) and members of the Center for Civic Media met last week for a codesign workshop to explore using NewJack in the Press Pass Respect in Reporting (RIP) campaign that seeks to establish new standards among journalists writing about violence.

Press Pass describes the RIP campaign: “When facts are missed or people are misrepresented, families, neighbors and community spend time and energy needed to grieve and move forward instead fighting to preserve the memories of their loved ones and restore their reputations. And when irrelevant information like addresses and hospitals are reported, innocent lives are put at risk. At Press Pass TV, we believe in the unlimited power of media to awaken individuals, create dialogue across race, religious and ethnic lines and empower communities to shape their own destiny. The Respect in Reporting campaign is an opportunity for news outlets to partner with communities to shape a more just and equitable future for all of the neighborhoods that they serve.”

Press Pass promotes this campaign through public events, organizing among communities that have lost members to violence, and with news reporters. The RIP campaign asks reporters to to pledge to follow guidelines developed by Press Pass together with the families and communities (click to view guidelines: http://www.respectinreporting.presspasstv.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/RIPGuidelines1.pdf). NewsJack (http://newsjack.in) is a web-based tool that lets you remix the news. You can select any news story on the web and edit the text and images of the story and the content surrounding the story on that web page. Since Dan Schultz and Sasha Costanza-Chock announced it to the Civic Media community and the world wide web on April 24, we’ve seen mostly comical uses of the tool -- with people replacing content as satire.

Together with Press Pass, we’re using this tool as a critical analysis tool in teaching about media literacy and giving people a way to engage with the guidelines of the campaign by experimenting with them themselves. In our codesign workshop, we used NewsJack to edit contents of articles about violence reported by Boston news sources and to remake these so they adhere to the RIP guidelines.

The image below is a screen capture from one of the remixed articles. Among changes like eliminating mentions of specific hospitals and addresses, the remixers changed the title of the article. The robbery was known to be marijuana and the remixers explain that many readers may have experience with marijuana sales or sellers, but fewer will have experience with other drugs. Specifying that that this was a marijuana sale allows more people to relate to the people in the article and referring to the robbery generally as a “drug robbery” may create distance and judgment or fear. Click hereto see the full remix (http://poof.hksr.us/xpneuxab).

We changed language and also discovered that the guidelines might possibly require different reporting methods from reporter and not just changes in choices of language. One remixer found that her article already seemed to adhere to the guidelines and noted that this was true of some publications and seemingly less true of others. The act of finding articles and reporters who are already reporting in ways that RIP suggests could lead the campaign to allies in taking the pledge.

We will continue to develop ways that RIP can use NewsJack to give people experience in modeling the pledge guidelines and in analyzing media content.

Related links:
Press Pass TV - http://presspasstv.org/
RIP guidelines - http://www.respectinreporting.presspasstv.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/RIPGuidelines1.pdf
RIP-NewsJack remix - http://poof.hksr.us/xpneuxab
NewsJack - http://newsjack.in
NewsJack.in writeup in Poynter - http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/171467/newsjack-launches-to-let-you-hijack-news-websites/

Defending the Internet

Sat, 05 May 2012 23:13:16 GMT

The closing ROFLcon keynote. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to defend These Internets from those that would take away its freedoms. On the heels of the SOPA/PIPA debacle, we’ve assembled this final boss panel to scheme and plan for the next time some baddies come around the corner.

Panelists:

Alexis Ohanian (Reddit / Breadpig)
Tiff Cheng (Fight For The Future)
Derek Slater (Google)
Elizabeth Stark (Stanford / Yale)
Anil Dash (mod – Think Up)

Derek (@derekslater): We need to fix the process of how internet policy is made. Internet policy should be like the internet, not politics as usual.

Alexis (@kn0thing): I just want up and down vote arrows on everything that comes out of Washington.

Elizabeth (@starkness): The RIAA and MPAA don’t really like the internet. We’ve seen them fight every new technology that emerges, whether it’s VHS or MP3. Every minute you’re spending on Reddit or other sites, you’re not spending it watching a TV show or a movie. They’re doing everything they can -- last year they spent $94 million to lobby, versus $14 by all technology companies -- so we’re fighting a pretty strong opponent.

Tiff: Until the SOPA battle, we hadn’t collectively said together, “We believe in an open internet.” We should work to expand and protect that power and that public good that the internet provides.

Elizabeth: Technically, Facebook has a policy that, if 35% of users agree on a policy, they can bring it to Facebook and modify official policy.

Derek: We have freedom online. You can choose to join or leave a conversation online. But when it comes to governance and internet policy, we can’t just pack up our toys and go home. We actually need to engage with other people, have empathy for where they’re coming from, and try to find a way forward.

“Why do you care what I think? I care what you think.” The great thing about the internet is that you have a voice to say something.

Anil: If we can’t rule ourselves, who are we to say you should be making policy for us?

Alexis: Ostensibly every American cares about privacy and personal rights. That’s part of being an American.

Elizabeth: Media was not even covering SOPA until the very end. SOPA became a meme and it propagated through the internet. Did anyone see the SOPA toilet paper on kickstarter? The SOPA glasses/t-shirts/etc.? This the first time we saw mobilization at this scale.
The internet’s response was chaotic, distributed, and decentralized.

Anil: But there were instigators. What happens between “this is a bad bill” and “we need to do something about this?”

Tiff: It’s not about policy. Nobody here actually cares about making policy. We work to represent and push for the broad capabilities of the internet. Reddit works on this principle of openness that drives ingenuity on the web. Participatory culture-making is where we want to go.

Alexis: It’d be great if we could get Congress to publish all bills as advice animals. A bunch of folks from the New York tech community got together

Elizabeth: So many Democrats were lined up to cosponsor SOPA, they couldn’t all get their names on it because they wanted the bill to be seen as bipartisan.

Tiff: We’ve lost on copyright for 20 years, and this was going to be another slam-dunk for them that they put a ton of work into, so the fact that we won on this was a big deal.

Anil: Skeptical observers point to Google’s influence behind the scenes.

Derek: It’s hard for people in Congress to understand how the internet could mean so much to so many people. Generally speaking, people in DC went there for good reasons and are busy trying to keep our democracy and our economy going. We had this moment on January 18th, but what’s next? The next big threat won’t be a SOPA, it’ll be death by a thousand cuts. They’ll try to split the coalition between “I work for the internet” and “the internet works for me.” We need to work to keep these groups together. How many of you know about the ITU’s attempts to take over more control of the internet? [only about ten hands go up]

Anil: $94 million isn’t actually that much money, relative to Microsoft Office sales or the box office for the Avengers.

Elizabeth: You give me $94 million, I’ll get a lot of shit done, OK?

Anil: I want Hipmunk for Congress, where I can sort members of Congress by influence and then buy advertising in their districts.

Alexis: What gives me hope is that a bunch of people with phones and email addresses were able to scare Congress and remind them that they work for us. I believe we can do this job without playing their game.

Derek wants voters to get together, and build the tools to help voters organize.

Anil wants to know when the panelists got passionate about

Elizabeth doesn’t necessarily trust Google. The decisions are made in backroom deals, where one corporation can pretend to represent everyone using the internet. “We are the fucking Internet, and we are not going to let these people take it away from us.” She had basically given up and resigned herself to maybe out-innovating policy with new technology. SOPA came around and was the worst legislation she had seen in at least a decade, so she called some folks at Mozilla. Capitol Hill insiders advised them that, unless something huge happened, SOPA was going to pass. The November 16th day of action turned the tide, and Elizabeth decided she hadn’t given up.

Alexis was headed down to testify in Washington. He brought with him his personal success story of founding Reddit and selling it to Conde Nast for lots of money. Redditors advised him to ignore the censorship argument and focus on the internet’s role in job creation and as an economic growth engine. My entire identity is, like many of you, forged by the internet. The thought that the MPAA and others were going to take that away hurt so much. It became personal.

Derek argues for a big tent of internet freedom fighters, one that includes the Tea Party.

Where’s the next battle?
Elizabeth: The Obama Administration has given a nod to the MPAA and RIAA to enact a six-strike campaign based on Bittorrent activity. They’ve also given a nod to other legislation that would allow blocking of foreign websites.

The internet is international, and the open internet is an international issue. We don’t even know what the TPP says because we cannot get access to it. It’s becoming law through extralegal means. The US has a tendency to export its extremist copyright laws elsewhere around the world.

Tron Man stands up to comment. He says he’s the poster child for “made famous by the internet.” But he’s also a conservative, “and damn proud of it.” He’s upset with the anti-corporate rhetoric he’s heard here, and thinks we need to do a better job explaining the importance of the open internet to the political right.

Elizabeth: The conservatives and Republicans have been better than the Democrats on these issues.
Anil: Well, they’re not getting money from Hollywood.

Q: Did anyone in Congress honestly believe their constituents wanted this bill?
Alexis: They didn’t know about the ones who didn’t. Some of the best conversations I had were with FOX News and conservative congresspeople. Everyone thinks they have the best ideas, so let’s duke them out on a level playing field.

Derek argues that our representatives in Washington want to support innovation, but they’re just so busy and only hear from well-paid, well-connected lobbyists.

Consider: Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works vs. Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works.

The groups working to close the internet are well-funded and are paying very close attention to Congress. The online masses are already showing signs of outrage fatigue. CISPA is seeing less backlash than SOPA. Each new threat requires further education, and not all threats will be as clearly labeled as SOPA was. The price of libery is eternal vigilance.

Time's Up for Scott Thompson: More breaches of Yahoo's code of conduct

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:19:34 GMT

Forbes :: Fibbing about Scott Thompson's education wasn’t his only breach of Yahoo!’s code of conduct. He currently sits on 2 outside boards of directors of public companies: Splunk and F5 Networks. Yahoo! only allows officers to serve on 2. He’s in violation of that requirement since Splunk’s IPO.

Details - Continue to read here Eric Jackson, www.forbes.com

Spotify updates social sharing in desktop app, adds Tumblr

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:13:42 GMT

The Next Web :: Spotify has just released a minor update to its desktop app, with new fine-tuned sharing UI that means its users don’t have to leave the app. Perviously, sharing to Twitter opened a link to the browser, away from the app. Now, as it should, the app facilities complete sharing within.

A review by Harrison Weber, thenextweb.com

Twitter's little 'redesign': More context

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:08:59 GMT

Twitter :: After recent experimentation, we introduced a slight redesign to every Tweet that flows through your timeline on Twitter.com. A Tweet may be our basic unit of communication, but it also contains a universe: each one has an identity with a username, real name and avatar; a 140-character message that includes text as well as metadata like time and language; some context (replies, favorites and retweets of that Tweet), and perhaps media (photos, videos or links).

Explained here - Continue to read blog.twitter.com

Verizon moves toward 911 texting

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:04:47 GMT

The Hill :: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski praised Verizon Wireless on Friday for selecting a vendor to help deploy its first-in-the-nation implementation of its "text-to-911" service. The service will allow wireless phone users to contact Public Safety Answering Points, or 911 call centers, using text messages.

HT: Alex Wilhelm, The Next Web

Continue to read Andrew Feinberg, thehill.com

Arab Spring proves expensive for news agency AFP

Sat, 05 May 2012 20:59:25 GMT

TheNational :: The French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) says it incurred "substantial additional costs" from covering the Arab Spring protests last year. AFP, which approved its financial statements for last year on Wednesday, said sales were €281.4 million last year, a slight increase on 2010. Its margins remained similar last year, despite the high costs of covering events in the Middle East and North Africa, AFP said.

Continue to read Ben Flanagan, www.thenational.ae

The trouble with Sarah Lacy's PandoDaily? No cultural impact on the horizon

Sat, 05 May 2012 20:27:52 GMT

Kernel Magazine :: Something troubling is happening at the blog who would be king. Sarah Lacy’s PandoDaily rose from the ashes (ashes?) of AOL’s beleaguered TechCrunch and was initially touted as a new journalistic power in Silicon Valley, but it’s failing to meet expectations. The rumours are that traffic’s not great. One reason? A disappointing lack of proper journalism, despite the fact that Lacy is one of the few writers on the West Coast whom I would actually call a journalist.

The issues run deep.

From a reader - Continue here Milo Yiannopoulos, www.kernelmag.com

The day Facebook blocked Robert Scoble because of 'irrelevant' content ...

Sat, 05 May 2012 20:18:58 GMT

Robert Scoble | Google+ :: I go over to Max Woolf's content area on Facebook, and respond to his post about PandoDaily, which is here: https://www.facebook.com/max.woolf/posts/326466947419794.

Clipped from: www.facebook.com (share this clip)

... but Facebook keeps me from posting a comment. It gave me this error:

[Facebook error message:] This Comment Can't Be Posted. This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate ...

Looks like Facebook is doing content analysis in real time before it will let you post and is looking to keep the service "happy." I sure wonder now what kind of algorithms Facebook is running on content.

Robert Scoble initiated a discussion on Facebook:

Clipped from: www.facebook.com (share this clip)

Continue to read Robert Scoble, plus.google.com

Sky News is launching a 24-hour Arabic News Channel

Sat, 05 May 2012 20:04:38 GMT

The Next Web :: Having just been made available in the US and Canada via Livestation, Sky News is launching a 24-hour Arabic news channel, which has been two years in the making. Tomorrow, Sky News Arabia, the multi-media news platform is finally launching at 4pm GMT (8pm UAE time). Joining the ranks of Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and BBC News Arabic, Sky News Arabia is a 50/50 joint venture between BSkyB’s Sky News and UAE-based Abu Dhabi Media Investment Company (ADMIC).

Continue to read Nancy Messieh, thenextweb.com

The Battle for YouTube's Soul: Commercialization vs. the Creative Web

Sat, 05 May 2012 18:38:38 GMT

Christian Sandvig introduces our panelists:

Matt Harding (Where The Hell Is Matt), who became famous in that dark time before streaming video sites.
Judson Laipply (The Evolution of Dance, a 2006 YouTube performance with 70 million views in the first 8 months),
Liam Sullivan (Liam Show / "Shoes", which received 41 million views)

We have, gathered here, internet video royalty. But the field itself is changing significantly. On Wednesday, YouTube announced increased investment in professional production of content, to the tune of $200 million. They're going to have channels, hire existing celebrities to appear, produce serialized content, and get sponsors like AT&T to run ads over it. It's 2012, and YouTube has invented television!

The End of the Internet Video Star

It's 2012. There's a new vibe at YouTube. Its employees are less excited about finding new one-off sensations. They've been pushed to make money, and there's a specific kind of content they've learned to produce that reliably turns up an audience. It's television; serialized content. It takes Matt two years to make a 4-minute video, which works great for him, but isn't really worth the trouble for YouTube. They're not even interested in huge sensations like Friday, because these kinds of video are flashes in the pan.

Judson points to The Long Tail. Businesses have traditionally relied on a few big hits to pay the bills for all of the flops. The relatively free shelf space the internet provides was supposed to enable businesses like Amazon, Netflix and YouTube to be profitable off of the long tail of creativity. But marketers want to know who buys their product and how to get in front of those people. When you build a channel, you get a good idea of who's watching, demographically. Friday is a shotgun blast, and less valuable to advertisers.

Liam says the rule of YouTube is Always Be Posting. Success there now requires consistency, not premium quality. He tries to crank out one video a week without sacrificing quality.

There are new barriers to entry to success online. It was a sad day for the internet when The Evolution of Dance was bumped off of the YouTube Top 20 list by a Vevo music video. [the room boos Vevo] There's a rising tide of commercialization of YouTube videos. Matt Harding thinks the medium has been co-opted and the marketers have descended and it's time to move on to more creative pastures. He links original amateur work on YouTube to punk rock and other creative genres, where the artists must constantly seek new media to stay ahead of commercialization.

One Justin Bieber video has 300 million views. If you want to blame anyone, blame MTV, because they stopped showing music videos, turning younger generations to YouTube to watch music videos.

Were the guys on this panel real pioneers? Matt Harding points to the origin of the content. Is it a result of individuals being creative, or the professional entertainment industry? The latter is really good at making entertaining content.

Is YouTube picking winners and losers, or is the audience watching what they want?
Google has a LOT of money, and is positioning itself for the long-term with YouTube. Computer use has surpassed television watching amongst young people, a huge shift in terms of content consumption. Consumers are time-shifting and platform agnostic.

The spirit and relative virtue of the internet is interactivity and the fact that we get to pick what content we consume. There's a fear in the room that professionalization and commercialization of channels like YouTube have eroded this spirit. It's becoming more like TV, and that's a loss.

A nice side benefit of the Viacom lawsuit of YouTube was that it exposed previously internal memos establishing that YouTube never cared about internet culture and viral videos. They were happy to make money ripping off old sitcom episodes, if that was the path forward. It poses a challenge to ROFLcon attendees: If you care about internet culture, it might be time to move on. Says Dancing Matt, "YouTube doesn't care about us."

And here's some background on the panelists, mostly unrelated to the panel's theme:

Tell us your internet fame origin story.

Matt Harding found that a 15-year-old kid had uploaded his video and solicited Paypal donations, which tipped him off to the fact that other people found his video awesome. "I haven't had a job since" draws applause.

Judson actually started out wanting to be a professional speaker, and was looking for the hook that would make him original. He got the idea watching a black comic rip on white people dancing at a wedding. Everyone would get up from their tables, stand up to do the same dance, and then sit down until the next planned dance song came on. Judson put together a compilation of the forms of dance. This being 2001, he had four years to practice and improve the routine. He says that if YouTube had been around for the first version of the dance, it would have gone nowhere.

Liam was an actor and sketch comedian in Los Angeles who hadn't heard of YouTube. He put his work online, and, as YouTube was launched, people uploaded his videos to it.

The Viral Video Business

Before YouTube shared revenue, web sensations like Matt Harding had to partner with brands for revenue. He lucked out when Stride gum came along and gave him a bunch of money to go re-do his video for them. They didn't particularly care where in the world he was, as long as he returned with video on the agreed upon deadline. Matt also cashed out with Visa and other companies in TV ads in foreign countries.

Things have changed now, Matt says. These companies all have social media people who study branded content. There's an entire industry of web content production so that these companies no longer have to rely on accidental web stars.

Judson's main source of income, meanwhile, isn't from his video, but like other internet sensations here, the sheer amount of attention he received as a result of his video was priceless. Copyright restrictions prevented him from profiting on the original video and its 195 million views. The Soulja Boy video, for example, has 18 rights holders, and using the song required getting permission from and cutting a check to each one of these rights holders individually.

Liam sold t-shirts to stay afloat until revenue sharing came along. There are companies now that build collectives of creative artists like Machinima, the Collective, and Maker Studios. It reminds Liam of early Hollywood.

Your Most Awkward or Otherwise Memorable Interaction as a Result of Your Video

Judson got to go on Oprah, where, after watching his video, she disclosed off-camera, "I don't know why that's funny. But it is." He got the distinct feeling that you should not upset Oprah.

Matt really wanted to get into Saudi Arabia and disrupt show people smiling and dancing like they do everywhere else. Someone offered to get him into the country, so he scanned a copy of his passport and sent it to the stranger. The very next day he got a visa in the mail. It turned out that someone in the extended royal family had pulled strings. He flew to Saudi Arabia, where two men "in Lawrence of Arabia robes" met him at the door of the airplane with a sign reading, "Where the Hell is Matt." He got the royal treatment and didn't spend a dime.

The next day, they picked him up and told him he'd be dancing. They drove deep into the desert until they reached a large tent, where 40 guys awaited him, watching Oprah on a TV. He was given the traditional dress and a sword, like President Bush:

Matt ended up doing the Buffalo Shuffle (picture the frog dance in Looney Tunes) with a crew of 40 Saudi guys in the desert.

Liam's awkward moment is the Halloween he met his wife while dressed as a teenage girl. He spotted her, but was resistant to say hi because he was dressed as a 16-year old girl. She was with two gay friends, who told her that Liam was most likely also gay. Fortunately, she proved them wrong and approached Liam, and said "I've never wanted to make out with a woman before." (His poor wife is here in the audience).

Judson attributes their opportunities to the fact that they got in early. When he posted his video, the most-viewed video in the world was the Pokemon theme song. Google bought YouTube because they were competition, and as a huge corporation, it's better to buy them out than watch them become a real competitor like Facebook.

Making great TV even better: The BBC's approach to companion experiences

Sat, 05 May 2012 18:23:33 GMT

Here's how Victoria Jaye, BBC, Head of IPTV and TV Online Content describes companion experience: it "means additional content offered on a companion screen (PC, mobile, tablet or even the same TV), related to and synchronized with the programme you're watching on TV. This could be further information, a play along experience, social or control features - the overall aim being to enhance the audiences' TV viewing."

BBC Internet Blog :: In September, we'll be launching a companion experience for Antiques Roadshow on BBC One. Antiques Roadshow has established a special place in living rooms across the country over the 35 years it's been on our screens, with audiences shouting at their TVs, guessing the value of the antique items brought in by members of the public for valuation, and delighting in their extraordinariness and the stories that lie behind them. This year, we're going to tap into that audience behaviour.

BBC's approach - Continue to read Victoria Jaye, www.bbc.co.uk

The Southeastern Channel: Web Developer 1/ Web Designer/Streaming Video Expert

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:57:00 GMT

The Southeastern Channel: Web Developer 1/ Web Designer/Streaming Video Expert

Game changer…

Sat, 05 May 2012 16:45:13 GMT

Every now and then something comes along and the reaction is, “COOL! Why didn’t I think of that?” (or…”I thought of that years ago and it’s FINALLY come out.)

Back in the early 2000s JVC had something called the GY-DV300u aka the Streamcorder. That little gem was way ahead of its time. I grabbed one because after some pretty heavy duty research I found it had all the gizmos I wanted and needed to have a life after a multi-decade career as a broadcast news cameraman. But it had that little extra “umph” in the background that intrigued me – the ability to stream live to the web. And for some reason it never really took off. And the camera and it’s revolutionary potential kind of faded away…

Until this year when the 300u’s great granddaughter returned. And with a vengeance.

Meet the ! To me it’s an old friend gussied up and modernized. But it is a game changer and this time the time is ripe for it to reach the heights it missed last time around.

What’s new? Okay, so I admit I’m addicted to glass. A 23x zoom. Something that can reach out and pull you (and your audience) in close to situations you don’t even WANT to get close to. Most prosumer cameras in this price range only have a 10x or 14x zoom, leaving you miles short of the shot you really want.

Dual slot recording…the less expensive version of this camera, the has two slots for continuous recording too, but lacks the ability to record in HD in one slot and SD in the other. That ability allows you to shoot HD for the main event but SD to stream back quickly to the station for on-air. Wow.

I don’t even need to get into real manual controls, XLR inputs, three chips (1/3 CMOS)…the usual suspects in a pro’s array of necessary tools.

What happened in the past ten years that makes this new again?

Well, this time news is READY for a camera like this. In 2002 (when I got my JVC 300u) going live on the web was something entertaining…fun. But nobody in real news considered it seriously. After all, it wasn’t really professional – was it? Tiny little camera, poor quality…and there were live trucks and microwave trucks to handle important stories.

Times change…and now cell phones and Skype can put out decent enough (okay, so even I debate that one) images for news. Plus, reality has set in – financial reality. With the competition out there, lean and fast may make the difference between survival and death to cost conscious news organizations.

And while I absolutely love those good ole days, I’m a realist. What I see is a camera that may mean survival.

LOLitics

Sat, 05 May 2012 16:43:11 GMT

Panelists: Dan Sinker (Mozilla / @MayorEmanuel), Biella Coleman (McGill University), Latoya Peterson (Racialicious), Molly Sauter @oddletters (mod - Comparative Media Studies). This post written with Erhardt Graef.

Molly Sauter introduces the panel: How do regular memes and politics collide? There's the political world, the IRL world, and the internet world of hilarity and provocative humor.

Dan Sinker came to fame during a six-month @MayorEmanuel Twitter account telling an alternative and extremely profane version of reality of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's campaign. The first tweet went live the day Politico broke the story. It was a tale of a man who knew he was going to become mayor of Chicago, but who found the act of getting elected extremely tedious. He teams up with fictional David Axelrod, thinks up slogans, and adopts a puppy named Hambone and a mustachioed duck named Quaxelrod, also the name of the official website of the twitter feed: http://www.quaxelrod.com/.

The account drew a huge amount of attention, and 8-10 times the followers of the real Rahm Emanuel. The real politician has yet to keep up.

The account ended quite dramatically during a freak real-life hailstorm.

Complicating matters is that Dan remained anonymous throughout the entire affair.
Alexis Madrigal revealed his identity in The Atlantic in a piece "that, like, referenced Russian literature."

The news trucks descended, which inevitably led to a live meeting with the Mayor himself. The live meeting was broadcast on TV and drive-time radio.

We see echoes of politicians embracing memes in Hillary Clinton's meeting with the guys behind Texts From Hillary Tumblr. Savvy politicians have learned to disarm the meme by embracing it (Santorum?).

In fact, web-savvy politicians now seek to produce their own share-worthy memes. The Obama campaign has received 29,000 Facebook Likes on their Life of Julia project. The campaigns have learned about sharing and creating content that people want to share.

Unfortunately, the Mitt Romney campaign shut down the fake Mitt Romney Pinterest account, which poked fun at his immense wealth. Dan considers this a misstep. But the Romney campaign did score a win by taking over the Obama campaign's #julia Twitter hashtag and subverting the narrative. "At age 14, #Julia joins Sluts for Obama...". The hashtag's originally intended purpose, to help the Obama campaign, now serves to roil up the GOP base.

The 2012 campaign will see billions of dollars in spending, mostly on television advertising, but we're seeing memes play out online. The campaigns are fighting public battles over whether it's worse to eat a dog or travel with one on the roof of your car.

---

Latoya Jackson, editor of Racialicious, loves to investigate the internet's treatment of memes. She says the internet is just as segregated as public life, which we see most clearly in Shit Girls Say. Sheppard starts the site, and people around the internet see it and think, the girls I know don't talk like that, leading to Shit Black Girls Say. A black man in drag parodies the statements the girls in his life say ("Basketball Wives is on...").

As soon as the Shit ____ Say evolved, you saw it become racialized and adopted by various groups (her blog post on it). We watch Shit Asian Girls Say. The videos are humorous, but they also serve as in-house conversation: a racial group's in-group discussion about race not intended for the general public.

These videos are really funny if you can identify with them. But with Shit Spanish Girls Say sparked a huge YouTube debate (which Latoya admits, is not the best way to measure controversy). Commenters fought out the definition of "Spanish," and whether that included Dominicans and other groups.

The meme continues evolving, and you begin to see different types of marginalized identities producing their own versions. We see Shit Guys Say, and Shit Black Guys Say, where black women re-enact their favorite male quotes. The women's perspectives received far less accolades and attention than the Shit Girls Say videos.

It goes deeper. Instead of men in drag talking about women, or vice versa, we break from the heteronormative path and see gay men themselves naming themselves in the meme, because no one else was going to name them. Latoya sees it as an assertion of identity in the broader culture.

Then we have Shit Southern Gay Guys Say, which Latoya loves for a number of reasons. You probably need to watch:

This conversation erupted with who we are, what our culture is, and how we make fun of each other within that culture. As happens on the internet, the meme evolves, and suddenly X is talking to Y. Shit White Girls Say...to Black Girls, where black girls parody the things white girls have said to them their whole lives: "Is it bad to do blackface?"

Shit White Girls Say to Arab Girls: "Do you bellydance? Your family has oil money??"

We see many permutations. Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls: "I bet you're a terrible driver" "Where are you from? No, I mean, where are you really from? Where are your parents from?"

The variations show an articulation of the things individuals have heard because of their identity. People begin subverting the meme for activist ends: Stuff Cis People Say to Trans People

Folks who feel so marginalized, they begin poking fun at the offensive things their own allies say to them.(Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys).

The final activist mutation of the meme: Shit Everybody Says to Rape Victims. It serves as a public service announcement about the very real doubts rape victims face when they come out. "You were drunk. You hook up with everyone anyway. If he spent a lot of money on you, you knew you'd have to owe him something."

The evolution of the meme has gone places no one anticipated. What began as a joke became a way to inform each other about our own identities, and take the time to articulate a conversation we don't often hear.

Biella Coleman of McGill University is here to teach us Why Everything We Know About Anonymous is Wrong. She's grown frustrated in recent weeks by the representations of anonymous that are sedimenting.

We have different interpretations of Anonymous. Evgeny Morozov and Yochai Benkler disagree, but our picture is incomplete.

Our first assumption is that Anonymous is fundamentally inchoate and spectral, fluid and distributed. We retell the group's own mythos. These people are present on very stable IRC channels: AnonOps, AnonNet, and Voxanon. They're anonymous, but if you hang out there long enough, you can get a very real sense of who is who and who's doing what. We feed the hysteria around Anonymous by painting them as invisible spectres, which is exactly what overactive governments and law enforcement officials want.

We also frame Anonymous as some good, some evil, and all powerful. This isn't really the case. They haven't done anything to take lives or cause real damage. They've never been able to take down a website capable of major financial transactions, because those websites have the resources to fight DDoS attacks.

AntiSec's controversial hacking work is the closest we get to real harm, but even then we see an FBI informant steering hackers into more aggressive behavior.

Another incorrect aspect of our understanding of Anonymous is that they provide ammunition to those wanting to strengthen the surveillance state. Yes, Biella says, but more like rubber bullets than machine gun ammunition).

Quotes H.L. Mencken: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

If Anonymous were to disappear, the surveillance state would not. It's entrenched in our institutions, regardless of what Anonymous does.

Others argue that their political impact is insignificant because what they dish out is pure spectacle. Yes, they're good at spectacle, because of the DDoSing and the lulzes and other stupid things that garner media attention. On its own, this is ineffective, but it can be a very valuable tool in a diverse political kit.

If Biella had to choose between Anonyous and the EFF as the group fighting for my digital rights, she'd choose the EFF, but it's not a zero-sum game and she doesn't have to pick. She says we need investigative journalists who put the pieces of the puzzle together, we need activist organizations, and we need internet service providers who push back on the demands of surveillance from governments.

Biella argues that Anonymous has provided a small oasis of anonymity in a desert of surveillance, much like the literal facility currently being built in the desert in Utah by the National Security Administration. Their work has helped expose the creeping tendrils of the surveillance state. Their work doesn't fortify the surveillance state, because it's already here, but Biella's concern is that it might fortify the policies cementing these forms of resistance as criminal behavior.

I don't think you can call them a movement; it's just an idea. And don't we have a collective responsibility to say what we think is bullshit? Aren't we all Anonymous?
Biella: There are many people that use the name Anonymous. But if we lost IRC... Anonymous needs those stable places to exist, and real relationships form online. With AntiSec, there had been a lot of criticism from within Anonymous, including rumors of government infiltration.

I work with the National Lawyers Guild to provide Anonymous with defense attorneys. Often times the people who are accused of criminal activity were caught up in the middle of things. Do we defend them as mere pawns in a bigger game, or work to define their action as politically protected behavior?
Biella: You can represent them as concentric circles of more and less involvement...

Dan, why did you stay secret?
Dan: I didn't want to lose my job; I was a professor at a school in Chicago. The account was pretty vile. As it grew, I felt like I had a certain amount of cover. I liked Dan Line's Fake Steve Jobs when you it was anonymous it allowed you to suspend disbelief and enjoy it even more. The other reason is I'm not a "Fame Whore." I remember writing to Alexis Madrigal at the time saying I'm a little bit worried about this because it's going to make my life a little bit crazy. And it got way more crazy than I thought that it would. There was definitely a protection of self involved.
Latoya: Share the experience. No one on the internet knows that you are a dog. References Lisa Nakamura's work on identity and race online. You see this the most in fandom where you can be as passionate as you want but if you start asserting your personal identity more and more you can get ostracized. You can ask why the guitars are six-string or five-string in Guitar Hero, but certain questions are out of bounds like, "Why isn't there a single black guitarist?" danah boyd talks about this in terms of exploring queer identity online. And Ethan's work has been asking more generally, "Who is the 'we' here?"
Dan: Anonymous is a good example of this when they say "We are legion," which doesn't work if you know they are 25 people.
Biella: The fascinating thing with Anonymous is that their pseudo-anonymity allows a relatively high amount of diversity in a political movement. It allows people who are not alike to congregate around actual values rather than demographic identity.

For Biella, you talked a lot about the hobgoblins that mainstream media has created. I was wondering if you had a suggestion of how to change that mainstream media discourse since there is evidence that suggests this is how they treat social movements in general.
Biella: Mainstream media likes to make heroes out of individuals in social movements. I recommend Whitney Phillips work on trolls. I have spoken to 150 reporters over the past year and a half and I know it has some effect.

The Shit _____ Say uses the trope of montage and the rhythm of comedy to convey their message as memes. Is there are way this can be done more seriously?
Latoya: Comedy breaks down walls. I understand it therefore I can parody it. Shit Girls Say was already on its third video when you saw the first spinoffs start coming out. A lot of this is about how power is subverted which is where humor is a really powerful tool. When you get the rape victim video you can no longer laugh because you know the underlying truth is not funny, which I think was the real power of that video. Having that moment of reaction of it's so serious that I can't laugh is really moving.

Dan: It's well-documented, and certainly not monopolized by the internet, that humor allows us to laugh at things. Mayor Rahm Emanuel let us talk about how fucked Chicago is, and how 21 years of the Daly administration fucked us beyond repair.

"It's a lot funnier to talk about sticking your dick in the parking meter and fucking it" then the actual case of the city's parking meters being privatized.

Humor also spreads a lot more easily. The tens of thousands of retweets allowed Dan to experiment with what combination of the word 'fuck' and political commentary would be the most shared.

.@MercuryX is adding a community room to their newsroom #fillthelab

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:46:03 GMT

Merceditors Desk :: The call to #fillthelab takes on new meaning for The Mercury audience and residents of the Pottstown tri-county area, with the announcement today that our Community Media Lab was selected as one of 10 newspapers throughout Digital First Media to get funding for a community room project.

HT: Jim Brady, here:

The @MercuryX is adding a community room to their newsroom. @merceditor writes about it here: bit.ly/LfxTXS
— Jim Brady (@jimbradysp) May 5, 2012

Nancy March, or @merceditor, is the editor of The Mercury, an award-winning daily newspaper in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. She "writes about the trials and tribulations -- and joys -- of running a newsroom."

Continue to read Nancy March, merceditorsdesk.blogspot.de

Pricing: Paulo Coelho e-book sales jump +4,000pc thanks to $0.99 sale

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:19:13 GMT

TechDirt :: We recently wrote about Paulo Coelho convincing his publisher, Harper Collins, to run an experiment, in which they offered up nearly all of his ebooks for just $0.99 (the one exception being his most famous book, The Alchemist).Paulo himself contacted us to share some of the initial results -- pointing out that, according to Amazon, the sales of a bunch of his books increased between about 4,000% and 6,500%.

Continue to read Mike Masnick, www.techdirt.com

Dan York: As an author, why I truly hate e-book DRM

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:12:56 GMT

Disruptive Conversations :: As an author of multiple technical books, and a prolific online writer, I care a lot about intellectual property issues as they pertain to my content. On one level, you might think I would be extremely concerned about people stealing and re-using my content. And don't get me wrong... I am concerned. I choose distribution licenses carefully and I have pursued those who have scraped my content to simply wrap it in ads.

But I do NOT see "DRM" as the answer.

Continue to read www.disruptiveconversations.com

A Brief History of Webcomics at #ROFLCon

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:23:32 GMT

Panelists: R. Stevens (Diesel Sweeties), Sam Brown (Explodingdog)
Growing from the backwaters of nerdy scribblers uploading their doings onto the web, webcomics have grown into vast, mighty engines of culture online in the past decade plus. Whether it’s the firm geekery of xkcd or the more obscure dabblings of Achewood – webcomics have, more often than not, come to be the shared cultural anchor-points in the broader internet.
This panel brings together Rich Stevens and Sam Brown, who have been deep at the dark, beating heart of webcomics-land from the very beginning for a casual Q&A about the big picture of where things have been, where things are, and where they’re going.

“Thank god for the Internet. Don’t ever go to old media when you can make it big on the Internet,” says webcomic artist Rich Stevens to the audience. This panel is in a smaller auditorium than the first few talks, nestled in a side hallway off MIT’s Infinite Corridor. The audience, however, is filled with loyal fans, some of which appear to be artists aspiring to create webcomics of their own.

“This is just going to be a casual Q&A session,” says Rich. The creator of Diesel Sweeties has published webcomics for over a decade. Sitting next to him is fellow webcomic veteran Sam Brown of explodingdog, who has decorated the blackboard with cartoons. The audience wastes no time breaking out into questions. One fan brings up gamer webcomic Penny Arcade. “It’s gotten so big that it has its own expo, while other comics fail. What’s the difference between success and failure when it comes to webcomics?”

“As you heard in the keynote, when people try to force a meme for commercial gain, it seems to fail.” The same thing holds true for webcomics, says Rich. He points to Jeph Jacques’ Questionable Content as an example of a webcomic that grew organically, having originally been based around small community forums.

Similarly, the two panelists also had humble beginnings—both went to art school, with Sam studying fine art and Rich in the design stream. However, they have very different approaches to their webcomics. Sam works on his comics sporadically. “I don’t update regularly. I’ll take months off and work on a different project, but I always like coming back to it, because I always get new ideas.”

Rich, on the other hand, adheres to a strict schedule. He explains, “It just became a thing, updating at midnight. I can’t not do it. That’s all there is to it, you have to make yourself ill.” For him, the daily comic acts as a sort of a journal, whereas Sam’s less regularly updated comic is more like a gallery when he looks back on his work.

Another audience member asks about fan appropriation of comics. “For memes such as Nyan Cat, the internet has its clutch of ownership upon it. But what about your comics? How comfortable are you with other people using your characters and creations?” The two respond positively to fan engagement. Sam responds, “That’s what’s so exciting about the Internet. You just send it out and it goes a million different places and you don’t know what’ll happen to it.”

Rich is similarly open to this kind of fan engagement. He says he’s fine with people remixing his characters and content, as long as they don’t simply copy his comics and claim it as their own. For commercial adaptations, on the other hand, he is more skeptical. Asked whether he’d prefer a million dollar Hollywood adaptation or a fan adaptation of his comic, he jokes, “I’d take the million dollars, and then do everything to sabotage the adaptation so that it failed. Then I’d go back to doing what the fans want.”

The discussion then progressed to the topic of art styles. Rich originally modeled his characters on the old-school Mac user/usergroup icons, and his unique style grew from there. “I could have never done this level of complexity if I hadn’t practiced for five years,” he explains.

Both Diesel Sweeties and Explodingdog have been going on since 2000. Sam’s irregular schedule has actually enhanced the longevity of his webcomic. “I don’t update much at all, so I don’t see myself burning out. Whenever I do it, I enjoy it.”

Rich is just as committed to continue producing content. “I’m going to do it until I can’t stand it at all anymore. Then I’ll spend the rest of my life selling iPhone chargers on Kickstarter.” This is not foreign territory to Rich, who has produced a DRM-free collection of his strips, fully funded on Kickstarter.

Despite optimism for the future of webcomics, Rich expresses nostalgia for the earlier days of the Web. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Internet.” He says that it used to be more “tethered” and thus the types of online communities back then—such as message boards—were more intimate and more likely “to do neat stuff.” Rich recalls the early years of his career, when he would promote his content by submitting links to nerd link-sharing website Slashdot, the namesake of the Slashdot effect. “The Internet was so much smaller then. A single good link could make all the difference. Now it’s become so fractured. Things just churn up, and you can’t control it.”

Still, neither Sam nor Rich seem to worry too much about marketing their comics. They agree that the best approach was to simply produce good content and let it spread via word of mouth. There have been a couple of exceptions to this, such as Rich getting Diesel Sweeties t-shirts into CBS’s Big Bang Theory. “I’m a big fan of watching for opportunities to send the right person something,” he explains.

Letting their webcomics spread organically was a good decision, as the audience has changed a lot over time. Starting out, Internet usage was tied to physical location and they could actually observe how their comics spread in a very localized, natural way. This is no longer the case, as Rich is quick to point out. “Now they’re all grown up and just read everything on their iPad. Everything’s flattened out.”

But webcomic audiences have also changed for the better thanks to this untethering of the Internet. Sam explains that, while webcomics started out as “the typical nerdy guy type of thing”, it’s so diverse today, drawing in significant female readership. Rich compared this phenomenon to Japanese manga: “Everybody reads it, but nobody knows each other. So there’s no stigma.”

Catering to these broad audiences can be difficult, of course. Asked whether they’ve ever contemplated writing longer serial stories, both Sam and Rich admit it’s too difficult. Rich envisions Diesel Sweeties as being “Peanuts with sex.” He considers himself a bad planner. “It’s one of those things that doesn’t come naturally. We wish we could.” Sam further explains, “We have to really commit to doing it. It’s really hard to do something that’s too long.”

After a few more back-and-forth questions from the fans, the discussion eventually leads to the topic of ebooks, and how that industry has affected webcomics. Rich, having himself produced an iPad edition of his collected comics, is positive about the medium. “Apple has trained us to spend small amounts of money,” he says. As an example, Rich points to Bill Amend’s FoxTrot, which makes more money via these small collections on the iTunes store in a month than it does by traditional sales in a year. “He’s making them available—easily, and people are responding positively to that.”

The Q&A session continues, and at one point Sam reveals that, while he’s not bothered by it, he doesn’t think that the webcomic label is necessarily accurate. “I don’t consider myself a comic. I’m just friends with cartoons,” he explains. “The word comic insinuates that they must be something funny. I don’t think about how to be funny.” Rich sympathizes with this sentiment, and cites how comic books are sometimes referred to as funny books. “And then nobody takes it seriously.” Sam says that there are also narrative drawbacks to the “comic” label. He adds, “I also feel like you get more out of humor when you’re not expecting it.”

Take for example the Red Robot character in explodingdog—Sam created the character back in 2000, and since then it’s become a sort of in-joke webcomic artists. The Red Robot has appeared in hundreds of other webcomics, including Diesel Sweeties. Rich elaborates, “I just ripped off Sam, and I’m lucky he’s a nice guy.”

The discussion eventually ends up on the topic of how Sam and Rich initially made the leap into making webcomics. Sam recalls how he got laid off, like many others during the dot-com bust. He took it as an opportunity to make a life change. Rich, on the other hand, had voluntarily quit his job, having saved up for six months. He told his dad, “If it doesn’t work out by next year, I’ll get another job.” Both artists have been producing webcomics ever since.

Despite his success, Rich says his family members don’t “get” what he does. His “non-internet” relatives think that he sells t-shirts. Still, he continues to find opportunities to connect with them; he tells us about how he gave his mathematician uncle—who knew nothing about his webcomic—a Diesel Sweeties t-shirt featuring the value of pi rendered in the image of a Pac-Man cherry (“cherry pi”). His uncle loved it. Rich explains, “You find what they understand, and then you give it to them.”

Local news site DNAinfo.com: How to launch on $10

Sat, 05 May 2012 13:16:53 GMT

Washington Post :: On Monday, the Erik Wemple Blog featured a story on DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan local news site that’s branching out into the other boroughs of New York City. To do so, it’s hiring 15 journalists, boosting the editorial staff to around 40 positions.

The post stopped short of hailing DNAinfo.com as a emulable model for news entrepreneurs. That’s because the name of its benefactor, Joe Ricketts, commonly adjoins the word “billionaire.” A DNAinfo.com executive said this when asked about profitability: “I can’t comment on that,” said Publisher and Editorial Director Leela de Kretser. Of Ricketts, she noted, “His investment allows us to do this.. . . He wants a profitable media company, and that’s what I think we’ll be.”

Continue to read Erik Wemple, www.washingtonpost.com