BigShinyThing

One of the main findings is that, like everything else in internet-enabled nations, news is now social. Pew’s research found that Americans are increasingly active participants in online news creation and dissemination, as well as keen consumers of mobile news content. For example:

• 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
• more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails.
• a third of cellphone users access news on their phones.

Pew’s analysis of this situation is that:

People’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads.

Locked down, pay-walled content is more or less shut out of this conversation — after all, how many ’subscription required’ links have you forwarded to your mates or colleagues lately or posted to Facebook? Worse still, the research further reveals that only 17% of Americans read news in a national newspaper on a typical day. So, as physical newspaper reading wanes, many newspaper companies are actively shutting themselves out of the online ecosystem by pursuing a pay-per-view or subscription model. Smart.

Amazon is in deep trouble with the online LGBT commmunity this Easter. The retailer has re-classified as ‘adult’, and removed sales rankings from, a range of books which includes Henry Miller, Anais Nïn, contemporary same-sex romances and young readers’ books which feature same-sex parenting. Cue uproar on social media, with hashtag #amazonfail top trending last night across the whole of Twitter.

Google ‘amazonfail’ for the developing story, or check this nice summary post from the National Post for background. Fittingly, we first heard of Amazon’s actions via author Hari Kunzru, on FaceBook (thanks for the tip!)

Amazon’s first statement claimed that the de-ranking was the result of a ‘policy decision’. However, as we go ‘to press’ (as making a fresh pot of coffee and curling back up in bed with the laptop is referred to, in blogging circles), the bookseller appears to have changed that position. Its updated statement is so tepid and vague (“There was a glitch with our sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed…”), that we’re guessing the PR agency has taken Easter off, leaving Amazon to crisis-manage for itself. Ouch. Would love to eavesdrop on that conference call tomorrow morning….

Although this story has been picked up by the US-based culture blogs and mainstream press, we’ve seen no mention of it ‘above ground’ in the UK. Maybe UK media journalists are also having a long lie in today, rather than doing their jobs?

Regardless of Amazon’s final response (which needs to be significantly more credible than its efforts so far), plenty damage has been done to the brand, amongst communities which know how to organise, and that understand the strength of collective action. A glimpse of that strength came last night, when, within a few short hours, a word-of-mouth googlebombing campaign successfully dislodged Amazon’s own definition of its precious sales ranking system on Google. An Amazon-critical alternative definition of Amazon Rank now tops search rankings in the US and UK.

Online, the ‘hacklash’ continues: there’s an open call out for an amazonfail logo, to replace Amazon widgets and links removed by site-owners in solidarity with the ongoing protests. Expect more creative activism in the same vein, over the coming hours and weeks. Until, in fact, Amazon actually comes clean, credibly and openly, about what, exactly, just happened. The longer that communication is delayed, the more damage will be done to the brand. Through social media, communities organise and engage in real-time. Brand-owners must respond likewise.

Whoever it was, a few years back, who said we should stop belittling people’s power by calling them ‘consumers’ and start respecting them as ‘amplifiers’, got it so right. We’re going to hunt his book down. But not on Amazon.

[UPDATE 13 April, 15:15. As of this writing, this post is top-ranked on Google UK search for 'amazonfail'. If Amazon and its PR agency do care about social media engagement, we're easy for them to find, and would love to hear from them.]

We’re huge fans of the work TheyWorkForYou put into archiving and making accessible the process of British Government. And we encourage you to help them out with a bit of crowdsourced video-tweaking if you can.

Meanwhile, we notice that the august Beeb has started twittering from Parliament. Last time we looked they had under 80 followers (including us!), but give ‘em a chance. A nice simple way to maintain some peripheral awareness of What Goes On in politics.

People get ready. Both Google and FaceBook have this week announced APIs (Google Friend Connect and FaceBook Connect, respectively) which enable ‘any site’ to be aware of identities and social networks — turning the web inside out and focussing (finally!) on people and their interactions rather than content and its location. We’ve been banging on about this since 1994, and think it’s about bloody time, frankly.

Big news (and probably a harbinger of the demise of bespoke social media aggregators like our recent fave FriendFeed). Read the press releases and phone your favourite VC. Now.

Lawyers for Hasbro and Mattel have asked Facebook to pull the game, saying that Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game. The game was built for the site by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two software developers based in Kolkata, and has 594,924 daily active users – about a quarter of the total that have so far signed up to play it. Interestingly, the brothers say they hit upon the idea of launching a free online Scrabble game when a site where they used to play decided to charge its users in 2004 (how very Web 1.0).

“Next year, we decided to launch our own free scrabble site. It was to help the gaming community,” says Jayant. Rajat and Jayant claim that they contacted Hasbro about collaborating on the game but received no response. It it worth noting that it has taken the toy giants rather a long time to react to the game, despite its high profile and obvious similarity (it’s exactly the same) to Scrabble.

Brands dream of getting this kind of traction online — and Scrabulous has arguably caused a generation to fall in love with Scrabble all over again. If Hasbro and Mattel succeed in having the game removed — rather than entering into talks with the developers — they will have scored a spectacular own goal. A Save Scrabulous group is already ablaze with Facebookers commenting on their shortsightedness – it currently has 6,000 members and counting. Of course Mattel and Hasbro are going to create their own version. But why not just piggy-back on what’s already there, and reap the benefits? Hasbro and Mattel have an opportunity here to engage properly with social media and look like good guys. Let’s hope they don’t blow it.

Source: BBC.

UPDATE: following widespread reporting in the press, the Save Scrabulous group had ballooned overnight to 28,000+ ….

We are BIG fans of CSI: its noirish plots, zeitgeist-grabbing storylines (remember the Furries episode?) and general ridiculousness. This season, it has got the geeks gossiping about the use of Twitter in a scene and the attendant neat explanation of what drives people to live their lives online:

“Some people just don’t value privacy.”
“They don’t expect privacy, they value openness.”

Nice bit of transmedia advertising/storytelling too. Via Plasticbag.org.

Recently we were discussing Wikipedia’s anti-business bias: Wikipedians tend to find businesses ‘not notable’ and often dismiss entries about them as them as ‘advertising’. Whilst it is admirable to root out the many articles on Wikipedia which are barely-disguised pat pieces, just because Wikipedians don’t find business interesting doesn’t mean it isn’t. It’s as if the resurgence of the long tail has become its own kind of snobbery — a land where the entry for Anna Nicole Smith can stretch to several pages but where entries about famous businesses get deleted.

A similar debate has been going on on Cute Overload. Put simply: do possums make the cut? A Wiki ‘delete war’ can stretch out for weeks and hundreds of empassioned postings. Cute Overload — understanding the nature of social media, and therefore its community, opened and closed the debate within the space of two posts:

People, it’s tough at Cute O headquarters. We can never decide if possums are cute, or just horribly evil. (There is a fine line, and otters LOVE to jump back and forth across that line, taunting! always taunting!)

But I digest. Check out this dewd with this anerable paws. Don’t look at his schnozzle or ears tho. OK, you can look at his schnozzle.

Rebecca M. claims:

• They RULE in the Moist Nosicle category.
• They have a thumb without a nail on their back feet.
• They have elaborate whiskers.
• Their ears are pink when they’re babies and turn black as they grow up.
• They CARRY LEAVES CURLED UP IN THEIR TAILS — Come ON!
• And let’s not forget they carry their babies in a pouch — North America’s only marsupial.

Wikipedants, take note. There should be a joke here about possums and long tails, but frankly we’ve got better things to be getting on with.

Context: the stunning Opera Mini, iGoogle and the GMail mobile client give us pretty much everything we need on the road: Search, WordPress, FaceBook and email. And Opera Mini does a fair job of managing our RSS life as well. So when Refresh Mobile invited us to come and check out their new mobile midware thingie, touted as ‘a window to the mobile internet’, we were interested to see what more we could be convinced we need. Due to London transport, we didn’t make it to the demo, but we’ve spent the evening messin’ with their product instead. Here are our first thoughts.

Mippin (dreadful name, kids, and the default colour scheme sucks: change it, purleeze!) is a WAP 2.0 social RSS aggregator and news reader for mobiles, with aspirations to greater things, from the people who brought us Mobizines (yes indeed).

On the couple of native phone browsers we tried, as well as an online WAP emulator, and Opera Mini, it all worked as expected: type in the URL of an RSS-enabled site, and off you go. No RSS? Too bad: at this point Mippin only works with feeds. Oops. And the press release is relentless is calling potential subscribers consumers. Get with the program, kids: we aren’t consumers, we’re multipliers, damn it — flatter our egos and we’ll give you a bit more slack on the features and functionality!

Anyway. Sign up, and you get a Mippin profile preloaded with a bunch of the usual-suspect blogs, in categories including Men and LifeStyle (LifeStyle, interestingly, seems to be mostly ‘girl stuff’ — don’t Men also have LifeStyles? Not online, it seems). There’s no indication as to whether those categories are static, or dynamically-generated based on Mippin users’ usage patterns and interactions. After experiencing the subtle magic of FaceBook’s filtering systems (‘A friend of a friend who you often email has posted an event in a category of events invitations which you usually accept, so I’ll tell you about it’), we’re kind of hoping that Mippin has some collaborative filtering magic behind the curtain as well. If so, the press release is keeping schtum on that whole area. Mippin does, however, make it easy to text, twitter (do people really use twitter — real people I mean?) or email stories to friends, and encourages readers to vote sites up or down in popularity. All a bit 1.0, but better than nothing, we guess. And Mippin is still in beta.

But, we’re left feeling a bit whatever. Mippin is a decent WAP-based RSS aggregator, with a bit of a social media flavour thrown in for the kids. And it adapts well to the capabilities of the different handsets we tried it on, without the need for any installs. If you’ve got a WAP-only phone and need a news fix, Mippin might be a must-have as-is. For the rest of us, I guess it’s wait-and-see on what emerges as the beta progresses. To us, it all currently feels akin to an open source project a few months prior to it being Slashdot-worthy. Refresh promises to listen to community feedback: we say try it out, and let them know your thoughts. If they’re serious about that, your feedback might be just what Mippin needs to shine.

A recent study conducted at Indiana University, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, shows that the negative opinions expressed by others cause the greatest attitude shifts, not just from good to bad, but also from bad to worse.

As reported on Eurekalert:

Consumers were presented with information about a new product and allowed to independently form their evaluations. As would be normally expected with many products, some of these evaluations were positive and others negative. The researchers then revealed to participants whether their peers evaluated the product negatively or positively. They found that the opinions of others exert especially strong influence on individual attitudes when these opinions are negative. Additionally, consumers that privately held positive attitudes toward the product were more susceptible to influence from group opinion than those who initially held negative opinions.

Furthermore, the researchers also found that those with negative opinions of the product were likely to become even more negative if asked to participate in a group discussion: “When consumers expect to interact with other consumers through these forums, learning the views of these other consumers may reinforce and even polarize their opinions, making them more negative,” the researchers reveal.

“This research has several interesting implications. First, given the strong influence of negative information, marketers may need to expend extra resources to counter-act the effects of negative word of mouth in online chatrooms, blogs and in offline media. Conversely, companies could damage the reputations of competitors by disseminating negative information online,” the researchers explain. “Consumers should be aware that these social influence biases exist and are capable of significantly impacting their perceptions.”

The JCR doesn’t appear to be available freely online. If you want to hunt this article down, the full citation is:

Adam Duhachek, Shuoyang Zhang, and Shanker Krishnan, Anticipated Group Interaction: Coping with Valence Asymmetries in Attitude Shift. Journal of Consumer Research: October 2007.

With its establishment of a members-only website (as we reported last week), London’s Hospital club exemplifies a trend towards invitation-only digital communities.

Whilst information may indeed want to be free, it seems increasingly clear to us that social networks often require boundaries for them to function effectively. Hardly surprising, really: offline, cliques, clubs and communities frequently entail nomination, rites-of-passage and other signs of commitment and shared values. Those gate-keeping processes have evolved for many reasons, and not all of them are about money and snobbery. Many of us, in many social settings, just need to get on with it, and not have to spend half of every meeting explaining the rules of order, dress code or music policy to the newbies.

In fact, at the risk of sounding tweedy in the extreme, we see the trend for online walled communities as a sign of a Very Good Thing: that people are starting to forget that they are interacting digitally, and simply getting on with interacting per se, in the ways that make sense to them — that are fit for their purpose — rather than feeling obliged to do things differently simply because ‘oh it’s on the internet so it has to be open to all comers’.

On reflection, it seems strange that this even feels controversial, and yet it does. We’ve spent ten years experiencing the revolution (and it is a revolution) that digital social media has brought to collaboration and innovation. We are there, people, we are with that worldview. But there’s a lot more to social activity, innovation and creation than access and open facilitation. Some things are still best done by small groups and kept that way until they’re ready for wider engagement or involvement.

It would, however, sadden us if the innovation and creativity engendered in those walled communities became trapped there. We think the outcome for which to push is not universal access to every online community, but openness as to their goals, and for the exploitation of their digital nature to — as and when appropriate — gift their insight, creativity and creations back to the digital commons. Hmm. We’ll see you the other side of the velvet rope.

The FT reports today that America’s intelligence agencies are about to launch ‘A Space’, an internal communications tool modelled on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), believes that the site will help dismantle the agencies’ siloed mentalities and help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited. He told the FT, “Burying the same number of analysts in ever higher piles of hay would no more increase the number of needles.”

Of course, this story has rather handily come out the day before ‘a systemic failure’ was blamed for the CIA failing to predict the 911 terrorist attacks.

The DNI has also built an internal collaborative site called Intellipedia, based on Wikipedia. The CIA recently used Facebook to recruit and has created a version of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, for members of the intelligence community. Another tool is an intelligence library which can be accessed via A Space.

The big lesson here is even the intelligence community is beginning to recognise the importance of opening up flows of communication and information. Mike Wertheimer, the senior DNI officer for analytic for transformation and technology (we are LOVING these job titles) said that, “We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never experimented before. It breaks a lot of traditional senses that people’s lives are at risk, and how can you take any step that increases that risk.” Spies — like big corporates — have issues with sharing stuff. But maybe for better reasons. Wertheimer says, “They ask ‘well can we have access (to the intelligence library)?’ I ask them back if you want access, what services are you willing to put in, have you thought through your risk/profit scenario? They kind of stand back because that is not normally how we talk to them. It is a new day.”

All those organisations busily banning Facebook and other new tools of collaboration and communication should take heed.

We keep running into ex-colleagues, all of whom, when asked what they’re doing, answer “it’s not that easy to sum up” by which they mean:

I’ve got a couple of paying projects going, plus I’m on the edge of other stuff that might or might not turn into work, but involves people interesting enough that it’s worth some time anyways, plus you know, I’ve got that blog thing going and bits of other stuff on the side.

Long ago, we had a gig as armchair futurists at a Famous Ad Agency. One of our favourite predictions was that the structure of creative business would go the way of Hollywood: rather than existing as long-term corporate entities, groups of highly-skilled freelancers would be assembled for the life of a specific project, at the completion of which they would pack their bags and head of to the next one.

The model never really caught on in adland. However, this month we get the feeling that our generation has finally crossed some intangible tipping point. We see signs and portents: people, it’s practically raining frogs over Soho. Key indicator: suddenly we’re all exploiting network utilities like FaceBook, and communities like PlannerSphere not just to keep ‘in touch’ but to expand the size of the network which we touch (see note [1], below).

We’re building structures which accumulate and expose opportunity, knowledge, income. Crucially, we are doing this for ourselves.

We’re also, in the flux of transmutation, restructuring our personal brands, making our own individual and collective land grabs for authority, influence, status and respect. We’re building a colony, out in the unmapped places, and things don’t need to be the same way they were back home at the centre of Empire. It’s all up for grabs.

Which isn’t to imply that we’re shortchanging shareholders in the companies that pay us — the more efficient our networks, the quicker and better we can turn the work around. Happy clients mean more income and repeat business (we’re tip-toeing quietly over the sleeping issue of where and for whom the glittering prizes of intellectual property and long-term value will accrue).

But before you drink the Electric Kool Aid, we also suggest you pick up (and yes, read, dammit) a copy of Fred Turner’s excellent From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Turner’s book offers a good critical history of exactly this kind of technotopian futurism, a worldview which comes with heavier and more unpleasant historical baggage than you might expect. We say: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. On FaceBook”.

—
1. Sphere is the wrong metaphor. A sphere maximises the amount of stuff held within. Now is all about maximising surface area, expanding the opportunities for contact, the opportunities available for each of us, alone or together, to touch, engage, involve the rest of everything. We advocate forms which are the topographic opposite of spherical — hyperbolic surfaces: folded, gnarly, spaces where surface is everything. We will stand or fall by the richness of our contact with the world as a whole, not just that within the closing horizons of our tiny corner of a corner of it.

Google has announced a souped-up version of online application suite Google Apps. The (un)creatively named ‘Premier’ edition offers enhanced functionality, more online storage, phone support and a bunch of other corporate-friendly features. All with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, for a flat USD50/person/year. Not just a tempting offer for small businesses who want to avoid spend on IT infrastructure — Google has already signed up Procter and Gamble and General Electric as flagship clients.

Sounds like value to us — importantly Google have also published programming interfaces for their office suite, so that third-party developers (or switched-on corporate IT departments who see which way the wind is turning and want to continue to justify their salaries) can enhance and tweak functionality. All that virtual team collaboration stuff? Already in place. Blackberry integration? Soon, probably. Yawn, then take a deep breath: next comes the modern bit.

Google Apps is the first mainstream system to give business users tools which really begin to acknowledge the cloud, tools which aspire to the benefits of those long-used by Linux hackers and wikipedians; tools with which to engage and work with strangers or competitors for mutual advantage. They aren’t there yet — Google’s initial focus is to get some traction in the mundane worlds of word-processing and data-crunching — but the trajectory is easy to plot: on- and up-wards into business-focussed social media. The challenge is to reshape — or re-create — traditional business processes into a form where they can really profit from such tools.

Companies find it difficult enough to move from Flash-heavy websites crammed with stale corporate nonsense, to actual conversation with their audience. It will be much harder for most to find a path on which they can make their borders more porous, their processes more diffuse, their knowledge more open, and yet still have an edge. But adoption of tools like Google Apps — even in their current early form — might serve to redirect people’s attention up from their desks, out through their screens, and into the cloud where the world is. It’s a start. Wait and see.

First, a bit of background. Stay with us. It’s worth the trip.

In his magnum opus Being and Time, philosopher Martin Heidegger has a lot to say about tools. He argues that when we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of a tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which, in his terminology, ‘withdraws’ into the task. The tool is only experienced as a thing-in-itself again when put down. Think of the experience of a skilled carpenter using a hammer, or a geek geeking in front of a computer. They’re not aware of the tool, they’re working at the task.

But something special happens with tools which are never put down — which, like the tool of language, are always on, always reliably available. Particularly when the task at hand isn’t something finite — such as making-a-chair, or building-a-house — but is, rather, the task of being-in-the-world. Consider the fishes of the sea:

The extraordinary efficiency of the fish as a swimming device is partly due, it now seems, to an evolved capacity to couple its swimming behaviors to the pools of external kinetic energy found as swirls, eddies and vortices in its watery environment. These vortices include both naturally occurring ones (e.g., where water hits a rock) and self-induced ones (created by well-timed tail flaps). The fish swims by building these externally occurring processes into the very heart of its locomotion routines. […]

Now consider a reliable feature of the human environment, such as the sea of words. This linguistic surround envelopes us from birth. Under such conditions, the plastic human brain will surely come to treat such structures as a reliable resource to be factored into the shaping of on-board cognitive routines.

Where the fish flaps its tail to set up the eddies and vortices it subsequently exploits, we intervene in multiple linguistic media, creating local structures and disturbances whose reliable presence drives our ongoing internal processes. Words and external symbols are thus paramount among the cognitive vortices which help constitute human thought.
[Andy Clarke & David Chalmer -- The Extended Mind ]

Or, as Clarke puts it elsewhere:

Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace.

In essence, our brains are good at using reliably-available [that caveat is important] features of our surroundings as part of what Clarke calls the ‘extended mind’:

…you say to someone you know, do you know the time, and they say yes. And then they look at their watch. You can sort of challenge them well, did you really know the time when you said yes? They’ll say “yeah, I knew how to get the time” and I think that’s often what we do mean when we say yes, we know things, [we actually mean that] we know how to get them from our long term memory, from some reliable environmental resource, from wherever.

[Andy Clarke -- interview]

To distill further — we’re good at experiencing having-accessible as knowing — with the tools (wristwatch, language, social media) themselves no longer even experienced as being outside ourselves. See where we’re going with this? With always-on social media, we have accessible not just encyclopedic (wikipedic?) knowledge of the world, but vortices of social networks and interrelations as fluid as the ones exploited by Clarke’s theory-fish. And we’re innately equipped to utilise those networks and interrelations as part of our ‘extended mind’.

This is [part of] the argument behind our claim that these media are post-communication: they’re enablers that sit beside (not within) the idea of communication, in our box of tools-for-being-people. If true, this is a huge and humbling thing to be a part of. If wrong, looking at emergent media — in particular social media — this way, at least pins it down for long enough to probe at concepts which are otherwise, well, slippery as a fish.

Your set text for this week, should you choose to accept this mission: Clarke’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again.

So, the theory is that dark energy, through some anti-gravitic effect, is the reason, maybe, that our Universe keeps expanding, rather than collapsing into itself. Maybe.

Anyway: hold that thought. Business zeitgeist in London over the last few months has been all about ‘getting to grips’ with social media as knowledge-management tool. Bright shiny lights going off over management heads across the city — if Wikipedia works so well in the real world, why not do it here: get all that tacit knowledge bedded in using tried-and-tested collaborative co-creation tools. I’m all for it. But I doubt that most management teams are anticipate the impact that skilling up with social media, if it really catches on in their business, might have on that business. Turn people onto these tools or, more particularly, onto the value and reward of participatory co-creation, by all means. But don’t affect surprise when you realise that their attention has turned outward, across your firewalls, into the 99.9999999% of the world where most of the things they care about — and 99.9999999% of the expertise that could assist them in their work — already lies. Social media isn’t about collapsing your business’s knowledge resources into a tight knot of hot intellectual property: it’s about joining the vast swirling galaxies of shared effort, collaborative problem-solving, open innovation.

The hackers have known this for years — but it’s only the Web 2.0-era intersection of hacker culture and second-wave digital entrepreneurship that’s exposed the rest of us to the dark energy-like expansionary effect of Wikis, open content, co-creation. First time around, management could read ClueTrain and pay lip service to its manifestos. This time around, business is opening the door to the tools, without still understanding their effect, if they’re actually embraced. There’s a reason they’re called disruptive technologies, people …

All copy from Cluster.

Earlier in May, US lawmakers reacted to public fears about online child abuse with proposals for a bill (DOPA) which would block access to social networking sites and Internet chat rooms in most federally funded schools and libraries. Too blunt and misdirected a weapon for the purpose? Many think so — to the extent that Business Week ran a recent analysis which claims that DOPA could spell an early end to the nascent world of Web 2.0:

[DOPA] could rule out content from any number of Internet companies, including Yahoo! and Google. What’s more, DOPA would prohibit sites that enable users to create their own content and share it. That covers a wide swath of the online world, known colloquially as Web 2.0, where users actively create everything from blogs to videos to news-page collections.

Of course, the failure of a few tech startups is less important than the safety of children. But as with all such panics, the question remains as to the real nature of any threat at hand, and how well the proposed legislative solution will address those real threats.

At this point it’s all a bit unclear — for starters, how much impact on kids’ unsupervised access to MySpace and friends will a simple ban on schools and libraries make? But hey! Subtlety is often lost when there’s a moral panic on, and this is just the latest of many. We’ll keep you informed.

For a nice overview of the ‘new reality’ of online youth, check out a recent interview between MIT’s Henry Jenkins and danah boyd. We’ve reported before on boyd’s view that social media sites function as ‘digital publics’ where young people — whose freedoms are heavily constrained in the physical world — can live more freely, via media ‘in which’ (and, crucially, ‘where’, these media being conceptualised and experienced as places) they feel completely ‘at home’.

So — the kids have a new ‘place’ to play. What’s the difference between MySpace and all the other places where generations of young people have hung out to get a bit of freedom — the park, the mall, the video arcade? Maybe the clue is in this quote from Jenkins:

Just as youth in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, youth in an information society play with information and social networks.

Bows and arrows, yes, but fast forward: during the Industrial Revolution, very few children played with live steam and drop forges. During the Atom Age and Cold War, kids never got hands-on with Deuterium-Tritium fusion reactions. But in the Information Age, they’ve got Access All Areas to the most culturally-transformative technologies of our time, and a fluency with them that comes only to digital natives. Children being children, they’ve been getting busy with these toys — people don’t grok where their kids are at because the kids have left the building. They’ve gone. Nobody noticed, while a whole generation bootstrapped itself up and out — offworld, into media-which-is-a-place, where they’re forging a new reality: a vibrant pop culture mashup of late consumerism and virtuality-enabled persona-hacking. And it’s in their world, not ours, that they’re going to learn, invent and grow up. We’ve lost them. Off into elseware. Gone.

Until childhood’s end: we tip 2015-2020 as the period when the grown-up children of this new world start to port their way of being back into our world, enacting their society, their way.

Expect a revolution.

Tell someone they are dead to you at Snubster.

The Snubster Difference: Aren’t you tired of all of those people out there trying to grab all of these fake friends online? It’s all about how many people can I pretend to be friends with to make myself feel better. Welcome to a better way at Snubster.

Members of Snubster list what pisses them off: President Bush, guys who talk at urinals, etc. Snubster also allows its users to snub each other via e-mail. The site has a tool for sending an e-mail to people newly added to the list to tell them why they’re being snubbed. [Nice].

Software engineer Bryant Choung originally started Snubster as a satire of online social discovery services. Ironically, it is now bringing people together — Snubster users surf each others’ hate lists and sometimes get in contact.

“It has developed into a sort of community atmosphere,” Choung says. “It seems as though people find entertainment and connections in finding other people that hate the same things as them.”

‘Courtesy’ of Nettime.

The ‘how to’ could be a manifesto for remix culture:

Upload your own video, photos and music; Explore shared content; Grab what you want.

First collection of clips ripe for remixing? Things on kittens. Of course. More seriously, this could be a very useful tool for communities-of-interest who have lots of individually-recorded footage of events, and who want to collaboratively edit it down to a single film — think weddings, club nights, street protests: welcome to group mash-ups. Last year we pointed at the Glastonbury Festival coverage on Flickr as a tipping point for photosharing. This year we’re predicting Glasto ‘06 The Movie — assembled and edited in close-to-real-time on something like Jumpcut, from video and still images contributed by festival goers themselves via their videophones… sponsorhip opportunity, anyone?

Sourced (along with reviews of loads more sharing/remix sites) at Techcrunch.

The wisest words we’ve heard for a while on the subject come from MIT’s Advertsing Lab:

My take: throw in a recommendation engine. If people are to endure ads on their MySpace pages, at least let them and their friends pick the ads to see. If I know that my buddy is on the market for a new car, I’ll think there’s a better chance he’d appreciate a Toyota ad more than a random punch-the-monkey banner. And if a banner is funny or otherwise amusing (yes, there are amusing banners), people would recommend those too (just watch all these commecials uploaded on YouTube), eventually driving the overall quality of advertising up.

Well yes. Content is media. Respect its creators, learn the vernacular, and maybe the community will welcome your advertising content into its world. We’re particularly excited to see that great ads are accepted as simply being great clip media. And no we didn’t plant this on YouTube. It’s there because some punter loved it enough to do that themselves. And that’s worth thinking about.