The cult of free – a user’s guide — John Degen provides this spot-on look at the core strategies of the freecult, a post that apparently hit a little too close to home for some free culture advocates. He follows up with another excellent piece, is there actually a freecult manual?
How Hulu’s Battleground changed the web TV ballgame — A great profile from GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers on Hulu’s first original scripted series and its implications for the future of online TV. I’d add that much of the show’s initial success is due to the fact that it is very, very good. Worth checking out.
How Phil DeFranco plans to save YouTube — Also from Roettgers: “So is all well in YouTube land? Not exactly. ‘Smaller YouTubers need to evolve, because it is a very toxic world out there,’ DeFranco told me. It’s hard for up-and-coming producers to get noticed at all, he said. And when they finally catch a lucky break and one of their videos goes viral, they’re bound to get offers of help from all the wrong places.”
Exclusive: FilesTube Comments on Google Transparency Report — Cyberlocker search engine FilesTube topped the list of targetted domains in Google’s transparency report, clocking in over 400,000 DMCA requests to remove URL’s from Google over the past year. According to statements it made to ZeroPaid, FilesTube itself receives 60,000 DMCA notices a day.
The Meme Generation — Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard presents a scathing, humorous, and thought-provoking writeup of the third annual ROFLcon, a conference for the “worker bees, Internet-famous celebrities, and leading intellectual lights of the universe known as Web 2.0, which is forever, reverentially, and loudly in the business of congratulating itself.” Highly recommended, with such gems from Labash like this: “True, as the tech triumphalists often crow, everyone now has a voice. It’s become an article of faith that this is an advance we should all be grateful for. Yet about 50 percent of those voices, at any given moment, seem to want to say nothing more than, ‘You suck.'”
Google’s “Transparency†Masquerade — Ethical Fan offers its thoughts on Google’s Transparency Report. “The picture being painted by the anti-copyright press is that Google is doing their part to help copyright owners. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Re “The Meme Generation”, something is not quite right when personal communication, by voice over a telephone (POT or cell) and/or in person, finds itself in disfavor over keyboard communications. The former allows the recognition of nuances (inflection, emotion, etc.) to be perceived, whereas the latter only very rarely, if ever, permits same.
I readily embrace technology that enhances our daily lives, but I do have to wonder if in the eyes of memes personal communications have fallen in large measure by the wayside.
Word of caution:
Memes are only meant for entertainment or to show reasons why people enjoy a particular hobby. Taking them as the epitome of language and social structure would be quite unsettling.
You’d think so, but read the article again. Academic centers like the Berkman Center for Internet and Society spend time and resources studying “memes”.