Extending into Cyberspace?
Are most people using new communications to extend themselves into cyberspace? http://eicker.at/Hyperconnectivity
hi siri
Well, she won’t hear you at this place. ;)
The public perception of Diaspora is low: time for some questions regarding its marketing; http://eicker.at/DiasporaMarketing
Wikipedia shuts Italian language site, fights against DDL intercettazioni (Wiretapping Act); http://eicker.at/WikipediaVsItaly
Wikipedia – L’enciclopedia libera: “Dear reader, at this time, the Italian language Wikipedia may be no longer able to continue providing the service that over the years was useful to you, and that you expected to have right now. As things stand, the page you want still exists and is only hidden, but the risk is that soon we will be forced to actually delete it. – Over the past ten years, Wikipedia has become part of the daily habits of millions of web users looking for a neutral, free-content, and – above all – independent source of Knowledge. A new, huge multi-lingual encyclopedia, freely available to all, at any time, and free of charge. – Today, unfortunately, the very pillars on which Wikipedia has been built – neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of its contents – are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as ‘DDL intercettazioni’ (Wiretapping Act). – This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image. – Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge – the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website. – Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a ‘corrected’ version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources. … With this announcement, we want to warn our readers against the risks arising from leaving to the arbitrary will of any party to enforce the alleged protection of its image and its reputation. Under such provisions, web users would be most probably led to cease dealing with certain topics or people, just to ‘avoid troubles’. – We want to be able to keep a free and open-to-all encyclopaedia, because our articles are also your articles – Wikipedia is already neutral, why neutralize it?”
BBC: “Wikipedia’s Italian edition has taken all entries but one offline in protest at a draft privacy law restricting the publication of police wiretaps. – Transcripts of his telephone calls have embarrassed Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on trial for corruption and using underage prostitutes. – The draft law would oblige websites to amend content within 48 hours if the subject deems it harmful or biased. – Italian protesters wearing gags gathered outside parliament in Rome. … Wikipedia says it may take down its Italian site, http://www.wikipedia.it, permanently if the law is passed. Amendments would have to be published within 48 hours at the request of the person making the complaint, without any recourse to a court or independent adjudicator.”
CDT: “DDL Intercettazioni, the proposed wiretap law (see page 24, paragraph 29(a)), would require online publications and websites to publish a correction within 48 hours of receiving notice about any content that any third party believes is detrimental to his or her image, with scant safeguards against abuse or judicial involvement. Failure to publish a correction could result in a [Euro] 12,000 fine. – It is unclear how this mandate would apply to websites that enable user-generated content – for example, a social network or a blog that allow users to comment on articles. Such websites should be protected under the Italian transposition of the E-Commerce Directive for the defamatory statements made by third party users. However, you can imagine that harmed victims may simply send requests for corrections to the user-generated content platform itself. – As Italian Internet activists have rightly pointed out, this requirement could profoundly chill freedom of expression and innovation online.”
TD: “All-in-all, the Italian politicians behind this proposed legislation emerge with little honor; at the very least, the new law will cast a chill over freedom of expression online in Italy, and at worst could see the Italian Wikipedia shut down permanently – a huge loss for its users and Italian culture. – Update: Via Carl Levinson, Roberta Ranzani and Jillian C. York on Google+, we’ve learned that the controversial paragraph 29 of the Wiretapping bill has been dropped (details in Italian). It’s not clear exactly why, but the action by the Italian Wikipedia must surely have concentrated people’s minds. However, it’s important to note that the rest of the bill is still going forward – and has plenty of other changes that will harm freedom of speech in Italy if enacted.“
Diaspora social communications: superusing Diaspora, the federated Web, the early days; http://eicker.at/DiasporaCommunications
Diasporial: “One of the first things I fell for in Diaspora was its neat marriage of two posting methods: a unidirectional ‘blasting’ option to reach the general public and a two-way ‘sharing’ model for more intimate exchanges… sooo basically a Twitter and a Facebook. Through the proper use of aspects, posts could now either spark a conversation among select friends or publish a message to the entire Internet. … With the recent introduction of Markdown formatting, I’ve noted a increase in longer, well thought-out posts more resembling blog entries than status updates begin to appear in my activity stream, which tickles me pink… You can actually use this system to pre-publish a thought and gather comments on it before full out blogging about it… ‘But I’m a famous celebrity. What does this mean for me?‘ The benefits are surreal. You don’t have to rely on some lame ‘fan’ or ‘group’ pages: people can connect to the real you, and you can control what your subscribers see simply through carefully watching what you post as ‘Public’. Your real friends can be put into their own specific aspects where you can tell them all about your new yacht or perfume line, while the rest of the Internet will receive your public updates about book signings or that new charity you’re promoting.”
Diasporial: “I’m pretty sure that everyone on the Diaspora platform has their own story about how they found Diaspora, made friends, and got into the network. Some of us have enjoyed it more than others. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that this is a very opportune moment for a community to come together and really shine. … [T]he biggest thing about Diaspora is not its features, but the community that surrounds it. Several times a day, I’ll check in and notice great conversations going on by people that originally didn’t know each other at all. In fact, I’ve made a good handful of friends there, from all walks of life. The best part is that it’s not just a bunch of Linux nerds. There are people there that are passionate about film, technology, art, philosophy, literature, you name it. It is a community of passion, and it continues to grow on a daily basis.”
Diasporial: “The early days of Diaspora – a personal story – While writing this I realise how hard it is to put the pre-alpha experience into words. I am sure that those who were there with me at the time feel the same nostalgia and the same enthusiasm as I feel. Having been an early adopter on pre-alpha Diaspora is definitely something I am proud of. The whole look and feel of Diaspora was just great and the people I met were all very kind and loving. The software iterated with the speed of lightning and every time your account got reset you just knew that something had changed. Rather than feeling bad about the data loss, you would just sign up again as quickly as you could to find out what’s new.”
»[T]he biggest thing about Diaspora is not its features, but the community that surrounds it. Several times a day, I’ll check in and notice great conversations going on by people that originally didn’t know each other at all. In fact, I’ve made a good handful of friends there, from all walks of life. The best part is that it’s not just a bunch of Linux nerds. There are people there that are passionate about film, technology, art, philosophy, literature, you name it. It is a community of passion, and it continues to grow on a daily basis.”«
Sehr gut gesagt. »Gefällt mir« :)
Indeed, Diasporial is definitely a must read. ;)
Facebook Like gets sharing granularity: hypersharing becomes (scarily) automatic; http://eicker.at/FacebookLikeButtons
Forbes: “Facebook released a broad new set of social features Thursday that makes it easier for people to share a wide range of information about themselves. The new changes could boost the quantity of sharing and change the quality of information that people push through the social network. … [P]eople can now automatically share what music they’re listening to, what television or movies they’re watching, what news they’re reading and even what food they’re eating or what exercise they’re doing. It’s ‘frictionless’ to share in Mark Zuckerberg’s words. … The upshot of this is that Facebook is going way beyond enabling people to simply share their interests, to enabling people to share virtually anything they’re doing both online and offline. … The connection between sharing and actual purchases is one that Facebook is careful about, particularly after Beacon. But with all the sharing about products that people will inevitably do through the new changes, more traffic will be driven to companies’ sites where people can make purchases.”
AF: “Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference promised a lot of things today, but one cool subset of them takes the most popular interaction on the site and spins off variations. – We’re talking about the like button here. – Today, we click like when really a more specific action is involved but the thumbs-up is only option that exists. – So, get ready for buttons that could include: Want, Buy, Own, Listen to, Read, Eat, Watch, Work out… the open graph will also make people’s news feeds more customized than ever, requiring a more complex algorithm than the one that currently determines what people see on their home pages.- The algorithm that Facebook today calls EdgeRank becomes GraphEdge tomorrow.”
Mashable: “You can’t deny the success of Facebook’s Like button. Its popularity quickly skyrocketed; it took less than a month for the button to appear on more than 100,000 websites. Now it is a standard method for endorsing something on the social web. – But that’s exactly the problem – the Like button is an endorsement. … Facebook’s bet is that more people will click a button that says they’ve ‘Listened’ to a song or ‘Watched’ a video, rather than simply liking it. … It’s Facebook’s partners that will take this capability and turn it into applications that populate Facebook and their websites with these Gestures, though. That’s Facebook’s plan – to become the social layer on which the web is built. … The new Open Graph will change Facebook drastically.”
Forrester: “If there’s one thing Facebook is not afraid of, it’s change. … Facebook is laying claim to your life. Through its new Timeline feature that recaps in one fell swoop everything you’ve ever posted and lets you feature the highlights, along with its new apps that let you discover and share real-time experiences like watching movies and listening to music, Facebook is changing the social networking game. Of course you could argue that it was already acting as the online identity for many people, but this takes it to a whole new level.”
TC: “Unlike the Like button which gives you a way to explicitly share individual pieces of content, this Read plug-in (and presumably, Watch, Listen, etc, plugins) would allow third-parties to add a single button to their site to enable some of the automatic actions Facebook unveiled today. … To be clear, this button will be totally opt-in for users. And the button will also have ‘pause’ and ‘undo’ capabilities if a user decides they actually don’t want to share their activity automatically, Taylor said. – And the regular old Like button will continue to exist for users who still want to share specific pieces of content to Facebook.”
RWW: “While the focus of today’s Facebook announcements was the newTimeline profile, the Read, Watch, Listen media sharing apps have generated a lot of interest too. These so-called ‘social apps‘ haven’t been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social apps to your Facebook profile: The Guardian’s app and one from Washington Post. – Be forewarned though, with these apps you’re automatically sending anything you read into your Facebook news feed. No ‘read’ button. No clicking a ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button. As soon as you click through to an article you are deemed to have ‘read’ it and all of your Facebook friends and subscribers will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.”
Winer: “Facebook is scaring me – Yesterday I wrote that Twitter should be scared of Facebook. Today it’s worse. I, as a mere user of Facebook, am seriously scared of them. … This time, however, they’re doing something that I think is really scary, and virus-like. The kind of behavior deserves a bad name, like phishing, or spam, or cyber-stalking. … Now, I’m not technically naive. I understood before that the Like buttons were extensions of Facebook. They were surely keeping track of all the places I went. … People joke that privacy is over, but I don’t think they imagined that the disclosures would be so proactive. They are seeking out information to report about you. That’s different from showing people a picture that you posted yourself. If this were the government we’d be talking about the Fourth Amendment. … One more thing. Facebook doesn’t have a web browser, yet, but Google does. It may not be possible to opt-out of Google’s identity system and all the information gathering it does, if you’re a Chrome user. – PS: There’s a Hacker News thread on this piece. It’s safe to click on that link (as far as I know).“
3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse – Current Status and Future Possibilities; Dionisio, Burns, Gilbert: “In the past three decades considerable progress has been made in moving from text-based multi-user virtual environments to the technical implementation of advanced virtual worlds that previously existed only in the literary imagination. …[P]rogressive capabilities enable them to serve as elaborate contexts for work, socialization, creativity, and play and to increasingly operate more like digital cultures than as games. Virtual world development now faces a major new challenge: how to move from a set of sophisticated, but completely independent, immersive environments to a massive, integrated network of 3D virtual worlds or Metaverse and establish a parallel context for human interaction and culture. …[C]entral elements of a fully-realized Metaverse: realism (enabling users to feel fully immersed in an alternative realm), ubiquity (establishing access to the system via all existing digital devices and maintaining the user’s virtual identity throughout all transitions within the system), interoperability (allowing 3D objects to be created and moved anywhere and users to have seamless, uninterrupted movement throughout the system) and scalability (permitting concurrent, efficient use of the system by massive numbers of users). … The first aspect of ubiquity – ubiquitous availability and access to virtual worlds – rides on the crest of developments in ubiquitous computing in general. As ubicomp has progressed, access to virtual worlds has begun to move beyond a stationary ‘desktop PC rig,’ expanding now into laptops, tablets, mobile devices, and augmented reality. … The second aspect – ubiquitous identity, or manifest persona – has emerged as multiple avenues of digital expression (blogs, social networks, photo/video hosting, etc.) have become increasingly widespread. … As long as virtual world developments move alongside general ubicomp developments, moving in and out of the Metaverse may become as convenient and fluid as browsing the Worldwide Web is today. … It is also possible that virtual worlds may take a leadership position in this regard, as virtual world artifacts may be more closely linked to one’s digital persona due to the immersive environment… Interoperability in virtual worlds currently exists as a loosely connected collection of information, format, and data standards, most of which focus on the transfer of 3D models/objects across virtual world environments. … [V]irtual world interoperability is not solely limited to 3D object transfer: true interoperability also involves communication protocol, locator, identity, and currency standards… The wide-ranging requirements and scope of digital assets involved in virtual worlds have the potential of making the Metaverse the ‘killer app’ that finally leads the charge toward seamless interoperability. … Scalability. Virtual world technologies are currently in an initial stage of departure from highly centralized system architectures… Going forward, an integrative phase is needed where the multiple independent research threads are brought together in complementary and cohesive ways to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. … Progress in virtual world scalability implies progress in the scalability of many other types of multiuser, multitiered systems. … There are several factors that promote optimism that a fully developed Metaverse can be achieved, as well as a number of significant constraints to realizing this goal. … [A] new generation accustomed to graphically rich, 3D digital environments [both virtual worlds and immersive games offered online and through consoles such as PlayStation, Xbox360, and Wii] is rapidly coming of age and will likely fuel continued development in all immersive digital platforms including advanced virtual worlds. … Along with forces that are propelling the development of the Metaverse forward, there are two significant barriers that may inhibit the pace or extent of this progress. The first pertains to current limits in computational methods related to virtual worlds. … In addition to conceptual and computational challenges, the development of the Metaverse may be constrained by significant economic and political barriers. Currently virtual worlds are dominated by proprietary platforms such as Second Life, Cryworld, Utherverse, IMVU, and World of Warcraft, or government-controlled worlds such as the China-based Hipihi. …[J]ust as the old walled gardens of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were instrumental in expanding Internet usage early on, but ultimately became an inhibitory force in the development of the Worldwide Web, these proprietary and state-based virtual world platforms have sparked initial growth but now risk constraining innovation and advancement. … [T]he advancement of a fully-realized Metaverse would likely be maximized by harnessing the same process of collective effort and mass innovation that was instrumental in the creation and expansion of the Web.“