Backing Down In The Face of Twitter

The end of 2011 saw big reversals by major corporations in the face of public outcry. First was GoDaddy, who came out in favor of SOPA and was quickly persuaded by online outrage into switching positions. The second was an even faster about-face by Verizon Wireless. Verizon thought they’d quietly slip-in a $2 bill payment fee, only to find the public reaction so seething that they cancelled that bright idea before potential shaming by the FCC. Two up. Two down. Is there something to be learned here?

It might be possible to dismiss either or both of these incidents as the obvious corporate toe stubbing that occurs from time to time. But when you add them to a stack of other news stories this past year that fall into the same category, there’s a pretty obvious pattern that emerges.

What other stories? How about the “Arab Spring” demonstrations that swept many countries in the Middle East and prompted regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt & Libya and ongoing protests in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Jordan? How about the “Occupy” movements that have been dubbed an “American Autumn” by some? How about 100,000 demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin that included tractor parades and farmers dressed as cows circling the Capitol last February? By this summer, it may culminate in recall of the state’s Governor.

How does all this disparate activity tie together? The common thread is the Internet. We are living in a new age of the empowered individual that is different from anything we’ve seen before in one important aspect. Thanks to technology, that empowerment is nearly instantaneous.

Time was, if you didn’t like something you always had the option to write your Congressman or the editor of your local paper. You could call or write a company to voice your disapproval. If the results weren’t satisfactory, you always could discuss matters with your friends, even escalating your group efforts into a demonstration or protest march. The civil rights movement and student protests of the 1960’s can certainly be said to have changed the course of American society over a period of turbulent years.

For those of us old enough to remember 1968, there is a certain resemblance to Zucotti Park and UC Davis. One difference is the way we hear about these things and see the images. In the 60’s, you tuned in Walter Cronkite from 5:30 to 6 PM or you went without video. There were always AP wirephotos in the Sunday newspaper or color pictures in next week’s Time magazine.

Compare that with watching the live feed from Tim Pool's cell phone as he walked through the crowd in New York City, interviewing people involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests as he went. What’s it take to be such a citizen journalist with your own audio and video remote broadcast facility? In this case, a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone and an unlimited 4G broadband account from Sprint feeding into a Ustream account called “The Other 99.” Would you like to broadcast live video to a dozen friends or tens of thousands of interested onlookers worldwide? The Ustream.tv channels are free. You can feed them from your desktop, laptop or smartphone with wired or wireless broadband connection.

Social media is said to be a major theme for business in 2012. The social media revolution has already become mainstream activity for individuals everywhere. In WWII, desperate messages came out of countries under siege via Morse Code sent from hidden short wave transmitters. In 2012, that’s text messages and tweets from some of the billions of cell phones in service worldwide. Think this can be stopped? Just who is going to round up all those billions of phones or cut off the Internet or texting for very long? There are so many interconnections that if you need to send a message anywhere on Earth, you can probably find a path in short order.

It’s more than the power of motivated individuals. Social media and the readily available tools that feed it allow those motivated individuals to quickly, almost instantly, join forces with others of the same mind. In hours, minutes, perhaps seconds, group efforts can be mounted to address nearly any issue. This is what doomed the ill-fated initiatives from GoDaddy and Verizon before they ever got solidified. One disgruntled customer on the toll-free service line can be placated or ignored. Ten thousand or a hundred thousand in concert bashing your business on Facebook, Twitter, text messages, YouTube, blogs and email are a force to be reckoned with. Once they get the attention of the mainstream media who monitor those social channels looking for newsworthy material, the game is over ... even if it only started a few hours or days ago.

Salman Rushdie and the Nym Wars

LINK

Rushdie Runs Afoul of Web’s Real-Name Police. (The New York Times, 11/15/2011)

Excerpt: The argument over pseudonyms — known online as the “nym wars” — goes to the heart of how the Internet might be organized in the future. Major Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have a valuable stake in this debate — and, in some cases, vastly different corporate philosophies on the issue that signal their own ambitions.

Insists on authentic identity, or real names.

Authentic identity.

Laissez-faire approach.





For further reading.
Understanding the Nym Wars. (Boing Boing, 8/20/2011)
The nym wars:  how many identifies are enough.  (Practical Ethics, 8/22/2011)

It's a first! Someone posts something stupid on Facebook

LINK

And then there's this headline.......

Lets Face The Music, And Pass?

OK, this isn't strictly about copyright - its about the launch of the new Facebook Music service - which seemed to leave most cyberworld commentators somewhat under-awed. But I wonder if they (and the music industry) are missing the point. Its great to have a internet behemoth like Facebook promoting legal music platforms (isn't it ?) - but - isn't the real value of music being missed again? Facebook's new music service seems to be all about data collection - with the music services (or the 'copyright' element) just the bait to get users to share information with Facebook.

One of cyberworld's commentators, Gizmodo, tells us that Facebook has failed "To Let Fans Share Music Across Platforms". But of course Facebook has never (as yet) claimed to be a content provider itself. Instead, head honcho Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook Music to be the "connective tissue" needed by music fans and the music industry alike, so that people would be able to share music with each other without friction - and without breaking the law. How will it do this? Well Facebook will let you see what your friends are listening to in a real-time "Ticker" feed that appears on the right side of a Facebook page. But if you want to hear full-length versions of those songs, you'll need to use the same music service as the person who shared it, with Zuckerberg explaining "I can see all the stuff [my friend] is listening to, and play it with whatever music player he used to play it. As Gizmodo rightly explains, it means that if Facebook friends want to become "friends with (musical) benefits," they'll both need to subscribe to the same music service - and users of any participating music service will need to allow Facebook to track their activity - what they are listening to - and to share that data with their friends and followers in real time via the new update stream, or 'Ticker'. So far, so good for the music industry - its pushing people to legal music services.

But one worry is that Facebook Music will ultimately reduce consumer choice - not widen it. The new Facebook Ticker and Timeline features may well be the "connective tissue" for music lovers who use Facebook - but only between listeners who pay to use the same music service. Gizmodo say that there will likely be only one winner in all of this as far as unlimited music subscriptions go, and that could well be Spotify, whose CEO Daniel Ek appeared with Zuckerberg at the recent F8 conference and whose app Zuckerberg said he "really loves": If Facebook Music was open to all platforms, music fans would need to install every (legal) music service their frends use on all of their computers, smartphones, and tablets, just in case they need to find a shared song from a service they otherwise wouldn't use. And I have to agree with Gizmodo, that scenario seems a tad unlikely, to say the least. So Gizmodo expects a single winner to emerge from the existing music subscription platforms - and thinks its Spotify, although there are of course other players such as MOG - and maybe Rhapsody - and Facebook CTO Bret Taylor spent quite some time at the Facebook Music launch explaining how Clear Channel's I Heart Radio venture will also take advantage of Facebook's new data sharing functionality.

The music industry seemed chuffed. Rhapsody President John Irwin told the New York Post "The more you help people discover music, the more social it is, the more they will be engaged. If they're more engaged, then they're more likely to subscribe" and VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff told the Guardian "Today's announcement is a big step forward in Vevo's mission to bring more music to more fans in more places. A deeper integration with Facebook will help VEVO grow its scale and reach to new heights, while better targeting our connected, socially-savvy audience".

And alongside this story is growing concern that the Spotify streaming model just doesn't work for everyone. Recently three small heavy metal labels have pulled their content from Spotify - Prosthetic Records followed Century Media and Metal Blade in withdrawing from the streaming platform with its co-owner EJ Johantgen telling LA Weekly "there [does] not appear to be an upside" to being part of the Spotify party and that payouts are "fractions of pennies". Its interesting that the four UK major labels (Universal, Warners, Sony and EMI) along with Merlin representing the major independent labels own an estimated18% of Spotify - a nice return for shareholderds as the company is now worth upwards of $1 billion - and Universal and Sony part own video streaming platform Vevo. But does this actually help the creators of music - the artists and the songwriters? Well with PRS for Music collecting just 0.085p per stream (or £850 per million streams) it won't be making songwriters rich, in the short term at least, and there have been a number of horror stories about the lack of transparency and low level of payments in general - with Lady Gaga reportedly earning just $167 from a million plays of Poker Face. An online debate about Spotify's payments to both labels and songwriters has been initiated by self-releasing indie-folk outfit Uniform Motion based around the royalties they earn on their sound recordings. Posting a blog about the economics of being a DIY artist, they provided some interesting insights into what artists can make from the various digital services - both download and mail-order - and streaming - and the blog led to an online debate comparing the money artists can make 'per download' via services such as iTunes and 'per stream' models such as Spotify. Spotify responded by pointing out the diffence between the two models and saying that they have paid out $100 million to rights owners and that they are the second largest source of digital revenue for European labels. And of course lets not forget that they DO provide a legal platform. But interestingly, Uniform Motion has since noted that their problem with Spotify and other streaming services isn't so much how much they get paid per stream, but rather how that fee relates to what the streaming firms earn for ad sales and subscriptions saying "What we dislike about Spotify is the lack of transparency in their business model. With Apple, it's simple. They take 30%. With Spotify, we don't know if we're getting a fair deal or not". With two million subscribers paying Spotify now, that's quite a lot of money to be concerned about.

Others say that Facebook Music is hardly a revolution at all. It MAY help new music services get a foothold and gain a more mainstream customer base. Conversely it may prioritise one clear winner. But surely the technology and capacity to capture data will be the greatest asset of all - and that asset will be owned by Facebook. If users allow Facebook to track their online lives and collect rich and important data about what they (and their on-line friends) do and this will have a real value to Facebook who will have the capacity to shape and build new services around users and user data - allowing some fairly specific targeting and predicting, something marketeers dream of. And actually it won't really cost Facebook anything, as they are just piggy-backing on the music services, albeit promoting them at the same time. So, a question for the recorded music and music publishing sectors of the music industry - is this really monetising copyright in the most profitable way for you and your artistes? Or another lost opportunity for the music industry to build a new business model fit for the digital age - outflanked by the Geeks again!


My take on the economics of Spotify here http://the1709blog.blogspot.com/2010/04/spotify-full-house-or-flushed-away.html

and in Will New Music Streaming Business Models Survive The Dawn of the Digital Age? here
http://www.musiclawupdates.com/09Novemberlawupdates.htm

and here http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article/spotify-passes-two-million-paying-subscribers-landmark/

For Neil Wilkof's interesting take on Amazon's idea for the book publishing industry on the IPKat - Can There Be an E-Book Library? - see here http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2011/09/can-there-be-e-book-library.html


http://gizmodo.com/5842983/facebook-fails-to-let-fans-share-music-across-platforms


Photo by 4ELEVEN Images http://www.facebook.com/4ELEVEN512

Hacker group to destroy Facebook on Nov 5?

Can't live without Facebook? Need you be concerned about the following news? (courtesy of Daily Chilli.)

An-anti Facebook movement called Operation Facebook, or #OpFacebook, is reportedly planning to kill the social networking site on November 5.

Calling themselves Anonymous, the hackers posted their video message on YouTube, saying: "Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed.

"Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your privacy settings, and deleting your account is impossible. Even if you delete your account, all your information stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time."

Operation Facebook added: "[Facebook] knows more about you than your family. It has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world."

But the real hacker group, Anonymous has denied that it is behind the planned attack.

Source: www.digitalspy.co.uk
Published Aug 12 2011

Facebook hacked and Things you should be Careful about when Using Facebook

I read somewhere that vis-a-vis our population, Malaysia has a significant percentage of membership in social media sites like Facebook, My Space and Twitter. Malaysians also make up a sizable number of bloggers. Given the borderless world where technology is concerned, everyone is equally vulnerable to security hiccups anywhere in the world, and equally liable to fall prey to scammers, hackers and the like.

I read about a med student who on March 24 clicked on a Facebook user's link to vote in a competition led to her receiving a message, allegedly from the hacker, saying that he would hack into her Facebook account unless she paid him RM200.

He also threatened that he would create and post fake nude pictures of her on her Facebook account.

She deleted all her pictures in her Facebook and even changed her name and thought it would be the end of it, but he still managed to upload her picture onto her Facebook account and revert it to her real name.

The hacker had given her a mobile phone number and also a bank account number. She managed to trace a photograph of the suspect based on the suspect's mobile phone number and made a police report in Pengkalan Chepa, Kelantan.

MCA Public Services and Complaints Department head Datuk Michael Chong, who highlighted the case, said that the department had received nine similar complaints last year and four cases were reported to him this year, including this case.

Unfortunately, nothing in this world is foolproof. We just need to take proper precautions so that we do not expose ourselves to liabilities.

Here are 5 Things You Should Be Careful About When Using Facebook!

Even President of United States of America Barak Obama has also advised Facebook users to be careful about what they post on their Facebook profiles. Important video to watch. Take a look..

Dog Abuser, he is not

Alamak! A case of mistaken identity.

Yesterday, I agonised for over 15 minutes watching that video of a brown poodle being abused by its owner. The video is 15:07-minute long, I believe. The news was all over the papers the past few days and complaints officially lodged with the relevant authorities.

Fingers were pointing at a chef in Malacca (name, shop location and even his mobile phone number were provided) and his ex-wife as being the perpetrators - one did the actual beating, the other did the recording.

Well, whaddayaknow! As it turns out as confirmed by The Star today, it is merely a case of mistaken identity and his business experienced a sudden increase as curious people thronged his shop to catch a glimpse of him. Meanwhile, the dog-abuser is still not known.

I will spare you the agony by not linking the video here but one thing is for sure, I think people like that need professional help, help they can only get at a residential rehab centre where they have expertise for all sorts of rehabilitation treatments.

By the way, the video is posted not by the dog-abuser himself but by the person who found the lost pen-drive with the video in it, with the hope of highlighting this inhumane act.


Image source: The Star

Funny Photo