A lot of folks have asked me "What went wrong with Friendster? Why is MySpace any different?" I guess i never directly answered that question, even though i've addressed the causes in other talks. Still, i guess it would be helpful to piece some of it together and directly attend to this question.

* Social technologies succeed when they fit into the social lives and practices of those who engage with the technology.
* People use the social technologies that all of their friends are using.
* Social technologies need benevolent dictators who love their constituents.
* It's not all about productivity.
* It is not about technological perfection.
* Is it all a fad?

This essay by Danah Boyd is worth a read. Danah is a Berkley PhD student who has been watching this space very closely for quite some time now and has always shown some good insight. Also take a look at the followup post where she talks about the term "super publics" in the context of traditional communications theory.

Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?

CTRL ALT DELETE your TV and watch the IT Crowd online!

I saw some of this at Interz0ne and it is absolutely hillarious. If you have ever wondered what would happen if the guys from Monty Python started hanging out at 2600 meetings this is probably it...

Channel4.com - IT Crowd

Masked, plainclothes police carrying assault rifles staged a midnight raid on the country's oldest newspaper and its sister television station early Thursday, burning tens of thousands of newspapers in the most dramatic attack on the press in Kenya's history.

Boing Boing: Media shutdown in Kenya -- TV station, newspaper torched

You do realize that you have basically betrayed a legacy of protecting journalistic sources (that at the WaPo includes the most infamous of such, Deep Throat), not only that but you have inadvertnatly (we can only assume it was inadvertant) destroyed faith in the concept of journalists protecting their sources, making it more difficult for future sources to come forward.

Read the threads... Apparently there is a googlemap link to 0x80's likely neighborhood.

Brian Krebs and 0x80 - (washingtonpost.com)

A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and recommend TV in a way that's easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before.

Has anyone played with this?

Boing Boing: Democracy: a new platform for making and seeing TV on the net

The Internet has a rising star whose name isn't Google. Just over 2 years old, MySpace now has 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google

The development comes as the leading portal, Yahoo, becomes more like MySpace, starting a social-networking service called 360 and buying content-sharing sites such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.

MySpace rises as new online star

David E. Rosenbaum, a longtime editor and reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, died yesterday after being beaten and robbed Friday night near his home in upper Northwest Washington.

Was this a hit?

N.Y. Times Editor-Reporter Dies After Attack in NW

There is a stupid notion going around that the news media would be better off if anyone and everyone got to make a contribution to it. Blogs and podcasts are examples of this and reader-generated electronic "newspapers" are beginning to spring up. People who should know better see this as democratizing the flow of news and information...

I have been concerned about this new, online "citizen journalism" becoming the source of more disinformation than truth, a concern that actually extends to most of the Internet.

Some people in the media are absolutely giddy about the opportunity to pile a complete and total indictment of the entire Internet on top of this incident. Oh my god! People can express their own views without control from the 4th estate! How will we ever know what is true anymore?!

Check out the headline on this article:

For all its wonders, the world-changing effects of the digital civilization contains a slimy, anarchic undercurrent of democracy run amok.

There is so much that is broken about the perspectives being offered around this incident:

The idea that Wikipedia and encyclopedias are the same kinds of things and their value should be judged by the same criteria.
The idea that Wikipedia must either be 100% reliable or completely useless for any purpose.
The idea that people are not capable of critical thinking and should not be responsible for doing it.
The idea that the alleged connection to the Kennedy Assasination would have been viewed as credible by anyone who isn't nuts.
The idea that internet anonymity is a bad thing.
The idea that "supporting freedom of speech" is compatible with "demanding accountability." (Haven't you people ever heard of the Federalist Papers?!)
The idea that the highly reliable totally awesome 4th estate should be the arbiter of the truth, when in their articles about this VERY incident they have repeatedly twisted this guy's voluntary resignation from his job (which he had to do because of the pressure THEY would put on his employer if he hadn't) so that it appears as if he was fired. "Man looses job over wikipedia prank..."

The biggest problem here is the idea that a national press campaign and the threat of lawsuits are a reasonable way of dealing with a problem on a publically editable wiki! This notion is so irrational that one suspects John Seigenthaler of taking advantage of the opportunity because he wanted to launch a broder attack on the Internet. You gunna sue me for suggesting that, John? Go ahead. Make my fucking day.

Internet Backlash

This is some beautiful stuff someone captured. Apparently someone at CNN trying to put together a map of the areas of France not currently in flames and bursting with rioters managed to really screw up using Google Maps.

Check it out, it's almost like a public school student's attempt at making their own map of a country they know nothing about.

The World According to CNN

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

Gore peppers this speech with some annoying political swipes, but the core message is something that I have strongly believed for what is now a very long time.

Al Gore tells it like it is