Best thing I’ve seen this week: Ze Frank‘s Social Network song (mp3 format direct link) set to animation: Social Network Just for Two by Shaun Moriarty
No embed code, so you’ll have to go there to see it.
Why Make Miro?
Regular readers of Open Parenthesis know I’m a big fan of Miro (even back when it was the Democracy Player), the Participatory Culture Foundation, and Make Internet TV.
To help understand why, watch this video from Nick Reville, the foundation’s executive director, talking about the mission behind Miro.
Use your Long Tail Facebook Apps
Thanks to Dion Almaer using more than six apps on facebook is again possible.
Well, possible is an overstatement – but I tended to forget the ones which fell below the virtual fold imposed by Facebook showing only six by default.
Dion’s aptly named Greasemonkey script to expand Facebook left bar effectively clicks the “more” button under your applications in the leftmost column on Facebook, showing you all of your installed applications.
What gets pushed further down the page, of course, is advertising – in this case the “Facebook flyer” which I for one can do without.
Of course, you have to be running Firefox and have Greasemonkey installed, but you should have both of those things anyway.
Thanks Dion for a nifty quick hack.
WordPress 2.3 Tags not indexed on Technorati?
Update:
Changed the permalink structure (options->permalink) to custom so that permalinks are of the form:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%
Rather than using the “date and name” option which looks much the same but has the trailing slash.
This also strips the trailing slash from the tags link. I’ll try this for a while and see how it works – WordPress accepts the requests and drops the slash if requested. Hopefully technorati will re-index the posts and pick up the tags.
/Update
For the last few days I’ve been attending the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago, and blogging a fair amount about what I saw there. While doing so, I religiously tagged my posts with fcf07, as recommended by Jeremiah.
Yet my posts were not getting indexed, or aggregated, or even found as part of the technorati tag fcf07.
Why not?
I think there is a conflict between WordPress 2.3’s tagging feature and Technorati‘s expectations for tags.
On Technorati’s Tagging with Links page, they explain:
1. The tag link must occur within the boundaries of a weblog post to be included in Technorati’s index.
2. The constructed link must define a link relationship of “tag” by adding rel=”tag” to each post link you would like Technorati to include in its tag index.
3. The referenced URL must have content after the final forward-slash (“/”).
It’s that third one I’m wondering about. On my blog, the tags WordPress generates have links which end with a trailing slash. For example, the tag for fcf07 appears in those posts like this:
<a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/tag/fcf07/" rel="tag">fcf07</a>
Note that trailing slash after fcf07. I think this trailing slash prevents Technorati, which does index my posts, from seeing these as valid tags.
Anyone else seeing similar behavior with WordPress 2.3 and posts getting indexed by technorati but the tags being ignored?
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture at Forrester Consumer Forum
I’ve written several times before on Jenkins – he’s a major guru I think of the new media shift. If you haven’t read Convergence Culture go do so now.
Today he’s one of the keynotes at the Forrester Consumer Forum
Notes:
——
I’m here as the token EggHead of the event. I always go where no humanist has gone before.
If you want to understand the web now, you need to hire humanities grads – the questions about the web used to be technical questions, but now they are social and cultural questions – the kinds of things studied by liberal arts grads.
Describe Web 2.0 in 2 sentences or less:
“You make all the content. They keep all the revenue.”
Convergence culture is a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms.
Along with convergence culture is participary culture – he actually used this slide:
Which is user generated content which originally came from this presentation.
The question now is really what can I do with your product.
We hear about people worried about losing control – the reality is you lost it long ago. Consumers can take your content and remix it and share it and publish it almost as publically as you can. You can sue, and shut a few people down, but the genie is out of the bottle.
The ability for “us” to control and remake content and republish it at an equivalent quality and fidelity as large media brands is fundamentally and radically different than previous eras of media.
But large media and brands have a place as well -all the parodies of the mac ads circulate in part because everyone knows the original.
There’s also great innovation going on here in terms of fan practices and how they are cocreating value.
There are all kinds of low cost experiments which remix the raw materials our culture provides and you can support and cultivate these in dialog – not shut them down.
Four Eyed Mosters and collaborative curating – creating a market for your product before it is even released.
Wizard Rock – over 200 wizard rock groups using myspace to create music with reference to Harry Potter – a whole genre of widely listened-to music that did not exist before it came bottom up, not top down.
Any platform that can be used to trade cat pictures can bring down a government – Ethan Zuckerman.
The fundamental questions are all about what this new participatory and convergent culture will be like.
The story of Fanlib – a company which wanted to create a commercial portal to distribute fan fiction – and some of the fans are revolting – they don’t want a commercial entity to run this.
Fanlib committed several obvious mistakes – 80% of the fan fiction writers are women, but the ad campaign was all men. The company told fans it wanted to empower them, but to corporate rights holders they were telling a different story – complete control, staying within the lines.
The community didn’t like the idea of things being regulated, commercialized, and brought into the lines.
Example of Stephen Colbert – but his studio sends a cease and desist to YouTube – different parts of the same company have different ideas of what this means. That is the current state of convergence culture.
One quick plug at the end for the Futures of Entertainment 2 conference.
Q: Is copyright dead?
A: No, but it is evolving. In the future, companies will have every right to protect their content but every incentive to let it go. It isn’t that they don’t have legal right but they should not use it.
Q: Is participatory culture even across the world?
A. Not even, but global. When the media folks went after Harry Potter fan fiction in Poland and Thailand, the kids in the US knew about it immediately. In some ways this group is more connected and interactive than anyone else. But there are other countries which are clearly left out. This is a global phenomenon, but not one in which everyone in the world participates equally.
Q: To what extent should brands try to control / engage in negative discussions about their brand?
A: You can’t shut it down. Your best response is to do something about what you’ve done that people are criticizing you for. If it is a misperception get out there and correct it – if it is an accurate criticism change the behavior.