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Do I believe in Web 2.0 or what is the point of Facebook

A couple of days ago at the Sour Herring dinner at Lund one of my companions at the table said that he did not believe in Web 2.0. Interaction, he said, was overrated. Most of us around the table took the remark as humor and we were satisfied with this.

But the remark has been gnawing at the back of my mind. Do I believe in Web 2.0?

At first this may seem like a strange question, coming from me. I blog and participate in other blogs. I have set up and run wiki’s and used these technologies in the classroom, in research and with friends. Still the question is rather valid.

No blogs and wiki’s don’t require that you believe in them. If they are useful they will be used. I enjoy them and use them as a central part of my work (and play). But what about the more typical social networking sites?

Just to name a few I am a member at Technorati, Linkedin and Facebook. I have even upgraded my free account on flickr to pro (which means I am paying money for it). Besides flickr the usefulness of the others is unclear to me. Technorati is not much of a social networking site it is more of an aggregator for blogs – so let’s move on.

Linkedin seems to be a more formal social networking site based upon professional contacts. It is not really designed to encourage wide scale use. Facebook on the other hand it something quite different.

Facebook is a huge social networking site where people are actively encouraged to collect friends and interact with them by comparing films, music and books. The site encourages users to play games with each other such as the presently popular war of the vampires.

With all these applications I can really see that users can spend literally hours online finding and interacting with their online friends but after some testing I still am struck by the sensation or feeling: What is the point of facebook? It is surprising to see how many people are using it – in particular its appeal the the large group of non-techie or non-Web 2.0 crowd. But I still don’t really get it. What is the allure of this site? What need or desire does the site fulfill?

Or is it simply that the social interaction between friends, even in an online virtual forum, is the whole point. Oh well, I would like to analyze this further but unfortunately I need to update my profile 🙂

Posted on by mklang

The Internet Imagined in 1969

This is a really cool documentary short about the future of the Internet made in 1969. If we ignore the appalling gender stereotypes mother – mother shops for clothes while father looks concerned and pays the bills. “What the wife selects on her console will be paid for by the husband on his console”!! And the fact that the kids are not on the Internet it is a really cool look at the future with

  • eCommerce (fingertip shopping sounds much better)
  • Browsing
  • Online banking
  • Instant messaging
  • Video surveillance

Sure there are some things missing but it was a pretty good guess. Its also just worth watching for the gender roles…

(via Guardian Unlimited)

Posted on by mklang

Semantic Webs

Spend 8 minutes with Tim Berners-Lee and listen to him explain the enormous potential of the semantic web built upon open access and open data. He also explains why standards and openness are cornerstones in this development.

sir_tim.jpg

 (via UBC Academic Search)

Posted on by mklang

Internet

Andres over at Technollama reports that John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, has vowed to clean the Internet by “blocking pornography, upgrading the search for chatroom sex predators and cutting off terror sites.” The PM plans to achieve this by giving all Australians a free content filter.

Its amazing that the old tactics of creating paranoia and fear are still used so widely. Well why change something that works? Blocking pornography will not make it unavailable but it can be filtered out.  It’s still there but many people will not see it. Its like going into a porn theater and putting a paper bag over your head.

I am more amused by the fact that he intends to “upgrading the search for chatroom sex predators and cutting off terror sites” by using filters.

This is the stuff that sounds good to concerned parents but is technically useless. Its just words.

Posted on by mklang

100 best films

The American Film Institute is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year and has presented the 100 greatest films of all time. It was ten years ago since the last such list was made.

The top ten are best films are Citizen Kane (still first on the list since the last list was made) followed by The Godfather – Casablanca – Raging Bull – Singing in the Rain – Gone with the Wind – Lawrence of Arabia – Schindler’s List – Vertigo and The Wizard of Oz.

Surprises on the list? Well E.T. (nr 24) beats Apocalypse Now (nr 30) and Titanic is on the list (at nr 83).

The bottom ten of the hundred are Sophie’s Choice – Goodfellas – The French Connection – Pulp Fiction – The Last Picture Show – Do the right thing – Blade Runner – Yankee Doodle Dandy – Toy Story – Ben Hur.

(via Humaniorabloggen)

Posted on by mklang

iSummit begins

Today is the first day of the iSummit and we begin with the legal day with presentations by Catharina Maracke, Heather Ford, Paul Keller, Lucie Guibault and Mike Linksvayer.

The agenda is the version 3.o, international law and statistics on license use so it should be very exiting and I am looking forward to the presentations and discussions.

Naturally there are lots of other people here blogging – amongst them is TechnoLlama

Posted on by mklang

Harvard Thesis Repository

With so many discussions on Free Culture, Open Access and the problems connected with making academic publishing available outside academia it is surprising how few good places there are to find thesis’ online.

This is why I was happy when Peter Murray-Rust pointed me towards the Harvard College Thesis Repository (a project of Harvard College Free Culture).

Here Harvard students make their senior theses accessible to the world, for the advancement of scholarship and the widening of open access to academic research.

Too many academics still permit publishers to restrict access to their work, needlessly limitingâ??cutting in half, or worseâ??readership, research impact, and research productivity. For more background, check out our op-ed article in The Harvard Crimson.

If you’ve written a thesis in Harvard College, you’re invited to take a step toward open access right here, by uploading your thesis for the world to read. (If you’re heading for an academic career, this can even be a purely selfish moveâ??a first taste of the greater readership and greater impact that comes with open access.)
If you’re interested in what the students at (ahem) the finest university in the world have to say at the culmination of their undergraduate careers, look around.

The FAQ explains much of the process. It is also good to see that they are applying Creative Commons Attribution License

Q. What permissions do I have to grant to free my thesis?

A. To make sure your thesis is always available for scholars to build on, we ask that you give everyone permission to do the things you’d want to be able to do with a scholarly work you liked: download the work, read it, keep copies, share it with other people, and adapt it into fresh works. The specific legal permission we ask for is the Creative Commons Attribution License, the same one required by the world’s leading biology journal PLoS Biology and the other journals of the Public Library of Science.

My only (small) complaint is that I wish the repository was clearer in showing the license terms for their content. I only found it in the faq. Normally I would not bother reading the faq. To increase the usability of the site the terms should be on the download page and preferably on the essay file.
Despite this I think this is an excellent initiative and I would hope that the fact that Harvard has taken a step such as this would work as an incentive for other universities to follow suite.

Posted on by mklang

What Google wants

To many users Google is understood as a neutral tool. A search engine without bias in any form. While Google has never made any such claim their attitudes and appearance do nothing to dispel this common misconception. It is easy to understand how the idea that technology in itself is neither good nor bad and may be seen as neutral comes about. But such an idea fails to take into account that technology is a man-made phenomenon and as such is the result of countless decisions and perceptions of right and wrong. Therefore while the technological thing may be neutral the choices behind its design, manufacture and use are not.

One of the implementations of Google that may be seen as less than neutral is the harvesting of user searches. Google has a long tradition of recording what people search for. This practice is not without its critics but until now Google has been silent about their purpose for harvesting this data. Last week Googleâ??s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer posted three reasons why Google captures and retains usersâ?? search queries. The reasons fall into three areas:

  1. Improve our services
  2. Maintain security and prevent fraud and abuse
  3. Comply with legal obligations to retain data

This has not passed uncommented. Micheal Zimmer and Seth Finkelstein are both critical to these explanations in two excellent commentaries they explain why Google’s reasons are mainly unsatisfactory and even misguided.

Posted on by mklang

Army 2.0

You might be excused for getting the impression that the US military is struggling to understand how they should be using Internet technology. On the one hand they recently began an effort to control what their soldiers are posting online (War blogs silenced) and now they have blocked access to sites such as YouTube and Myspace.

The reason for this? Bandwidth.

The US says the use is taking up too much bandwidth and slows down the military’s computer system.

But a US Strategic Command spokesman said a “secondary benefit” was to help operational security.

At the same time the military have realised the potential impact of sites such as YouTube and have started putting material online.

The Pentagon only recently started posting its own videos on YouTube, showing soldiers in action in Iraq in a move designed to reach out to a younger audience and to show the successes of the US military. (More on this over here).

But the best quote in this BBC article is the honest: “The cyberspace battle space was not one that we were particularly operating well in” Lt Col Christopher Garver, US Army.

Yes… we have noticed…

Lex Ferenda has more including the order (AP report | full text of order) and a increased list of blocked sites:

â??To maximize the availability of DoD network resources for official government usage, the Commander, JTF-GNO, with the approval of the Department of Defense, will block worldwide access to the following internet sites beginning on or about 14 May 2007.â??

www.youtube.com
www.1.fm
www.pandora.com
www.photobucket.com
www.myspace.com
www.live365.com
www.hi5.com
www.metacafe.com
www.mtv.com
www.ifilm.com
www.blackplanet.com
www.stupidvideos.com
www.filecabi.com

Posted on by mklang

Secret Numbers

Have you been following the recent blog craze on the topic of Digg and the HD DVD key? Basically the Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

Naturally this just made things more exciting and the number now appears on over 50 000 websites, as a set of colors, a poem and at least one t-shirt!

Many of the blogs reporting this news have been in anguish over the fact that numbers should not be copyrightable but this is acutally missing the point. Fred von Lohmann (EFF) clarifies the situation in a neatly written post:

Is the key copyrightable? It doesn’t matter. The AACS-LA takedown letter is not claiming that the key is copyrightable, but rather that it is (or is a component of) a circumvention technology. The DMCA does not require that a circumvention technology be, itself, copyrightable to enjoy protection.

Posted on by mklang