Category Archives: Web 2.0

acquaintances, Anthropology, Facebook, friendliness, friendship, Web 2.0

Friendship and Schools

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The recent controversy over Facebook connects with an interesting issue. Here’s a comment from the Buzz Out Loud podcast.
Show Notes 307 – CNET Buzz Out Loud Lounge Forums

Bill sticks up for FacebookIf you look closer into the anti-News Feeds/Mini-Feed groups on
Facebook, 90 percent of the people that are protesting this “invasion of
privacy” are the people with hundreds of friends that they likely just
added to boost their “e-cred.” Most level-headed people that add only
their real-life friends myself included are finding the new additions
extremely useful. I love that I can go to Facebook on my cell phone and
find out everything that has happened since I last checked the site
without wandering aimlessly all over the place. Its a lot better than
wasting a 15-cent text message to be told that I was poked.

Maybe people need to learn the meaning of the word “friend” before they
complain about their friends being updated on what theyre doing.

Love the show, keep up the good work,

-Bill

Well, my observation is that, in the U.S., and especially in schools, colleges, and universities (Facebook’s target market), the term “friend” is applied to almost anyone with whom one is on friendly terms. People in a hierarchical relationship (say, professor and student) typically don’t call each other friend even when their relationship is sound. “Friend” isn’t necessarily the opposite of “ennemy” or “competitor” and friends do compete in many situations. There’s a whole lot more to say about this and anthropologists have been surprisingly silent about the importance of friendship in U.S. society.

Another thing to think about is that a special notion of friendship is at the basis of what O’Reilly calls “Web 2.0” and was already present in (now defunct) SixDegrees.com as well as today’s MySpace.com and other Facebook.com.

Web 2.0

Music Publishers Getting Clue?

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RED HERRING | Gracenote Frees Lyrics

“We’ve been in a real catch-22 situation,” noted Nick Firth, chairman and chief executive of BMG Music Publishing, which has signed with Gracenote. “It’s kind of difficult to go after the illegal sites when you haven’t got a legal alternative.”

Of course, music publishers are not the same thing as the recording industry. But it’s still nice to see some of them state what seemed obvious to most of us.

In the Buzz Out Loud podcast in which they mentioned this story, they also alluded to the fact that Gracenote reappropriated the CDDB from a community project into a commercial site with very harsh usage restriction. Similar things happened with several of the early community-built online projects, including IMDb (though the IMDb remained somewhat more community-friendly). Will the whole “Web 2.0” projects avoid CDDB and IMDb’s fate?

blogosphere, blogs, podcasts, social networks, Web 2.0

Tikiboom, RocketBarTV

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The latest Rocketboom episode is a cross-over with TikiBarTV. With speculation that LaLa might have been considered as a replacement for Amanda Congdon, the cross-referencing is even more likely to generate buzz.

Yes, as many have been saying, the new personalized/community-oriented syndicated online distribution systems for content (all these “Web 2.0” things based on versions of RSS and Atom) like blogs, podcasts, and vidcasts/vlogs are like an “echo chamber” or some other metaphor about self-referential, inward-looking, insular communities with rather high clustering coefficient. Cliques, so to speak. But not really elitist per se. And, in fact, not at all close-ended. Just groups which are their own little universe.