Experience shows that the first wave of Internet-enabled change was tainted by irrational exuberance. A sober analysis of today's trends reveals that this new participation is both a blessing and a curse. Mass collaboration can empower a growing cohort of connected individuals and organizations to create extraordinary wealth and reach unprecedented heights in learning and scientific discovery... (but) the new participation will also cause great upheaval, dislocation, and danger for societies, corporations, and individuals that fail to keep up with the relentless change.
- Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Wikinomics, page 15.
Last week Microsoft grabbed headlines by buying a small stake in Facebook. Many people viewed this as quite a coup in Microsoft’s struggle to resist Google’s ever-increasing dominance of online advertising. After all, Facebook seems to be rapidly turning into the defacto social utility network, and if Microsoft combines a small ownership stake with some exclusive ad serving deals within the utility, surely it will put a major dent in Google’s armor - right?
Well maybe - but maybe not. This week, in what some could see as the ultimate web 2.0 strategic response, Google announced the launch of OpenSocial - an open API Google is bringing to the social networking world along with partners Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Ning, and several others.
To outline why this is a big deal in the social networking world, I’m going to call on Marc Andreessen - the cofounder of Ning, who also gained some recognition for the rise of a little company called Netscape. If you go back to June of 2007, he called the open Facebook platform a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry. My favorite quote from his post:
Metaphorically, Facebook is providing the ease and user attraction of MySpace-style embedding, coupled with the kind of integration you see with Firefox extensions, plus the added rocket fuel of automated viral distribution to a huge number of potential users, and the prospect of keeping 100% of any revenue your application can generate.
The leadership that the Facebook team is showing here rivals anything that the large and established software and web companies have done in this decade.
Well put - we couldn’t have agreed more around here, and said so in this very blog. Then, in his excellent post on OpenSocial that went up today, Marc called it the next great leap forward. On this point I must also agree.
The key reason is simple - while Facebook opened up it’s platform, any application that was developed could only run within Facebook, meaning you could get in but not necessarily get out (or at least not easily). Now, developers can work with OpenSocial and have their applications function in multiple social networks and other “containers.” In other words, it takes the apps out of Facebook’s walled garden, in addition to a variety of other benefits built into OpenSocial that Marc lays out beautifully.
Now obviously Marc has a vested interest in OpenSocial succeeding, as Ning is one of those “other” social networks (and a very interesting one, with a slogan of create your own social network for anything - you should definitely check it out). In his blog he also talks about how Facebook might just prefer proprietary lock-in to be maintained (which is probably what got my friend Nicholas Carr writing about this announcement). But where this gets really interesting is when you think about one of Marc’s main arguments for why Facebook should welcome the change:
It’s hard to see Facebook losing in a world of a billion or more social network users, and hundreds of thousands or millions of social network apps. And it’s also easy to see how a lot of other people — containers, and app developers — will win, as well.
In fact, if rumors of a Facebook web-wide ad network are true, then this could be great for Facebook in another way — such a Facebook-run ad network could be an outstanding ad network for all of these new Open Social web applications!
A Facebook-run web-wide ad network (in partnership with Microsoft, of course)… what do you imagine Google thinks of that? You know, the company that people are saying did this whole OpenSocial thing to ward off Facebook? Or perhaps a better question is can anyone look at all of this and argue that the rules of competition aren’t changing dramatically in the Web 2.0?
We all know how the Do-Not-Call list is used to prevent unsolicited telemarketing calls, well AOL has announced they will be supporting a Do-Not-Track list to prevent unsolicited tracking of your online behavior.
Companies like Google, Yahoo, and AOL have been tracking everything we do for years. Although these companies claim that they only record demographic information and surfing behavior (i.e. you’re a 26 year old female, and frequently visit parenting Web sites), it really doesn’t take much to connect the dots and find out your name, address, and phone number. We saw how easy this was last year when AOL released users’ search data to the public, claiming to have no personally identifiable information. The reason why it is so easy to gather information is a result of human nature; everyone does a search now and then on Google to see where you show up on the search results, or look up on Google Maps to see your house from the satellite view. Now your online privacy isn’t so private, and heaven forbid you enter your credit card information, or phone number to see where that shows up.
Although I do support the efforts of a Do-Not-Track list, and preventing people from mining my information, I think it will have a small and unnoticeable impact on information gathering as a whole. AOL may stop tracking me, but I already know MySpace, Facebook, Google, and the list goes on, is already tracking everything I do and using it at their own discretion.
While you may not be able to stop yourself from searching on Google, you can change your searching behavior, and limit your use of non-essential Web sites. See an earlier post on four reasons you should remove yourself from Facebook.
Think of other things you could be doing with your time spent on Facebook. If you find yourself spending, say, 10 hours a week on Facebook, make a list of all the other things you could accomplish in that time. You could:
I have vague recollections of contests and challenges during my undergraduate business school classes (and yes, all my recollections of that time are now a little vague): I’d either join up or get set up with some other students, we’d “invent” a product to market like Ginseng Berry Juice Bombs (or a new service, or solve a “pressing” problem for a company, etc.), we’d submit a report for judging, if we were really lucky we’d get a decent mark, some sort of novelty hat or t-shirt, and head back to the pub to celebrate. Er, I mean head to the pub to celebrate.
Now everyone has different priorities, but I can’t help but feel that the prize Cisco is offering in their new “business and technology idea” contest might draw a little more attention then free t-shirts: the I-Prize will include $10 M in funding over 3 years to get an idea actually started, along with a $250,000 signing bonus. Other guidelines for the contest:
judges are looking for an idea that can generate $1 B+ over 5-7 years
criteria used to select idea will be similar to internal processes Cisco uses
no Cisco employees, or family of employees, are allowed
a 10% referral fee and a novelty t-shirt of some sort should be sent to Denis Hancock, care of New Paradigm Blog, post haste.
While this sounds kind of interesting, to be totally honest I’m finding that the contests popping up all over the place quite boring, and they are becoming very hard to call innovative anymore. After all, most boil down to (with acknowledgement that Cisco’s is better than most):
“Hey! Do you have an idea that could make us millions or billions of dollars? If so, we’ll let you work on it for a long time, and then bring it to us in competition with a whole bunch of other ideas, so long as you sign a waiver saying you have very few rights, and if we like your idea, and decide that it’s different enough from other ideas we’ve been generating internally, we’ll give you a relatively small pile of money! Everyone we don’t select will be like a free R&D lab that costs us nothing - think how great are margins will be!”
Moreover, tied to the “quote” above, I’m not so sure that these contests are as great for stimulating innovation as many people may think. As people far smarter than I have postulated before, failure breeds success - in order to encourage and stimulate truly ground breaking innovations, you need to give people space to make mistakes.
In a model where hundreds or thousands of people do a lot of work, and only one or two of them get paid, there’s a natural problem built it - it doesn’t scale well when thee who fails, fails to eat. You rarely hear this issue discussed in relation to the contests, but it’s something to think about as contests become more pervasive. At the same time, that person who won should generally stop and think about whether they’re getting full value for their idea or not - because the answer is generally not.
Even better, if you want to do some interesting reading on this subject, I recommend The Winner Take All Society, a book which delves into some of the issues and concerns tied to the contest model quite nicely.
In honour of the first day of the NBA season, I thought I’d share an interesting development in the world of data analysis in sports. This isn’t a new development, but in the context of the enormous growth in video content over the past two years, I think it’s very significant.
Synergy Sports Technology has used some next level meta-tagging to correlate hundreds of thousands of hours of video to almost every basketball stat imaginable, creating the first (to my knowledge) searchable video database of this magnitude.
Imagine being able to search for “behind the back assists by Nash” or “angry dunks by Bosh” and pulling up every video clip ever recorded. A boon for coaches, Synergy is currently catering its offering to the NBA, but the possibilities for growth are endless. Professional sports teams are increasingly scientific in their approach and this type of video indexing provides access to insights not previously available. Need to stop Dallas’ Dirk Nowitzki in the next home game? Now coaches can give defensive assignments to players using a video iPod filled with every offensive play Nowitzki has ever made.
Consider this: In its inaugural 2005-06 season, Synergy only had four teams on board; the two teams that reached the finals – the Dallas Mavericks and the Miami Heat – happened to be Synergy clients. Last season, 14 teams were clients, and this year the company considering expanding into other sports.
For me, this is a development akin to when CDs first came on the market to eventually kill the cassette tape. At that time, the killer feature that made me switch was being able to skip to a track at the touch of a button. Video currently suffers from the same shortcoming as tape – viewers have to fast-forward or rewind to find the specific clip they are looking for.
Google-like control over video would be a YouTuber’s dream. Of course, the downside is that tagging must still be done manually. Synergy employees still sit through each game’s video footage and painstakingly link every stat available to its corresponding clip.
For more insights on the Synergy offering, read last year’s press coverage in CNET and the article from the New York Times. From the CNET article:
Across the sports landscape, professional teams are taking a more scientific approach to running their businesses. With so much money on the line, executives and coaches who often relied on hunches and gut instincts are starting to do what nearly every other industry already does–make decisions based on hard data.[…]
“The infrastructure of the Net has gotten to where it can now support these kinds of models,” Lahr said. “We couldn’t have done this just a few years ago.”
In no order of importance, the following is a growing list of concerns I have with Facebook.
1. Facebook employee perks
According to recent reports, there have been significant privacy concerns at the Facebook HQ. It seems that Facebook employees get a great perk – spying on whomever they want. It seems that an employee can learn a lot about you, without you ever knowing it. Not only that, but they can see information on whose profile you’ve been looking at. Do you really want that information tracked?
2. Facebook Applications
Every time you sign up to play Texas Hold’em or hit your friends with rotten pumpkins (if someone makes this app), you’re giving away all of your personal information to these application providers. How often do you when you play games on yahoo, or MSN first give away all of your information? There are even more applications that exist solely to extract your personal data, and to be used for whatever they want.
3. Targeted advertising
Now, although not a surprise, the latest deal with Microsoft may make the internet a smaller place. Next time you’re searching on the internet and you find yourself being served advertisements for beer when you’re on a random florist website, it may be thanks to your Facebook cookie. When Facebook launches their new “SocialAds” platform on November 6th, it will unleash a network of sites with information not only on your browsing habits, but on all of your personal information.
4. Personal Privacy
Remember the announcement of Facebook’s public listing search? Announced on September 5th, you will now be able to search on Google, or any other search engine and see the profile picture of one of the 50 million people on Facebook. Thankfully I’ve already opted out of this service, but for those of you who didn’t set your privacy controls, the display picture of you drinking with your buddies may be plastered all over the web for future employers to see.
This is just a short list of the growing fears of misuse of personal information; there are numerous other reasons why I would consider removing myself from Facebook. I already know that deep in the Google vaults is a long list of search queries, browsing history and information on who I associate with. How long until all of my information gets linked together and everything I do on the World Wide Web ends up in one person/company’s hands.
Full disclosure: this post really doesn’t have much to do with Wikinomics. It’s just a link to a really cool entry on Wikipedia.
The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis about roboticsconcerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was introduced by roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, although drawing heavily on Ernst Jentsch’s concept of “the uncanny,” identified in a 1906 essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Jentsch’s conception is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay, simply entitled “The Uncanny” (”Das Unheimliche”). A similar problem exists in realistic 3D computer animation.
I’m not even sure why this entry resonated so much with me, maybe its the sense of earnestness, maybe its because I came across it on a random walk through the Wikipedia domain.
Here are a couple other entries that I recommend, so the same reasons: earnestness and the fact that I found them while “looking for something else.”
FirstMonday.org has long been one of the most interesting and informative sites on the web – to quote the site, First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since it first started in May 1996, it has been a remarkably successful and fertile source of insights into how the world has been changing, with contributors over the years ranging from John Seely Brown to Linus Torvalds himself.
We’ve highlighted some of the FirstMonday articles on here in the past, but I felt their October issue deserved special attention for a couple of reasons. For one, this month marks the transition of First Monday over to the Open Journal System, including the current issue and all archived content (noting, of course, that this also means the home page has changed). Second, and more importantly, the special October issue might be of particular interest to many, as it is full of selected papers from a recent conference at Simon Fraser University to discuss open access and scholarly publishing.
While I can’t go into all 18 articles here, a small sampling of the titles (the link will take you to the abstract of each) will give you a taste of some of the fascinating research available:
It’s some fascinating stuff – but if this particular topic is not your cup of tea, I encourage you to take a tour through the archives and see what else they’ve been publishing over the last decade. If you’re interested in wikinomics, I guarantee that you’ll find something that interests you somewhere on FirstMonday.
Cool video I found on SAP Developer Network (SDN) ‘evangelist’ - Craig Cmehil’s blog.
It’s a really good illustration of the opportunities presented by the Web 2.0 and some of the changes it’s bringing to the business world.
itopia’s Virtual Finance Forum has exhibitors such as IBM and SAP. Businesses are really starting to find interesting and creative ways to use these tools to their advantage.
The blogosphere went a little nuts on reporting the story of how Microsoft paid $240 million for a (relatively small) slice of the sweet sweet Facebook pie. It is believed that this deal sets the value of Facebook at $65 billion.
In fact, Dana Cimilluca of the Wall St. Journal pointed out that:
That’s right, unlike past meteoric technology risers, the three-year-old company is actually profitable. Facebook’s valuation also equates to 100 times its $150 million of annual revenue.
To put a valuation like that into perspective, if you slapped it on General Electric, the industrial conglomerate would have a market cap of $11 trillion, just $1 trillion short of the total U.S. GDP.
Terrence Russell of Wired magazine, though, bravely argues that Microsoft got a deal. His main three arguments:
Microsoft Only Needs an Entrenched Position If the company is to go forward as planned then taking a small, strategic piece of Facebook makes sense. Microsoft’s financial interests in Facebook’s ad platform already exist, so it only makes sense to strengthen that tie as the hype builds.
Microsoft Wouldn’t Drink the $15 Billion Kool-Aid Even though Facebook can claim that it’s 1.6% of $15 billion, it will always be $240 million to Microsoft. At the end of the day, the social networking site is probably just happy to have a lighter load for generating revenue, and Microsoft is glad it didn’t dump $750 million into what could be the next Skype.
Microsoft Was the Highest Bidder It’s safe to say that Microsoft was the highest bidder because it wanted this particular investment more. That’s not to say that Google turned its nose up at Facebook entirely. The interest was there — just not at Facebook’s asking price.
Despite being a long-time Toronto Raptors fan, it’s taken me until this season to join an online fantasy basketball league. Now I’m hooked. For those not familiar with the concept, fantasy sport sites allow groups of people to form online leagues and draft their own “fantasy” teams from real-life players in a major sports league. Throughout the year, players’ stats are updated using results from actual games. There’s usually money involved and teams can monitor stats, adjust their line-up of players, make trades, and “trash-talk” with fellow members of their fantasy league.
The sophistication and growth in popularity of these leagues is impressive. According to a Wikipedia entry, “19.4 million people age 12 and above in the U.S. and Canada play fantasy sports and 34.5 million people have ever played fantasy sports.” Further, “Fantasy Sports is estimated to have a $3-$4 billion annual economic impact across the sports industry.”
My first foray into the world of fantasy sports has opened the doors to an unimaginable wonderland of statistical analysis, renewed my passion for the sport of basketball (beyond my myopic espousal of a single ‘home team’), and given me the opportunity to interact with my peers through a new social medium. There are some clear lessons here for students of Wikinomics.
Real-time reporting. Fantasy sports Web sites have mastered the art of collecting, analysing, and disseminating information in a usable manner. They offer customizable dashboards, side-by-side comparisons of players and teams, and tips from experts to guide decision making. Wouldn’t it be great if government services and enterprises had the same kind of statistical reporting and advice? Imagine being able to select a hospital in the area based on the average wait time at a given moment in time. How about “drafting” an area school from a database that tracked performance indicators like average class size, number of after-school programs, and percent of students that become college grads? The same approach could be used when deciding which city to live in – what are the crime rates, average housing prices, number of parks per capita, air quality levels, commute times, and employment rates of Toronto vs. San Francisco? For enterprises, imagine if the same type of dashboards and reporting tools were leveraged when deciding on different products, suppliers, and marketing promotions: Process A not as good as process B; make a trade. An alternate supplier just got new high-performance equipment; move them to the starting line-up. The latest ad campaign is a dud; bench it. Thinking about entering a new market; get online advice from an expert.
Distributing the brand experience. Marketing 2.0 involves extending the user experience across a diverse set of media. Fantasy sport does just that. By adding an element of gaming, professional sports leagues are involving users more deeply with their brands (players and teams). A friend of mine recently went as far as to say, “fantasy sports have saved sports.” While this may be a bit overstated, it’s not a far stretch. While fantasy sports may not sell more tickets at arenas and stadiums, they do create a reason for fans to watch more sports games and follow players’ activity online (the chart below shows this relationship – football and baseball seem to be most affected in the U.S.).
Creating a social network. This is an obvious one – fantasy leagues are social networks. They pull together a diverse group of individuals with a common interest, allow users to create profiles, and provide a platform for messaging and posting information. Some leagues even have draft parties and other game-time events, taking the online experience offline.
“Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments” - Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus, A.D. 10.
“By the turn of this century, we will live in a paperless society” - Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, 1986.
“I think the Leafs just might win the Cup one of these years” - Lots of different people, lots of different years.
What ties these quotes together is obvious - Julius Sextus Frontinus and Roger Smith would have made good Toronto Maple Leafs fans. Sorry, I mean what ties them together is that being in the business of making predictions is tough, because accurate predictions are difficult to make, more often than not people get a little too ambitious in determining what they think the future will bring, and often end up looking rather silly in retrospect.
But with that in mind, this article in the Times Online goes about painting a picture of the world wide web in the future - and I’m not just talking about the Web 2.0 here, or even the Web 3.0… they’ve headed all the way out to the Web 4.0 baby! How we’ll all get there from here is as follows:
Each decade in turn corresponds to an engineering focus on either ‘the front end’ or ‘back end’ of the web. Web 1.0 was a back-end decade, focusing on the web’s basic platform, its link structure and navigation system. Web 2.0 was front end, with a heavy focus on users and usability, clean-looking sites, and people making connections with one another.
In Web 3.0, the emphasis will revert to the back end, with a renewal of the web’s key index - the essential data that is catalogued by search engines like Google. That in turn, Mr Spivack says, will make way for Web 4.0, another ‘front-end decade’, only with more advanced programs than the likes of Facebook.
I find this structure quite interesting, particularly how Spivack (which is even a futuristic sounding name I might add) highlights a pendulum effect back and forth between front and back end technologies. There are also a ton of interesting insights into various technologies being developed that include, without giving away too much, what some people are calling the Google Killer. But alas, some of the other predictions might be off on their timing, as one of the commentors indicates at the bottom of the page:
I was working in AI at IBM 20 years ago. We believed natural language parsing was possible and would arrive. Nope. It still hasn’t and won’t within the timescale of Web 3.0 either nor Web 4.0Me, I’m still waiting for Web 1.0 Service Pack 1…
Pete Morris, Dorking, Surrey
Leave it to a guy from Dorking to help keep things in perspective.
Try making an entry on Wikipedia for yourself today. If you are famous enough to be on Wikipedia, you’d already be there. More likely, you entry will be immediately deleted for being not notable, etc. In fact, this happened to Wikinomics, the first time it was posted. Results of the trial is shown below.
At the time, the noble guardians at Wikipedia decided that Wikinomics was not yet a notable term and voted to delete the post. Since then, it has become a pretty good entry.
If you do try to add a questionable entry, you should hope that it doesn’t make the front page. If that happens, you will certainly raise the ire of Wikicritics. This has happened twice in the past two weeks. This guy (pictured below) basically posted his resume online and has feverishly defended it against critics. Many people don’t think the fact that Darren Heitner won a local video game contest as a child and played on his high school volleyball team is encyclopedic.
winning a nintendo contest and winning a few childhood contests now a poster now makes someone notable enough to get a wikipedia page? This page was SEVERELY changed from it’s original intent…first it was all about his “blog” and his agency, then when he realized he wasn’t notable enough for a wikipedia, he changed it to articles about his childhood? No I say! Delete this garbage! What makes this person more notable than anyone else? Everyone has some sort of childhood achievements, everyone placed or won something in their life, does that mean they deserve a wikipedia entry? I won bowling leagues when I was a little, do I deserve a wikipedia page too? Give me a break!
Another example is Ernest Emerson. He is a former Navy SEAL, martial arts expert, and knife manufacturer. Basically, you wouldn’t make fun of him in person, but you might on his discussion board. Wikipedians thought it should be removed, but were a little embarrassed that it even made the front page:
I do not think it prudent to have an AfD notice on a main page-featured article, so I removed the AfD notice and temporarily closed the AfD. Personally, I am not interested in arguing the merits of the article. My only issue right now is the fact that a main page article is going to have a deletion notice on it. Frankly, this looks terrible. This article has had featured status since March and I see no reason why we must discuss its possible deletion right now. However, Albatross feels strongly that the AfD should go forward immediately. If a third party agrees, I won’t have a problem with the AfD going back up. But nothing could be accomplished in the next 11 hours or so; this page is, in all likelihood, going to stay on the main page for the rest of the day, and the deletion discussion will continue for a few days. So I say please wait a few hours to start the debate, for the sake of the thousands of people who will view this page today.
Moral of the story…if you try a vanity site, keep that baby off the front page.
Microsoft has just announced that they have acquired 1.6% in Facebook for $240 million. That’s a valuation of $15 billion for the overall company. It will be interesting to see if the numbers are justified – Google went from $23 billion to $210 billion since its IPO while Skype’s $2.6 billion price tag has seen a recent write down of $900 million by eBay. Either way Mark Zuckerberg joins his fellow Harvard drop-out and makes $3 billion in the process…
Facebook, arguably the most talked about social networking site, is growing at an average of 250 000 members per day and has reached almost 50 million users. While these statistics are impressive, the site is far from being the biggest. MySpace has over 200 million users while Google’s orkut boasts 68 million. On the other end of the spectrum, a number of smaller social networks have emerged catering to specific interests and needs of niche groups. There is a mix of country specific communities such as Cyworld in Korea, Grono.net in Poland and Mixi in Japan. Networks such as Care2 and TakingITGlobal are communities for social activists. LinkedIn, XING and Ryze have special tools to facilitate interactions between business people. There are event networks, created by LifeAt, to connect people living in the same building.
The logic for a one stop shop in social networking is compelling. Creating and maintaining multiple profiles on different sites is overly time consuming. However, as more people begin to integrate social networks into their everyday life, the demand will grow for specialized tools and applications provided by the niche players. In order to create these, Facebook has opened up their platform to external developers. This has resulted in over 5 000 applications, however, the majority are simple utilities and widgets that allow people to express themselves or play games.
The logical solution would be for Facebook to partner or acquire other social networks to bring their more sophisticated tools as well as users under one umbrella. While this might make sense for Facebook, there will be resistance from users. Combining or integrating user profiles would limit the types of online interactions users might want to have for fear of the wrong person finding out – you don’t want your boss to know that you spike trees on the weekend or ride with a biker gang. Managing multiple Facebook identities is already becoming tricky – think of having your work colleagues as friends alongside your old frat house buddies.
To date, no major mergers and acquisitions between social networking sites have taken place. As such, it is difficult to tell what the impact on users would be. Facebook could test the waters by acquiring one of the smaller players – say CarDomain, a community of car enthusiasts or Buzznet which is a set of communities around music and pop-culture. Whichever way Facebook chooses to grow and develop their services it will be important to give users more granular control over their interactions with the communities they belong to.
A few months back my colleague Derek blogged about the potential applications of the Wii, Second Life and other gaming technologies in replacing/supplementing physical activity. And while I agree with him that virtual exercise will never replace the real thing, there’s an increasing trend towards using gaming technologies in healthcare environments, in particular in physiotherapy and rehabilitation treatment. See here, here and here.
The potential of such applications seems limitless and it should be no time at all before we see such technologies applied in training techniques in industries as diverse as healthcare, policing or the service industry. Or for the sake of pie-in-the sky thinking, could you combine open-source education models with gaming technologies to create new virtual classrooms?
In the mean time I’m gearing up to challenge my dad to a game of bowling…
A new draft law initially approved by Mr. Prodi’s Cabinet of Ministers in October may need to be revised after the outrage they received from the Italian blogosphere. Much of the anger was due to the increased liability that the blogger would hold after the law was enacted.
In hopes of cleaning up Italy’s publishing-related regulations, the law would require non-professional, not-for-profit blogs and editorials to register with Italy’s registry of “communication operators”. By doing so, they would inadvertently be accepting a new journalistic standard which if not followed carefully, can lead to fines and even jail time for what many blogs could be guilty for – libel and defamation of character. This is already the case in Poland, their Act of Press Law (Prawo Prasowe) which like the Italian law, forces newspapers and magazines to register was amended by High Court to include websites and blogs in July.
A lot of the success of the blogosphere can be attributed to the fact that the internet is a soapbox for many of us with very few rules and to increase the potential liability for a blogger would definitely encroach on our freedom of speech online.
Now, libel and the blogosphere have met in the past. There have been many cases where blogs have been sued for libelous comments or defamation of character. But for the most part, it is generally accepted that if the piece of libelous writing is only available on the internet – then you’re pretty much guilty of nothing. It’s looked upon as the equivalent to writing rumours about a friend on a Facebook wall. Not that big of a deal right?
In case you have been living in a closet for the past few years, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massive multiplayer online game that has not only become hugely successful, but managed to make its way into the main stream. In fact the controversial show South Parkwon an emmy for the episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft”. The show starts off with the following exchange.
Randy (Stan’s Dad) – “You’ve been on your computer all weekend, shouldn’t you go out and socialize with your friends?”
Stan – “I am socializing r-tard, I am logged onto an MMORPG, with people from all over the world and getting XP with party using team speak”
(Thanks to the wonders of the web you can view the episode below if you like)
As the exchange above highlights, new collaborative media (and yes MMOGs enable collaboration) present different way of thinking about social interaction and collaboration. However, when you talk about ‘mass collaboration’ it doesn’t get any bigger or sophisticated than WoW. Players work together using complex dashboards to track in game stats along with messaging and voice communication to orchestrate their quests.
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