Both inside and outside the walls of Facebook, the story of social games has become one of dead geese and golden eggs, flatlined growth, formulaic games and shady practises. Many warned that the sector was slowing down, but sometimes giants need to fall. It needs to get bad enough before people start to really consider what's next... So what comes next?
posted by Artw
on Jul 31, 2012 -
61 comments
In yet another attempt to bring order and usefulness to the comments section of a high traffic news site,
Gawker has implemented a new comment system. They are borrowing the basic concept from Slashdot that most comments will never be seen, and thus the focus is to find the interesting conversations that do occur under the article, and promote them with no regard for chronological order . The system shows some promise, although it clearly has a ways to go as a recent article failed to highlight replies in the comments from the subject of the article.
Also of note, the photo of Nick Denton used in the article is by MeFi's own
mathowie.
posted by COD
on Jun 24, 2012 -
56 comments
Fungible: A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead.
The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.
posted by shakespeherian
on May 11, 2012 -
25 comments
Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert - "McLuhan prefigured the Internet era in a number of surprising ways. As he said in
a March 1969 Playboy interview: 'The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of harmony and peace' ... Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of 'authority', 'authorship', and even 'knowledge' ... Knowledge is growing more broadly and immediately participatory and collaborative by the moment."
posted by kliuless
on May 29, 2011 -
90 comments
The rise of the f*** yeah tumblrs has been
noted on MeFi, but with the appearance of
Is it a F*** Yeah!?, it's easier to find curious FYTs. So in addition to the obvious
cats,
sharks and
what have you, one might happen upon
modernism,
Hamlet,
e.e cummings,
chinchillas,
archeology,
Romania,
The Kinks,
weather, and
ballet.
posted by nthdegx
on Jun 3, 2010 -
59 comments
Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most
infamous hack,
masher-upper,
digi/net artist.
His work stands for a
growing culture of artists who
run wildly through
animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted
data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI
renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the
Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net
art be set to
infect the real,
fleshy world, like a rampant
Conficker Worm? Has
YouTube become the truest reflection of our
anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the
mythic beasts of yore, hoping,
in time, that
digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void?
[...
previously]
posted by 0bvious
on Dec 8, 2009 -
20 comments
A tempest in a Livejournal: It starts with author Elizabeth Bear's post
Writing for The Other. Or maybe it started with Jay Lake's
Thinking about the Other. It leads to a wide ranging, intense and angry debate on the portrayal of ethnicity in fiction, culture and the media. Avalon's Willow responds with an
open letter on the racial content in one of her books, and relates it to media portrayals of ethnic peoples. Deepa D follows up with a post on,
cultural appropriation. And then things get intense.
[more inside]
posted by happyroach
on Jan 19, 2009 -
82 comments
Internets: Serious Business! These last few months have seen an increase in the attacks on the participatory culture of the web. The mainstream establishments, both political and corporate, have been looking with a cautious eye towards this new developing place.
So far we've established that
blogs can get you fired,
keep you from getting a job, give
pedophiles a place to ruminate on snatching your children, threaten journalistic integrity *snicker*,
endanger the marketing ,
product planning, and
product life cycles for automobile manufacturers, can
infect your computer with virii, and have
all sorts of negative consequences. The internets (both of them) can cause
your children to be charmed, seduced, and addicted by readily available porn, and can also provide access to extremist radical and fundamentalist groups, prompting
Congress to discuss more restrictive legislation (
NSFW), but only for the porn. It has even been claimed that the web has given
"Al Qaeda wings". P2P is blamed as causing record loses by the music industry, despite their investments in
local station marketing payola. The FEC has held
public hearings attended by both hemispheres of the blogosphere (amazingly in near-agreement)
discussing the regulation of political speech online. The figureheads of
a certain political party fear that their affiliated slice of the blogosphere may be too far-left. Newspapers and TV are leading the charge, with the internet standing in for pharmaceutical scares, yo-yo diets, and missing white women.
The question is, how will the libertarian-minded digerati respond to this very real attack on the essence of web culture?
posted by rzklkng
on Jul 29, 2005 -
34 comments
Information gods amongst mortals is the first in a series of three blog entries (so far, anyway) by
Brad Wardell on the topic of the growing knowledge gap between the net-savvy and the non-wired.
I found the link in a newsletter from
WinCustomize today. They plugged all three:
- Information gods amongst mortals
- The
Information Gods respond
- Information
Gods Srike Back
He explores the theory that those who are net savvy are quickly leaping ahead of the non-wired among us: "You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic."
posted by tbc
on Sep 27, 2002 -
12 comments
"In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us -- white folks and people of color -- will have to shed the defensiveness that surrounds the topic of race." So says Henry Jenkins in a Technology Review article on
Cyberspace and Race. On the Internet, nobody knows you're oppressed?
posted by sudama
on Mar 22, 2002 -
4 comments
Make World event in October, Germany - about borderless digital culture, no doubt curated long before The Current Situation, but I'm sure will be rendered far more relevant as a result.
posted by blackbeltjones
on Sep 26, 2001 -
0 comments
"This stuff is still great." Paul Ford reminds us, as ever, why we're here, and thinks smart about the downturn: "We thought that Metcalfe's law on networks and Moore's law on processor power would change everything. But people don't change every 18 months; cultures don't start moving faster than processors. People don't increase their value with the increase in value."
posted by holgate
on Feb 27, 2001 -
18 comments
John Seely Brown interviewed by Wired. The former head of Xerox Parc. There were two really insightful quotes I came across in this article;
Lurk is the cognitive apprenticeship term for legitimate peripheral participation. The culture of the Internet allows you to link, lurk, and learn. Once you lurk you can pick up the genre of that community, and you can move from the periphery to the center safely asking a question.
Sort of like Metafilter =) And...
Bob Metcalfe has it all wrong: The power of a network isn't the square of the number of people - it's the number of communities it supports. If you look at n people, there are potentially 2**n communities.
I've actually wondered about Metcalfe's law. This n^2 has always seemed metaphorical to me, but it seems a lot of people mention it as if it were a literal relationship. What is the "value" of a network anyway? Anyone know of research on this?
posted by lockecito
on Aug 16, 2000 -
2 comments
Do we all need to get out more? Although they're putting the "too much time with computers, not enough social interaction" spin on this study's findings, there are actually some good results of it. Heavy internet users spend less time in traffic (because they
look up traffic before going anywhere?), less time in malls (shopping online instead, duh), and less time watching TV (this is the best news of all, I barely watch it anymore because it's mostly inane garbage, whereas on the internet, I can find
interesting things to
read and
enjoy). As for the less face time with friends and family, I have a growing number of friends online that I consider to be as close as any Real Life friend could be.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 17, 2000 -
11 comments
An interesting article over at Slashdot on
the 9 continents of the Internet. I've always had a sense that there were these different "circles" that people ran in, but I never could quite pin them down. Of course, I'm not sure that they can be pinned down precisely to 9, but I can appreciate the attempt.
posted by jkottke
on Feb 14, 2000 -
8 comments
