Annenberg Lab – Transparency report

This report shows the relationship between piracy infringing web sites, the ad networks distributing advertisements to them and the major brands who unwillingly support the pirate web sites.

It is important that the broader Internet community starts to realize that we don’t live in 1999 anymore and that almost any activity on the Internet is being monetized. But the participation in that monetization is kept from the creative community who, more often than not, create the films, books, music, pictures that drive the majority of traffic.

IFTTT – that’s what computers are for

IFTTT (If This Than That) is a service to monitor a source and conditionally post to a destination.

I’ve setup WordPress blog posts to Twitter and Facebook status update.

It seems simple enough to setup and it takes a lot of work off of my hands. Also, it allows me now to use my blog even more than before to post pictures and comments and everything. The advantage is that, once I (have to) leave a service such as Facebook or Twitter all my content over the years are still available on my own server. This to me is what the internet was about in the very beginning when I started my first homepage more than 12 years ago.

Frictionless sharing

I just read this paper on frictionless sharing and I like to comment on something written inthr paper. Quoting is not allowed without permission do I just rephrase it, but the whole idea goes back to what I wrote a couple of month ago

Basically the part I’m talking about deals with recommendations: in the case of a little restaurant I like, recommending it to friends may help to keep the restaurant in business longer.

This is the argument used by most people in favor of filesharing and unlicensed distribution of music. But as you can clearly see: sharing a recommendation is all fine and dandy if you encourage your friends to support the act/artist/musician/producer as is the case with a restaurant. But sharing the actual work will have the opposite effect: less people will buy the music and the act/artist/musician/producer will go out of business.

And an industry that has been reduced by roughly 65% in the span of 12 years (meaning, we lost 3 major labels and now are left with two and also lost many many independent companies) is proof that something is broken in a medium that means so much to people and that helps young people to define who they are. It saddens me to have to argue with people (even colleagues) about business models, legality and such instead of just sharing a recommendation to a good piece of music.

How the Internet really works – and it’s not pretty

When the tech pundits talk about free speech then they easily forget the power structures of the “new world”

This article is worth a read If you have little experience and understanding of what is going on under the hood.

And to the people over at EFF and netzpolitik.org I shout: why don’t you work on democratically based tools and mechanisms to keep forces balanced instead of moving over the currently broken equilibrium of the Internet to the real world?

When it comes to mods, the political model of Reddit is not so much a vast digital democracy, as it’s often framed by fans and users, as online feudalism. Moderators like Violentacrez are given absolute control over their turf in exchange for keeping the kingdom of Reddit strong. Moderators become more or less powerful in direct relation to the number and popularity of the subreddits they moderate, so they try to take over other subreddits to boost their profile in the community. Inevitably, Reddit’s administrators develop relationships with the most influential moderators. Like feuding medieval lords vying for the king’s favor, moderators form alliances or wage epic flame wars over power struggles.