Rotw2009's Blog

Bittorrent.com – The first and most obvious. A major landmark for the peer-to-peer filesharing medium and a launching point via a freeware client. Site | Wiki
ThePirateBay.org – One of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexing websites. Recently embroiled in a huge legal battle. Site | Wiki
Rapidshare.com - “The 17th most visited website globally” and a filesharing alternative to BitTorrent. Operates on both free and subscription-based plans. Site | Wiki
Mininova.org – Like The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent indexing website. Less controversial than The Pirate Bay, but still a massive force in the P2P realm. Site | Wiki
Yousendit.com – Similar to RapidShare, a filesharing service that doesn’t use BitTorrent. Marketed as a “business communication” service, but offers the standard functions of filehosting and premium content delivery. Site | Wiki

Five Killer Links for Understanding Filesharing:

How BitTorrent Works – ‘Nuff said. A complicated process, firmly rooted in “Web 2.0″ cornerstones of user-to-user interfacing.
A Brief History of Filesharing: From Napster to Legal Music Downloads – Lengthy and informative, focused primarily on the music industry.
File Sharing’s New Face - A New York Times article that seeks to explain BitTorrent and provide a historical backdrop.
Education 2.0: The College Student’s Guide to File Sharing – A frank exploration of filesharing options from Wired.
Cases related to File Sharing – “When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense.” Here’s their extensive section on court cases related to file sharing.

More Sites and Additional Reading:

Box.net - A filesharing site in the same vein as Rapidshare or Yousendit.
Napster.com - Nope, it’s not a filesharing medium anymore, but looking at the new Napster might give interesting insight into how business conglomerates and the RIAA want to stomp out the vast pirating potential of the internet.
EVERYTHING 2.0′s “FILE SHARING 2.0: 130 ways to upload, collaborate on & swap or share media & data” – A seemingly unending list of supposedly Web 2.0 filesharing websites. Some good, many not so good, but worth a look.
PCWorld’s Coverage on The Pirate Bay Trial – Not too extensive, but has some hyperlinks that lead to a more complete look.
Spectrial - The Pirate Bay.org’s obviously biased – but very thorough – coverage on the trial.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)’s Write-up on Piracy – Self-explanatory. A good look at the other side of the coin.
TorrentFreak’s “Government Refuses to Revoke Draconian File-Sharing Law” - An article about filesharing laws in New Zealand that provides interesting perspective to the ongoing piracy debate.
Legal Issues with Bit Torrent Wiki
Bit Torrent Tracker Wiki
File Transfer Protocol Wiki
File Sharing Wiki

Video Sharing Sites By Sean Stewart

rotw2009 — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:52:46 +0000

Video Sharing Sites By Sean Stewart

1. YouTube.com

2. blip.tv

3. divx.com

4. hulu.com

5. revver.com

5 Killer Links/Readings

A great article cataloging available video sharing sites

Interesting piece on religion in the scope of the video sharing platform

Article detailing how conditions of posting work

Recent blog post on media piracy in video sharing

MPAA figures out a way to trap piracy offenders

Social Bookmarking Cluster

rotw2009 — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:11:41 +0000

Social Bookmarking Cluster by Grace Carmen

Top 5 Sites

1. Digg
wikipedia on digg
review of digg

2. Stumbleupon
wikipedia on stumble

3. Delicious
wikipedia on delicious
review of delicious

4. Reddit
wikipedia on reddit
review of reddit

5. Ballhype
review of ballhype

Five Killer Links

1. Wikipedia Defining Social Bookmarking

2. Webtrends on Social Bookmarking

3. Oreilly.com on delicious

4. Evolution of Bookmarks, Library Research

5. Not Everyone Loves Bookmarking

Best of the Rest

allow you to post one page to all your bookmark sites

Additional Reading

here’s a nice youtube video on bookmarking

even nytimes recognizes the importance of bookmarks

short, helpful little summaries of a few bookmarking sites

images, the next level of bookmarking

definition of folksonomy

Blogs: self-publish and social network

rotw2009 — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:16:44 +0000

Blogging Platforms

(Bloggers on) blogs and what they’re good for:

The thing that appeals to me about blogs is that they allow a deeper conversation to occur. They reveal the person behind the words. The motivation behind the advice. The human behind the company. (John Porcaro, “Business Is Personal”)

Weblogs allow individuals to become publishers. They are personal soapboxes, cable access television programs and Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner all wrapped up into one.

Simply stated, Weblogs are frequently or regularly updated web pages that can be constructed in a variety of formats–as an online diary, offering observations and revelations on daily life; a filtering of Web links with commentary, possibly organized around a central theme; or a site with longer, thought-provoking treatises. (We’ve Got Blog)

Blogs are a publishing platform, sure, but they are a social publishing platform. (Richard MacManus)

The nominal purpose of Weblogs is to point out links of interest that you, the reader, would not have run across yourself. A variant is the diaristic or daily-journal Weblog. (Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog”)

“A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.” (Jason Kottke)

Common features of blogs

reverse chronologically and time-stamped – sense of immediacy
readers can join the conversation
real time communication channel between creator and readers
weblog different from predecessor homepage: multiple posts on a single page
linking (importance of permalink for reference) + commentary vs just commentary
social networks built on top of this weblog framework
medium free of physical page limitations, editors, delay of publishing system

Why were these blogging platforms created?

Livejournal: “A college hobby project started in April 1999,” built for University of Washington friends. – Brad Fitzpatrick
Twitter: “What if you have LiveJournal, but you just make it more live? You have these people watching your journal, but it all happens in real time, and you can update it from anywhere.” – Jack Dorsey
WordPress: “…if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?” – Matt Mullenweg & Mike Little
Tumblr: “I wanted something online to call ‘me.’ Sometime around two and a half years ago, I’d shut down my third Blogger blog after trying WordPress and TypePad and a whole bunch of other platforms. I couldn’t keep it up. I also really found them discouraging for what I wanted to do. It was work. I found myself sitting down every night for 20 minutes summing up my day or whatever it was that I wanted to convey.” – David Karp
IMEEM: “I’ve always been interested in music, media and the Internet and founded imeem (imeem.com) after graduating from college. I wanted to figure out how I could offer an entirely new type of service to the user while also working with artists and labels so they could profit, too.” – Dalton Caldwell

Features

Livejournal

Open source software (Livejournal.org)
4-in-1: blogging, forums, social-networking (“friends”), aggregator (“friends page”), RSS/Atom.” Open source. (Behind the Scenes at Livejournal)
Initially user supported (paid members) instead of advertiser supported. “We had 5 percent [paid users]. That more that covered all the freeloaders. But the freeloaders aren’t just freeloaders, they’re contributing content and making other people stay and making it useful.” – Brad Fitzpatrick

Twitter

Guiding principles are “simplicity, constraint, and craftsmanship.”
Communication platform
Open platform allows for third party developers to build on top of it
Embedding: if you paste a link to a YouTube video in your tweet, Twitter recognizes it and allow it to expand into an embed playable in the Twitter page or Twitter client
Building up the technology as a utility, something that is so trustworthy that it becomes a natural mainstream activity (Jack Dorsey)

WordPress

Free/open source at release (WordPress.org)
Released under GNU General Public License (GPL), allows anyone to change software as long as derivative work is done under GPL
WordPress: “Our development model is completely user-centric and our flexible platform and dedicated team have allowed us to respond quickly and effectively to what people want.” “New features and services are driven by you so let us know what you want.”

Tumblr

Clean micro-blogging platform; focus is on simplicity
Short-form expression, like Twitter
Multi-media: text, photos, quotes, links, chats, videos displaced elegantly
“The magic of Tumblr is we let you put anything in and get it out any way you want. We want you to be able to post anything. Tumblr takes care of formatting content nicely and making it look good on your blog.” (David Karp in Mediabistro article)
reblogging: propagating what you’ve created, taking it and spreading it to a bigger audience, adding on top of whatever the initial poster created, with attribution going back to you
“Twitter is a service you use to tell people what you are doing. We look at Tumblr as a service to share those experiences.”

IMEEM

Music-based social networking site
users can listen to licensed streaming music, upload music and blog about it, all for free
has licensing deals with all four major labels (EMI, Universal, Sony and Warner Music) and “80% of the indy music market”
Fanbase app: lets you connect with other users through an integrated chat feature while also viewing a continuous feed of both the official and the unofficial news, photos, and videos
extensive widget program: Imeem music can be listened to on a wide range of websites

Why make it Open Source?
Wordpress: “The community is great and a lot of fun to be part of. Most of all, it’s very rewarding to know that all this work is like a gift to the world, free for anyone and everyone to use. Working on something that touches so many people definitely puts things in perspective.” – Matt Mullenweg

Other
» Blogosphere as social network

The Blogging Cluster: Key Sites & Readings

rotw2009 — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 01:15:18 +0000

by LiAnn Yim

Five Key Sites To Study:

1) Livejournal.com – Wikipedia entry on Livejournal

2) Twitter.com – Wikipedia entry on Twitter

3) WordPress.com – Wikipedia entry on WordPress

4) Tumblr.com – Wikipedia entry on Tumblr

5) IMEEM.com – Wikipedia entry on

Five Killer Links

1) An explanation of microblogging

2) Comparisons of blogging platforms:

Comparison of Six Apart (Livejournal, Typepad) and Automatic (WordPress)

Microblogging, compared

3) Weblogs: A History and Perspective by Rebecca Blood,

A NYT article: Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another Fad?,

What We’re Doing When We Blog on O’Reilly

4) (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything…

5) Blogs, Bandwidth and Banjos: Tightly knit bonds in weblogging, a speech/article by Mena and Ben Trott, co-founders of Six Apart (the company responsible for Movable Type, TrackBack TypePad and TypeKey, and until recently, Livejournal)

Best Of The Rest:

1) FMLife.com, a micro-blogging site with a theme

2) FeedBurner.com, and Wikipedia entry on FeedBurner

3) Fotolog, a photoblog, and Wikipedia entry

Additional reading for the curious:

1) Dive Into Accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible web site, a free for download ebook that answers two questions: “Why should I make my web site more accessible?” and “How can I make my web site more accessible?”

2) “You’ve Got Blog” by Rebecca Mead, a New Yorker article (requires account to read fulltext)

3) FirstMonday.org study on Livejournal: LiveJournal as a new and more applicable way of managing information and creating knowledge in today’s society

4) Wall Street Journal article – …Find a Blog

5) Blogs To Riches, a New York Magazine article on the Blogging Boom.

Create a Dialogue to increase Accountability and Transparency

rotw2009 — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:13:00 +0000

Government 2.0: improve the efficiency of service and information delivery to increase accountability and transparency

Expose data, facilitate exchange of information and make it available and easily accessible to citizens.

Information is crucial for civic life and the use of blogs, wikis, tweets and RSS feed in the government opens a two-way information exchange and permits social networking. Like in the media, sharing information gives citizens more power.

At the Web 2.0 Expo, Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Global Public Policy for Google, presented an overview of Government 2.0:

“The potential for Government 2.0 is both real and exciting: technology-wise, we can now cheaply and efficiently enable a government that is transparent, participatory, collaborative, and effective. But there are some very real, very stubborn obstacles in the form of outdated laws, regulations, and policies.”

Recovery.gov

Why is it crucial to set up this website now?

What is the mandate of Recovery.gov?

–> “To help citizens track the spending of funds allocated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

Carry out ARRA in full transparency and accountability. Reduce layers of government.

Who is in charge of this website?

–> The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board members have now been selected (complaints that it had not been formed)

WELCOME TO RECOVERY.GOV

President Obama wants to push transparency of the government by allowing people to come and get information instead of having information delivered to them.

Readers are able to read the FULL bill right on the website

WHERE IS MONEY GOING?

People can “track” exactly WHERE their money is going. There is no reason why people should spend money and not know where or why it is being spent.

Obama not only wants people to be aware of where their money is going, but also wants people to see the progress of the recovery bill.

SHARE YOUR RECOVERY STORY:

“Tell us how the Recovery Act is affecting you. What’s working? What isn’t?”

–> Invites citizens to share their story.

–> Using the features of Web 2.0 to INVOLVE people:

Not only wants to reach people but wants people to reach the government: asks for personal input

Read and write function

CHECK FOR PROGRESS:

Obama is using Web 2.0 to revolutionize the government itself. Creating this website is a way of bringing back transparency and accountability to the government. If government’s actions and goals are directly available online, there is no way to cover up for failure, to exaggerate consequences of money being spent, or lie about where the money is going.

RECOVERY WEBPAGES:

Transparency and Accountability to all areas of the government:

–> 25 departments and agencies that have received recovery aid have set up their webpages listed and accessible to visitors.

–> Ask people to come back and check for updates!

What people think of Recovery.gov: “I do like how the Obama websites all kinda look the same and feel comfortable to the user. Each one has simple navigation, and the information is easily accessible. This really is the first transparently techy president.”

WhiteHouse.gov

Blog

Somewhat like any blog, not only political (eg: NATO and Afghanistan, The First Lady at the Notre Dame Cathedral, Obama’s Weekly Address, Open for Questions Follow-Up, News on the G20 Summit…)

Criticism: WhiteHouse.gov/blog does not allow for comments

Most interesting part of WhiteHouse.gov is the Open for Questions section (Education, Home Ownership, Health Care Reform, Veterans, Small Business, Auto Industry…)

–> 92,937 people have submitted 103,981 questions and cast 3,602,695 votes

–> Participants of all ages may post questions to the President about the economy on WhiteHouse.gov. Participants will also be able to rate the questions and the President will answer some of the most popular ones.

–> “Double” user partcipation: the success of this test really depends on users and their collaboration

* Users post questions and then are able to rate them for popularity or flag them if they consider the questions violate the terms of participation

The Agenda

Lists the challenges that the new administration faces:

–> Civil rights, defense, disabilities, economy, education, energy and environment, ethics, family, foreign policy, healthcare, immigration, Iraq, poverty, taxes, technology…

Also gives the Obama-Biden administration’s detailed position on all these issues on the White House’s agenda

Israel 2.0: IsraelPolitik.org and isRealli.org

israelpolitik.org –> political

isRealli.org –> life

–> Project of the Israeli Consulate in New York City (5298 followers on March 10th and 5513 followers on April 5th)

–> Goal is to rectify the typical image of Israel: “deserts, warfare and bloody conflict.” Show the real face of Israel, beyond what the media dictates to the people.

–> Blog built as “a platform for the Consulate General of Israel in New York to directly address audiences throughout the world and to serve as a vehicle to better communicate the State of Israel’s message of hope and peace”

–> Who administers the blog?

* David Saranga and his team

* David Saranga is the Consul for Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General in New York. Maintains direct contact with America’s New York-based national media and oversees public relations initiatives as part of Israel’s branding strategy.

* First Israeli diplomat to implement new media methods (Web 2.0) in the field of public diplomacy.

Q&A Section:

Bloggers post questions and David Saranga answers.

Example of questions:

Is a 48-hour cease-fire (as proposed by France) a possible scenario for assessing Hamas’s intentions?

Have the attacks in Gaza changed Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinian Authority?

40 years of military confrontation hasn’t brought security to Israel, why is this different?

Why have you chosen to come on Twitter. Is that not political in itself?

–> We saw debate on Twitter and saw people who had unreliable information. We felt Twitter would be a good way to put an official voice out there.

What are you doing to ensure the media is objective when covering the conflict?

–> This is one of our attempts to open Israel up to questions, in addition to using the mainstream media.

The Situation in Sderot (city in the South of Israel):

Videos posted:

Israeli launches missiles on Gaza

Israeli air strike kills Hamas militant

Palestinian rockets hit Sderot city

Comment Policy

Link to Twitter Widget

Link to Facebook page

TSA.gov/blog

Blog directly sponsored by the TSA to “facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process”

Bloggers:

Bob: TSA since 2002

Lynn: TSA since 2006

Nico: TSA since 2002

Paul: Arrived at TSA right after college

Option to follow TSA bloggers on their Twitter

–> Bloggers post updates (change clocks!), answer questions directly on Twitter (lapel pins? Bob answers on the blogger’s Twitter), redirect to blogposts on the TSA blogs

Possibility to:

* “Digg This!”

* “Save to del.icio.us”

* “Link to Technorati”

* “Share on Facebook”

Comment on every blog post, and sometimes get feedback/answer from one of the bloggers

Follow with Feedburner

Peer-to-Patent

Project conceived at the New York Law School by Beth Noveck and run in cooperation with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO).

The goal of this pilot is to prove that organized public participation can improve the quality of issued patents.

“represents the first significant effort to apply social software (that allows users to interact and share data) directly to the decision-making process of the federal government”

Institutions that sponsored the pilot program: MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, General Electric, IBM, HP

Many direct competitors joined together to sponsor this initiative. Why?

–> Technology companies were eager to submit their patents to broader public review because their applications would move up to the front of the line.

Who participates and what how?

–> 2,500 registered participants, teams bringing together participants from 152 countries, nearly 350 items of prior art submitted on 121 applications.

–> Can be individual volunteers, although it is better to join a team with an online workspace.

–> At the end of their study, teams submit the ten most compelling examples of prior art to the patent examiner. Patent examiner benefits from annotations from team.

–> Almost three-quarters of the patent examiners involved in the pilot process indicated they would like to see Peer-to-Patent implemented as a regular office practice.

Question raised on the Gov 2.0 Summit website: “How do we bridge the culture of web innovation, forged around the world and in Silicon Valley, with the culture of political innovation?”

The Political Cluster: Key Sites and Readings

rotw2009 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:15:55 +0000

by Louisiane Remy

Key Websites:

(1) Recovery.gov

(2) WhiteHouse.gov - Wikipedia on WhiteHouse.gov

(3) Peertopatent.org - Wikipedia on Peer to Patent

(4) IsraelPolitik – Wikipedia on IsraelPolitik and

isRealli – Information on the New Blog of Israel

(5) TSA Blog: The Evolution of Security

Killer Links:

(1) Federal Web Managers White Paper: Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government

(2) A TechPresident Article: What’s in the New Recovery.Gov (and What’s Missing?)

(3) Change in the White House?

1. Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House?

2. Gov 2.0 Summit: The Platform for Change

(4) The White House is “Open for Questions:”

1. White House is ‘Open for Questions’ on economy;

Obama will answer some Thursday

2. The White House is Open for Questions

(5) What is Peer-to-Patent?

Best of the Rest:

WhiteHouse2 – A Utopian White House Democray

Other readings that deserve a quick look:

Ellen Miller: Make Washington More like the Web:

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-10/sl_miller

You can listen to this:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90638360

Government Futures, you can play this slideshow:

http://governmentfutures.com/reports/player.html

Obama’s MySpace:

http://www.myspace.com/barackobama

What people expect from the Government:

http://www.government20club.org/2009/03/room-120-survey-expectations-of-the-government-2/

Online Radio and It’s Different Potentials

rotw2009 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:35:11 +0000

The Overarching Theme of Internet Radio: Search, Discovery and Personalization

From Dan Costa’s Article in PC Magazine:

Most of us don’t have the time to follow the latest bands, or the expertise to set up great playlists. We just want to listen to stuff that we like and to be able to share it easily with friends. And we’re willing to pay for the privilege. Especially if that means we don’t have to squeeze all those track names on a cassette case.

From Martin Manley’s Blog Post:

Discovery turns out to be a cousin of search. Search is how you find information, media, people, or experiences that you know you want. Discovery is when you find these things without knowing in advance that you want them. At best (as happened to me), the web helps you discover things even when you are not on a website.

With the new business model emerging in the music industry — for example, record labels are no longer the only taste makers and, with digital technology, more people can afford to record their own music without financial help from a label — in response to the prominence of the web, radio 2.0 sites like the ones we will discuss have risen.

How are these sites 2.0?

The Web as a Platform
Data as the Driving Force

Example: Pandora’s Music Genome Project
Example: Lastfm’s Audio Scrobbler
Example: Blip’s Data is User Posts
Example: Slacker’s Professional Programmed Stations
Example: Musicovery’s Reliance of User Response Data
Example: All Reliant on User Data

Network Effects Created by the Architecture of Participation

Users to add value to the application as they use it.
Pandora’s Reliance on User Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down to “Humanize” Music Genome Project
Lastfm’s Audio Scrobbler Completely a Product of User Data

Open Source Development

Lastfm’s Site Overhaul Owed to Users:

Back in May we unveiled our project to build a new version of Last.fm. Our goal was to lay the foundation for an online music experience more compelling, accessible, and discoverable than anything that had gone before.

But modernising a service powered by the people since 2002—touching on everything from the core of Audioscrobbler engine to the look & feel—wasn’t something we could do alone.

So we turned to you—Last.fm subscribers and users—and wow, you sure came through. Here’s a look at the past eight weeks of beta testing:

13,234 individual pieces of beta toolbar feedback

7,856 posts on the beta forum

1,866 coffee pods consumed by Team Last.fm

634 Trac tickets closed

2 sessions of guerrilla user testing

1 Mr. Clock Radio

We’ve been listening hard, trying out new ideas, and making tons of changes in response to your feedback. Today we’ve taken the next step in this process, bringing the new Last.fm to everyone.

Lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication

The Importance of Links and RSS

Share Stations With Friends/Gift a Station to Your Friend on Pandora.com
Send a Friend a Link to Your Slacker Radio Station: The Nerves Radio
Broadcast Your Blips
Embed Your Blips
Embed Your Lastfm Widget on Your Blog, MySpace or Facebook – They Create the Code For You
Example on Blogger Account as WordPress Doesn’t Let You Embed

The end of the software-adoption cycle (the so-called perpetual beta)

Constant Feature Updates

Software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the “Long Tail”

Portable Devices – the iPhone, Slacker G2, Logitech Squeezebox Boom, Pure Evoke Flow, etc.
Enticing Features: Build Last FM

Ease of picking-up by early adopters

Knowledge of basic HTML was a plus for early adopters; now it’s no longer a necessary skill.
Built for “Music Buffs”

Some social-networking aspects

Making Friends, Sharing Stations, Joining Groups, Following DJs, etc.

Issues With Digital Rights Management

Unsolved as of this date – appeals pending in May

Internet Radio integrated in Blogs – The Idea of Radio 3.0

Are aggregators like the Hype Machine, more of a 3.0 site as they bring the content to you via an RSS Feed?
Idea of Having an RSS feed bring everything to one place?

Different Version: The Viability of Portable Devices: Will online radio eventually go off the computer?

iPhone Apps
Logitech Squeezebox Boom

Question: What is the most significant difference between the music you play on your iPod and the music that someone might play on their Slacker G2 or iPhone with Pandora?