06.03.06
A Great Quote
I just loved this quote of Dr Dave’s blog…
My mum always told me that when you have nothing nice to say, you should keep your mouth shut.
Obviously my mum has never heard of blogging.
05.31.06
Submission Day!
I’m just about to head off tonights lecture, but thought I’d type out one final entry before I left. I’ve really enjoyed this subject this semester, and it’s given me some great ideas for my own endeavours. Christina has put together a great program, and John is a great tutor. I haven’t written an entry in over a week, but I hope the intermident entries over the semester shall make the cut 
Tom, n5428874
05.25.06
Interview with a Community Manager
Atomic is a online forum with over 40,000 users and over 3 million posts. Whilst being primarily a computing and tech based community, its General Chat forum has over a million posts, making it one of Australia’s largest. I asked Ben Mansill the sites Online Producer a few questions…
Roughly how many users does atomic has?
42421 registered user accounts as of right now. Around 1/4 are active on the forums. 216,006 unique browsers for the month ending 30/04/06. So, we have around 200,000 users.
What is one of the biggest challenges you find managing an online community?
Providing the freedom of expression while maintaining acceptable social and behavioural standards.
What do you think is going to be the biggest change seen been online forums like yours over the next 5 to 10 years?
As the size of the community grows and attracts newcomers through the strength of its appeal, it will move further away from the core subject matter of the site itself, being computers and technology.
What stance do you/haymarket take on users using your interlectual property? (IE: fansites etc)
We only have one condition, that they display prominently that their site is not officially affiliated with ours. Of course if we ever found someone trying to take advantage of our property we’d act to stop them. But the many Atomic fansites have proved an excellent adjunct to the official site, providing features and serives we can’t or won’t offer on the official site.
What do you think the most crucial aspect is of any online community?
To be sucessful it must have the critical mass and momentum for it to be self-sustaining. It must also have a generally high level of maturity in order to propagate and attract desirable newcomers.
Interview by email, 24th May 2006
05.22.06
The Game Within A Game
Wired has a great story up, that ties in perfectly with much of what we have discussed this semester:
This is the story of a game that became a hit — inside another game.
The story begins with Second Life, the online multiplayer world where players use a simple scripting language to create virtual items — buildings, clothes, vehicles, toys. In Second Life, you get enormous street cred for being creative and figuring out new ways to socialize. So in December 2004, one of the players — an Australian whose screen name is “Kermitt Quirk” — got an idea: Why not create a video game that’s playable inside Second Life?
05.19.06
The Protocol Debate and ICANN’s Power
Before the lecture I had never fully understood just how much control the US government had over ICANN. I was always under the impression that no one country could take down the internet even if they tried, it appears I was wrong.
The internet governance website discusses the main problems with ICANN and its current situation with the US government:
- Concerns about unilateralism by the US Government in its control of the DNS root and its supervision of ICANN.
- Dissatisfaction with ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC), where governments have only advisory powers.
- The perception that ICANN’s governance model does not properly balance the interests of developed and developing countries and suppliers and users.
- Concerns about the relations between ICANN, country code top level domain administrators (ccTLDs), and national governments.
- The overall perception that ICANN lacks legitimacy.
Researching further, it really does seem that the US has a stranglehold grip over ICANN and does determine its practices. A very crucial factor of this is the .xxx domain. This new domain, to be used in order to create an ‘adult area’ on the internet, was left hard dead in what appeared to be meddling by the US government. The european union in particular was quite supportive of the idea, and was not very impressed with what appeared to by US meddling. According to a reuters article:
An EU executive said the decision underscored the need to make ICANN independent quickly, following unsuccessful demands last year by a group of countries including the EU to make ICANN fully independent. “We see here a first clear case of political interference in ICANN,” said Martin Selmayr, spokesman for EU Information Society and Media Commissioner, Viviane Reding.
The actual event was seen by many as ICANN’s chance to prove that it wasn’t controlled by the US. With strong objection to the domain from the US government, ICANN allowing it would have shown to many of the countries that it wasn’t afraid to show that the US government had no jurisdiction over it. Unfortunatly, it appears they were afraid.
More Reading:
Reformation Paper
.XXX Articles:
PC World Article
ZDNet Article
Washington Post Article
05.16.06
A Fantasy Nightclub
I’m going to start by pointing out that despite posting more then 90% of the other blogs, I think I’m going to suffer in marks because I never repond to the lectures or readings. Believe it or not I’ve only missed one lecture to date, and one tutorial. I just tend to find a lot of the lecture material stuff I already know, and as such I like to blog about new stuff as I come across it. I might do one big blog post about all the lectures.
The picture above is from a new MMOG based around going clubbing. The idea seems to be to allow the underage to get into the clubbing scene, without filling their veins with alcahol. It’s an interesting idea for sure. This is what cnet news has to say about it:
Start-up company Doppelganger has launched a virtual nightclub called The Lounge. Designed with teens in mind, club-goers choose computer generated characters as online alter egos. They pick hair color, clothes and even posture. In this picture, avatar characters representing members of the British all-girl band the Pussycat Dolls hang out in the nightclub’s VIP room.
Time shall tell if they take to it or not.
05.15.06
Blog or Plog, a mandatory slog!
I wanted to use this entry to do my discussion on blogging, vesus plogging. Plogging is my self-coined word for paper logging.I agree with Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs in the reading that blogs have lead to “the fordist model [being] replaced with one of individualism, personalisation and customisation.” I find it interesting the the idea of a journal or diary has seemed to have been redefined when placed in an online context. As a child, my definition of a diary or journal was somewhere in which you recorded your inner thoughts, and usually kept hidden under your mattress or bed.
Online journals or diaries (or blogs for that matter), never seem to be private. In fact almost all services I found online actually lacked an option for keeping it private. Why all of a sudden have we moved from diaries and journals being something of great privacy, to something that we want everything to read. Have we all become attention whores?
The internet has changed the way we communicate with the world. Whilst sharing diaries with close friends didn’t provide much excitement, the idea of sharing thoughts with the world over does. As an early participant of Usenet said, “anyone with something to contribute could come to the party.” I feel blogs have created a new communication medium that allows us to share our inner most thoughts in a way not seen before.
Now that I have discussed the idea and transformation of personal journals and diaries online, I wish to discuss it in a more commercial sense. Blogs truly are an evolution of print media. Even Boing Boing, an A-list blog evolved from a printed publication. Many other online blogs actually accompany print articles. Wired has several highly successful bloggers, all of which help complement the Wired magazine. I think we will continue to see more and more traditional media companies launching websites and blogs to promote and complement their print media, before a transformation as the print media begins to complement the online content.
The whole idea of a blog feels much more personal to a reader, it is usually written in much more of a relaxed or diary fashion, and despite being more opinionated, inspires more confidence in a reader who can feel closer to their source. Each of these blogs can then be linked out to other sources, truly embracing the idea of networked culture, as discussed by Wellman, as the blogosphere comes alive as bloggers link back and forth reacting to each other comments. This entire new level of interaction between authors was unseen until the advent of blogs, and has led to consumers becoming Produsers, discussed by Bruns, as they not only consume content, but produce it as well.
Open Source Explained So Simple A 5 Year Old Could Understand
A Fruit Tree On the Outskirts Of A Village
Virtual Cultures on Google
This blog is now Number 3 when you search “Virtual Cultures” on google. Not bad considering the top QUT page on the subject is 9th!
05.12.06
The Virtual Cultures Commenting Initiative
I’ve only had two comments so far, one from Bec, and one from some guy in the US. Wordpress accidently pinged vitamin leaving a trackback, which sent about 30 US readers to check the site out. More comments would be great though, and so I propose:
The Virtual Cultures Commenting Initiative
The idea is simple. Every time another Virtual Cultures student posts a quality comment to a blog entry, you return the favour by commenting on one of their entries, and you also pick one other blog at random from the bloglist to comment on. In theory, we should all have so many comments we can’t reply to them all. No matter, at least it should start some good linking between blogs, discussion and debate. The final thing, every time you comment, link to this entry in the post, to try and get that blogger on board!
My Online Community
My community is a private online forum used for my work as a sailing instructor at a large Brisbane yacht squadron. The forum currently has 44 members, all of whom are sailing instructors that use the forum for rosters, notices and to make general chat. The forum is not just an online community, but an extension of a community offline. It was originally created with the aim of allowing an easy to way to get rosters and news to instructors of the sailing school, however it has now been extended to a place where all instructors come to chat about many topics completed unrelated to sailing or work. It allows the same features as any forum such as private messages, posting, thread creation as well as adding a few custom features such as allowing a phone book and a collaborative calendar. The forum has 44 registered users, ranging in age from 12 to 70. This unique age range gives the community an interesting feel as you have people discussing from a very wide point of views and experiences. Members get news and rosters (as previously discussed) as well as a place to chat online with other instructors. It is very interesting to watch that many members are quite shy at work in real life, however online many display a completely different side to themselves.
Member profiles display much more then most public forums. Due to the forum being private and all members working with each other in the real world, private information like phone numbers and locations are also displayed. Members communicate mostly in the General chat room, with the other rooms used primarily for senior staff to release information. There are also other rooms that are available for only a certain selection of members. Some of these rooms are available only to 18+ instructors, allowing for an environment for members to discuss more openly without the fear of younger members reading the content. The success in the board is primarily assessed on how helpful it has been to help the business of the sailing school. Before the implementation of the forums, senior staff were required to ring approximately 30 employees per week to seek availability and inform of working times. The community’s success therefore has been immense, by saving senior staff several hours a week in organising rosters. The forum has also been successful in causing an increased amount of communication between members. The community has continued to grow, with more ideas to improve it being implemented. In the past 2 months on the feedback of members, new forum rooms have been added to allow members to post about work that needs to be completed, and allow members to post resources like guides, worksheets and PowerPoint, in order to educate other members. The rate at which suggestions are adopted and implemented allows the members to feel a strong sense that the forum is created and used for their needs, increasing the amount of time members spend on it.
The forum has allowed for a unique and successful new way for members of the sailing school to communicate, collaborate and interact. It has combined an online and offline community to create a successful forum.
05.10.06
Using Blog Data
What should we do with all that blog data? My previous posts have shown just how many blogs are out their collecting human thoughts, emotions and feelings. So what can be done with that data in order to make it useful or usable?
The first website is called We Feel Fine. What we feel fine does is explained very well by the site:
Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The end result looks like a sony bravia ad, with a multitude of coloured balls bouncing around the screen. Mousing over a ball tells you the location and feeling expressed. Whilst all balls are turned on the emotions are fairly broad, and often boring, however if you narrow the emotions down, it becomes more interesting. I asked We Feel Fine to only show me emotions expressed on Afghani blogs, and suddenly the emotions were a lot different. The number of blogs from teenage girls seemed to decrease, and suddenly the emotions were more like ’sick’, ‘alone’ and many other interesting emotions, both positive and negative, that seemed to relate to the war on terror in their country.
The second website is called Lovelines. It has a very similar theme to the first site, as well as the same creators. The explanation for Lovelines is as follows:
Lovelines examines thousands of blogs every few minutes to find expressions of love and hate, posted by all manner of people. When it can, Lovelines identifies and saves the age, gender, and geographical location of the person who wrote the post, and then presents that information along with the post. The entries range from frivolous to profound, offering a glimpse into the hearts and minds of people blogging about their wants and needs. Lovelines presents a stark white screen, bounded on the bottom by a slider running from “Love” to “Hate”, with a draggable heart that becomes scratched out to the point of illegibility as the heart approaches “Hate”. As the slider is pulled through Love, Like, Want, Indifference, Dislike, and Hate, words and pictures appear above to represent the chosen state of desire or despair.
The result is both inspiring and sad. Placing the slider on love shows numerous people blogging about their love for ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘you’, ‘this song’, ‘life’ and a heap more. Placing the slider to hate however is a little more depressing. The site shows the huge number of people blogging that they hate ‘themselves’, ‘you’, ’school’, ‘myspace’, ‘monday’ and once again a huge plethora of emotions.
MMOG Graph Points
A few of the things I noticed:
- Lineage II seemed to see most the Lineage players switch to the new version
- The new Everquest does not seem to see many players switching versions
I found this interesting. Why would the sequal of one game see most players upgrading to the newer version, but not the sequel of another game. Perhaps players are not allowed to switch their players between version, and as such don’t want to lost the emotional investment they have built up in the first game.
World of Warcraft being released has seen a huge increase in the number of people playing games, however the graph does not seem to portray many people leaving other games to switch to it. It is possible that WoW was marketted more towards those not already playing MMOG games, or players decided to continue to play the two games simaltaneously.
05.03.06
MMOG Stats
[Source]
Statistics regarding subscription levels in MMOG’s. I’ll blog about interesting occurences in the graphs in a later post.
Does This Make me a Geek?
I’m going to once again transport you back to the week where we had the lecture on blogs. (I swear I go to every lecture though!) One of the blogs that was discussed was postsecret. Now I am a RSS whore, I love nothing more than having firefox alert me whenever one of the blogs I read gets a new story posted to it. I love my news.
Getting back on track. As she discussed postsecret, some genius in the crowd (I’m not being sarcastic) pointed out that they had published a large amounts of the post cards in a book. I already knew that. I already owned the book. I bought it just before christmas.
Yes, I have bought a book based on a blog. Now whilst it wasn’t one of Cory’s great sci-fi stories, it is definetly a great read. I spent a good half hour slowly flipping the pages and wondering about the faceless people behind the cards.
The book:
One of my favourite postcards:
One of the most discusting ones of all:
And my absolute favourite:
It is no surprise to me that these websites do so well. Anonymity is one thing people enjoy about the web, as demonstrated in many of the MMOG lectures. One of the other very similar websites to Postsecret that is as old as the web itself is group hug. If ever you are feeling down, a read of group hug will pick you up when you realise there are people living all around you with bigger issues.
05.01.06
Communities: Good Or Bad?
I started reading a new site a few weeks back called Vitamin. Its a very new site that claims:
“Vitamin is a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs”
Cool Huh! Their little tagline claim aside, they’ve managed to get some very, very interesting people on board. Some of the ones I really respect and would like to read:
- Thomas Fuchs from Script.aculo.us. AJAX is the next big web thing, and this guy makes it easy to use. I’ve just started using some of script.aculo.us’s stuff, and I love it.
- Cal Henderson, one of the pioneers of Flickr
- Dave Shea from CSS Zen Garden
- Jeffrey Kalmikoff from Skinnycorp
I want to talk quickly about Jeff from Skinnycorp first. Skinnycorp are a very cool new web company. Their first prokect was yayhooray.com. Yayhooray is an online forum, but one they developed with some pretty unique features. It’s very different from phpbb and vBulletin that everyone else uses.
Their other well known project is Threadless. Threadless I think would have to be one of the biggest online tshirt companies. I’m actually wearing one of my several threadless tshirts as I write this. Now I’m not sure how big threadless has become, but they must be up there. I’d probably see on average one person wearing a threadless tshirt at uni on an average day. Now considering they are a web based company, and every person I see has obviously ordered it from the site, they have some pretty serious saturation. Why does threadless work so well? The net is filled with tshirt companies, so why have these guys pulled it off so well?
Threadless, apart from being a tshirt company, is also a big community. How you ask? Its filled with community aspects. People who feel part of a community there are more likely to return, and more likely to buy a shirt. What makes it a community?
- Any one can submit a shirt design
- Visitors to the site vote on what shirts they would like to see made
- Customers can send in pictures of themselves wearing the shirts to get future discounts
- People can refer others to get discounts
- People can comment on shirts
These may not be ground breaking community ideas, but these guys seem to have been the first to aplpy a lot of it to clothing. As such, threadless is now huge (top 6000 sites on the net according to Alexa).
So I started rambling about Threadless for a little there, so now I’ll go back to the original topic I was talking about. An article on Vitamin by… (*shock horror*)… Jeff Kalmikoff (remember, the guy from skinncorp). He discusses in the article why so many big businesses are so afraid of having a forum for their customers, and why they shouldn’t be. I was going to base this blog entry around quotes from it, but I’ve spent so much time talking about my love for the threadless community, I’ll just link to the article. Enjoy!
04.24.06
New Technorati Stats
Technorati released new figures the other day (April 17th) about the state of the blogosphere. These are updated graphs of what we saw in the Blog lecture. Blogs are still looking strong! David Sifry, the founder and CEO of technorati makes a few interesting points about the new graphs:
The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.
Technorati currently tracks over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created.
04.08.06
Picking A Community
Picking a community to do was a bit tough. I post to a few forums, and post to one or two. Embaressingly, over the past few years I’ve even posted over 8000 times to one of these sites over the past 3 years. I could have done this site, and I’ve noticed a few amazing ways this site has shifted over the years. At one stage they brought in a subscription fee to access the General Chat area of the site, unless your bought the magazine the site was based around. It caused a huge debate with many prominent members leaving (most to return in a few hours). Two days ago, about 12 months after it was originally brought in, the fee was abolished, and you are now once again able to post whether you buy the magazine or not, and without paying any subscription fee. That aside, participating in it for three years has been very interesting, however I decided to do something different for my community.
I work as a sailing instructor in Brisbane. The fact its one of the coolest jobs around aside, organisation for it can be tricky. Due to the work being on weekends and courses continually starting and stopping, the roster changes vastly each weekend. It was a huge effort to organise each week with a large number of phone calls having to be made in order to get it all worked out. To counter this we decided to set up an online forum to see if it could help.
12 months later and the forum is now used for more things then we ever imagined. Apart from rosters and availability, it is now also used for maintenence reports, photos, calendars and finally a heap of general off topic chat. I think the forum is going to be very interesting to do the assignment on, as the members range in age from 12 to 60, have an equal number of males and females as well as showing how people act differently online and offline.
04.07.06
More Major Blog Linkology
One of the blogs I read is called “information aesthetics” and it’s basically a blog that centres itself around cool information design. The other day it had a cool diagram on how the top 50 blogs link to each other.
Whilst it’s impossible to see in the poor quality image above, there is a pdf of all these blogs relations available. It’s based on the last 90 days, with the data being taken from technorati. Now whilst we are on the topic of technorati, I’d like to make a few comments about my experience with the service.
I post on a few different blogs, and host a few more. For this little section I’m going to blog about my oldest one called sandstorming. It’s about 2 years old now, it started on blogger, and I later migrated it across to wordpress, which I’ve found to be superior in absolutely every aspect.
It’s a blog fairly wide range blog, and I try to do at least a blog a day. But back to my experience about Technorati…
Traffic on my blog was rather small until pretty much the time the Family Guy movie came about. The movie was leaked on bittorrent about 3 months before it was due to be released. Myself and another one of the bloggers on the site rushed to try and find some sample footage from the film. We managed to get a 1 minute section from the leak, and we then set about taking a few screenshots from it. We posted it on the blog, along with a brief story and then submitted the story to Digg. Now digg has a daily reach 3 times that of BoingBoing according to Alexa.
The result was 10s of thousands of visitors to our blog within the next 24 hours…. but the secondary result was hundreds of blogs linking to us. Now there was several way to see who was linking to us, but the biggest ones were Trackbacks (this was disscused in the lecture), Technorati and referers. Referers is when the web browser passes to the web page where it came from, so as such I could look at the sites logs and see where people had been linked from.
The results was that I could accurately see who was linking via referers, and compare this data against who Technorati was picking up was linking to us. Comparing this data it became apparent that Technorati picked up maybe 10% of the sites. If that.
We’ve managed to get stories on sandstorming to the front page of digg 3 or 4 times since then. Digg is continuing to grow at a huge rate, and the idea of having users as editors is something I will touch on in a blog at a later date. Needless to say each time the traffic almost (or does) bring down the server. The traffic always drops off again though. In the first lecture John said that creating a site was easy, getting people to come there is hard. Based on my experience this is generally incorrect. Getting traffic to your website, provided you produce some original content is easy, getting those people to visit more then once is very hard.
03.31.06
Wednesday’s Night Lecture
I think Virtual Cultures would have to be the first ever subject in which I make a big effort to reach the lecture every week. Normally a lecture going until 6:30 or 7 at night would give me a good reason to skip it, but Virtual Cultures I really enjoy going too.
Wednesday nights lecture was a beginning (sp?) look at blogging. The lecturer spoke about how she felt that blogs may begin to stop increasing as people move onto the next big thing. I disagree with that, I believe that whilst the growth rate of blogs may slow, the idea of having a public place to publish online is something I feel appears to a lot of people. I do invisage more people more people using new methods like moblogging (blogging from a mobile), and also a strong move for people to have more than one blog. In 5 years time we will see the young teens with their myspace and msn space blogs moving to an age where they would prefer to blog about politics and world events, rather that who’s kissing who.