Digital Culture Studies

I have always wanted to plot the migratory course of social networking software -the groups of people who started at Six Degrees, and then made the decision to use Friendster, the jump to Orkut, the small subset of friends on Small World, the ones who drifted from pitas.com to blogger software on their own domain, who then swarmed to livejournal, something they never would have done in 99 when it debuted, but now is old enough (in web years) to be retro, and then the splitoff to deadjournal and others like it after the breastfeeding icons controversy. Other packs ended up at Vox, some opted out of blogging entirely and jumped to Facebook and MySpace, others hit wordpress and blogspot along the way, but in general, I suspect that people, as they migrate through social networking software sites, are retaining a high percentage of links to the same group of people - their digital tribe - as they pass through each iteration of social networking online.

And then everyone was at Twitter, and now twittering is passe and the people who loved it most complain about the overloaded servers and unexplained outages, and now plurk.com is the next big thing, with its gorgeous timeline visuals. It will be interesting to see what kind of retention plurk has from twitter networks.

Tomorrow night (6/17) Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet…And How to Stop It, will be on Colbert. This should be fun.

I bought a copy of this book for my summer reading list because I am oldskool and like to hold books in my hand to read them, but you can download and read it for free directly from its website, and if so inclined, there is a group annotation in progress.

Its the first day of summer vacation, and I just finished a seminar paper so fun that I cannot let it go. To that end, I am seeking out sociology/anthropology/gender studies academics who study child beauty pageants. I know these people must exist, but I have no idea who they are. Do you? Let me know, please!

• Twitter Announces a great solution for TOS issues: When your users are being harassed, and that harassment is covered in your terms of service, just ‘task your lawyers’ [ed note: not my grammatical construction] to review your TOS so that harassment via your product is no longer your problem. Problem solved, right?
• Blogging in Theory and Practice: My favourite quote is this - “Like a great number of weblog authors, I had started a mental recycling project.”
• Freedocumentaries.org: I don’t recognize a lot ofthe titles, but the ones I do recognize are excellent, so hopefully they are in good company. Warning: documentaries are almost never about happy subjects - there is no cuteoverload.com documentary :)

Hilarious.

Yogurt: “it’s substitute for human experience good.” There is nothing wrong with yogurt as a product, if you like to eat it, but there is something so very, very wrong with yogurt marketing.And marketing food as medicine. And all other marketing aimed at women. But for now, yogurt ads. And if you forget everything this video has to teach you, just remember this: Yogurt eaters come from every race, but just one socio-economic class. The class that wears grey hoodies. It’s that ‘I have a Master’s but then I got married’ look.” Hilarious.

Link shamelessly stolen from Kate Harding.

I am not often afraid of technology, but there are exceptions. This is one.

• Dissertation Calculator: I love time management tools.
• Social Network Wars: Poor Friendster. Not enough skanky pictures.
• Cell phone jammers: I could make the obvious joke about how great this technology is, but I can’t get my head around the other side of it - this would be a great tool for criminals, given how few public phones still exist.

Thank you MichaelH for your help in upgrading my Wordpress software. Now, a month of school, and then some redesigning and tweaking - I know there are problems with the css in places, and a few links are messed up.

But fixing it has to wait all these papers are written!

• Beware the curse of YouTube: Lore Sjöberg explains why having every bit of pop culture online is a dangerous thing, using the lyrics of La Isla Bonita his example.
  
• PDF Pad: Excellent free source of templates - from Cartesian graph paper to blank sheet music.
• Wesabe: A social networking site for your bank account.