insights from the digital future
Is it any surprise that all of the primary links on MySpace News — digg style voting on stories by MySpace’s 160 million users — are to Murdoch-owned entities like the Times of London, FoxNews, and the New York Post?
Chicago Tribune goes hyperlocal with TribLocal — will be watching thic closely.
And After chewing for quite a while, Yahoo! finally wrapped upcoming.org users into their Yahoo! ID and migrates the event listings site to upcoming.yahoo.com
Gone are the days of cruising the streets with friends and rendezvousing at midnight at the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot to see what’s up.
55% of online teens use social networks and have created online profiles. Girls moreso than boys (70% of girls aged 15-17), according to the results of a Pew Internet & American Life Project poll released this week (summary | full report [.pdf]).
As today’s high school students grow up in an age where everything that pops is born and manifests online, the results of the study indicate a teenage culture where friends are made and maintained via MySpace (85%), Facebook (7%) and the like. But increased caution is being practiced (if it’s not forced by parents or the generally tasteless spam friend requests from MySpace) — nearly 60% of the 12-17-year-olds surveyed restrict the visibility of their profiles to friends only.
Also of note, no big discrepancies between teenaged social network users based on race or differences in household income. But only 17% admit to having ever used these sites for “flirting,” however that’s defined.
photo by dogseat via flickr.
No surprise here. As if NBC/Vivendi/Universal is not already getting enough free pub and promotion from the UGC-oriented social networking and video sharing Web sites alone, now they’re getting double the love after threatening to sue YouTube and MySpace over copyright violations.
Universal Media Group Exec Doug Morris: “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”
Making the issue sound even more ridiculous, Morris proceeds to say Universal is just adapting from experience, saying: MTV “built a multibillion-dollar company on our (music) … for virtually nothing. We learned a hard lesson.”
This is a blatant misunderstanding of the law, as the infringers would be arguably those who download the music/video, not the sites that unknowingly host it (and would be quick to remove it, at least in the case of YouTube, if an argument was filed).
Does Morris blame FM radio for coming along and broadcasting cuts from records other than or in addition to the singles he pays them to play? I do wonder.
Two very well-read articles were brought to my attention today, both published in the relatively new World Politics Watch online daily.
Guy Taylor writes of an intense interest in pop culture and reality TV in the face of bombing in Lebanon. He alludes specifically to Star Academy, the Lebanon Broadcasting Corp.’s reality show/contest now in its 3rd season and Super Star, a show allegedly based on the British show Pop Idol.
I heard a song on some NPR program yesterday, can’t seem to dig it up via search, but it was a Palestinian song with words altered in support of Hezbollah / Nasrallah and I can?t get it out of my head. According to Al Jazeera, the number one hit song of the summer on the streets of Ramallah has been “The eagle of Lebanon,” a tribute to Nasrallah. Good chance it can be heard on any of these Gaza/West Bank-based online radio stations.
Juliette Terzieff provides an in-depth update on the latest in Iraqi reality TV. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. on transplanting notions of Western democracy on the Iraqi public, ?it has been the localized versions of “American Idol” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” that captured the hearts and minds of Iraqis.” Programs including “Construction Contract,” “Fame or Fortune” and “Congratulations!” are aired regularly on Al Sharqiya TV (watch live), a privately owned satellite-based channel.
My question is, when is Murdoch going to announce an initiative to penetrate the markets with his monster MySpace social network?
Here’s 15 minutes of “Star Academy.” More video clips can be found at Yahoo! Video.
Thanks to John Brown for passing along info on these two articles.