Get out of MySpace, bloggers rage at Murdoch [independent, 8 jan 2006]

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

…

A spokesman for MySpace said it would not explain how the blocking of YouTube came about, nor how it was resolved, nor whether in future it would continue to block links to rival websites or censor messages between MySpace customers.

sounds like one of those determinism things to me.

3,004,601 weblogs watched.

(i’ve added technorati links here in the footers)

update (8:30am): more from the horse and the joi.

i really can’t dive into something fun like this, but someone really needs some choice 2001 quotes to go with this.

one practical comment i want to make is that if “people don’t read essays” then there really isn’t much point in syndicating them for easy reading, eh?

dave winer, june 14, 2004

I thought I would try doing it as an audio thing as opposed to writing an essay about this. My feeling is that people generally don’t read essays, so if you want to present a subtle idea, that’s not a really good way to do it.

for more on this story, it looks like lawmeme has it. jeannie is deep, deep deep into the thing.

i have a larger motive for putting this here – it’s worth my attention (and perhaps yours) on it’s own, but i hope to come back to this in the near future from a different [political] angle.

pip content creation report [pdf]

2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.

the pew study is fairly brief and worth reading, but i’m going to have to pick some nits with the associated press and cnn – not a great headline, guys.

first, the data is almost a year old (march 12 – may 30, 2003).

second, the study reports based on adult (over 18) internet users.

third, 2% of adult internet users works out to more than 2 million americans (this nit pre-picked by matt woodward over at ars technica). to back that up, both technorati and the nitle blog census figure about 1.8 million (those are both global counts) blogs. livejournal alone is carrying some 1.2 million “active” users. ¹

so, if i may introduce some commentary at this point, there’s a youth bias and there’s an active versus passive situation.

i’m just guessing, but i think maybe the under-18 population might be busy in this medium. i also think it’s just silly to assume that everyone would (or should) assume an active role in any medium. in the case of blogs, based on this survey, there are 5.5 passive participants (that is, readers – 11%) for each active participant (2%). is it really surprising that more people read than write? given the demands on attention, i’m not terribly surprised. in any case, i think a 5.5 passive-to-active ratio for blogs is a lot more impressive than the passive-to-active ratio for most, if not all, other media². don’t get me wrong – i think there are some serious problems that come with lots of people “going active” – not the least of which is that most of what’s out there is crap and it introduces a filtering problem.

the bigger numbers from the study (and ths stuff that pew leads with) is that 44% of people are contributing some content in some form. this is an old lesson that i’ve explored here with musicians, – people will find a form of expression with which they are comfortable, and they will use it.

do these people really expect everyone to use every medium just because it’s availble? i think that’s an odd expectation – no more reasonable than assuming that everyone on the planet would paint, draw, write, photograph, model, act, speak, edit, and direct, just because those verbs are available. personally, i’m glad that (for example) anthony hopkins focused on acting… and i think it’s safe to say that many of us wish some [nameless to protect the guilty] models would stick to… y’know… modeling.

i do think that blogs are still a small phenomenon, and there’s an echo chamber phenomenon going on (the echo chamber phrase seems to be pretty hot in the blogosphere lately). there’s always a danger when you assume everyone has your perspective on things. blogs haven’t taken over the attention market, but they are begining to make a showing…. and it’s enough of a showing that the problems (like that crapfiltering thing i mentioned earlier and blogspam) are becoming evident.

very few bloggers on the net? well, it’s enough to make trouble.

¹ at this moment, technorati reports tracking 1,806,014 blogs, the nitle blog census reports 1,750,365 “likely weblogs.” livejournal reports 1,191,820 active users.

² one source puts broadcast (both television and radio) employment at just over 250,000. assuming most people in the united states listen to a radio or watch a television at some point, there are at least 250,000,000 passive participants (i’m being generous). that’s a 1000-to-1 ratio, so 5.5-to-1 seems pretty impressive to me.

the last time i think i dreamed about something like this was tetris (ok, actually, it was nyet, because tetris was bloated). if i start dreaming about this blog, you can expect some serious changes… maybe i’ll just go ahead and make the categories into shapes made from square blocks and let you figure them out….