TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

internet

Voting open for the rock stars of Web 2.0!

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I’ve posted in preparation long enough – you can now vote for the people you rate as the true rock stars of Web 2.0.

How you define a web rock star is entirely up to you – which is the fun bit. This isn’t a list defined by a company, magazine, or website – it’s purely decided by the voters. Which means it’s already had some surprising results – I wouldn’t have tipped the four or five early leaders to be out in front, for example!

As Ditto’s categories are primarily set-up for general entertainment, I’ve volunteered to collate additional entries and suggestions, and missing pictures etc, (daniel dot thornton at bauer consumer . co . uk).

Court allows Viacom to invade privacy of Youtube viewers

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Due to the litigation case between Viacom and Google, a federal court has ordered Google to produce:

all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website

Time to boycott any Viacom products? Read more details on how this erroneously ignores the protection of the US Video Privacy Protection Act on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website. For the record, actions like this are a far bigger problem than Twitter failing to scale!

Why I love links

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By nature, I’m a frustrated librarian and a compulsive hoarder. My music collection is in alphabetical and chronological order, and my loft is packed with old video consoles and other collections which I know fatherhood will stop me from indulging in, except as family heirlooms in 30 years time!

Part of this is a reluctance to lend CDs and books, even to close friends, for fear of them being lost, or being returned with the spine of the book broken beyond all recognition.

But now access to knowledge and entertainment is instantly sharable from the moment of discovery. From the almost infinite resource of online knowledge I can share findings via links, Del.icio.us bookmarks, or RSS. My tastes in music are logged, and accessible via Last.fm, and TV and videos get distributed from Youtube, the BBC iPLayer, or where ever they’re found. And it doesn’t matter if my friends lose them, and they can’t return them broken. In fact, even if, God forbid, I lost all my saved files and links, I could find most of the memorable ones that mattered in a few minutes with Google.

There’s a popular quote by author and broadcaster Leo Laporte which has spread via shared links:

“I’m less likely to read print lately because I can’t tag, bookmark, and share the stories. Info gathering has become a social process for me”

And it rings true. Print and physical copies are now back-ups, or objects for sentimental value. They’re for those rare occasions that you want to get away from it all.

And that’s why I love links!

I’ve come out of the internet alias closet….

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After 300 posts on this blog, several other projects, and signing up for who knows how many social networks, I’ve made the decision to come out from the alias closet.

I originally had different ideas for what I would be blogging about, so a totally anonymous identity made sense. Then, as I settled on a slightly different focus, I wanted friends to be able to identify me, but was still more comfortable using an alias (years of chat rooms/social networks/Xbox Live).

But now my blog is not only an important part of my identity, it’s also a key element of my public persona, my network, and my career.

So despite the fact I’ll continue to exist under the pseudonym of Badger Gravling on Twitter, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg, FriendFeed, etc, etc, within my blogging home, I’m Dan.

Hello.

Could technology lead to micro self government?

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A bit of a break from my normal musings on community marketing, digital publishing and journalism, but this idea has been in my head for a while, and I’d welcome other opinions and thoughts…

The idea?

Is there any reason why communities can’t be empowered by a micro-level of self-government, using digital technology?

Or, to put it another way, is there any reason all the people in my street can’t vote on what day the rubbish is collected, for example? Using internet/mobile voting, it could mean that we tailor the services provided by the council to our actual needs, and remove any unnecessary spending. For instance, do we actually all fill our recycling bin, or green waste bin, as often as the ‘normal’ waste bin? Or would we be better served by a collection service for glass?

There would have to be geographic/resource limitations, as I realise at street level, you couldn’t have everyone requesting their rubbish goes at exactly the same time…or everyone choosing a different time and forcing refuse collectors to work 24/7.

But considering the interest when No 10 unveiled its e-petition site, the penetration of internet/mobile connections, and the fact I can invest in everything from shares to bands, sort my banking, pay my bills etc, surely it’s time to update democracy?

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