Revisado, Enero 2007. Publicado originalmente en Netartreview, Marzo 2005.
Este texto fue publicado en Abril del 2007 en la publicación Installando/Installing, editada por el Colectivo Chileno Troyano.
Abstracto:
Este texto considera la posición crÃtica del “colaborador†de acuerdo a Walter Benjamin durante la primera parte del siglo veinte en relación al bloger al princÃpio del siglo veinte-uno. El texto considera el concepto del anarco-comunismo y el papel que juega el intercambio de regalos en comunidades virtuales de acuerdo a Richard Barbrook, para mejor entender la posición de los blogers en la cultura de la red. (more…)
In my last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today. Companies are actively “widgetizing” their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products. And as we discussed in the last post, it’s believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.
DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget.
Looked at this way, letting thousands and even millions of users build Web sites and apps out of your Web parts and then monetizing it with advertising, usage fees, or subscriptions sounds great in the abstract. But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online. While this last question is still very much an open one, part of the answer will come from the way that the consumption side of DIY develops. The question is this: Are environments emerging that will enable rich and sophisticated DIY scenarios that are usable by most people?
One of the hallmarks of a good Web 2.0 site is one that hands over non-essential control to users, letting them contribute content, participate socially, and even fundamentally shape the site itself. The premise is that users will do a surprising amount of the hard work necessary to make the site successful, right down to creating the very information the site offers to its other users and even inviting their friends and family members to use it. Web 2.0 newcomers MySpace and YouTube have shown how this can be done on a mass scale surprisingly quickly, and of course older generation successes like eBay and craigslist have been doing this for years.
There’s little question that the Web is increasingly turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves lined with thousands of useful, off-the-shelf parts of every description and utility.As part of this, users are getting increasingly accustomed to the ease of which they can customize their own corners of the Internet, whether it’s a blog, profile page, Web site or even Web application. While skinning and customizable layouts have been with us on the Web for a long time, increasingly users want to share — or particularly important to this discussion — even repurpose the content and services they find on the Web in locations and forms of their choosing.
Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.
Inspired by Linux, the OScar project aims to build a car by tapping the knowledge of a volunteer team. It won’t be an easy ride, but their journey is important
The computer operating system Linux and the Web browser Firefox are generally considered the two biggest successes of the movement to develop open-source programs—software anyone can modify, transform, and redistribute back into the community. While there are thousands of other examples, Linux and Firefox have managed to mount serious competition to established commercial products, and have therefore come to represent this specific, collective mode of creation.
But Linux and Firefox are made of bits. They are immaterial. Bits can be shared and sent around easily, so that distant people can work on them concurrently; bugs can be corrected almost instantly; new versions containing updates, improvements, or fixes can be released virtually for free.
Standing quietly behind his chrome-encased digital turn tables, Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, affably channels the virtues of communism into the auditory world of music creation. As do many in DJ culture, Miller composes by sampling and remixing previously existing songs and images into an audio-visual collage all his own—essentially a de-privatization of the sonic landscape. But rather than adding drum lines to borrowed melodies and claiming the product as his own (see Diddy’s “I’ll Be Missing Youâ€), Miller completely reworks his source material into a creation entirely of his own making.
November 2006
Abstract
Wikipedia is an free, online encyclopaedia which anyone can add content to or edit the existing content of. The idea behind Wikipedia is that members of the general public can add their own personal knowledge, anonymously if they wish. Wikipedia then evolves over time into a comprehensive knowledge base on all things. Its popularity has never been questioned, although its authority has. By its own admission, Wikipedia contains errors. A number of people have tested Wikipedia’s accuracy using destructive methods, i.e. deliberately inserting errors. This has been criticised by Wikipedia. This short study examines Wikipedia’s credibility by asking 258 research staff with a response rate of 21 percent, to read an article and assess its credibility, the credibility of its author and the credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Staff were either given an article in their own expert domain or a random article. No difference was found between the two group in terms of their perceived credibility of Wikipedia or of the articles’ authors, but a difference was found in the credibility of the articles — the experts found Wikipedia’s articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes.
Abstract
This paper is concerned with gifting: giving not motivated by a direct, immediate, or obvious benefit. We analyze a popular technology used for gifting: the BitTorrent file–sharing system. We determine features associated with high levels of gifting and suggest changes to the protocol and to the design of associated BitTorrent Web sites to promote it. We then extend our conclusions and suggestions to gifting technologies in general.
