Introducing Ubiquity
On the Mozilla Labs blog, Head of User Experience Aza Raskin discusses Ubiquity, a natural-language interface for Mozilla browsers that gives users the ability to create their own mashups on the fly, tapping existing open APIs that developers currently employ to create site-hosted mashups. Raskin says that the experiment promises to usher in a new era of “user-centric” browsing, in which users tell the browser what tasks they want to accomplish, rather than what information on the web they want to find.
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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."
Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.
Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.
more media file links for September 10, 2008:
Six Degrees of Separation Is Now Three
TechCrunch reports on a study by French mobile firm O2 that updates the “six degrees of separation” meme. According to the study, the average person is now connected to others by three degrees of separation or less, via social networks of work, family, and friendship. When the “six degrees” concept was first promulgated in 1967, mobile phones, online social networks, and other fixtures of contemporary wired society had not yet been invented.
How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself
To read Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco describe it, the music industry has formed yet another circular firing squad, placing streaming-music sites Muxtape and Pandora in the center. By securing rules forcing streaming-media sites to pay steep “performance royalties,” the music industry threatens to snuff out a venue that encourages users to sample a broad range of songs and artists, beyond the single-download mentality of iTunes or the narrow, hit-driven repertoire of most terrestrial radio (which is not saddled with performance royalties). The problem, Dumenco writes, is that music industry executives are delusional--clinging to a past that is gone and not likely to return, instead of exploring paths to future revenue.
Magazine Web Traffic Continues To Rise
Unique visitors to magazine web sites rose 8.5 percent in the second quarter of 2008 versus the same period in 2007, according to a report released by the Magazine Publishers Association and summarized on MediaPost. Based on site traffic data compiled by Nielsen Online on 314 consumer magazine brands, the report states that total magazine web site reach rose to 69.7 million people or 42.2 percent of the US Internet population, compared with 64.2 million people or 40.5 percent penetration in 2007. Average time per visitor rose 12 percent to roughly 29 minutes per month, said the report. This figure is meaningful because publishers typically report magazine usage figures in terms of minutes or hours spent reading per issue.
Participatory Philanthropy, Part I
In the first of a two-part post for MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices’ David Sasaki examines how so-called “crowdsourcing” strategies can give philanthropic organizations the ability to effectively vet a much broader range of charitable opportunities than is feasible through traditional project selection processes.
Participatory Philanthropy, Part II
In the second of a two-part post for MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices’ David Sasaki examines how so-called “crowdsourcing” strategies can give philanthropic organizations the ability to more effectively measure the social impact of their charitable activities than is possible through traditional project evaluation approaches. Crowdsourcing can supplement or potentially replace professional, consultant-driven evaluation methods with approaches that give the target beneficiary communities themselves the tools to judge the success of development and philanthropic projects.
CIA, FBI push ‘Facebook for spies’
CNN reports on A-Space, a Facebook-like, classified social network created for analysts within the 16 US intelligence agencies. The site was designed to ensure that crucial bits of intelligence data or analysis produced by individual analysts don’t get lost in the sea of information collected the various agencies. Analysts can highlight a specific piece of intelligence and share it with their “friends”--analysts working for the other agencies.
