It looks like MySpace has finally made a move into China four days ago, with almost of all of its control in local hands  (i.e. with no direct connection to its overseas office). Furthermore, in a move that surprised no one, MySpace China has made moves to limit prohibit certain controversial topics of conversation.  What’s interesting is how its done so. [Since I don’t read Chinese, much of this information was gleaned from texyt who has done a great job covering the issue.]

1. On publicly available message boards and forums, certain topics just don’t exist — religion and politics, for example
2. There is a keyword filter to any searches, postings and comments, where trying to query a specific term, or post using a suspicious keyword will flag your post and tell you to “try again”.
3. (the most troubling) There is now a means for users to flag *other* content, whether it be messages, profiles, or what not, so as to alert their overseers administrators for “misconduct” by other users. What does this mean? The usual things like “endangering national security, leaking state secrets” and so on — but it also, apparently, includes the vaguely worded phrase “disturbing the social order”.

While I take the translation with a grain of salt until I can confirm it myself, it does seem like MySpace is using “social tools” so that it can keep a greater eye on its citizens. And it does make sense in an Orwellian fashion. After all, what better way to monitor users activities than to get users to monitor themselves?

Its an issue of scale, really. When some social systems get large, things that were in place previously to monitor “deviant” activity may not be as effective; getting people to monitor things themselves is no different, really, than say, adding +/- to comments in a forum like Slashdot, so that people can censor the trolls themselves.

Or, like Digg, where they rely on their users to report “spam” or questionable content.

Well, I guess its no different except for the consequences that is. After all, getting your post pulled on Digg or marked as (minus) on Slashdot doesn’t get you hauled away in the middle of the night and thrown in jail (or worse).

Oh, that and contributing to self-imposed censorship, I guess.

MySpace China shows a different side of user-generated activities, and I guess it really shouldn’t be all that shocking. In a time when China is making a move to clamp down on suspicious Internet activity, I wasn’t really surprised to hear that MySpace China was toeing the line, and actively encouraging people to snitch on each other.

What’s kind of interesting though, is to think about the motivation behind doing so. In other social networking systems on the net now, sometimes there’s an altruistic reason behind contributing, but more often than not, its motivated by self-interest.

*Is* MySpace China “rewarding” its users for reporting suspicious content and the misconduct of others? Would it go the Netscape route, and ever encourage user activity, moderation, and checking up on suspicious activity with real-world dollars? Would the government, in turn be rewarding MySpace China for encouraging such reporting?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but if you do, you can leave a comment or three below.

tip: Steve O’Hear

Or, press release, for that matter. This past week, Adobe announced that it was opening up parts of its Flex platform under an open source license, with the intent to release its entire code sometime by the end of the year. Pretty interesting stuff, right? Somewhat important, no?

But you know how the tech community found out?

Through a video interview by Robert Scoble on PodTech.

If you monitored the blogging / news-osphere thereafter, a number of other posts started to surface, with Adobe’s official release over here.

But, ironically, the most useful post, I found, was neither of these posts (it was Nik Cubrilovic’s over at TechCrunch).

In fact, I found the entire situation frustating because:

1. I knew Flex was important
2. I’m not geeked up technically savvy enough to know what Flex was
3. In general, I need information fast
4. I didn’t feel like trawling through different posts to find out what I wanted to know

What would have been really nice would have been a central repository for some nice, quick, facts in an every-day kind of language, with a bunch of *annotated* links to a variety of important resources on the web, such as interviews, videos, opinions, and examples.

Wait — I just described a social media news room! This is an idea that was championed by Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications a little while ago, and I think it might have been useful in Flex’s launch. Really Useful.

Here’s why.

Listen, I think its great that Adobe decided to go “cutting edge” with a video interview on PodTech. Scoble’s got a huge audience, and on the whole, has their attention because of the credibility he’s got.

But did anyone not find it terribly ironic that the news was all about going “open source”, while the content on the interview was “locked” into the video? I’m stretching the metaphor here, but what I mean is that it was simply maddening that the bloody show had no show notes!

Sure, there’s an argument to be made that “if they’re interested they’ll watch all the way through — and that’s good for PodTech and Adobe”. But isn’t that a kind of command-and-control attitude that is the anti-thesis of the “transparency” and “open-source” ethos?

I still haven’t watched the interview, not because its *bad* per se, but I just don’t have the time to sit down and watch something for 25 minute when I could glean the same information (which is all I’m looking for — *information*) in less than two on a single, well constructed site.

And I think this is where Adobe really could have gotten it together.

Rather (or, perhaps, in *addition* to stringing) together a traditional press release over here, which is full of jargony technical speak, forcing people to find *other* resources online, it could create a single page with a few simple lines describing a) what the technology was and b) why its important, and add a whole bunch of annotated links to other important resources on the web.

I think the word “annotated” is important, because rather than just a long list of links, it gives the reader some idea of what each link means, and more importantly, how it contributes to the over all message of the page.

Robert Scoble’s interview, for example is more than just a “PodTech Interview”, but rather “Robert Scoble Interviews David Wadhwani, VP Engineering and Ely Greenfield, Flex Architect” and another sentence or three on why its important, or different, or why it adds to the “conversation”. Other examples?

• How about Michael Cote’s extensive video and analysis over what Flex means?
• What about how one of Adobe’s own senior engineers feels about Flex going open sourcem, over at Kuwamoto.org?
• How about a man-on-the-street perspective from a long time Flash developer, over at ZeusLabs?

The best part? It doesn’t need to be static. Like any good “new media” document it could be an evolving “document”, with new links added all the time as more stuff comes on board.

Now, the scary part is exactly what new media pundits will be clamoring over, which is that there’s nothing’s authentic about this kind of bit of communication, where’s the conversation, and for the love of pete, why not just start a blog?!

Hey, I love blogging just as much as the next man / woman / person, but as you can see in Flex’s case, sometimes it just makes no sense. Starting a blog for the purposes of promoting “awareness” about a product seems fairly disingenuous, and furthermore, while there’s an argument to be made for starting a product/service oriented blog at *the beginning*, you can see here that Adobe wanted to keep things under wraps for a little while.

Note — they didn’t want to *lie* … but they wanted to keep things secret.

I think I see the flip side of this. If done the “right” way, social media news rooms (or press releases) allows for the congregation of *many* different kinds of voices, and yes, if it sticks to the transparent and open source ethos, it would even list dissenting opinions as well. Furthermore, its something that stays on a host company’s site, and would not be something “pushed” on to journalists (or bloggers), but rather, something more of a resource.

Having blogs is good. Having video is good. Podcasts are useful as well, in their own way. The announcement of Flex was interesting in the seemingly haphazard way it was done, and I think, might have served as a great example of what social news room could be. Furthermore, given the kind of technology that they were dealing with and the kinds of opinions that were proliferating in and around the blogosphere, I think it would have really been a great opportunity for Adobe. Since they didn’t have a “Flex” blog, it would have been an opportunity to at least *collect* important opinions, so as to acknowledge the conversations that were going on in a way that would have been helpful to everyone.

Resources:

• Todd Defren’s Social Media News Room Template [pdf]
• NeatReceipts: An example of a SMNR (a client of SHIFT Communications)
• GM Europe: Another example of SMNR
• Marcom Blog: The case against SMNR’s wild proliferation
• A recent forum on Social Media Press Releases (a cousin of SMNR), courtesy of Brian Solis

• Media / Entertainment, As A Category, Dead Last in “Trust”
  In first place? Technology. A survey done by Edelman attempted to rank levels of trust in a variety of industries. Its thought that the rise of pirated media “may” have influenced the perception of value, and hence, trust of an entire industry.
  (tags: piracy pirates trust technology edelman iht media)
• Akihabara, Eat Your Heart Out!
  I can see 98% of most geeks having some kind of epileptiform seizure if they were to go to a place like this. For the rest of you, enjoy the technological orgy that is the SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen, China.
  (tags: awesome akihabara bunniestudios shenzhen china electronics)
• Wait — Does This Mean Leopard Will Get Delayed Even *More*?
  Not that I actually care all that much, but it seems like Apple is plowing even more resources into the iPhone. What’s that sound? It could be hardcore mac heads gnashing their teeth. ;)
  (tags: osx leopard delaying appleinsider apple iphone)
• Outsourcing Web2.0?
  It might not be, but in this article describing a new incubator, Hitforge, it sounds like the premise certainly hinges on it. “Entrepreneurs see their idea go from idea to product … largely with help of an offshore engineering team.”
  (tags: incubator entrepreneur startup vc interesting web2.0 outsourcing gigaom)

Hey, I love Firefox like everyone else.  Glancing at my logs for DJI, it looks like the majority of you do to (60% of you, in fact; 35% IE, and 5% Safari, if you’re interested).  For me, the best part about Firefox is the fantastic plugin / theme support.  Where would any of us be without firebug or webdeveloper or greasemonkey, right?

Having said that, I am SO glad that its shadier aspects are getting a little bit of a spotlight at Wired.

I mean, am I the only one who is tired of Firefox’s bloated size and gi-normous RAM footprint?  Yes, yes — I know, I should limit the number of tabs I have open, and limit the number of plugins I’m using.  Fine.  But, you know what?  I kind of do, and if I leave Firefox open for more than a day, I too find that my PC grinds to a halt.

The frustrating thing is that although this “problem” with Firefox isn’t new, it never seems to have been directly addressed by Firefox.  There are work arounds to the problem thanks to fiddling with the about:config, or even some separate plugins, but are these really optimal solutions?

I mean, while you couldn’t copy Firefox’s community, nor its gargantuan library of extensions, themes and plugins, I do wonder if this represents an opportunity for another browser to surface — one that is slim, fast, and is absolutely thrifty as it comes down to memory usage? One that adheres to all W3C standards?

Could it be done?

Does it already exist, but hasn’t yet gotten enough traction from the Geek community?

If so, let me know.

For the moment, I find myself using Firefox Portable, which is about 30MB, and seems a little faster than the “normal” version.  The “portable” aspect of it represents a rebuild so that it can be used off a portable storyage device, like a USB key.  Its not ideal for me, since it can’t “remember” anything (cached or otherwise — it doesn’t record a “history” for example), but it is faster, which is a trade off I’ll happily make.

There is an interesting report surfacing, courtesy of comcast, that suggests Google has now topped Microsoft in traffic numbers.

While I certainly don’t dispute Google’s world-consuming status, and am not at all surprised that it certainly competes with Microsoft for King Of All Traffic on these interwebs, I am reserving any further hoopla / parties / Microsft is teh dead! posts until I see the actual report (should be here, thanks to Barry for pointing this out).

After all, does the comscore numbers reflect traffic to just the domains Google.com and Microsoft.com?  Or does it refer all domains that they own?  I expect that it includes Gmail, but how about Hotmail?  How about Google Maps?  How about all the Xbox-related urls that Microsoft owns? Does MSNBC.com count? Does Blogspot?  Blogger.com?  Live spaces?

Ok, fine — it might be splitting hairs.

But I think in the future, I don’t think there’s any question its going to be Google that dominates.

Why?

With Google’s push towards and all-online office suite (now that it has google docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and soon as well, video conferencing) you can bet that although the actual time spent now on Google properties is *relatively* low, this will undoubtedly increase as its users will be spending time not on reading or consuming content, but actually creating it and sharing it.

In yet another tiresome effort to “control” the “internet”, China’s president Hu JinTao is calling for even more stringent controls on how the kind of media that Chinese citizens are exposed to.  The purpose?  To foster a”healthy online culture that … sticks to the direction of socialist advanced culture”  China has a legitimate reason to be concerned.  With over 100 million individuals using the Internet, which is more than the number of internet users in the US, and that number continuing to grow at greater than 20% per year, the need to monitor and control what they see has never been greater.

If, that is, you were seriously convinced that “cracking down” on the internet, or even TV, will have any material effect on what your citizens see.  Although the “Great Firewall of China” does a moderate job of censoring URLs and IP’s (even though China officially denies that it “censors” “anything”), there’s no question that information and rumours still flow freely through instant messaging systems, forums, and other kinds of web1.0 “social networking” systems.

Quite frankly, it will be interesting if there ever was a more concerted effort at enforcing its socialist “values” while restricting morally “suspicious” content throughout the Internet — if only for the focus it would put on China, and the deliciously strong backlash that would result.

And I am beat!

A few weeks ago I was honored when Rand Fishkin (via Rebecca Kelley) asked if I wanted to participate as a judge for the 2007 awards (I said yes). So when it came time to actually vote I dove into the process with gusto.  Little did I know that there are a ton of categories, and quite a few contestants per category, so it took a heck of a lot longer than I had anticipated.

(FYI: The list of last year’s winners, plus honorable mentions can be found over here)

Having said that, I discovered a *lot* of Web2.0 applications, services, and products — more than I had ever encountered, in categories that I thought I was quite familiar with.  And I thought that was a great part of the exercise — getting exposed to sites that I haven’t seen before.

There were some that I really liked, and some … well,  less so.  I can’t say any more than that right now, unfortunately.

Voting for the judges ends within the next week or so, so I imagine that the actual results will probably be revealed sometime after that.