Das Angebot von Musik im Internet ist fast undurchschaubar geworden. Zu viele gute Seiten, ob für Samples, Social Networks, Filesharing-Foren etc. gibt es im Netz zu entdecken. last.fm sollte mittlerweile fast jedem bekannt sein. Aber was es sonst noch für spannende Seiten gibt, das hat mashable in einer Liste zusammengestellt.

Link:

Online Music: 90+ Essential Music and Audio Websites

Der Grabenkampf zwischen MySpace und Facebook ist in den USA im vollen Gange. Wer wird die Nase vorn haben? Wer hat die meisten User? Dies waren die Fragen, die in den letzten Wochen und Monaten fast alle Social Network-Forscher interessiert hatten. Eine Forscherin namens Danah Boyd kommt allerdings zu einem ganz anderen Ergebnis bei der dialektischen Betrachtung dieser beiden Internetkommunikationsplattformen: Facebook und MySpace sind jeweilige Plateaus einer neuen Klassengesellschaft in den USA.

Zitat:

“The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

In order to demarcate these two groups, let’s call the first group of teens “hegemonic teens” and the second group “subaltern teens.” (Yes, I know that these words have political valence. Feel free to suggest an alternative label.) These terms are sloppy at best because the division isn’t clear, but it should at least give us a language with which to talk about the two groups.”

Das weiße Bildungsbürgertum tummelt sich demnach auf Facebook und die Minderheiten und prekären Jugendkulturschichten auf MySpace. Wenn man dieser Studie Aufmerksamkeit schenken möchte, dann könnte man zu der Einsicht kommen, dass die These, dass das Internet ein gleichmachendes demokratisierendes Medium darstellte, überdacht werden müsste. Amerikanische Klassenunterschiede und ihre jeweiligen Ideologien haben also ihre Foren gefunden und von permeablem Austausch würde demnach zunächst keine Rede mehr sein.

Das gesamte Essay ist zu finden im Hyperlink unten:

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Man sagt, virb.com sei das bessere MySpace. Elegantere Anmutung, deutlich mehr Fokus auf kreative Outputs der Netzwerkenden, von der Quantität der Partizipierenden überschaubarer uswusf. Da dies teils stimmen mag ist dies zum einen einen Blick wert und außerdem gibt es dort auch eine weitere Premiere: nodeland hat einen ersten Social Networkaccount! Also mal vorbeischauen und Freund werden und was man nicht sonst noch alles so tut im 2.0.

Click On:
nodeland on Virb.com

Wahrscheinlich eine der interessentasten netzökonomischen Ideen seit langem.

Mehr unter:

BBC NEWS: Social lending gains net interest

“Hmm, wenn man bei Last.fm und Pandora sein eigenes Radio machen kann, warum dann nicht sein eigenes Musikfernsehen mit Videos, die ich mag?”. Schnell mal “last fm video” eingegeben und gegoogelt. Heraus kommt tatsächlich Last.tv. Ist wohl an mir vorbeigegangen.
Funktioniert so gut, wie social network radio funktioniert: Die Videos entsprechen dem Musikgeschmack und manchmal genau wie beim ichmemoi-Radio eben nicht. Da die Künstler aus Last.fm-Datenbanken gelesen werden, die Clips darauf basierend aber aus YouTube selektiert sind, mogeln sich Handy-Videos, Fan-Slideshows und Interviews dazwischen.
User generated deluxe und die seltsame Unruhe, nach drei Clips müsse doch endlich mal Knut aufs Handy-Werbung kommen, lässt nach einer Weile auch nach… I want my MTV, I got it.

www.last.tv

“The users of a new music business website have given the band Second Person £26,000 - but they’ll be lucky to see a return on their investment.

On a near-weekly basis we’re told that the record company is a moribund beast and the “digital revolution” has made labels as anachronistic as wooden teeth. The argument runs that the business model is broken: find an act, pay over the odds to sign them in a bidding war, throw millions at them in cross-eyed and frivolous marketing spend, watch them limp into the lower end of the charts, drop them, find a new act and repeat until the shareholders mutiny. …”

read more at:

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - music: Sellaband’s music business revolution won’t work

Das MaFo-Institut Konzept&Analyse kam im Dezember 2006 zu folgendem Ergebnis:

Der erwachsene Prototyp-Blogger ist männlich und trägt Dreitagebart. Er ist bis 29 Jahre alt und führt eine freischaffende Tätigkeit aus. Die körperliche Fitness zählt nicht zu seinen Prioritäten – viele der Intensivnutzer bezeichnen sich als „kaum oder untrainiert“ und „leicht übergewichtig“ bis „stattlich“.

Keine Überraschung. Überraschend jedoch, wie sehr das neue MySpace in Sauberform, Unddu, seine zukünftige virtuelle Demographie antizipiert: Von den 31 abgebildeten Personen sind 25 männlich (das entspricht ziemlich genau der Blogger-Realität), viele Stoppelgesichter lächeln uns an. Ein Männerbund für ihn oder ein Datingpool für sie? Man wird sehen, was das von Web.de aufgebaute Portal wird reißen können.
Zur latenten Adipositas, die den Protoblogger laut o.g. Studie auszeichnet, schweigen wir uns wegen möglicher Verzerrungseffekte bei Thumbnails aus.

Am 19. April startet die öffentliche Testphase.

Prompted by the recent Facebook uproar, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 believes most users of social networking applications have yet to realize what kind of new world they’re entering:

It’s one thing for people to share their personal information in public when it’s only their friends stopping by to see what’s up, but when they wake up to the fact that technology can enable this information to be tracked and syndicated across the network — suddenly everyone starts to feel pretty naked. And granted this is just a matter of perceptions — information on Facebook is no more publicly accessible than it was before, but suddenly everyone is casting around for a fig leaf.

Link: Publishing 2.0 — This Is What the Social Networking Privacy Backlash Looks Like

in television times, they used to call it test pattern when the signal was down…

the first social network about the global sneaker culture. it is still in beta. but maybe it becomes the upcoming friendster or myspace for superstar and lo dunk fetishists.

Link: Sneakerplay

Friendster said Thursday that it has received a patent that covers online social networks, one the company had applied for long before its decline and recent recapitalization.

The U.S. patent, which was awarded June 27, is extremely general, and would seem to cover the activities of many other sites, especially those like LinkedIn that allow people to connect within a certain number of degrees of separation.

Naming Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, who has left the company, as inventor, the patent refers to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”

Link: RED HERRING | Friendster Wins Patent

86 million users are not enough for Rupert Murdoch Myspace.com will go regional this summer, opening a branch in German language, too. So MySpace really becomes the new MTV?

While watching the progress of masterpiece cleaners‘ new wireless network for the café St. Oberholz in Berlin you can’t help but notice the potential: using technology to create and enhance existing social spaces.

St. Oberholz is a beautiful café in Berlin Mitte, and if you’ve been there recently you’ll have noticed the large amount of laptop users. The café is one of the few places in the area with free wifi, and lots of places to sit. And they just got a new wifi network, hand-crafted by a couple of enterprising artists and technology activists.

I recently talked to smallcaps of masterpiece cleaners, and he tells me they are now trying to create a social marketplace within this technical space — the café’s owner is a little resistant, but I’m sure he’ll cave in as soon as he realizes the potential.

It might sound like a paradox: isn’t this just like the old joke, people silently sitting next to each other, staring on their laptop screens, talking to each other via instant messenger?

But it can be more than that. It has the potential to establish other types of connections, other relationships.

It never has been so easy to ask all of a café’s visitors, present or not: “Hey, where are tonight’s cool parties?!”

Or as Clay Shirky put it succinctly in an article about the value of social software:

[…] there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

Image by KrisJohn

There has been some talk about the observation that World of Warcraft is more and more used as meeting point in business environments, just as golf used to be — a place where you hang out and socialize with your business partners, where potentially the real deals are made.

People have been talking about these aspects of the game for a while, but the golf connection entered public awareness with a recent interview 1Up.com did with Joi Ito:

Overheard, at brunch: two tech entrepreneur types discussing World of Warcraft. What server are you on? What guild? Oh yeah, me too, I heard it’s a good way to schmooze.

It seems irritating at first that such a phenomenon happens within the rather conservative environment of WoW, when e.g. Second Life seems much more suited as both social environment and playing field for new ideas. On the other hand the typical entrepreneur is probably prone to play competitive games in his spare time, and hence will rather be found playing WoW than slacking in the comparatively noncompetitive environment of Second Life.