Matthew Stringer produced this video as part of class discussion of Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Have a look – it’s excellent!

Google holds 71% of the search market; Bing, 10% (chart).

Cory Doctorow has a clear crystal ball. Earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch accused Google of stealing his content and threatened to cut the search giant off. Cory guessed that Murdoch might be angling for a search-engine payment deal: Read more…

In the MCDM program, we study many positive examples of digital media. Now I would like to share information about the shutdown of Cyworld, a negative example of brand management and customer service in social media.

As the largest social networking site in South Korea, Cyworld started reaching an overseas market in 2006. Local offices were launched in the U.S., Taiwan, Japan and China. However, Cyworld’s big dream of globalization crashed in 2008. Most local offices were closed, but those services were still maintained by Cyworld headquarters in South Korea. Then in early November this year, an announcement of the closure of the Cyworld U.S. service was posted on its U.S. website and mailed to its American members. The content was poorly written and full of grammatical errors, as reported by TechCrunch. The same embarrassing thing also happened with the closure notice for Cyworld Taiwan: inappropriate phrases, grammar errors and bad layout. For loyal Cyworld users, the shutdown notices were rough and thoughtless.

Read more…

Image from "This" Magazine

If this past summer’s controversial presidential election in Iran was any indication, Twitter has fast become a major platform for political discussion and grassroots organization on the global stage.  Social media, particularly the micro-blogging service Twitter, flexed its muscles during the opposition protests of the Iranian election results, and, at least for a month or two, it seemed that a global on-line conversation about democracy in Iran might actually help change the political climate of that country.  While it appears that the government of Iran eventually succeeded in squelching the unrest and cracking down on protests, it has become pretty clear that the nation of Iran will never be the same – and Twitter is partially to thank for that.  Considering the case of Facebook use in Iran, once you’ve got a taste of that sort of social freedom, it’s difficult to turn back. Read more…

For years, video games were strangely absent from the social media tidal wave. Aside from casual games built into social networking websites, games didn’t support social media.

The recently released (Oct. 13) “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” for the PlayStation 3, hopes to change that with a built-in Twitter feature. The game uses Twitter in a fairly simple way, by sending updates on a player’s progress to his or her Twitter account.

Twitter is also at the heart of a social media update to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that went live today. It allows you to post tweets, read the tweets of those you follow, search and view trending topics. Along with a Twitter app, the Xbox 360 update also has a Facebook app to stay connected to friends through basic Facebook features.

These instances of Twitter in video games—one software and one hardware—still only scratch the surface of the potential to meld social media and gaming. The use of Twitter in “Uncharted 2” seems like a good way to market the game and to find other people who play the game, but beyond that it doesn’t do much. And the Twitter integration on the Xbox 360 isn’t very deep, as you can’t run the app while you are playing a game.

The real issue here isn’t how Twitter is integrated into games or hardware platforms, but how the gameplay can take advantage of social media’s best assets—connecting people and sharing information.

Read more…

IndieFlix Play It Again Podcast with Masizakhe Filmmaker Scott Macklin Hosted By Lois Fein

“We are each other’s best and most powerful resource.”

At one minute past midnight, YouTube announced a new tool for news organizations: YouTube Direct. With this tool, Google makes it clear that it wants to nurture individual “acts of journalism” (Shirky). And in the spirit of motivated self-interest, should news organizations adopt the tool, the quality level of Google’s YouTube content can only go up.

Read more…

From such viral hits as I Can Has Cheezburger to helpful tools like Walk Score, hundreds of startup companies have their roots in Seattle’s thriving entrepreneurial community. This Q&A is the second in a series of interviews with Seattle-area startups.

Ksenia Oustiougova, Founder and CEO of Lilipip Studios

When was Lilipip founded?
The idea for Lililip originated in 2005, and we incorporated on paper in 2007. But the actual business didn’t really take shape until the summer of 2008. Read more…