Community Gathering Spots

Let me be somewhat blunt.

Websites with online communities are like campfires. If the community doesn't like the campfire (because some outsider comes in and decides to whore out the community to advertisers), they will disperse to another, better, campfire, and sit around that one instead.

I am amazed at how many people do not understand this basic tenant of online communities. If you own a website, you do not own the people who visit it. Simple. The short version: Websites are like campfires.

Google H Score, Year 4

Ok my score just went to 6! Hooray! Let's see what's doing what. I'm dropping some of the lesser-cited pieces (fewer than three cites). I'm dropping the Journal column for width, since I have to add 2012. And technically I'm publishing this a day early but I don't expect anything to change in a statistically significant manner in 24 hours. Today is Sunday, I have the time.

Article (short title)		Year	2009	2010	2011	2012
Mechs of an online public sphere		2005	25	42	51	73
To broadband or not to...		2004	9	10	12	20
Honey, I shrunk the world!		2006	8	12	15	21
Playing Internet curveball...		2006	7	11	12	15
Online org...		2011	-	-	1	8
Tweets and votes...		2012	-	-	-	6
A cross-national study...		2007	1	2	5	5
Technology as place		2010	-	-	2	3
Strat and global elite theory		2009	0	0	0	3

Values as of Sept 10th, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.

And, the previous years: Year 3, Year 2, Year 1.

Nokia Lumia 920 "Not"

This is amusing. So Nokia recorded a video that starts with a guy on a bike pointing his little Nokia Lumia at perhaps his GF on a bike next to him. Then, the view changes to what is obviously supposed to be the guy on the bike, with his Nokia. But, as people pointed out, it's not.

It's a dude in a van. At the 28 second mark, you can see it. I captured it here for your viewing pleasure.

"OIS ON" means that the Optical Image Stabilization is on. You can see the camera van in the reflection there on the right, clearly. One supposed the OIS is from the OIS in the Lumia they were just telling you about and just showed you pointing at this same woman on her bicycle, but no.

Actually the people who originally caught this have a bigger picture.

Copyright Follies

A lot can be said, and a lot has been, about the horrible issues with how the legal regimes of countries (mostly the US) with major cultural production sectors are trying to maximize copyright and kill fair use, among other things. Here are two stories, one recent and one I was recently pointed to, that shed some light on the larger picture.

One is How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards, which is laughably horrible and all true.

The other is over at Granta, titled Life Among the Pirates, and is by Daniel Alarcón. It looks at book piracy in Peru, which is at a scale beyond what we have here in NYC for a variety of goods (like "Rolexes").