EFF BoF talk at eTech

I did a live webcast of this and recorded it, some very interesting discussions on legality of various web 2.0 services.

Technorati Tags: death threats, EFF, etech, etech07, openID, podcasting

death and rape threats are criminal

Kathy Sierra has cancelled her appearance at eTech because of death threats she has received online. I am shocked to see this happen, and I am particularly shocked because some of the people who brought me to blogging in the first place are connected. I have seen a rise in mysogynistic nastiness recently, from the casual asides on lonelygirl15's youtube comments to attack blogs like Violent Acres, but this is way beyond that, and we need to help track down those making the threats.

The history I know is that Chris Locke and Jeneane Sessum began commenting on some of Tara Hunt's posts, particularly this one, and when the conversation got heated, and 'mean kids' were discussed, Chris (and some others) set up meankids.org as a place to comment without being deleted. It became a place to post ad hominem rants.

In a post there attacking Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero, Frank Paynter pointed to the unclebobism.wordpress.com blog that Kathy mentioned specifically as making threats. Paul Ritchie mentions specifically being invited to unclebobism as the successor to meankids, then posts links to his vandalism of Kathy's Wikipedia entry. (Some links are to Technorati caches of deleted posts).

Thats what I have found out, hopefully those who know more will talk about it too.

When I am at conferences like eTech, I always pay extra attention to the female speakers, because I know how much extra work they have had to do to get up there in this field. I can't believe it has come to this.

Update: Chris and Frank have posted, distancing themselves from the comments. However, if "You Own Your Own Words", how about identifying the 'owners' of the threats and nasty posts on the blogs they administered?

Technorati Tags: death threats, Kathy Sierra

How many Newspapers did you deliver today?

So, how many podcasts did you download today? I didn't download any, Tim. My computer downloaded 4 episodes for me from different shows, and when I plugged my iPod in, it synchronised them so I had something to listen to. That's the whole point.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, podcasting

My talk at VON

I gave a talk on video, the net, feeds an microformats at VON today - I also answered questions with other panellists, but I'm only posting my bit here as I didn't get their permission. Here are my VON slides.

Thanks to Denise Howell for holding the camera for me while I spoke.

Technorati Tags: 2007, Live TV is Dead, microformats, video, VON

Social network narcissism

I just read a very thought-provoking post on narcissism by danah. It reminded me of lots of things bubbling around in my head before, such as Danny's essay on the death of privacy online and Chris Locke's ongoing documentation of the self-esteem virus (including this latest post). As for reality TV, I also see it as a grab for extreme power over a few instead of diffuse power over many by the broadcasters.

I'm also reading Publics and Counterpublics on danah's recommendation, which makes a distinction between the notion of the general public, and the different publics we are each addressing when blogging or making profiles on Social Network sites. In these activities we are performing to a public of our own, and we can feel invaded when a wider public pays attention, as in Danny's discussion above - danah has said that children's MySpace public includes 'everyone except parents and teachers'. Coping with fame becoming a smooth continuum rather than a sharp dichotomy is something else we need to work on in a power-law distributed long tail world.

Update: John Scalzi is grappling with simialr issues in his SFWA campaign.

Technorati Tags: long tail, power law, social, software, tagcamp

Hot news - people lie

Danny Ayers posts a demonstration that you can't always trust assertions people make on webpages. He seem to think that assertions people make in the <head> are somehow immune from this. But then, he is a big fan of another technology that is all about trusting assertions on webpages.

Technorati Tags: data formats, microformats, RDF, semantic web