Free Culture Movement

The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works, using the Internet as well as other media. The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely rejects the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".

In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act which President Clinton signed into law. The legislation extended copyright protections for twenty additional years, resulting in a total guaranteed copyright term of seventy years after a creator’s death. The bill was heavily lobbied by corporations like Disney, and dubbed as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Lawrence Lessig claims copyright is an obstacle to cultural production, knowledge sharing and technological innovation, and that private interests – as opposed to public good – determine law. He travelled the country in 1998, giving as many as a hundred speeches a year at college campuses, and sparked the movement. It led to the foundation of the first chapter of the Students for Free Culture at Swarthmore College.

In 1999, Lessig challenged the Bono Act, taking the case to the US Supreme Court. Despite his firm belief in victory, citing the Constitution’s plain language about “limited” copyright terms, Lessig only gained two dissenting votes: from Justices Stevens and Breyer.

In 2001, Lessig initiated Creative Commons, an alternative “some rights reserved” licensing system to the default “all rights reserved” copyright system.

Information Technology

Definition :

IT (information technology) is a term that encompasses all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange, and use information in its various forms (business data, voice conversations, still images, motion pictures, multimedia presentations, and other forms, including those not yet conceived). It’s a convenient term for including both telephony and computer technology in the same word. It is the technology that is driving what has often been called “the information revolution.”

Introduction:

Over the last two decades, the Internet has delivered tremendous economic and trade benefits. It has driven record increases in productivity, spurred innovation, created new economies, and fueled international trade. In part this is because the Internet makes geographically distant markets easy to reach.

 

Information technology has impacted the economy in a number of ways. The most noticeable changes involve e-commerce, marketing tactics, facilitation of globalization, job insecurity, and job design. There are variety of concepts pertaining to the changing economy, including downsizing, outsourcing, the use of cookies, the benefits and costs of globalization, and the impact of e-commerce. The last decade has seen incredible changes to the economy due to the World Wide Web. Entrepreneurs have harnessed technology and changed the way we conduct and transact business. Fortunes have been made and lost. Some experienced huge success and became dot-com millionaires or billionaires overnight, while others became dot-bomb failures. Information technology has redefined organizational boundaries. No longer are businesses confined to brick and mortar stores. Transactions such as payments can be conducted over the Internet. Relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners can be strengthened and streamlined. Inventory can be kept electronically. Purchase orders can easily be exchanged among different companies electronically.

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/JPEG/itu-t81.pdf

 

User Generated Content

User generated content has never been as easily accessible for both brand marketers and consumers as it is today. The prevalence of smartphones and tablets makes it easier than ever to take photos, make videos, draw pictures, and otherwise broadcast our thoughts and opinions instantly through numerous social channels

From social media to video games and from online fan production to machinima the phenomenon of user-generated culture has secured its position in the mainstream during the last few years. This shift has resulted from the blurring boundaries between media production and consumption as well as between professional and amateur authorship. The phenomenon is claimed to be characterized by collaboration, accessibility and democratic potential. During the You, Me, User Conference we approach the user-generated culture, or in other words, multiple situations where culture becomes modified, produced and distributed through everyday practices, social and new media

Technological developments and changes in the communication through Internet have produced significant changes in production and fruition processes of cultural objects as well as, more generally, in the relationship between both the private individual sphere and the participatory collective dimension. From some of the most reliable theories about new media and Internet, the author intends to focus on some reflections and questions that affect the sociological research applied to the study of cultural practices through new media and Internet. Furthermore, one specific attention is given to new forms of artistic and musical creativity fostered by the development of online participatory culture and characterized by the spread of user-generated content, by which concepts such as “producer”, “product” and “user” have lost their traditional boundaries in favour of new types of actors and new forms of culture.

User-generated content (UGC) covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies. It entered mainstream usage during 2005, having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles. It is used for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, gossip and research and reflects the expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public. All digital media technologies are included, such as question-answer databases, digital video, blogging, podcasting, forums, review-sites, social networking, social media, mobile phone photography and wikis. In addition to these technologies, user-generated content may also employ a combination of open source, free software, and flexible licensing or related agreements to further reduce the barriers to collaboration, skill-building and discovery(“‘UGC’”) has also gained in popularity over the last decade, as more and more users have begun to flock to social media and “‘content-based’” sharing sites.

India of Convergence:

Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences. Convergence refers to a process, but not an end point. Convergence will be a relation between view technologies rather than an integration of systems. It represents a reconfiguration of media power, and reshaping of media aesthetics and economics. The French cyberspace theorist Pierre Levy uses the term “Collective intelligence” to describe lage scale information gathering and processing activities that have emerged in web communities.


http://453.stilled.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Eessay-user-generated-content.pdf

Conditions involving Convergence

User generated content (UGC) is not a new concept, but for digital marketers, UGC has never offered as many exciting possibilities for engaging with consumers and building brand loyalty.

With the recent billion dollar acquisitions of content companies like Instagram and Tumblr, tech giants are further demonstrating the immense value of content today,and the opportunities are apparent for marketers.

In a January 2013 Econsultancy/Adobe report on digital marketing trends, over 700 digital professionals identified content marketing as the single most significant trend in marketing today.

Content, in short, is king, so it’s incumbent upon brands to make good use of it.

With its many shapes and forms, identifying the right content to engage the customer and doing it at the right time on the right channel, requires strategic planning and resources.

One compelling solution is to allow consumers to create content for your brand. The rise of social media and mobile technology has made every consumer a potential broadcaster, and it is easier than ever for brands to solicit, collect, promote, and analyze content that comes directly from your customer base.

The OECD has defined three central schools for UGC:

Publication requirement: While UGC could be made by a user and never published online or elsewhere, we focus here on the work that is published in some context, be it on a publicly accessible website or on a page on a social networking site only accessible to a select group of people (e.g., fellow university students). This is a useful way to exclude email, two-way instant messages and the like.

Creative effort: of creative effort was put into creating the work or adapting existing works to construct a new one; i.e. users must add their own value to the work. UGC often also has a collaborative element to it, as is the case with websites which users can edit collaboratively. For example, merely copying a portion of a television show and posting it to an online video website (an activity frequently seen on the UGC sites) would not be considered UGC. If a user uploads his/her photographs, however, expresses his/her thoughts in a blog, or creates a new music video, this could be considered UGC. Yet the minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context.

Creation outside of professional routines and practices: User generated content is generally created outside of professional routines and practices. It often does not have an institutional or a commercial market context. In extreme cases, UGC may be produced by non-professionals without the expectation of profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include: connecting with peers, achieving a certain level of fame, notoriety, or prestige, and the desire to express oneself.

Hoe does Google work....

Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. Google has three distinct parts:

Googlebot : a web crawler that finds and fetches web pages.

The indexer : that sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database.

The query processor : which compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant.

1. Googlebot, Google’s Web Crawler

Googlebot is Google’s web crawling robot, which finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It’s easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn’t traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google’s indexer.

Googlebot consists of many computers requesting and fetching pages much more quickly than you can with your web browser. In fact, Googlebot can request thousands of different pages simultaneously. To avoid overwhelming web servers, or crowding out requests from human users, Googlebot deliberately makes requests of each individual web server more slowly than it’s capable of doing.

Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the web.

Unfortunately, spammers figured out how to create automated bots that bombarded the add URL form with millions of URLs pointing to commercial propaganda. Google rejects those URLs submitted through its Add URL form that it suspects are trying to deceive users by employing tactics such as including hidden text or links on a page, stuffing a page with irrelevant words, cloaking (aka bait and switch), using sneaky redirects, creating doorways, domains, or sub-domains with substantially similar content, sending automated queries to Google, and linking to bad neighbors. So now the Add URL form also has a test: it displays some squiggly letters designed to fool automated “letter-guessers”; it asks you to enter the letters you see — something like an eye-chart test to stop spambots.

When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. Googlebot tends to encounter little spam because most web authors link only to what they believe are high-quality pages. By harvesting links from every page it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page in the web. Because the web is vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.

Although its function is simple, Googlebot must be programmed to handle several challenges. First, since Googlebot sends out simultaneous requests for thousands of pages, the queue of “visit soon” URLs must be constantly examined and compared with URLs already in Google’s index. Duplicates in the queue must be eliminated to prevent Googlebot from fetching the same page again. Googlebot must determine how often to revisit a page. On the one hand, it’s a waste of resources to re-index an unchanged page. On the other hand, Google wants to re-index changed pages to deliver up-to-date results.

To keep the index current, Google continuously recrawls popular frequently changing web pages at a rate roughly proportional to how often the pages change. Such crawls keep an index current and are known as fresh crawls. Newspaper pages are downloaded daily, pages with stock quotes are downloaded much more frequently. Of course, fresh crawls return fewer pages than the deep crawl. The combination of the two types of crawls allows Google to both make efficient use of its resources and keep its index reasonably current.

2. Google’s Indexer

Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google’s index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.

To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google’s performance.

3. Google’s Query Processor

The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box), the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.

Google considers over a hundred factors in computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another on the page. A patent application discusses other factors that Google considers when ranking a page. Visit SEOmoz.org’s report for an interpretation of the concepts and the practical applications contained in Google’s patent application.

Google also applies machine-learning techniques to improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings. Google closely guards the formulas it uses to calculate relevance; they’re tweaked to improve quality and performance, and to outwit the latest devious techniques used by spammers.

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by Google’s Advanced Search Form and Using Search Operators (Advanced Operators).

How Google processes a query

1. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a book--it tells which pages contain the words that match any particular query term.         

2. The query travels to the doc servers, which   actually retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are    generated to describe each search result.      

3. The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.

http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

The Impact of Social Media on Viral Videos

The term “viral video” refers to video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or instant messages, blogs, and other media-sharing websites, such as YouTube

  The use of viral videos is becoming an international phenomenon. Whether it is to promote a film, video game, or for other marketing purposes it is more commonly seen now than ever before. When most people hear the phrase ‘viral videos’ their first thought is the use of YouTube or other video-sharing website to rapidly generate fame and interest in a particular person or action. With the ability to easily share and post these videos across websites and social networks it is becoming an increasingly popular way of attempting to attain celebrity status or just putting out your footage for the general public to either recognize or enjoy. Take the videos posted by Libyans during the Arab Spring to exemplify the hardship and anguish they were faced with, these were just as much viral videos as Justin Bieber’s YouTube post.

Facebook has played a big part in this, with the ability to share videos among your friends, more people are likely to be exposed to certain videos and and in turn are more likely to make a simple video viral where normally you would have to find it yourself on the video-sharing website. Facebook being more likely to promote the talent side of viral videos.

  

      Twitter is another big player in the social networking business in modern Internet, although Twitter is more celebrity centered or news centered as opposed to Facebook's more personal bonds between users, this allows for even more mass communication. Making the videos shared on the website even more likely to reach larger audiences, and since news channels play a big role in Twitter, political movements and marketing is the biggest example of viral videos that come out of the 'Twittersphere'.      

     YouTube, arguably the most important factor in this current trend, what many believed to have start the viral video craze, a video-sharing website that allows anyone to post anything including amateurs and professionals, with access to the general public.

Some of the viral videos are shown below

Al Jazeera World - Fighting in the Fifth Dimension

Innovations in technology are changing the tactics of modern-day conflict. There are new tools in today's arsenal of weapons. Helped by advances in electro-magnetics and modern information and communications technology, a new form of electronic warfare has been created. It is called cyberwar and is increasingly recognised by governments and the military as posing a potentially grave threat.

"If you have a few smart people and a good computer, then you can do a lot. You don't need an aircraft, you don't need tanks, you don't need an army. You can penetrate another country, create huge damage without even leaving your armchair."Alon Ben David, military analyst for Israel's Channel 10

And it is not just cyberwar that is a growing phenomenon. The internet has empowered cyberactivism, allowing people to share information and mobilise support to take direct action - both online and on the streets.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been at the forefront of this new wave of cyberactivism, helping to galvanise the protests that have recently spread across the Arab world.

The so-called Arab Spring has been described as an electronic revolution. Protesters were turned into citizen journalists - taking frontline images on their mobile phones and uploading them via their computers for the world to see. The regimes may have jammed the signals of satellite news channels and banned international reporters from entering their country, but they were unable to prevent citizens from becoming reporters in their own right.

From cyberactivism to cyberwar

Using the internet as a platform for political action is one thing. But infiltrating and disrupting computer networks and databases takes cyberwar to another level. American security experts have warned that a cyber-attack could cripple key governmental and financial systems and it is a threat the US is taking seriously.

"Cyberspace is real. And so are the risks that come with it. From now on, our digital infrastructure, the networks and computers we depend on every day, will be treated as they should be, as a strategic national asset." Barack Obama, the US president

In recent years a cyberwar has been brewing between China and the US, with both countries accusing each other of running an 'army of hackers'.

A key battlefield in this war has been the case of Google.

The US internet company partially withdrew from China in 2010 after a tussle with the government over censorship and government-backed hacking.

China accuses the US of using Google to spy on the country, while Google accuses China of hacking into the email accounts of some of its members.

"We must differentiate between independent hackers and those of the state. We must understand that in some countries the authorities hire hackers with excellent technical knowledge to serve their interests. Everything is possible and states shouldn't accuse each other since all options are open in this war." Han, a Chinese internet hacker

The US also appears to be engaged in a cyberwar with another erstwhile enemy: Iran.

It appeared to begin in 2009 following Iranian anti-government protests - sparked by the disputed presidential elections which saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win another term in office.

Seeking to deprive the opposition of its main means of mobilising the masses, the Iranian authorities sought to choke off internet access.

But the protestors continued to use sites such as YouTube and Twitter and when Twitter planned some routine maintenance that would have taken it offline for a few hours, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, asked the site to stay up and running while the protests continued.

Electronic eyes and ears

In the Middle East, Israel has set up a cyber command to secure the country against hacking attacks on its key networks.

Israel's immediate neighbourhood is the place where it puts into use much of its technical know-how. Along its northern border with Lebanon, Israel deploys a large network of electronic eyes and ears.

And in the ongoing intelligence war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah, increasingly sophisticated electronic equipment is being used.

In February 2010, Lebanon arrested a man who reportedly confessed to being a Mossad agent. It was claimed that he had used sophisticated surveillance equipment that sent signals to his Israeli handlers via a mobile phone and computer located in a hidden compartment inside his car.

It may all sound like science fiction, but a global spying network does exist that can eavesdrop on every single phone call and email on the planet.

Eavesdropping on phone calls and text messages has become increasing easy for those with the right equipment, especially with the development of GSM networks - the technology used on the vast majority of mobile phone networks around the world.

"Give me your mobile phone for 30 seconds, give me 30 seconds alone with your mobile phone and I can install software that would make your mobile phone a travelling microphone. From that moment on, even if it is shut down, your mobile phone will broadcast everything that goes on around you, through a number that I determine."Alon Ben David, military analyst for Israel's Channel 10

A brave new world?

Many analysts are amazed at how internet users voluntarily hand over vast amounts of personal data to social media sites.

And planting software into a person's phone or computer to steal data has become a new tactic of warfare in the fifth dimension.

"Our entire life is now on the internet: personal information, emails, credit cards. We give all this information on the internet to sites like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Governments impose pressure on these sites as they know how much information they have. These governments have asked for personal information from these sites, and they gave them what they needed."

Marwan Taher, IT specialist

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2011/10/2011101916939402528.html