Category: hype

  • some new developments in web video

    Caught in my tech news net over the last week: Via Boing Boing, another new ‘meta’ service launches into public beta: Dabble, a site that makes it possible to search, recommend, rate, discuss and be sociable about video hosted anywhere on the the net, has come out of private beta and launched for public use. […]

  • Web 2.0 crowdsourcers tossing coins to the crowds

    Via CNet via Rachel’s del.icio.us:

    Saturday saw the launch of eefoof.com, a site that promises to share a percentage of the site’s revenue depending on how many viewers a video clip attracts.
    CNet positions this as a ‘challenge’ to youtube. Read the full article for the rest of the hot air and vapours. Now, because I am very old, I remember the late-1990s, before any talk of Web 2.0, when user-contributed music websites like mp3.com were ‘the future of the music industry’, because they would allow undiscovered talent to bypass the gatekeeping mechanisms of the record industry. (Bearing in mind that conventional wisdom also suggested that these sites were really a workaround – a way for the companies concerned to stake out marketshare for digital music sevices without having to wait until the copyright mess was cleared up).

  • Crowdsourcing as Free Labour

    I love Wired, it is just so blatant: For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down the block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are connected to […]

  • JumpCut

    JumpCut is another new player in the “creative online community” business – the idea is to not only upload, share, and discuss, but also edit, collaborate and remix images and video online. You can automatically import sets of images from flickr, too. After having a quick play around with the editing interface, it seems pretty […]

  • Hypercreativity and Techno-Utopianism

    So, the puzzle my Phd tries to solve (how creativity, cultural participation and the ‘democratization’ of technologies fit together) comes out of the hype around two converging ideas: the increased availability and production power of digital technologies for content creation and distribution (see Anne’s pointed mini-critique of some of this) and ‘creativity’ as life-fulfilling, as […]