So finally someone is paying attention to the fact that social networks are where the web is heading....

In this story in the Sydney Morning Herald about Googles top searches of the year...



And in news just in, (thanks Home Page Daily!) it seems that the Pres has also cottoned on to the importance of social networks in fighting the war on terror!

More thoughts on the Social Networking Conference, Day 2, are here.

I went to the Social Networking Conference in Sydney yesterday.  I posted a brief report on it at the GRMP blog.

Ironically I was just surfing around You Tube looking to see what references there were to V For Vendetta, the movie.... And up popped this absolute gem. It seems like the Ron Paul campaign has started to get seriously viral!

What a mess is being made of copyright in the online world.

People steal works from others. People borrow stuff. Some people rely on what they think is the "fair use" provisions of the copyright act. People in Australia think that because they have read an article online about how Google appears to be fighting the Viacom lawsuit that they can use similar arguments in Australia, where copyright law is different to the US.... and on it goes.

And then you see this kind of story appear and you realize that the whole thing is a rats nest of infinite proportions. (And thanks to Laurel Papworth and her blog for pointing to this story).

Seems like Viacom has muscled YouTube into pulling down a piece of content that was part of a program on VH1. Only problem is that the program on VH1 used the material that they have forced YT to pull without permission in the first place. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

We have to realize that copyright in the digital age doesn't work in the way that pre-digital legislators and rights owners contemplated (and the rights owners were the people who lobbied for the laws in the first place, and essentially wrote th first drafts of the statutes anyway).

It is a really interesting time for this discussion too because we are moving rapidly to a point where the amount of time spent consuming media online will be greater than the amount of time spent consuming traditional electronic media. I read the following in a report from Strategic News Service that came out last month:


So you can see with this sort of growth infrastructure will grow apace. And content will then have the air to also grow at a phenomenal rate. And at the same time the dirty little secret of the long tail will be there biting us on the bum. That secret of course is the corollary of the millions of markets scenario. This is the fact that content in the digital realm never goes away and continues to propagate at an ever increasing rate.

Which means that copyright owners (copywrong, I prefer to call them now) are going to find that the instances of their works are going to keep on appearing somewhere...

And unless they start by measuring the number of uses or number of occurrences they will never know how much money is leaking out of the system, how much revenue they are foregoing.

And of course this applies perhaps more strongly to new and emerging copyright creators and authors than it does to the incumbents. The incumbents already tend to be paid more than their due, because of the existing policies of the various societies. The rules of the societies are to pay the black box monies on a follow the dollar basis (of course they always deny the existence of a 'black box' but it is there under a variety of names).

So where does all this lead?

You have to have measurement, metrics, analytics. Not just so that advertisers can figure where the best spot is to place an ad, but so that a proper system of reward can be instituted for the creatives in the community.

This is really an imperative for collections societies, I believe. Whether we move to a Larry Lessig vision for the adoption of Creative Commons licenses or some other model, you need to start first with measuring the market. (Full disclosure: This is the vision for Vquence now, which I am a director of, to measure every aspect of social media online).

I am totally into Facebook.

I think that it has the potential to change things as much as Google has done. And after all, we are now really the Google generation, aren't we? A generation that is outside of age based demography and is more about memetics. A group of people who are always on....

But Facebook is beyond this again. And if you haven't tried it, you really should. There are definitely some annoying features - like the constant barrage of new apps. And that wears thin very fast.

But some of the applications are super cool. And really add value. One of them is the Facebook bookmarklet which you can add to your Firefox browser and kind of makes blogging redundant in some respects. It enables you with one click to add a reference to a web page/story to your facebook profile, which in turn means that all your friends get to see it, and that leads them to comment.... Much more viral than a blog which requires someone to actually come and visit you and your writing.

Then there is the Blog Friends application, and the more I see of it in action, the more I like it. I think it is still relatively small in terms of its distribution across the Face at present, but this application really has some serious potential. It presents a really fast access to your friends' blogs and their friends' blogs and means that you get a kind of randomized RSS feed of content, opinion and information that is really valuable...

I have been in touch with the CEO of Brain Bakery, the UK company that developed Blog Friends, and he seems like a really smart and visionary guy. I hope he and the company do well from Blog Friends. This sort of application, if applied to conventional news feeds, could be totally awesome.

Worth joining Facebook just to experience this stuff. Facebook and applications like the ones I have mentioned are going to absolutely change the face of media over the next few years.

We are at the beginning of the golden age of accelerated meme transfer.

I have set up a page at Facebook for debate about the impact of social networks on the Federal Election.

It is here. Please  join up!

Came across a very interesting blog via the A VC blog.

All about The Social Graph.... by Brad Fitzpatrick. A must read if you believe in the value and importance of social networks.