derek abdinor

It is held that MySpace and Facebook are inhabited by different classes, in America at least. America does not have a historic class legacy, so this paper is quite interesting as it allows one to point to the attributes of a phenomenon in order to describe it better.

Facebook= college, university, white, networking professionals = hegemony
MySpace = the Other

More? The US military bans access to MySpace and not Facebook. Soldiers who may be college-educated are of the officer class and use Facebook. MySpace is popular among the recruits from poorer areas who are most likely to swell the rank and file.

Facebook is sweeping the world with a sort of frenzy usually reserved for cute robotic toys offloaded onto the Japanese teen market. We all have fun on it, those with addictive personalities flirt with an obsession slightly less consumptive than meth.

I was always perplexed about 2 questions in the profile: what is your religion, and what are your political views? This coming in the same month as the VT shootings in a country where the USA PATRIOT Act 2002 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) allows the govt to check databases of any library, website or other public office. It would be ingenous. Osama can’t be found with thousands of troops, but by tracking 6 degrees from a pimply-faced frat kid he’ll be found on FB.
Seriously though, the money behind FB is from data mining companies and the CIA’s shadowy “Information Awareness Office“. This would give “social networking” a bit of a Stasi-Orwellian flavour.

A very interesting clip on the popular website Facebook. Includes who has money in it, its origins (including US government offices) and their privacy policies and terms of agreement which state they can use and profit from any of the information you post on the site. Check it out! Original source: http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook

Facebook has opened up its platform for extensible development by the community, so expect custom widgets on par with MySpace, but I believe, with far, far more reach.

We are seeing companies prefer open source solutions (Drupal, Joomla) over proprietary crap. Why? Rather have 300 000 developers behind your product than 5. Another thing is that prop software is so difficult to port or extend, you have to imagineer yourself into the original guys mind, and really: do you want to?

this is a brilliant move by facebook. Software guys may code widgets for FireFox and Yahoo!, Drupal and even PHP to up their geek credits, but what if you can code on facebook and impress ALL your friends? For the college crowd that make up the numbers at FB, these guys will be up all night and facebook is going to be the next public space (ww2?)

Went to the launch of this auspicious organisation and its Southern African presence at the Meraka Institute, CSIR on Monday 14 May. The W3C have been credited with “inventing” the internet (along with William Gibson, Al Gore and Bill Gates) but actually their Director is Tim Berners-Lee, of “inventing the World Wide Web” fame. Essentially they’re saw what the browser wars of 97-99 were doing and decided a standards body was necessary, sort of self-appointed marshals of the Wild West.

Bragging rights include the best CSS2 reference for much of the early 2000′s, starting RDF, arbitrating RSS-Atom, extending the extensible Markup Languages. Tim, feeling slightly underachiev-ish, having created the web, decided to make sense of this all and has begun the Semantic Web project. Look at this, as well as the Mobile Web Initiative which Meraka is also doing good work towards.

Incredible: PageRank indicates a 10/10 for W3c.org, first I’ve ever seen!!!