1. http://www.blogads.com/survey/2005_blog_reader_survey.html BLOGS AND E-DEMOCRACY (STATS) 2005 30,079 blog readers responded. Last year, 61% of responding blog readers were over 30 years old. This year, 75% are over 30 years old. Last year, 40% had family incomes greater than $90,000. This year, 43% exceed that figure. Year over year, some figures are remarkably stable. One reader in five is a blogger. As was the case last year, exactly 1.7% are CEOs. Almost the same number (44%) spend more than $500 for air tickets. 86% purchased music online, last year and this. Last year, 79% were men. This year, 75% are men.
2. 1. Age Response Percent Response Total 21-30 20.3% 6101 31-40 24.5% 7378 41-50 23.3% 7007 51-60 18.4% 5549 Total Respondents 30081 2. Sex Response Percent Response Total Male 75.5% 22711 Female 24.5% 7370 Total Respondents 30081 3. Annual family income: Response Percent Response Total $30-$45,000 10.6% 3038 $45-$60,000 13.3% 3811 $60-$90,000 21.3% 6113 $90-$120,000 17.8% 5103 $120-$150,000 9.2% 2633 Total Respondents 28748 http://www.blogads.com/survey/2005_blog_reader_survey.html http://culturecat.net/node/304
3. http://perth.norg.com.au/ About PerthNorg A norg is about people powered news. Anyone can join and contribute to the news as a Cit J . Add your comments, share your stories, post your pics, submit links to interesting stories, upload your YouTube clips and vote for the stories you feel are important.
4. Can e-democracy therefore provide a space for communicative action? PROPOSED CHANNELS FOR BROADCASTING AT FACT NAME OF CHANNEL Community Network Development for global change DESCRIPTION OF CHANNEL This channel shares experiences across the globe in the use of ICT (Information Computer Technologies) to build the sustainable communities of the future To spread awareness of the use of new media technologies for community building and to develop a global network of community champions. REPLIES TO THIS CHANNEL This sounds very interesting…but could you give some more details on how you see this happen in practise and how you would use the superchannel to create communities? How do you see ICT helping to develop communities, in particular, communities focussed on specific geographical areas. Our experience has been that success has focussed on isolated individuals finding an online community they didn't know existed, which has had little impact on the physical community around them. I really like the idea of building communites online for the future however practical use is good. I am based out of Chicago and would love to build connections between artist globally, I think that each participant would hold a program featuring local to global subjects and in particular media ideologies investigating the implication of media in the arts. http:// blogsearch.google.com /
5. But remember also that the blogosphere is all about biases and conversations and boot-strapping and not waiting for some authority-- a newspaper editor or university dean or foundation officer or venture capitalist or government agent -- to tell you something but figuring it out yourself, and, finally, about sharing fragments of imperfect data with peers to arrive at some useful collective knowledge. http://www.blogads.com/survey/2005_blog_reader_survey.html
6. We can no longer consider videogaming as a marginal element of our everyday lives. In recent years, the turnover of the videogame industry has exceeded that of cinema, and there are a growing number of adult and female players. There are more frequent overlaps with other media: there are videogames for advertisements (advergames), for educational purposes and for electoral propaganda. space invadersHow did videogames become such a central element of the mediascape? During the second half of the nineties, major entertainment corporations extended their activities in this sector and extinguished or absorbed small producers. Now videogames are an integral part of the global cultural industry, and they are in a strategic position in the ongoing processes of media convergence. These developments inhibit the political and artistic emancipation of this medium: every code line is written for the profit of a big corporation.
7. One solution: Gamevolution! We believe that the explosive slogan that spread quickly after the Anti-WTO demostrations in Seattle, "Don't hate the media, become the media," applies to this medium. We can free videogames from the "dictatorship of entertainment", using them instead to describe pressing social needs, and to express our feelings or ideas just as we do in other forms of art. But if we want to express an alternative to dominant forms of gameplay we must rethink game genres, styles and languages. The ideology of a game resides in its rules, in its invisible mechanics, and not only in its narrative parts. That's why a global renewal of this medium will be anything but easy.
8. Who we are Molleindustria is an Italian team of artists, designers and programmers that aims at starting a serious discussion about social and political implications of videogames. This will involve media activists, net-artists, habitual players and critics and detractors of videogames. We chose to start with online gaming in order to sidestep mainstream distribution channels and to overcome our lack of means. Using simple but sharp games we hope to give a starting point for a new generation of critical game developers and, above all, to experiment with practices that can be easily emulated and virally diffused. http://www.molleindustria.org/
9.
10. Is this in fact what online gaming group Molleindustria does, that is construct a social network with May Day? http://www.euromayday.org/netparade/ http://www.euromayday.org/
11.
12. As the EuroMayDay in Milano and Barcelona nears, you're hyperwelcome to join the MayDay NetParade, a virtual demo that runs thru a heavily guarded and branded city put under siege by insurgent legions of brain+chain+temp workers and assorted anarchists, commies, queers and greens. The marching avatars are digital simulacra of today's exploited masses of neoliberalism: précaires, precari@s, precari, cognitarie, contingent knowledge and service workers. We are a mixed bunch, a heterogeneous multitude of precarious jobs and lives. Yet we have not spawn out of fordist assembly chains, but out of dystopian retail chains and office spaces. Why don't you give your pictorial contribution to this multicolored parade, and reclaim that visibility that mainstream media, unions, parties are denying us? Make yourself heard! Voice your anger and/or irony! You will be able to be part of a piece of collective net art. But do it fast, cos after May 1st, the NetParade will remain visible online, but it will no longer be possible to join. By clicking on JOIN, you'll be able to create your avatar, singular and (un)crazy as you want it to be. http://www.euromayday.org/netparade/
13. 2001 Sexy Pic of Final Fantasy's Aki Ross [Friday, April 20th, 2001] Maxim Magazine will release its 2nd annual HOT 100 supplement next month, which features for the first ever time a computer generated woman, says Coming Soon . The woman chosen is Dr. Aki Ross, the lead character and heroine from the upcoming summer film, "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within". After months of work by several CGI artists.. http://www.killermovies.com/f/finalfantasythespiritswithin/articles/1370.html
14. One of Japan's hottest virtual celebrities is Yuki Terai (http://yuki.co.kr) created by Ken-Ichi Kutsugi. Yuki has travelled the globe and the universe selling the wares of happy sponsors. “One great thing about 3D chicks is you can put them anywhere from Brooklyn to Mars, as long as you can render their locale”. Yuki Terai is an extremely popular pop star in Japan right now. In her short life she's already put out a "non-stop ultra-hit cd compilation" featuring her hit single "Dancing Queen." On her site you can buy a number of Yuki goodies, including her virtual calendar and trading cards.
15. Eve Solal Attitude Studios Eve Solal was born in 1978 . She lives in Paris and works as a waitress in a bar. She is also a model for fashion magazines and she runs a radio program. You can see her in a short movie on her web site ( http:// www.evesolal.com ). You can even check out her resume. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1015480
16. Eve Solal from Attitude Studios Seems to have vanished as an active project. T-Babe, a virtual pop star from independent music label Glasgow Records
20. Aurora Technology, a subsidiary of Chinese gaming company Shanda Entertainment , has frozen the accounts of all male gamers playing female characters in its King of the World online game. This reeks of double standards as there are no similar bans on females who take up male avatars in the game, despite the fact that if you want to play as the opposite sex, you will have to prove your gender via webcam.
21. Irina Aristarkhova teaches the pioneering studio-based course, Cyberart , in the University Scholars Programme. She was formerly Senior Lecturer at the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts where she taught various courses, including Cybertheory, Technology and Embodiment, and Feminist Aesthetics. She holds an MA from the University of Warwick, UK, and PhD from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Aristarkhova, who has published and lectured widely on cyberculture and cyberarts has a range of research interests including issues of ethnicity and gender in cyberspace, net-art, immersive virtual environments, theories of power, technological embodiments, contemporary psychoanalytic theory, constructions of sexuality, postcolonial cybertheory, cyberethics and cyberaesthetics.
22. Now we must politicise cyberspace by creating possibilities for new relations of force, that change the face of power, "showing its potentialities no less than its dangers". To say that cyberspace is just a residue of the late capitalist economy, or that virtual reality is dangerous for feminism since it reproduces patriarchal imagery and is full of male fantasies, would only mean that feminism is poorly conceived by such critics, and power is always evil for them. On the other hand, if we consider cyberspace as a flow of unrestricted desires or unconscious, where one can build a cyber-society without power and domination, we put ourselves into another trap: it implies that to "avoid reality of power" (which is bad and polluted) is to "get free" from it in virtual reality, which is good and innocent, that corresponds to libertarian utopia. Thus, sooner we understand that we cannot "avoid" power relations in cyberspace, sooner we start using it for our purposes. We must try and reduce the potential of domination implied in power relations, and employ it as a means for inventing new forms… Dr Irina Aristarkhova http://www.heise.de/tp/english/pop/topic_3/4126/1.html#14 Cyberarts/Cyberculture Research Initiative (CCRI) http://www.cyberartsweb.org/ccri/
Editor's Notes
Start off with where we ended last week, that is with an introduction to blogging. info relating to blogging. The reason we are looking at blogging and ‘edemocracy’ is due to the similarities to communicative action. A weblog or blog (derived from web + log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). Although most early blogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs, and corporations. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author (known as a blogger), to the collaboration of a large community of writers. Many weblogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is often called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is sometimes called a blogstorm or blog swarm. The format of weblogs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article summaries or complete articles with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual weblog entries are almost always date and time-stamped (but this is not a pre-requisite for being a blog), with the newest post at the top (or bottom) of the page, and reader comments often appearing below it. Because incoming links to specific entries are important to many weblogs, most have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for them; this static link is referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are frequently offered in weblogs in the RSS or Atom XML format, to be read with a feed reader.
