Originally posted by
[email protected] 18 2006, 09:08 PM
recently there was a rather heated debate w/r/t MySpace over on the microsound list. Rather than posting the contents of the thread I was wondering what people here felt about MySpace politically and aesthetically.
some questions:
- What does Rupert Murdoch owning MySpace mean?
- Has anyone read the article in WIRED magazine about MySpace? if so, what thoughts do you have about it?
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/murdoch.html
- Is MySpace the WAL-MART of the internet?
- Does the fact that MySpace is used for data mining/trend analysis bother you?
- Are there ways to possibly subvert the mechanisms of MySpace -- turning it on itself?
- etc?
Rupert Murdoch owning myspace means...
1) He profits from ad revenue (think of all the people who will want to advertise on myspace. It has more hits than google. :wacko: )
2) He has the ability to censor
3) He can find out what we like and don't
Bad shit, look at this:
What is social search, again?
Social search is best defined by its differences from the algorithmic search found on sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Instead of sending computer crawlers out across the Internet to catalog the content of every page, social search engines build their database of Web pages by having members tag them with searchable keywords.
A user could tag an article about New York Mets starting pitcher Tom Glavine with terms such as "Mets," "New York," "MLB," Baseball," "Tom Glavine," or "Best team in baseball." The site would then be added to the search engine's catalogue of Web pages.
Then, when another member searches for "Mets" and "Tom Glavine," the page would likely appear as one of the results among the many other pages tagged by other users with the same keywords.
Algorithmic search would instead rifle through the search engine's database of Web sites to find those that actually had the words "Tom Glavine" and "Mets" on the page itself.
It's worked for Google so far. But Mansfield says social search can do more.
Social search is handy for users because sometimes what a Web site is about isn't on the page.
A tagging enthusiast at Harvard likes to point out that the terms "detective," "novel" and "1930s" aren't always found in 1930s detective novels.
Social searchers' results also tend to be useful because someone had to bother to recommend, or tag, the pages included in the returns.
The more members out there tagging and searching, the larger the database of Web sites to search, the more likely search results will be relevant and useful.
So the appeal for Mansfield in powering his search engine with a social network such as MySpace is obvious.
Suddenly he would be able to offer searchers relevant and useful results, a commodity Google has proven to be valuable.
But what's in it for MySpace?
Sponsored links and demographic data
Mansfield said you can sell social search to a social network by using the profile information of the hundred million people in MySpace to weight a search.
"Since we know who you are, we know where you live, we know how old you are, and we know what your interests are, we can give you a hyper-relevant search based on all that information."
Social network owners can show members addicted to their service contextually related sponsored links next to "hyper-relevant" search results.
The rest would be history. And perhaps Mr. Murdoch would be able to give his desk a rest. The money's already there in your social network, Rupert. You just have to search for it.
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I think if you have a myspace and post a lot of anti-myspace shit on it, it's kind of subverting. Most people don't know it's run by Murdoch so getting the word out is good. I hear there's an anti corporate myspace type website called mycrib.