cybersoc.com

iGod: church podcasts Sunday message

According to the BBC North Yorkshire website, a Church in Harrogate has started podcasting their Sunday religious message. Pastor Tim Eldridge of Harrogate New Life Church told the BBC:

"We put one message out on public view for about three weeks and we were just absolutely staggered by the number of times it was downloaded. About 160 times."

amazon patents user reviews

According to a recent article in InternetNews.com, Amazon has secured the (US) patent for user generated on-site product reviews. So is this the beginning of the end for sites like the Guardian's user generated travel site, BeenThere , epinions and all the other sites that depend upon user reviews for their content? Probably not.

In 2002 BT unsuccessfully tried to enforce a patent which, they said, covered all hyperlinking. Anyway, this isn't the first time Amazon has been awarded a patent covering social software / user-generated content. In 2003 they received a patent covering bulletin board (message board) style discussions. Scary stuff, but, unlike their patent for "one click shopping" which they have defended in court, as far as I'm aware, Amazon has never tried to enforce their patent on online discussions.

So why does Amazon bother collecting patents if they aren't going to use them? Well, it's fairly clear that, before it started making profits, Amazon had to be seen by investors to be building some sort of value and intellectual property was one way to do this. The discussion patent will have been applied for years before (1999) it was awarded in 2003. Likewise, the reviews patent will have been in the patents approval system for years. My personal opinion (which you shouldn't act upon without taking advice from a qualified legal professional) is that the on-site reviews patent, like the discussion forum patent, are simply a legacy from when Amazon needed patents to keep investors happy. The patents would be largely unenforceable and, even if they were able to enforce them, the backlash of internet users would likely damage the Amazon brand. It seems unlikely Amazon will ever seek to enforce their shiny new patent.

speaking carriages on trains?

I'm always annoyed when I get on a train and realise the only place with seats left is the quiet carriage. It's the complete opposite of the old smoking carriages where, if you could survive the smoke, there were all sorts of conversations underway.

In the Guardian Weekend last week I came across "spark the debate", a new advertising campaign where readers are encouraged to visit the Guardian website and get involved in a debate. The advertisement suggested an interesting alternative to pretending there is no one around you whilst in a packed tube train - talk to them:

"It's one of the sad ironies of modern urban living that the more neighbours we have, the less we seem to want to know about them. Nowhere is this more evident than on the daily commute to work. There we are, crushed together with the kind of physical intimacy one normally reserves for partners and spouses. We're on our way to the same sort of offices, to sit in front of the same computer screens in the same parts of town. You'd have thought it would be the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation. Instead we go to work in stony silence, unable to tear our eyes away from our Dan Browns or the adverts for travel insurance and spot cream."

"So here's the proposition. Why not designate one carriage on tubes and trains as a "speaking carriage", where passengers are encouraged to strike up conversations with each other?"

I really like this idea since, afterall, I married a girl I met on a plane. :-) More at spark the debate on the Guardian website.

Robin on BBC Radio Norfolk

I'm going to be appearing live on Nick Lawrence's radio programme on BBC Radio Norfolk tonight just after 7pm GMT (that's 2pm EST).

He'll be asking me about the growing importance of online communities in our lives, internet activism and online politics, whether there are any dangers that we're going online at the expense of our neighbourhood based communities, etc.

(Interview now available as a 12 minute streaming podcast here)

links for 22 november

Flickr, Buzznet expand citizens' role in visual journalism By Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review

Traditional journalists and newspaper sites tap into online photo communities to gather visual research and allow readers to contribute and interact. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.

TagCloud

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

How to make money on your news content website

Forget what you might have heard: Journalists can earn money publishing online. Here are some tips from OJR readers.

Mapping the revolution with "mashups" on ZDnet

Some good background information and links to mashups

match.com lawsuit: is this a photo of Autumn Marzec?

A couple of days ago I blogged about the lawsuit filed against match.com, the online dating site, alleging that the site used employees as "date bait". This story seems to have exploded onto the web with google showing 94,000 results to the search string "match.com lawsuit".The AFP News site is one of many that outlines the case: Matthew Evans, a match.com customer, had a few dates with Autumn Marzec (incidently, "Marzec" is the Polish for the month of March... and perhaps a surname). Evans alleges that, after a few dates, Marzec confessed to being a match.com employee. If nothing else this is bad practice and something that smaller players in the online dating industry are known to do but not something, according to Mark Brooks at Online Personals Watch, that the top ten dating sites have been known to get involved in. [Please note: these are simply allegations and haven't been proven in any court - match.com may very well be innocent and there are people blogging to that affect.]

In Marzec's defense, how many of us, were we single and working for an online dating website, would have used our employers service to get dates? I'm betting quite a few of us. But the lawsuit alleges that, rather than simply dating members in the same way as a health club instructor might date his or her trainees or a night club bouncer might take someone home at the end of the night, employees were actually SENT on dates with customers - something totally different. When I read the accounts of what had happened, I started to wonder how they did this. Did the employees simply set up an account, using their own name and details but omitting the fact that they worked for match.com? Were they given aliases or asked to create aliases? [Some news sites are even reporting that the people sent on dates were actually hired for that purpose. Match.com denies these claims.] Curiousity got the best of me and I found myself googling for "Autumn Marzec", just as many users of online dating websites would have done had they encountered her online.

It wasn't long, on the first page of results in fact, before I found this post on a Yahoo Group about Volleyball in Southern California. One click away from that page and you'll find a photo to go with the profile (age: 24, occupation: dance instructor since you asked) of the user. Could one of the two women in the photo to the left be the same "dark-haired, buxom twentysomething Autumn Marzec" that went on a date with Matthew Evans? The email I found using google was sent on Mar 11, 2004 so it would seem that, if the post and photo are part of a deliberate attempt to build an online identity then this started at least that long ago. It might be that, as I suggested above, Marzec was simply a dating website employee taking advantage of the easy ability to meet men through the service and, let's face it, if you work for a dating website you wouldn't go pay to use a competitors service. Or Marzec may have posted this profile innocently for personal use. Of course, it could be a photo of a totally innocent Autumn Marzec, or person of another name, who has never worked for match.com or any other online dating agency.

I have no answers to these and other questions but it does seem to me that, if Marzec is really a match.com employee and isn't, or wasn't in 2004, a dance instructor, that the whole purpose of this profile has something to do with creating an online identity - perhaps just for fun and perhaps for online dating. Anyone who has ever used an online dating site knows that users can and do check each other out by googling the names, usernames, and email addresses of people they meet online. Anyone that Marzec would have met online at match.com (or elsewhere) is likely to have found, like I did, this yahoo profile. The yahoo profile clearly doesn't say anything about working for an online dating site...

Technorati: blogs talking about match.com right now.

------ update 22 November 19:09 ------

All the evidence at my disposal yesterday seemed to verify that the yahoo profile I found, and the photo I posted above, were those of the same Autumn Marzec identified by Matthew Evans, the claimant in the match.com lawsuit. To verify this I emailed the person holding the Yahoo account, who at the moment I sent the email was shown as being online. I also emailed the claimant's legal representatives who have confirmed that:

* the woman depicted in the photo posted here on cybersoc.com is the same woman who appeared in photos on the match.com profile of "Autumn Marzec"

* a search of public records confirm that a woman of this name lives in West Hollywood, which is the same area given in the email I found posted to a publicly accessible Yahoo group and which is also consistent with information given to Evans by the woman who identified herself as Autumn Marzec.

I don't think there is much hope in Marzec, or whoever posted a profile with her photo on it, responding to my request for an interview. I'd like to know more about what happened but, with a lawsuit looming, and the rights to a 'made for television movie' likely to be on the minds of many, it seems unlikely that she'll respond.

----- 23 November -----

Match.com have hit back by demanding that the case against them is dropped: "The woman named in the lawsuit as a Match.com employee has confirmed in a sworn statement that she has never been an employee of Match.com, nor was she ever paid to go on dates with any members or subscribers."

----- 24 November ------

Gelf Magazine has, as well as an excellent article about this story and a .pdf of the allegations against match.com, a copy of the above mentioned sworn statement from Autumn Marzec.

television on your 3G mobile

Vodafone and Sky have teamed up to bring you Sky television on your mobile. Will people really sit and watch television on such a tiny screen? Well, Apple has done really well with it's newest video enabled iPod so it would seem that, yes, despite the screen size some people just can't get enough television.

At the end of June I moved to a 3G mobile service myself so decided to try downloading and watching a video on my phone. The process of finding content was easy enough considering my mobile provider now "helpfully provides me with" links everytime they send a message to inform me I have new voice mail. The download, a couple of mb of data, took perhaps a minute and a half. When I opened the file my phone, a Symbian based Nokia 6630 smartphone running RealPlayer, crashed and told me it didn't have enough memory. After closing some programmes I was able to watch a 3 minute long news clip on my phone.

Other than the pleasure of trying something new, I wouldn't say I found the experience particularly useful. It might get lots of use when a major incident occurs and people urgently want to know what's going on, like on the 07 July when bombs hit London, or when there is a big sporting even like England's recent success on the cricket pitch, but nightly episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, or Coronation Street? Yeh, ok, they're gonna make a lot of money off of this...

online dating agencies sued for fraud

Match.com , one of the largest online dating sites, has been accused in a California lawsuit of using their staff as date bait. The service, which charges about £17 a month, guarantees you'll "find someone special within 6 months". And if not? Well, if match.com really did send staff on dates as the lawsuit alledges, there probably aren't many users getting refunds in the vicinity of match.com's headquarters.

But it's not just Match.com that's been named in an online dating related lawsuit this week. Our familiar friends Yahoo ( Yahoo Personals ), who have had all sorts of negative press recently, are also being sued in a seperate California lawsuit alledging "breach of contract, fraud and unfair trade practices".

(Thanks BBC News Online)

moderation guidelines for children's services

The Home Office (UK) has now published it's non-binding guidance document on the moderation of online community and social software services for children.

The document:

• describes the types of moderation that can be used
• informs organisations of all the issues they should take into account when assessing the need for moderation of interactive services
• informs organisations of the issues they should take into account in the recruitment, training and supervision of moderators

"Good practice guidance for the moderation of interactive services for children" is available as a .pdf from the Home Office

Robin on BBC Radio Three Counties

This morning I was interviewed by Sony Award winning presenter Roberto Perrone on BBC Three Counties Radio discussing the BBC's new message board which I blogged about here recently. You can listen or read the transcript on the BBC Beds, Herts and Bucks website.