Todays homepage image on the Piratebay.org, that rather famous and recently chastised bit torrent site is a rather fitting homage to Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill. All though I would say that it is perhaps a tad unfair that it’s Gordon Brown’s mug shot up there. Perhaps Mandelson would have been a better target.

With the recent world events and current feeling of unrest and political disbelief, it seems odd to me that only 5% of MP’s would bother to show up and debate the passing of the Digital Economies Bill (#DEBill). This is a bill that has the potential to stifle creativity and induce restrictions over the very connectivity that Digital Britain needs. Repercussions will ripple far further than the Digital Creative community.

The controversial “Clause 18″ which would have enabled the government to block sites, was replaced with a slightly sugar coated version. “Clause 8″ which allows the Secretary of State for Business to block any sight deemed to be infringing, about to infringe or has infringed on copyright material in the past, if deemed so by the court. However unlikely, Google could be deemed

Many a finger bashing “thrill seeking” teenager might be shocked to learn that “Clause 41″ and “Clause 42″ of the DEBill have the potential to censor video that may be deemed violent. Not so relaxed about it now, huh? But I wouldn’t worry too much… This law might take months to pass. At least you have the summer for any extra gory titles to release. But say your more of an online gamer, then these laws could have a much more encompassing grasp than you might think. With cooperating ISP’s and publishers DRM’s look set to get tighter and tighter.

The impending General Election will surely not be a run away affair for any one in the now three horse race. So it seems rather odd to me that politicians would so readily alienate themselves from such a large section of society as the “digitratti”.

The vote was won by Government 189 votes to 47.

So, before you take your vote on the 6th, why not take a look and see if your MP bothered to show up and vote. Either way odds are, they probably didn’t attend the two hour debate.

Numerous website hacked together by feverishly working exasperated techies have sprung up over the following week, many of them within hours. Here are a few of them:

http://www.votethemout.co.uk/

For the record, my MP didn’t vote… “My MP Ben Wallace didn’t vote on the #DEBill”

See how your MP voted

and email your local candidate to see what their views are: http://bit.ly/emailyourcandidates

Not sure who to vote for? Why not let vote match help you decide…

The elections this year are shaping up to be a close run affair. News “sound bites”, flyers, brochures and radio only help to muddy the political spectrum. VoteMatch asks a series of questions around political stand points and ideals, then tells you, in percentage terms, who you should vote for… Now all we need is a “click here to vote” button.

In 2000 Amy Jo Kim proposed a membership life cycle for online communities. It states that members go through different stages of membership throughout their membership life cycle and must pass through ‘barriers’ before progressing (Kim 2000). The barriers tend to signify confidence increases in the user and generally result in increased participation. Kim’s theory was also mirrored by Lave and Wenger’s model (Lave et. al. 1991). They suggest five phases in the life cycle and introduced the term ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (LPP). LPP put states that “Through learning, newcomers become part of the community of practice” – (Lave et. al. 1991) and that “Learning is then the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice.” – (Lave et. al. 1991).

Lave and Wenger’s model suggests five types of trajectories amongst a learning community:

1. Peripheral – An outside, unstructured participation (Visitor)
2. Inbound – Newcomer is invested in the community and heading towards full participation
3. Insider – Full committed community participant
4. Boundary – A leader, sustains membership participation and brokers interactions
5. Outbound – Process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks

(Lave et. al. 1991)

Lave and Wenger’s Model Applied to YouTube
One of the most important factors surrounding online communities is participation and participation motivation: how do you get people involved? There are many theories based around online participation motivation, as many contributors face no monetary gain from their input. Altruistic motivations aside, Peter Kollock breaks them down into four categories.

1. Anticipated Reciprocity
2. Increased Recognition
3. Sense of efficacy
4. Sense of community

(Kollock 1998)

1. Anticipated Reciprocity - A member is compelled to contribute content or help others in the anticipation of one day needing help in return. This is an anticipated reciprocal relationship on the part of the contributor.

2. Increased Recognition - Reputation is the most recognized key factor in participation motivation. Users show a desire to gain notoriety and are generally willing to work for it. It can make Users key figures in communities and is often regardless of physical world situations or status.

3. Sense of efficacy - Users may contribute to a community because that contribution results in a sense of involvement and effect on the community. Normally driven by a Users belief in their ability to benefit the community either through expertise or group participation (Alexander et. al. 2004).

4. Sense of community - Many people are directly motivated by the desire to have people respond to their contributions. Social psychologists refer to this as a ‘sense of community’, Marc Smith refers to this as ‘communion’ (Smith 1991). Most online communities allow for this by enabling users to comment on contributed content. Using facebook as an example, Users are constantly confronted with requests to comment on other users actions. User actions can be rated, ‘liked’ or commented on. It is commonly acknowledged that there is some overlap between establishing a ‘sense of community’ and users increasing their reputation. It should also be acknowledged that there are degrees of overlap in all four of the key motivations (Smith 1992).

A virtual community is a group of people or social entity that have a primary means of communication other than face-to-face contact e.g. telephone, email, online social networks or instant messages. Generally these networks are used for a social, professional or educational means. They can be the sole source of communication between acquaintances or they can be a secondary supplementary source. It is common in today’s digital age for a user to have both a digital and physical relationship with.

Most online social networks make use of Web 2.0 technologies and ways of thinking. This has lead to many describing them as ‘Community 2.0′ (Ripanti 2008). However precursors to this modern phenomenon of online social medium were evident in the mid 90′s. Sites such as TheGlobe.com (1994), Geocities (1994) and Tripod (1995) attempted to bring users together through chat rooms and message boards. These were the harbingers of blogging and today’s social network platforms (Wikipedia 2009). In the early 2000′s modern social networks began to appear. Standard bearers such as flickr, mySpace and facebook had arrived. Similar trends are becoming apparent in the professional arena, as more and more companies begin to represent their staff and customers in a virtual community.

Online, and physical communities are dependent on similar kinds of social interaction and communication. Without these interactions, communities become dormant groups of people with no collective purpose or goals. Virtual communities can develop in much the same way as physical communities, in that they can develop cliques, fracturing to form new groups (Kim 2004). However one sees them, online social networks are now deeply embedded in everyday life. Be it social calendar, professional job hunting or online learning and tuition.

I bet if we took all of the hours spent by web designers and developers tinkering with websites to make them function in IE6. We could have ended world poverty, cured cancer and the ozone hole would be nicely stitched back together…

Unfortunately, we’re not really allowed to tell clients that using IE6 makes them stupid. Or that IE6 is a leading cause of Cancer in Over 25′s. But we may no longer have to.

I’m tired now so I’ll finish this in the morning. I could save it as a draft but I like adding things to the blog and it means I can add it to the list of productive things I did today…

I have just bought a word. But as it’s you, I shall allow you to use it.

Mischief

Quite an immaginative / useless way of making money. So obviously I was impressed enough to fork over some American dollars. It’s not like it’s real money any way…

I just read an article on The Guardian website about the Pirate Bay. For those of you who don’t know it’s a torrent site. Agree with them or not, their out there and it would seem as though they are here to stay.

To sum the article up, or to sum up the bits that are relevant here any way, The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has ordered Norway’s largest internet provider Telenor to block Pirate Bay. Now I personally think this is the wrong move for three reasons:

1. If they want it bad enough, they’ll go elsewhere
2. What about all the legal content changing hands?
3. Isn’t that verging on a big brother / nanny state?

When (the now apparently missing) Steve Jobs and Apple introduced the world to the iTunes music store they revolutionized the music industry and gave the record companies an out in terms of the downward spiraling record sales. But instead of opening up and embracing the changing scope of delivering music from the studio to your ears, they sat back and did very little but complain. I bet now with hindsight they are wishing they rapidly made changes to outdated business models and re-thought their traditional distribution processes.

Here is something for you to think about. I saw a documentary a couple of weeks ago, I think it was on the BBC. It was about this young lady who was producing music from a room in a small flat. The music wasn’t exactly to my liking, but then again, I’ve heard worse. Her marketing ploy was simple but really rather ingenious. She was printing copies of her music and taking it to the street venders around Rio (the ones that normally flog the pirated crap) and gave it to them for free. The venders keep all profit, but she gets her name out there.

Obviously this is not an easily upscalable model but it does show that the traditional way of doing things can and sometimes has to change.

So, what I’m getting at is this: Stop fighting technology, embrace it. Change the way you do business. Adapt to the market place that you now find yourself in. It may not be through choice that you find yourself having to change, but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Television did not kill radio. The internet has not killed television. Piracy will not kill music. If you learn to use this to your advantage.