Interesting People mailing list archives
bloggers to murdoch: outta my space
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 20:33:32 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Tim Finin <finin () cs umbc edu> Date: January 8, 2006 2:10:10 PM EST To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: bloggers to murdoch: outta my space Reply-To: finin () cs umbc edu The infrastructure to set up online communities is not all that complicated -- the member base is the real asset. I'm not sure that MSM companies will know how to manage them, as the following article suggests. -- Get out of MySpace, bloggers rage at Murdoch By Nicholas Wapshott, The Independent, 08 Jan 2006 http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article337149.ece Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. ... The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links. However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of "a simple misunderstanding". The explanation did not, however, calm the bloggers. "There was an outcry by some members after MySpace's acquisition by News Corp. People were afraid they might start monitoring or censoring MySpace," Ellis Yu wrote to the Blog Herald. "At the time, their CEO said nothing like that would happen. Well, now it has. MySpace was built on an open community and now they're trying to censor us, putting business interests above its members!" ... A spokesman for MySpace said it would not explain how the blocking of YouTube came about, nor how it was resolved, nor whether in future it would continue to block links to rival websites or censor messages between MySpace customers. Mr Murdoch, 74, last week appointed 33-year-old Jeremy Philips to run News Corp's internet strategy and armed him with a $1bn fund to buy more sites. -- Tim Finin, Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, Univ of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore MD 21250. finin () umbc edu http://umbc.edu/~finin 410-455-3522 fax:-3969 http://ebiquity.umbc.edu ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
Current thread:
- bloggers to murdoch: outta my space David Farber (Jan 08)