bloggers to murdoch: outta my space

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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



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