My daily readings 06/23/2007

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: From YouTube to YouNiversity  Annotated

I wrote the following article for Chronicle of Higher Education and it seems to be stimulating some discussion out there. Since at some point it will be taken off the Chronicle’s site, I figured I would exercise my rights as an author to republish it here. My one regret is that the Chronicle removed a reference to William Uricchio who is my co-director of the CMS program and whose contributions are key to the program’s success.

• Consider these developments: At the end of last year, Time named “You” its Person of the Year “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.” Earlier in the year, Newsweek described such sites as Flickr, MySpace, Craigslist, Digg, and YouTube as “putting the ‘We’ in the Web.” The business “thought leader” Tim O’Reilly has termed these new social-network sites “Web 2.0,” suggesting that they represent the next phase in the digital revolution — no longer about the technologies per se but about the communities that have grown up around them. Some are even describing immersive online game worlds such as Second Life as the beginnings of Web 3.0. All of this talk reflects changes that cut across culture and commerce, technology and social organization. - post by joel

These writers come from very different disciplinary perspectives — business, law, anthropology, and cultural studies — and they write in very different styles. We can’t really call this work an intellectual movement: Most of us didn’t know of one another’s existence until our books started to hit the shelves. Yet taken together, these books can be read as a paradigm shift in our understanding of media, culture, and society. This work embodies an ecological perspective on media, one that refuses to concentrate on only one medium at a time but insists that we take it all in at once and try to understand how different layers of media production affect one another. As such, these books represent a new route around the ideological and methodological impasses between political economy (with its focus on media concentration) and cultural studies (with its focus on resistant audiences). And these books represent a new way of thinking about how power operates within an informational economy, describing how media shifts are changing education, politics, religion, business, and the press.

• How might media studies, the field most committed to mapping these changes as they affect modern life, be taught in a YouNiversity? - post by joel

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days - Miguel de Icaza  Annotated

The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking
days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that
worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day –including
weekends– to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time.
We call this effort Moonlight.

• You can see our screenshot-log to see our progress or the Moonlight Project Planning Page. - post by joel

Rock On: 12 of the Best Music Social Networks

The Startup Game: How a six-month-old startup got bought by Google  Annotated

A little less than six months ago, Crosby left his pregnant wife at home in Phoenix and together with Walker, drove to Mountain View in an old Honda Civic to pursue the American dream. Crosby and Walker rented a small apartment, slept on air mattresses and began crunching out thousands of lines of codes day and night. So how did the pair, who met while working at Go Daddy, end up making a product (which, incidentally, was still in private beta) that Google had to snatch up? Here’s a look at how Zenter did it.