Teenagers and social networking

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Latest survey report from Pew Research Center:
Among the key findings:

* 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

* 66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. They limit access to their profiles.

* 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.

* Older girls ages 15-17 are more likely to have used social networking sites and created online profiles; 70% of older girls have used an online social network compared with 54% of older boys, and 70% of older girls have created an online profile, while only 57% of older boys have done so.

Teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships

* 91% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently, while 82% use the sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.

* 72% of all social networking teens use the sites to make plans with friends; 49% use the sites to make new friends.

* Older boys who use social networking sites (ages 15-17) are more likely than girls of the same age to say that they use social networking sites to make new friends (60% vs. 46%).

* Just 17% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to flirt.

* Older boys who use social networking sites are more than twice as likely as older girls to say they use the sites to flirt; 29% report this compared with just 13% of older girls.

The Steve Jobs Show

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We’ve just been watching Steve Jobs’s launch of the Apple iPhone and thinking “what is it with this guy?” when up pops Good Morning Silicon Valley with this joke:

So, Bill Gates dies, and ascends to heaven. He meets up with Saint Peter at the gates and says “Hey, it’s Bill, I’m just going to go on in.” And Saint Peter says, “Sorry Bill, everyone is equal in God’s eyes. You need to stand in line like everyone else.”

Grudgingly, Gates walks to the end of the enormous line of folks awaiting entrance. As he’s waiting, an iPod-white limo passes him and rolls up to heaven’s gate’s. The door opens and out steps Steve Jobs. Saint Peter greets him and, after a few brief words, welcomes him into heaven.

Gates is furious. He storms up to the front of the line and confronts Saint Peter: “Hey! I thought you said everyone was equal here! But, I just saw Steve Jobs cut to the front of the line and you let him in without a second thought.

And Saint Peter laughs and replies, “Oh no, that wasn’t Steve Jobs. That was God; he only thinks he’s Steve Jobs.”

Second life goes open source

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CNN report…

NEW YORK (Fortune) — Aiming to take advantage of its already-impressive momentum, San Francisco’s Linden Lab, developer of the Second Life virtual online world, will announce Monday that it is taking the first major step toward opening up its software for the contributions of any interested programmer.

The company will immediately release open source versions of its client software for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. In order to enter and move around the Second Life service, users must download and run this software on their computer desktop. But now, says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale, independent programmers will be able to “modify it, fire it up and sign on with it.” The company gave Fortune exclusive access to executives in advance of the change.

While this initial step will open up what is essentially the user’s window into Second Life for modification, it will leave Linden Lab in control of the proprietary software code for all Second Life’s backend services – the server software that makes the world exist. However, executives say that the company’s eventual intention is to release an open source version of that software as well, once it has improved security and other core functions. They say they have been preparing for the open source move for about three years.

The client, or viewer, software now being open sourced is what enables users to control their avatars, or digital in-world personas, as well as communicate with other users, and buy and sell virtual goods and services.

“We think that if we open source Second Life its product quality will move forward at a pace nobody’s ever seen,” says Rosedale.

The piece goes on to review the numbers claimed for Second Life:

Interest in Second Life – which is free for basic use – has grown dramatically with a quickening pace of press coverage in places like Reuters, Business Week, Time, Wired and The New York Times, as well as consumer publications and Web sites worldwide. New registrants were arriving at a rate of 20,000 per month last January but by October the number had soared to 254,000. But many were apparently thwarted by how difficult the service is to use. Only 40,000 of those October registrants were still using Second Life 30 days after they first joined, according to figures recently provided by Rosedale.

Linden Lab claims 2.5 million “residents,” meaning people who have registered for Second Life. But the service has only around 250,000 active members who still sign in more than 30 days after registering. Nonetheless, that group of active users is currently growing at about 15 percent per month…

Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.

I can’t understand it, officer — my Mondeo just keeps crashing

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From today’s New York Times…

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 7 — Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, is using the Consumer Electronics Show here to highlight several new consumer-oriented products and to unveil a partnership with the Ford Motor Company to build Microsoft technology into several Ford models…

And to think that Ford was doing quite nicely, at least when compared to GM…

Luckily, the problem will be easy to fix. Just reinstall the engine every few months. And accept the fact that your car stereo will no longer connect to your iPod.

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum

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Due to some mysterious glitch, this morning’s Observer column appeared in the paper edition but not on the Web. So here’s a pdf version. Sample:

The QCA is a fascinating organisation, staffed by responsible adults in suits. It produces tons of earnest documents, all of them possessing a single common property, namely that of reducing their readers’ will to live. Put such an organisation in charge of designing a curriculum on ICT, and you can predict the result: An Old Person’s Guide to ICT.

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum (OPIC) has three ‘themes’: ‘using ICT systems’; ‘finding and exchanging information’; and ‘developing and presenting information’. The first involves learning a Key Skill — that of ‘interacting with ICT for a purpose’. Pupils should be taught important things like ‘take a turn playing a screen-based game, using a mouse, selecting options and keying in information’. Teachers should ensure that pupils are able to ‘choose between option buttons displayed on a cashpoint screen’, ‘follow instructions when using interactive TV’ and ‘receive a text message to make arrangements, e.g. where to meet a friend’.

Now I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You think I am making this up. In that case, can I refer you to the QCA’s draft ‘ICT Skill for Life Curriculum Document’ released in September 2005 and available online from www.qca.org.uk?

There’s a surreal quality to the QCA’s ICT curriculum. It conjures up images of kids up and down the country trudging into ICT classes and being taught how to use a mouse and click on hyperlinks; receiving solemn instructions in the creation of documents using Microsoft Word and of spreadsheets using Excel; being taught how to create a toy database using Access and a cod PowerPoint presentation; and generally being bored out of their minds.

And then the same kids go home and log onto Bebo or MySpace to update their profiles, run half a dozen simultaneous Instant Messaging conversations, use Skype to make free phone calls, rip music from CDs they’ve borrowed from friends, twiddle their thumbs to send incomprehensible text messages, view silly videos on YouTube and use BitTorrent to download episodes of ‘Lost’.

And when you ask them what they did at school today they grimace and say ‘We made a PowerPoint presentation, Dad. Yuck!’

Vatican goes Wilde

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From Times Online

Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, gay icon and deathbed convert to Catholicism, has been paid a rare tribute by the Vatican. His aphorisms are quoted in a collection of maxims and witticisms for Christians that has been published by one of the Pope’s closest aides…

It is said that Wilde converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. I prefer to believe the story that his last words were: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do”.

Another scurrilous deathbed joke from my childhood surfaces. It concerns Michael O’Leary, a celebrated reprobate who never darkened the door of the parish church. But eventually he was laid low by a heart attack and his family, seeing an opportunity to rescue him from the fires of hell, summoned a priest to give him Extreme Unction. In accordance with the rite, the priest bent down and said, “Michael, do you renounce the Devil, and all his works and pomps?” Whereupon Michael, summoning up all his remaining energy, hauled himself up onto one elbow and said, “Jesus, Father, this is no time to be makin’ enemies”.

Eagleton on stereotypes

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Terry Eagleton had an hilarious review of Typecasting: on the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality in the London Review of Books. The article, alas, has disappeared behind a paywall, but here are two passages which made me laugh.

It would make for a bolder, more innovative study than this one to put in a good word for stereotypes, even though academics at certain American universities might find themselves under fire for doing so. Those of us who are not American academics, however, may feel less constrained. It is an open secret, for example, that Ulster Protestants are not by and large dandyish aesthetes notable for their extravagant wordplay and surreal sense of humour. The English middle classes are for the most part less physically and emotionally expressive than Neapolitan dockers. It is unusual to meet a working-class Liverpudlian who dresses for dinner, other than in the sense of putting on a shirt. Corporation executives tend not to be Dadaists.

And,

Academics who study these facts are known as sociologists, and like Stalinists have no interest in individuals. Without stereoypping of some kind, social life would grind to a halt. If the plumber turns up to fix drains dressed in tights and a tutu, I would natually be liberal-minded enough to invite him to perform a few pirouettes at the sink; but if the bank manager insists on discussing my loan in Latvian, I might take my business elsewhere. Human freedom is a question of life being reasonably predictable, not of being joyously liberated from rules. Unless we can calculate the effects of our actions, which includes the way others might typically respond to them, we will be incapable of realising our projects effctively.

Footnote: Apropos plumbers in tights, J. Edgar Hoover, the fearsome Director of the FBI who held even presidents in thrall, was a distinguished cross-dresser who wore tutus to informal social occasions. The absurd thing is that he didn’t have the legs for it, being short and stocky of build, and exceedingly hirsute to boot.

Terabyte hard drives are here

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From CNET News…

Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.

The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.

The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte drive in the first half of 2007. The two companies, along with others, will tout their new drives at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and will show off hybrid hard drives, as well.

A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a million megabytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, as measured by the hard-drive industry. (There are actually two conventions for calculating megabytes, but this is how the drive industry counts it.) As a reference, the print collection in the Library of Congress comes to about 10 terabytes of information, according to the How Much Information study from U.C. Berkeley. The report also found that 400,000 terabytes of e-mail get produced per year. About 50,000 trees would be necessary to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of information, according to the report.

Taste, trust and user-generated content

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Splendid rant by Simon Jenkins…

Whatever the borderline between amateur and professional, skill and artistry, some things are very difficult to do, and most people will admire and pay those who do them. Every creative talent comes with unseen baggage, directors, designers, stage-setters, publishers, editors and coaches. No art is without effort, and the effort is collective. If the electronic marketplace becomes devoid of copyright, producers will devise ways of protecting and “monetising” their appeal. Pulp fiction still seems to be thriving.

The internet has certainly torn up the media of communication pioneered by Gutenberg and Caxton, Marconi and Reith. The anarchist in me is attracted by the sovereignty of the mob. I like to see the market, the audience, hitting back occasionally – even if it does so from the Tower of Babel. Shakespeare had to contend with his groundlings and La Scala with its claque.

But rulebooks there will always be. The popular scientist EO Wilson explained the cultural genetics that guide our myriad responses to group stimuli. Embedded in our DNA, they govern everything from artistic sensibility to habit, style and forms of pleasure. In matters of taste, these genes demand frameworks of trust, whether the proclaimed intermediary be a priest or a fashion editor.

I trust certain writers, directors, composers, artists, even newspapers, to widen my horizons without revolting me. Between their transmitting and my receiving is a zone of faith. That is why, however worldwide the web, there will never be a “blog-standard” newspaper. I need to trust a news-gatherer to adhere to known standards of veracity and taste, or my own judgment will go haywire. Those with no one to trust are not to be trusted.

There is no substitute for a disciplined, rule-bound, edited news-gatherer any more than there is for a formal theatre, movie-maker or publisher. Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” will not find its apotheosis in the internet. The message transcends the medium and always will. The fact that a reader’s taste can sometimes be shocked shows the power of the trust on which it is normally based.

The backlash against user-generated content gathers pace.

shortText.com

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shortText is a neat, simple idea. Suppose you want to post something quickly to the Web with a URL that you can distribute. Go to shorttext.com, type in the box and link to an image or video (if desired) and hit the ‘Create URL’ button. Bingo!

There’s also a shortText plug-in for FireFox which enables you to do the same by highlighting some text and right-clicking on it.