Fio da Meada

Como é a blogosfera do Irã

Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere

John Kelly and Bruce Etling 

Abstract:

We used computational social network mapping in combination with human and automated content analysis to analyze the Iranian blogosphere. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Iranian bloggers are mainly young democrats critical of the regime, we found a wide range of opinions representing religious conservative points of view as well as secular and reform-minded ones, and topics ranging from politics and
human rights to poetry, religion, and pop culture. Our research indicates that the Persian
blogosphere is indeed a large discussion space of approximately 60,000 routinely updated
blogs featuring a rich and varied mix of bloggers. Social network analysis reveals the
Iranian blogosphere to be dominated by four major network formations, or poles, with
identifiable sub-clusters of bloggers within those poles. We label the poles as 1)
Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4)
Mixed Networks. The secular/reformist pole contains both expatriates and Iranians
involved in a dialog about Iranian politics, among many other issues. The
conservative/religious pole contains three distinct sub-clusters, two focused principally
on religious issues and one on politics and current affairs. Given the repressive political
and media environment, and high profile arrests and harassment of bloggers, one might
not expect to find much political contestation in the blogosphere. However, we identified
a subset of the secular/reformist pole focused intently on politics and current affairs and
comprised mainly of bloggers living inside Iran, which is linked in contentious dialog
with the conservative political sub-cluster. Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the
secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented
part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to
blog anonymously. Blocking of blogs by the government is less pervasive than we had
assumed. Most of the blogosphere network is visible inside Iran, although the most
frequently blocked blogs are clearly those in the secular/reformist pole. Given the
repressive media environment in Iran today, blogs may represent the most open public
communications platform for political discourse. The peer-to-peer architecture of the
blogosphere is more resistant to capture or control by the state than the older, hub and
spoke architecture of the mass media model.

MySpace e gravadoras criam site de música

Deu no New York Times: MySpace junta-se à Universal, Sony e WEA em site. Fala-se em assinatura mensal para download ilimitado.

“In the latest effort by the ailing music industry to bolster its declining prospects, three of the four major music companies have struck a deal with MySpace to start a music Web site.

As part of the deal, MySpace will spin out its popular MySpace Music service as an independent joint venture in partnership with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. EMI, the fourth major label, is not a part of the deal at this time, but people involved in the negotiations said it would probably join soon. The music companies will own minority stakes in the venture and will make their entire music catalogs available.

Chris DeWolfe, chief executive of MySpace, a division of News Corporation, described the new service, which will be introduced later this year, as a one-stop source for all music, in all its various digital incarnations.

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic.”

Otimização de conteúdo dos blogs nos buscadores

SEO em Search Engine Results, Blogs and Credibility

“A colleague in another area of marketing said to me the other day, “I’ve noticed the organic search results are getting worse.” When probed about what she meant, she said that she found results are more cluttered with blogs and user-generated content (UGC) that aren’t always credible or authoritative information sources. I explained that blogs are likely coming to the top of the rankings because they naturally achieve an abundance of inbound links, due to other sites referencing their content or using those posts to support their points of view.”

“If you consider the search engine algorithm’s approach to evaluating sites, blogs certainly seem to fit the bill of a site with high ranking potential. Blogs tend to have:

• A high number of inbound links (with keyword-rich anchor text)
  
• A lot of keyword-rich textual content, with typically a distinct lack of Flash and other non-textual content
  
• An inherent structure that enables the spider to both find and understand site content (e.g., posts are descriptively titled, organized by topical areas, and linked to in a logical manner)
  
• A high propensity for being found through popular blog directories or search engines, such as Technorati”

Metade dos adultos americanos assiste vídeos online

“Let’s look at the facts. Today, Internet demographics are a pretty close match to U.S. population demographics in general, as any report you read at the Pew Internet & American Life Project show. Seventy-eight percent of the U.S. Internet population use broadband, according to Nielsen Online, and nearly 97 percent have the latest version of Flash installed, cites Adobe, giving them access to just about every form of multimedia content. Pew reports that more than half of adult U.S. Internet users regularly view video content online, and 19 percent of them watch video on any given day.”

Nova mídia o caramba

“…Because the title, “New media expected to get more ad dollars,” belies a mindset that’s still dogging us about 15 years after the Internet started to come into the public consciousness. It’s irritating because it seems so dated and it continues to call what we do new media, making things tougher for all of us in the business and standing in the way of us reaching that nifty $160.8 billion in the next four years.

Calling what we do new media puts what we do in the category of other. It reinforces the notion that traditional media is the real stuff, and online media (or other forms of digital communications) are nice-to-haves, time and budgets permitting. It reinforces the notion that the Web is still the domain of cybergeeks who aren’t like the normal consumers many advertisers are trying to reach. Labeling online media “new” also implies there’s still something experimental and untested about it all.That’s baloney.”

By Sean Carlton, em artigo do Clicz

Linguagem é transformação corporal

O Deleuze e o Guatarri se apropriam os estudos performativos, dos lingüistas dos anos 70 e eles vão avançar. Eles dizem o seguinte: toda a linguagem é do tipo ato performativo. Tudo o que falo está fazendo alguma coisa. Eles se distanciam de Aristóteles e procuram avançar em um terreno onde a linguagem sempre foi associada a falar de alguma coisa, a representar alguma coisa. De uma forma primária, entende-se que linguagem é para dizer alguma coisa. Gosto dele, não gosto etc.

Os estóicos estão dizem que quando você fala alguma coisa, é do acontecimento e não do corpo, que é uma tese absurda, que mexe bem com a história da filosofia.

Deleuze, em Lógica do Sentido, em algum capítulo você vai entender, vai fazer sentido, afirma que o que é produzido no âmbito da linguagem é uma transformação corporal.

(Aula de Rogério da Costa sobre estoicismo e linguagem)