[Lancaster] Maybe help others and maybe expand the Linux network ...discuss ? maybe logic ?

[Ken Walton]

Hi Andy,

> - a social issue - what is it that brings people to myspace? is it the
> friends-network - being able to invite other people to read your blog /
> listen to your music / view your pics etc etc. Or is it the image that's
> created by the people who run the site, and the freebies / reviews / etc
> that they provide? I.e. how much of what attracts people to it is
> created by the members and how much by the company that runs myspace?
> What I'm getting at here is how much do people value the things that
> come from it being a single big site, as against the things that come
> from it being a more peer to peer network of friends?

Well, from the people I know in Lancaster who are on MySpace, it's
very much the social networking and sharing music that is important.
The ability to put songs online (particularly your own songs, if
you're a performer or a band) is something most of these sites don't
have. And there seem to be a lot of unsigned bands that move around
the pub circuit who use it for getting people to listen to their music
and encourage them to come to gigs. It's certainly not the media hype,
because if you believed that, you'd think everyone on myspace was in
their teens, and most of the people I know are in their thirties and
forties.

>
> SOme of it I guess is the 'success breeds success' thing - lots of
> people have heard of it so people want to be part of it, but there must
> be something that keeps people joining. Another thing here is that
> myspace is (I've heard) owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Sun - does
> he want to use this site to have political influence in the same way as
> he does with his newspapers or is he just out to make money?

I can't actually see how he *can* have political influence, since
people on the site talk to each other - there's no input from the site
itself, unless you count technical support! I think he's just in it to
make money -- it's more like a telephone network than a TV station. (I
was going to say, I don't see how he makes money either, since I don't
see any ads. But then I remembered I've got ad-blocking switched on,
so I wouldn't!)

>
> Personally I'm not that interested in trying to replicate myspace as it
> is, as most of the pages I've seen there (not many) don't really
> interest me - it seems to be mostly about people trying to be cool and
> gossipping / chatting about their lives, rather than really trying to
> say something. That's more about the culture of that site though rather
> than what I'm thinking about here which is more about what is the value
> of big sites like this in general compared to more distributed systems?

The problem of a distributed system rather than a big site would
surely be that if it ran on your own system rather than out there in
cyberspace, people could only read your messages/listen to your
music/look at your photos if you were online yourself. Unless it was
some sort of peer-to-peer thing, in which there'd be a danger of
people who didn't have a big network of friends ending up with very
slow connection to their info, unless it was designed very carefully.

I think. I don't know anything about network design. So I won't say
anything more about it! :-)

>
> The thing that started me off thinking about this is I've been
> considering starting a blog, as a way of talking about things that
> interest me and maybe making some friends online. I've thought of
> running wordpress on my own server, but the trouble with this is you
> don't get the connections and feeling of community that you get with
> bigger sites like livejournal which a friend of mine uses - standalone
> blogs like this tend to be more about promoting your own ideas rather
> than being part of a conversation.

To be fair, I think there's a large amount of gossip on LiveJournal
too. I think LJ was set up more as a community network for
literary-type people (most of science fiction fandom seems to live
there), whereas MySpace is more aimed at musically-inclined people. MS
also, it must be said, has more of a dating element to it. People on
MySpace tend to use their own names and show photos of themselves,
whereas people on LJ use screen-names and often have weird icons
instead of photos.

Anyway, enough of this, I should be working...

-- 
Ken Walton