caravia/cyberculture

Interesting article about how reputation in a virtual environment can be used as economic asset.

From the page: "Economists and legal theorists have long argued that real-world economies cannot function effectively without well-defined property rights. More recently, scholars have also begun to analyze at least three kinds of �oevirtual” economies: the online economies exemplified by eBay and other trade-facilitating mechanisms; the economies in virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft; and the virtual reputational economies associated with MySpace and Facebook. The first two economies generally involve the exchange of familiar forms of property. But scholars have thus far failed to fully identify or analyze the property underlying the reputational economy. What that economy demonstrates, especially in its virtual form, is that reputation itself�"social status and the respect of others�"can usefully be understood as a form of property. Strands of this theory appear in law and scholarship, but they have not been tied together in a way that shows that reputation can be property-like even without demonstrating economic value. Virtual reputational economies show that reputation can be gained, lost, traded, protected, and shared, all in property-like fashion, without regard to whether it has independent economic value. In other words, reputation is not merely valuable; it is the new New Property."

From the page: "Online video company Revver announced that it has paid $1 million in revenue share to video producers over the past year. With the help of a calculator and some additional reporting from NewTeeVee, can learn a lot from this nugget. Would-be online video producers, listen up.

NewTeeVee calculates that this payout translates to approximately $40 per REVVER producer per year, which obviously means that a handful make some money and most make nothing. One well-paid producer says he is making $1,000 to $3,000 a month. The highest paid Revver producer is reportedly EepyBird, which has "earned over $50,000 to date for the nearly 11 million views garnered by the Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments clip." That's about a half-cent per view, or a CPM of $4.50.

This CPM is well below the "$20" number that is often thrown around by those who are wildly bullish about the near-term money-making prospects of online video. As an astute reader immediately pointed out, of course, the actual GROSS CPM" (the price Revver sold the ads for) was about $10-$12, before the revenue split. This, too, is a far cry from $20, but it's better than $4.50 Unfortunately, after the splits, the $4.50 is still far below the level needed to sustain life at most online video production shops (you could probably make more money writing short stories). So don't quit the day job just yet.

Actually, go ahead and quit the day job--but only after you've secured a new one at one of the dozens of heavily funded video start-ups around (Revver, for example). These start-ups all have tens of millions of dollars. And, as we'll show in the next installment, they'll need every penny of it."

Published in Barcelona the magazine Art Nodes dedicates it's new issue to the investigation of the relationship between gaming, culture and representation.
As Johannes Huizinga wrote "The Homo is Ludens today" :)

Excellent syllabi in cyberculture by David Silver, a real expert.

She was my cyber mentor when I started to surf the net. I have still in my bookcases some exemplars of the magazine Mondo 2000, which she edited together with others geeks.

From the page: "If there is a heaven, the angels are in for a hell of a time when Jude Milhon, the Internet's real and very earthy patron saint of hacking, shows up.

Better known on the Internet by her nom de plume, St. Jude, Milhon died July 19 of cancer. Her age was an issue Milhon obviously decided not to address. Even her closest friends could only guess at it, and they admitted they could be off by as much as a decade.

St. Jude wasn't your typical saint.

She was a staunch advocate of the joys of hacking, geek sex and a woman's right to choose to use technology. She figured life was too short to waste worrying about what other people might think, and was also known for her very colorful way with the English language.

Back when the Internet was populated primarily by men, she encouraged and helped other women to get online.

"Girls need modems!" she said in a February 1995 Wired magazine interview.

"She certainly was an icon of the infancy of the wired generation," said security consultant Robert Ferrell. "We wouldn't be what we are without her, and for that, if for no other reason, she will be sorely missed."

Milhon also believed in learning how to hack "as a martial art -- a way of defending against politically correct politicians, overly intrusive laws, bigots and narrow-minded people of all persuasions," according to an e-mail she sent to this reporter in September 1999.

And she particularly wanted to introduce women to the joys of hacking."

DIGICULT is a professional reality made by different people, artists and freelancers that have experience in digital culture and electronic arts, and also in this border land that is communication through new media.

Around a bunch of people working at editing process, concept, design and project ideation, there are some freelancers involved in the italian digital culture, themselves representative of small or bigger net community.