QotW5: Who Am I ?

- Who am I?
- Well,you are a newbie who joined our Internet Marketing forum on January. You focus on Community site building and viral marketing. Your birthday is 20th May 1985.
- No, he is not. He is an expert on our Hardware zone forum, especially Apple stuffs. He said that he was 30 years old.
- You are all wrong. He told me that he was handsome like Tom Cruise, rich like Bill Gates. He is going to marry me next month on Second Life.
- Okay okay, you all just know a part of his complicated mind. He is virtual. Leave him alone!

http://www.sfondideldesktop.com/Images-Movies/Face-Off/Face-Off.jpg

As Sartre said in Being and Nothingness: "The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter" (Donath ,1996). A person can have multiple identities AT THE SAME TIME. In our real world, he/she can't be a mad student and a quiet teacher concurrently. He either chooses to be mad at this point of time or smart at another the time. However, I can have multi personas at one point of time on the online world. It is like opening many browser tabs in Firefox or Internet Explorer. Each tab brings me to a totally different world. To name a few: Hardware Zone (IT talk forum), VNCNUS ( Vietnamese Community in National University of Singapore), IMS ( Internet Marketing Singapore), 360themes (as a webmaster) ...

Even though the above forums differer ed from each other in term of content, they required (in my opinion) the similar way to gain reputation: CONTRIBUTION. Online identity is never be trusted. Therefore, in order to gain trust from someone else, we must show how we can benefit them. Another motivation for contribution is common rewards include peer esteem, making social connections, and the natural pleasure of helping others (Masum, 2004). As a member of a forum, besides administrator position, people always want to have at least a moderator position. It's nothing but the power to control a box within the forum as if you are the bishop of a land. I was elected in a real election for the title of Moderator's Sensitive box (Sex Edu discussion) in 2006.There was campaign slogan: " Real Sex Ed builds life", give-away freebies ( clips, documents....) and of course a live Election Night. The more I contributed to the forum, the higher my reputation was. That's was how I won the moderation position in a community of around 10,000 Vietnamese students.

Besides contribution, I think BEING TRANSPARENT is an effective way to gain reputation as well. In the world where we TRUST NO ONE, suddenly when we find a peer who expose their personal life, photos, stories, we start to trust that AVATAR. We know everything can be faked but we still trust him/her much more than other members.

Transparence is like a playing with knife. Over-exposing personal information may lead to identity theft. Identity theft occurs when someone uses personal identifying information to commit fraud or other crimes (Forbes, 2005). Imaging that someone else use my identity to post nudity, political opinions which are not allowed by forum rules and regulations or even national laws. It's horrible to think of the consequences. Other sensitive information like personal email address, hobbies, cellphone number, real name, home address can be easily abused by credit card frauder.

In sum, Online Identity is nothing new or special. It's ourself or part of our inner mind. We should treat like the way we care about our name, fame in real world. We should protect it like the way we run the society.

Reference:
1. Donath. , J, S. (1996). Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. MIT Media Lab. Retrieved on 20 February 2007, from
http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html
2.Masum, H, & Zhang, Y.C. (July 2004). Manifesto for the Reputation
Society. First Monday, 9, (7). Retrieved February
22, 2007, from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html
3. Oxford Analytica (2005).Hooked on Phishing. Forbes Online. Retrieved on 20 February 2007, from http://www.forbes.com/business/2005/04/29/cz_0429oxan_identitytheft.html

QotW4: My little Community

I was lucky enough to own a community on the Internet. My little website has about8675 members within a month(and counting at the rate of 184 new members per day). On the Alexa ranking website, I am standing at 99,232th in the whole Internet world. Here is the report

My website was also featured in one of the biggest Vietnamese news website on Tuesday (24h.com.vn, 2007)

http://www15.24h.com.vn/news.php/55/138546

The success of my website has come from a very simple reason:"The Gift Economy". How could I consider my website as a "Gift Economy"? There are few reasons.

I. The Definition
Rheingold (1993) has described interaction in one online community (the WELL) as consisting of a gift economy, in which help and information is offered without the expectation of any direct, immediate quid-pro-quo. According to Rheingold's definition, every online community on the Internet is a gift economy. Without being an exception, my gift economy has the market of nearly 10,000 customers . They exchange their own Yahoo blog customized themes. And the most important thing is that all "products" are free.

II. The way it works:
Even though all "products" are free, there is still an unspoken rule : you have to give while you take. Kollock mentioned this rule as a obligation in his book "The Economies of Online Cooperation". Members in the community are encouraged to design themes or give comments on others' themes. The more themes a designer share, the more popular he/she is. And the feeling of being recognized has motivated members to contribute volunteerly. Each theme is the gift from a member to the rest of the community. And the only essential is this: the gift must always move (Lewis Hyde, 1983). From one theme, the design is spreaded around endlessly. Someone may use it or be inspired by the gift, who later create a new theme from the existing theme. This flow of ideas is the power behind my Gift Economy .

As the community grows stronger and stronger, the economy becomes more complex. There are competitions among designers. There are copyright infringements. All the characteristics of a real economy has been shaped in my small online community.

Reference:
Lewis, Hyde (1983). "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property". 1983

Kollock, Peter (1999). 'The Economies of Online Cooperation; Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace" Retrieved February 8, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Addison-Wesley.Wikipedia (2007). Gift economy. Retrieved February 8, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

"QotW3: War of the Worlds”

"COPYRIGHT is so hot right now"

Ho Viet Hai

Introduction
The return of the web business in recent years has heated the topic of Copyright again. The easiness of sharing things online is like two sides of a knife. On one side, Internet users are sharing videos, photos or selling "lands", "houses" and even "avatar". On the opposite side, Copyrightedd materials are being sharing illegally everyday on the Internet. 3 years ago, in order to get a DVD Rip version of a movie, you are required to equipped yourself with hacking and cracking skills. Nowadays, everything is available at one click away on YouTube, MetaCafe or VideoEgg ... There is even a website named Eyespot where surfers can select videos to remix and create new works based on existed videos (copyrighted or non- copyrighted).
Entertainment industries, movies makers are getting headache because the simple word "Copyright".
Copyrights
There are many copyright acts. To name a few: the Bern Convention, the US Copyright act, the Canadian Copyright act, The Digital Millennium copyright act... However, in the age of Web 2.0, the Digital Millennium copyright act is probably the most referred one. The U.S government ambitiously want to maintain the laws on the cyberspace. It's a good thing to do as well as the hardest task. Copyright laws become obsolete when technology renders the assumptions on which they were based outmoded ( Digital Copyrights, 2001). In fact, sharing technologies always goes beyond Copyrights act makers one step ahead.
The Evolution of Sharing
Since 1990s, Peer to Peer network sparked off the wave of sharing files on the Internet. People were able to connect directly to their so-called "peer" computers in the same virtual network and download files. Millions of songs, software, ebooks have been transfered through Kazza, LimeWire, Bit-torrent..

Until 2004, according to Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, “There were more than nine million simultaneous users on the major peer-to-peer (P2P) networks” (Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, 2005). The users have also gone beyond the limit of files sharing to illegally copyrighted products sharing. There are thousands of website providing P2P links for users to download like:
TorrentSpy Demonoid

Courtesy of Userstyles.org Courtesy of AmigaOS

It's as simple as click, save the files and then wait till finishing. One of the cons of P2P is that the speed is slow. As P2p is slow, file sharing technology has evolved to the next level: Sharing in Web 2.0. YouSendIt started by offering free files sharing for files up to 1GB. Soon enough, users have used YSI as the new platform of sharing copyrighted softwares,songs, videos. YouSendIt had to revised their rules and regulations, limited file size down to 100mb. However, Rapidshare, a paid-service, is now the current leader in sharing markets.

Rapidshare tells everything the name. Users only have to click one click to upload their files, and of course, share them. Further more, Rapidshare offers a premium account with unlimited upload and download at bullet speed. Here comes the paradise of pirates: http://rapidsharelinks.org - the collection of all Rapidshare links. Even an old lady with a premium Rapidshare account know how to download the latest Windows Vista for FREE.

"Rapidshare is the most expensive website on the world because billions of copyrighted products are there for FREE"

It's great for users, it's bad for Microsoft or other corporations. As requested by businessmen, GEMA - one of the strongest collective licensing organizations in Europe representing the performance and mechanical licensing rights of 60,000 German authors, composers and publishers virtually without any competition was granted preliminary injunctions against the file-hosting platforms Rapidshare.de and Rapidshare.com (NewTeeVee, 2007). GEMA CEO Harald Heker said:

“These rulings will also be of major significance when it comes to dealing with Web 2.0 services like YouTube and MySpace in the future. They show that the mere shifting of the act of use onto the user and the alleged non-controllability of the contents do not release the service operator from its responsibility under copyright law for the contents it makes available on its website for downloading.”

The fight is now much crueler than ever before.
Where is the balance?
On one hand, if copyright laws was successfully imposed, there would be no place for third-world countries in this cyber world. Things are too expensive
On the other hand, if there was no copyright laws, big corporations would have gone bankrupt.

So where is the balance?

Let's take a look of the world music industry as a typical example.
According to ITFacts, in 2004, the top 10 countries where piracy is "at unacceptable levels" are Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Russia, Spain, and Ukraine. In China 85% of music sold is pirated, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said. In Indonesia the rate is 80%. Mexico, Russia, and Ukraine are all cited as having piracy rates of 60% or higher.
However, the same year ,BMI reported revenues of $673 million for the 2004 fiscal year, an increase of nearly $43 million, 6.8% over the prior year. The performing rights organization generated royalties of more than $573 million for its songwriters, composers and music publishers. Royalties increased by $40 million or 7.5% from the previous year. BMI President and CEO Frances W. Preston said both the revenues and royalty distributions were the largest in the company's history (Arstechnica, 2004)
A year later , Apple reported that the iTunes Music Store turned a profit in the fourth quarter of 2005, during its quarterly financial statement Tuesday. Customers are purchasing over 1.8 million songs per day, and the iTunes Music Store controls over 80 percent of the U.S. digital music market (Mac Observers, 2005)
Profiteers are still doing well despite copyrights violation. The fact would tell one simple thing: "Consumers are overcharged. Price could be cheaper". Lowering the price is one of the best solution for piracy crisis.
Lowering price would boost creativity
Either pirated or legal products, consumers still have to pay. They might pay for pirate CD softwares or premium account on Rapidshare. Hence, the difference is the price. As we see from the list of top 10 pirated countries, they are all poor. The poverty didn't show in the nation GDP but annual income per person. How could a farmer's son afford 1000USD for Abobe Photoshop and few hundreds dollars for future upgrading? Without piracy softwares, he would never ever been a computer experts. As Bill Gates was in Bucharest on Thursday ( 1st Feb 2007), the Romanian president Traian Basescu paid the Microsoft boss homage for the value of Windows. Well, paying homage is a lot cheaper than paying for software. Reuters reports had cited:

"Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania," Basescu said during a joint news conference with Gates.

"It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world ...

It sounds unfair to Bill Gates, but it's the fact. Consumers are willing to buy copyrighted products as long as they can afford it.
Conclusion
There will be no ways to stop the PIRACY WAR. The Internet piracy websites is like a 7 headed dragons. When laws makers and enforces chop one head, another head will appears. Unless, there was a global operations to track down and stop all pirates in the world at the same time (which is impossible). The "dragon" is still the "dragon" while the business world still spins with or without him. The most important is to educate people to respect copyrights law because "if you don't want other steal your works, don't do it yourself first".
Courtesy of Borromeoturismo.it

Reference:
“Top 10 countries for music piracy: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Russia, Spain, and Ukraine”. ItFacts.Biz. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007, from
http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P4228

Ken, F. (2004, March 9). “BMI posts record year, despite music industry doom and gloom.” ArsTechnica. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007,, from
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040903-4156.html

Janko, R. (2007, February 1st). “YouTube, MySpace Face European Copyright Clash.” NewTeeVee. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007,, from
http://newteevee.com/2007/02/01/youtube-myspace-face-european-copyright-clash/

February 1, 2007.“Piracy worked for us, Romania president tells Gates”. Reuters. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007,, from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020100715.html