Previously on Skandalon

Previously on Skandalon

“Facebook’s Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long; the United States Constitution, without any of its amendments, is a concise 4,543 words. […] To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet.”

Read the related article by Nick Bilton : “Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking”

The Boing Boing post links back to Susannah Breslin’s personal blog which is not very informative. More information can be found about this phenomenon under the term “haul video”, “haul videos”, “mall haul” or “makeup haul”:

“Haul videos are the democratization of the home shopping network. They typically feature teen girls just back from the mall, shopping bag in hand, gushing over their purchases (or “haul”) to their webcam to be uploaded to YouTube for the world to see. […]A search for Haul at YouTube returns 105,000 videos. A spot check reveals that surprisingly few of these videos are for U-Haul or another unrelated topic. What more could a retailer ask for that enthusiastic, peer-to-peer endorsements of their shopping experiences? Retailers should be cultivating if not deliberately encouraging the creation of these videos.” (read more over at David Erikson’s blog)

Have the consumer buy form you, have the consumer work for you:

“On YouTube, there are a new set of viral videos called “Haul” videos. These are videos posted by everyday people talking about the stuff they bought on their most recent shopping spree. Some name each items with cost, some are just showing off the items they bought. Some people are showing off how much they saved. There are a few videos that get more then 200,000 viewers them. This could be a treasure trove for local businesses.” (A Guide to Haul Viral Videos)

A “haul” is a cargo. Thus “haul vloggers” could be understand as human carriers, loaded with objects, speaking about those things (or literaly through them, as in the screen capture above), existentialy concerned by all this equipment. Now two things about that :

1) In its general form, it’s not a new phenomenon. Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” back in 1899 in his book The Theory of the Leisure Classe. Veblen was a major inspiration for Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society (1970);

2) It will be a mistake to associate this phenomenon strictly with teen girls. We all brag to a certain degree about what we buy, may it be books, DVDs, CDs, tools, wine, etc. We may not do it in front of a camera, but we speak about it, we post about it, we tell friends about it (Marco Arment, the lead developer of Tumblr, is currently buying a new BMW). That may be why some are thinking Blippy ―a kind of Twitter where you post about items you just bought― could become the next big thing (it launched last December).

The New York Times: “Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story?” by Nick Bilton, March 8, 2010

“I called up an expert on language for some insight into this issue: Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer and editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Mr. Sheidlower said the evolution of meaning and interpretation is natural for language. He considers it entirely possible that a younger generation growing up online might understand “like” to mean something different than older folks do.

“People are posting very heartfelt feelings on these social sites, and the option is to either like it or comment,” he said. “I don’t think it changes the meaning of the word, but there is a disjunct that is happening here, and it forces you to think of the word that is pointing to a story and not necessarily the content within it.”

“Like” clearly isn’t the only word that is seeing a change to its context or understanding. We are starting to perceive the word “friend” differently, too, thanks to social networking services.

“There’s a point when these friends are really just people I have in common with others, or people I’ve only met once, but ‘friend’ is the only word available to say you know this person, even though they are simply connections,” Mr. Sheidlower said.” (more)

“Last but not least, Tumblr plans to launch two revenue generating features next month. Details are scarce (all we know is they’ll be powered by the widget, pictured below), but with constant talk of Twitter’s revenue generating plans (which are still completely open to interpretation), it’ll be interesting to see how Tumblr plans to tackle the issue. Its success (or lack thereof) might pave the way for microblogging networks (although Tumblr arguably stands in the middle, between blogging and microblogging), an area traditionally devoid of revenue.

About Mashable:

“Mashable is an Internet news blog, started by Pete Cashmore in July 2005. With a reported 7+ million monthly pageviews and an Alexa ranking just over 400, it ranks as one of the largest blogs on the Internet. Mashable regularly writes about YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, Apple and startups, but it also reports on less high-profile social networking and social media sites. Mashable is popular on many social networks. As of December 21, 2009, it has over 1.8 million Twitter followers, over 90,000 fans on Facebook, and over 330,000 RSS subscribers.” (wikipedia)

Check Mashable’s “About Us” page.

First spotted via Oueb Niouzes.

“Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Some titles with distinct patterns are Mad Men, Obsessed and Last Chance Harvey.”

In New York City, people who watch Mad Men mainly live in the Financial District and in Downtown Brooklyn. Those are two of the most important central business district of NYC.