February 2003 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

E-mail versus Web Time/Behavior
by Steven Clift 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

I have seen a number of statistics on the fact that people use e-mail more often than any other online resource. While reports on the time and places spent on web are plentiful, what I haven't found are studies on the average amount of user time spent reading and/or replying to e-mail (or other forms non- web browsing of Internet activity.) How much _time_ does an average U.S. (or other country) Net user spend using e-mail at home or work? How much time does an average worker with Net access spend on personal e-mail versus work e-mail during work hours? What are the difference between different age groups and other demographic factors? On a typical at-home or work computer screen, what window is on top and for what amount of time is each top window being used? Neilsen says that home Internet users average 12 hours a month on the web <http://pm.netratings.com/nnpm/owa/NRpublicreports.usagemonthly> and at-work users 27 hours in December 2002. I wonder how much of this "web" time is actually being spent on web-based e-mail? Finally, are there studies on what people do with their e-mail? What kind of e-mails do people actually read, reply to, delete, forward, save/file, print, etc.? I have seen some studies on opt-in e-mail newsletters click-throughs <http://www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge/trend/email.asp>, is there anything on related e-mail topics from academia? Please reply to: clift(a)publicus.net Steven Clift Visiting Fellow, Institute for New Media Studies University of Minnesota P.S. I have had a great month as a fellow at the University of Minnesota. This short-term visiting fellow model has a lot of mutually beneficial potential. Check out the details from this month <http://www.publicus.net/fellow> and let me know if you'd like to explore something similar for your institution. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Please reply to: clift(a)publicus.net Steven Clift http://www.publicus.net

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Sagas ___developing interactive entertainment workshop____call for participation
by sagasnet 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

Please note the approaching deadline for application for the upcoming _______Developing Interactive Entertainment Workshop Greg Roach (Hyperbole Studios, LA) Part 1 Concepting: 20.3. 26.3.2003, ZKM Karlsruhe Confirmed speakers: Ted Evans, Flextech Television (London) Maureen Thomas, CUMIS Cambridge University Moving Image Studio, Mika Tuomola, Media Lab UIAH, Helsinki Olivier Janin, TeamCHman Part 2 Prototyping: 23.9. 29.9.2003, UIAH, MEDIA LAB, Helsinki Application deadline: 26.2.2003 _______Funding for travel and hotel costs to a limited extend available. In this intensive hands-on workshop the relationship between storytelling, visual media techniques and interactivity will be explored in depth. During part 1 participants work in teams on the development of several interactive narrative concepts, 2 3 of these concepts will be selected for being prototyped in part 2. Preliminary Timetable Part 1 Thursday, March 20 2003 Arrival 4.00 p.m. Guided Tour through FUTURE CINEMA exhibition 6.30 p.m. Meet & Greet (details t.b.a.) Friday, March 21 2003 9.15 a.m. OPENING SPEECH 9.30 a.m. Greg Roach INTRODUCTORY LECTURE I: Basic theories of interactive narrative design, examining the similarities and differences between traditional media, games and interactive entertainment and detailing important conceptual and design principles. 11.15 a.m. Maureen Thomas INTERACTIVITY AND NARRATION - LECTURE with following DISCUSSION 1.45 p.m. Greg Roach INTRODUCTORY LECTURE II Tools, media, production and development - examining the practical reality of creating large-scale interactive media products. 3.30 p.m. Participants presenting individual interactive ideas (5 min max. per person) - group forming process Saturday, March 22 2003 9.15 a.m. Greg Roach INTRODUCTORY LECTURE III: Platform and the marketplace - examining the market and technology forces which have become the gatekeepers of content distribution and identifying strategies for successfully managing these expectations. 11.00 a.m. Mika Tuomola INTERACTOR CHARACTERISATION - LECTURE with following discussion Interactive entertainment emerges in collaboration and/or by accepted rules between the "Authored Actors" (machine agents, bots) and "Interactors" (human agents, users). The encounter of the Actors is dramatic, narrative by the means of character action: the Interactor acts with or within the work and thus drives the whole (temporal-spatial) action of it among the other Actors. In stand-alone computer games, the relationship is generally between Authored Actors and somehow characterised and limited Interactor. On the other hand, online virtual worlds typically put more weight on the relationship between the Interactors. In both cases and the cases in between them, one must emphasise Interactor's characterisation in design: the interactive entertainment must be made effective mainly by the means of necessarily characterised interactions, as drama becomes effective by character actions. 1.30 p.m. Ted Evans STORYBASED iTV APPLICATIONS - PRESENTATION with following DISCUSSION 3.15 p.m. Olivier Janin, BANJA INTERACTIVE FICTION - PRESENTATION with following DISCUSSION BANJA - a award winning - interactive series broadcasted on broadband web portals in Europe, America and Asia brought several innovations, like: -creating within the comedy a dynamic for the audience, both individual and communal, -mixing a scheduled narrative content delivery with an unlimited entertainment area, -interfacing the program with the fiction itself. 5.00 p.m. group work Sunday, March 23 2003 9.30 a.m. Greg Roach GROUP WORK 11.00 p.m. Greg Roach First PRESENTATION of group concepts with following DISCUSSION 1.30 p.m. Greg Roach GROUP WORK Monday, March 24 2003 9.15 a.m. Greg Roach GROUP WORK 11.00 a.m. Greg Roach USER TESTING of group concepts with following DISCUSSION 2.00 p.m. Greg Roach GROUP WORK Tuesday, March 25 2003 9.15 a.m. Greg Roach GROUP WORK 1.00 p.m. Greg Roach PRESENTATION and DISCUSSION of final concepts ____working language: English creative cross-disciplinary workshop addressing writers, director, producers, developers, designers, programmers,... _____more details and application forms available at www.sagas.de Best regards, Brunhild Bushoff ---------------------------- sagas Writing Interactive Fiction c/o Bayerisches Filmzentrum Bavariafilmplatz 7 D-82031 Muenchen-Gruenwald tel + 49 89 64 98 11 30 fax + 49 89 64 98 13 30 mobile + 49 (0) 171 45 28 0 52 URL http://www.sagas.de e-mail info(a)sagas.de a joint initiative of MEDIA Programme TRAINING & Academy for TV and Film Munich

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more on ISPs and freedom of speech
by Sandra Braman 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

A follow-on to my earlier posting of today -- legally responding to ISP restrictions of speech is a difficult matter, for reasons we're now discussing -- but to bring the conversation back to where it started, which was the assumption of individuals who are politically active that switching to AOL or Yahoo in hopes of finding a more open speech environment -- this remains an unfounded assumption. In addition to attempting to push public forum analysis of ISPs through the courts, other approaches to trying to create, protect, or maintain an environment for free speech in the net by working with ISP terms of service include: - forming groups of users (such as all libraries, or all universities) large enough to negotiate preferred terms of service with ISPs (in the way that large business-oriented buildings get their own terms). - identifying protection of free speech as a market niche for an ISP that will choose to market itself that way. (with the problem, as we've recently seen, that such an ISP must have its own backbone or there is the possibility of being shut down by the backbone operator). - education of users to generate a shift in public attitude regarding what is acceptable in ISP terms of service and acceptable use policies. Sandra Braman

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ISPs, state action, and public forums
by Sandra Braman 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

Eric Goldman is correct, of course, that ISPs are not entities of the state and therefore do not involve state action. However -- and I didn't mention this earlier because I was trying to be brief rather than spelling out the entire argument of the piece -- ISPs now function as quasi-public forums because they are fundamental to the ways in which we communicate via the internet. As quasi-public forums, constitutional standards must be met in order to restrict speech. I'm arguing that public forum analysis must be applied to ISPs. This, too, has been raised in court but earlier on, before terms of service began to become harmonized with each other, and before the internet had become so significant as a medium of public communication. The claim is not that what ISPs are doing is illegal -- but that because they now are the gateway to the public spaces of communication the trends in terms of service and acceptable use policies are of serious importance and can have the EFFECT of completely undermining constitutional protections for political speech so carefully built up over so many environments. Sandra Braman

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Re: [Air-l] Book request
by Lisa-Jane McGerty 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

Many thanks to everyone who replied to me about getting hold of 'A Sociology of Monsters'. Its such a shame that the publishers let it go out of print despite the fact that almost everyone who mailed me said what a great book it is (and I agree!). I've been referring to it on and off for the last 4 years and had finally gotten fed up with borrowing it from libraries so had decided to buy a copy. Before I realised that its out of print, that is. Anyway, I'll keep trying the various book search facilities that people suggested - you never know. Thanks again Lisa Lisa McGerty Applied Social Sciences University of Bradford, UK ----- Original Message ----- From: Lisa-Jane McGerty <L.J.Mcgerty(a)Bradford.ac.uk> To: <air-l(a)aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 4:13 PM Subject: [Air-l] Book request > I am trying to track down a copy of the following book and thought members > of this list might be just the kind of people to have a copy lying around! I > need: > > A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination > John Law (ed) > 1991 > Routledge > > Apparently the book is out of print and despite much searching in book shops > and elsewhere I just can't get old of a copy to buy. If you happen to have a > spare copy that I could buy from you (of course I'll pay postage too) please > contact me off list. I know its a long shot but... > > Lisa > > Lisa McGerty > Applied Social Sciences > University of Bradford, UK > > > _______________________________________________ > Air-l mailing list > Air-l(a)aoir.org > http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l >

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NYTimes.com Article: Ratings Agency Says It Erred in Measuring Web Site Use
by frankthomasft＠netscape.net 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by frankthomasft(a)netscape.net. this sounds interesting: web audience mesurement agencies are not interested having independant auditors as "the internet is so different" /Frank Thomas frankthomasft(a)netscape.net Ratings Agency Says It Erred in Measuring Web Site Use February 24, 2003 By SAUL HANSELL ComScore Media Metrix, one of the leading companies that measure Web site audiences, has discovered flaws in the methodology that it introduced in October, and it has restated its measurements for the last three months of 2002. Web ratings services have faced questions about accuracy since they began trying to estimate audiences by projecting the behavior of a panel of presumably representative users. Despite their limits, ComScore's ratings, and those of its main competitor, Nielsen/NetRatings, are widely used by advertisers, investors, journalists and the Web sites themselves. The biggest differences in ComScore's ratings, announced last week, come in its estimates of Web use at the workplace, always the most difficult to measure. Big companies in particular do not want employees to install the software that the ratings companies use to track Web site usage. When ComScore adjusted its formulas to account for the underrepresentation at big companies, its audience projections increased, in some cases sharply. For instance, ComScore now estimates that Primedia's sites, mainly those run by about.com, had 56 million users in the United States in December, rather than the 44 million counted under its previous formula, a 25 percent increase. EBay's audience was increased 19 percent, to 54 million. The estimate for Terra Lycos was increased 21 percent, to 51.6 million users. That change moved Terra Lycos to the sixth-most-visited site in December, from seventh under the previous numbers, putting it in front of Google. As with any ranking, being placed at No. 1 is an invitation to gloat. WeatherBug, a fast-growing service of AWS Convergence Technology, has noted in news releases that it is "the No. 1 source for weather information on the Web, according to ComScore Media Metrix." ComScore's restated data, however, shows WeatherBug second to Weather.com, the site run by the Weather channel, owned by Landmark Communications. "There was some bragging rights associated with being No. 1," said Andy Jedynak, the general manager of WeatherBug. "To the extent we have lost those, we are disappointed." WeatherBug's bragging, of course, did not go down so easily at Weather- .com, which was still listed as the No. 1 weather site by Nielsen. "It was annoying," the chief executive of Weather.com, Deborah Wilson, said, " I can't say that it undermined our sales efforts, but to have obviously bad data floating around was a nuisance." The restatements result from the financial collapse last June of Jupiter Media Metrix, a company that combined Web audience measurement with Internet prognostication. As Jupiter was disassembled, it sold the Media Metrix business and its panel of Web users to ComScore, an upstart with a different technology that was created mainly to monitor products that Web users bought online. However, the software program that Media Metrix had used to track Web audiences was not sold to ComScore but to Nielsen, ending a patent dispute between the two companies. ComScore very quickly had to start using its own monitoring technology. It also expanded the size of the Media Metrix panel of users at work, introducing in October what it called Media Metrix 2.0. In response to complaints by its clients, the company has discovered some flaws in its new system. It decided to publish restated data for last fall rather than change its formulas from now on. "We could have made these changes on a forward basis," Peter Daboll, president of ComScore's Media Metrix division, said. "We felt it was the right thing to do to make the changes to provide an accurate trend." Marketers and adverting experts agreed that ComScore's approach ultimately improves the quality of the data available. "It's kind of embarrassing to have to admit this," said Rex Briggs, the principal of Marketing Evolution, an online advertising research firm. "I applaud them for trying to make their measurements better." The impact of a restatement, even of this magnitude, Mr. Briggs added, is less now than it would have been a few years ago, when billion-dollar deals were made on the basis of Media Metrix ratings. "Stock prices are no longer tied to the number of unique visitors you have," Mr. Briggs said. "Now investors have this little idea of being profitable." Furthermore, these audience measures are not used to set Internet advertising rates, as they are in radio and television. Since broadcasters have no way to tell how many people are watching a given program, they must use Nielsen's television ratings to determine how much to charge advertisers. On the Internet, Web sites charge to display an advertisement a certain number of times. Still, some industry executives worry that the restatement will add further doubt about the online medium, which is still trying to establish its credibility with marketers. "They have some explaining to do," said Geoffrey Ramsey, an analyst with eMarketer, a research firm that uses data from ComScore, Nielsen and other sources. This uncertainty and potential undercounting of daytime audiences is especially problematic for news and information sites, which are used mostly by people at work. "Daytime is prime time on the Internet," said Michael Zimbalist, executive director of the Online Publishers Association, a trade group. "The at-work numbers of the ratings companies are notoriously bad." The biggest changes that ComScore made involved how it estimated work audiences. But there were other issues as well. For example, after the acquisition, ComScore changed its method for calculating how much time users spend on each site, in some cases cutting the numbers by far more than half. Some publishers that boasted that their users spent an hour a month on their site, an unusually high amount of time, found the new system giving them credit for only 15 minutes. ComScore discovered that it had been allocating some of the time that users spend on some Web pages to the sites of advertisers rather than the Web publisher. Its revised system changes that. Not surprisingly ComScore and Nielsen each insist that their methods are more statistically rigorous. ComScore says that its sample of people at work has 30,000 people, far more than the 7,000 claimed by Nielsen. Nielsen, by contrast, says its work panel is chosen by placing phone calls to random telephone numbers, an expensive but methodologically superior method. ComScore uses various other methods to recruit its work panel, like sending e-mail messages to random names on lists it buys. It does not help that Nielsen and ComScore are vastly different in their estimates of most sites' audiences. ComScore, for example, now says Yahoo had 107 million users in the United States in December. Nielsen counted only 81 million. Some of that difference is because ComScore measures usage on college campuses and Nielsen does not. But the difference in the estimates of Yahoo's audience, 26 million users, far exceeds the total American dormitory population. ComScore claims that its numbers are far closer to the internal counts generated by Web site operators. But William Pulver, chief executive of NetRatings Inc., the company that publishes the Nielsen/NetRatings measurements, argues that there are good reasons that a measurement service will count fewer people than a site's own computers. "Just because numbers are higher doesn't mean they are more accurate," he said. Many advertisers and publishers, however, say they are tired of such claims and counterclaims and want both rating services to submit to the sort of independent audits that are regularly conducted of the services that measure traditional media. Both ratings services have so far refused, saying the audits are expensive and apply standards that are not realistic for the Internet. "There is no consistency over time or common guidelines applied to either of these services," Mr. Zimbalist said. "They need to be audited just like radio and television ratings." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/technology/24NET.html?ex=1047086118&ei=1&… HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales(a)nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help(a)nytimes.com. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

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Yahoo! News Story - How the Protesters Mobilized
by Yahoo!News 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

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Re: How anti-Iraq war protesters employed technology
by Michel J. Menou 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

alrao> Message: 4 alrao> Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 08:45:48 -0600 alrao> To: air-l(a)aoir.org alrao> From: Steve Jones <sjones(a)uic.edu> alrao> Subject: Re: [Air-l] FC: How anti-Iraq war protesters employed technology, alrao> from NYT alrao> Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org snip alrao> before it in this regard: One is the internet's relative alrao> instantaneity, another its reach to so many people, and another is alrao> the inherent "copy-ability" of internet communication (e.g., the ease alrao> of forwarding, posting). Which of these matters most, or are they all alrao> equal? And what I'd like to know more than that: Is there something alrao> else, something about the internet as a medium, that makes it more alrao> than a faster/broader medium in comparison to what has come before it? It seems to me that reach is unprecedented, together with instantaneity, or at least fastness, in that we have a worldwide (at least at major cities level) communication. Another aspect is that even if the security agencies do monitor, the traffic is, when it occurs, relatively safe for the actors, compared with the level of control, cut and counter-action that was exposed in using previous tools. I remember a time when the only outside link in an African country in situations of "crisis" was telex and all tlex messages were passing through a special office of the Ministry of interior. No single aspect is imo decisive, it is the combination of all of them that makes the difference. But may be one may add another key factor, blue sky (when it is still blue) hypothesis: the sense of a worldwide community created in part by the other formal characteristics, and also by an emotional sense of belonging to a cybercommunity, which is, delete as appropriate, new, different, promising, etc. Michel

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The internet and "critical mass"
by KeithDoyon＠aol.com 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

In a message dated 2/23/2003 5:20:41 PM Mountain Standard Time, dsilver(a)u.washington.edu writes: > yes, many past communication technologies, including those mentioned by > steve, have elements of this but what other medium has the whole shebang > and is used by so many? Which exactly takes us back to Yvonne Waern's most emphatic observation: "Now, however, I would like to say that we have reached the "critical mass" people use to talk about. The source of this metaphor is another example of how quantity brings quality." (not sure that the souce of the metaphor demonstrates quality, but it sure as h*ll provided for a bang). The internet (it's a small "i" now, and I'll be happy to discuss that with anyone in a new thread) has clearly reached critical mass. It's entered the public domain, it has a life, and a direction of it's own. And it's become, in every literal sense, indispensible. For all of Steve's factors, for Yvonne's factors, for David's insightful additions, perhaps for more not yet listed, the internet is dramatically bigger than the sum of it's parts. My experience only goes back to my 150 baud Apple II of 1980, but I share Yvonne's view. The internet is no BBS. It's metamorphasized into something quite qualitatively different. The sine qua non of the information age? I think that that's the singular reason we are all so very much interested in it. Keith

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RE: [Air-l] free speech via ISPs
by ericgoldman＠onebox.com 23 Feb '03

23 Feb '03

Only "state actors" are obligated to adhere to the First Amendment. Private ISPs are not state actors, and more than a handful of legal cases have confirmed this (the 2 seminal cases are CompuServe v. Cyber Promotions and AOL v. Cyber Promotions). So it's not accurate to say in this context that a user can waive First Amendment protection by contract; because the First Amendment does not restrict private ISPs, irrespective of their contract. Eric. -- Eric Goldman Marquette University Law School ericgoldman(a)onebox.com Personal home page: http://eric_goldman.tripod.com -----Original Message----- From: Sandra Braman <sbraman(a)wi.rr.com> Sent: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 11:54:34 -0600 To: air-l(a)aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] free speech via ISPs David Silver comments that many folks he knows are opening yahoo or other accounts separate from those they hold at universities and/or their employers and/or with smaller ISPs because of fear that political speech during these times may be restricted in those other venues. Before assuming that any particular type or specific example of a type of ISP-like service provider offers anything different in the way of potential constraints on free speech, read the terms of service and/or acceptable use policies! I did a comparative study of these agreements from about 30 different ISP-like entities (currently in press as Advadntage ISP: Terms of service as media law (with Stephanie Lynch), in Lorrie Cranor & Steve Wildman, Eds., RETHINKING RIGHTS AND REGULATIONS: INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES TO NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (Cambridge: MIT Press). As they existed in spring of 2002, the time of the study, there was not much difference across ISPs on this point and almost all of them constrained speech rights in ways that would be deemed unconstitutionally overbroad were they not agreed to by the contract that is your agreement with your service provider. Historically one has always been able to sign away one's First Amendment rights by contract, but historically that has only affected a few, in circumstances in which there were other alternatives to agreeing to the contract. Under current circumstances, as ISP terms of service and acceptable use policies increasingly conform, we have no choice but to sign these agreements. A serious threat to free speech. Sandra Braman

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