Beginning May 16th, I wrote a series of diaries here that sought to heighten awareness of the renewed and refreshed strident militance being shown by the Israeli government toward critics, and sought to bring more attention to the flotilla of boats and ships determined to lift the illegal siege of Gaza.
Saturday evening, as the flotilla was leaving the vicinity of Cyprus, I began a live blog post here. Sunday afternoon, as the flotilla neared the Levantine coast, Siun took over. Her firedoglake post ended up collecting information almost in real time, as the most serious attack by a foreign power in history on a collection of boats flagged by NATO members unfolded.
The blogs mondoweiss and Daily Kos also contained posts which sought to live blog the crime as it played out.
On May 16th, I noted that the freighter, MV Rachel Corrie, was leaving Irish waters, to join vessels already in the Mediterranean.
On May 20th, in light of Elvis Costello’s cancellation of an Israel concert tour, I speculated that it might be time to consider gathering artists together to create a 2010 version of the pivotal protest album from 1985, Sun City. That album helped galvanize resistance to the South African government policy of Apartheid.
On May 22, I noted the absence of mainstream media, especially in the USA, toward the gathering of vessels for the flotilla, and wondered how the approach of the the small fleet to the Gaza coast might be covered.
On May 25, I wrote about the assembly of boats, their problems, and the mounting evidence that the IDF would forcefully attempt to commandeer the vessels. I was concerned.
On Saturday May 29, I began the live blog, which was passed on to Siun yesterday, during her regular Sunday afternoon slot.
I’ve learned a lot from the process of writing about this. Foremost, perhaps, is that in spite of the stated IDF intention of isolating the vessels from being able to emit real time information during the attack, they were unsuccessful. As in the demonstrations in Iran in the wake of their farcical election last year, people managed to bypass jamming and blackouts, through workarounds or through discovery that government jamming had holes in it.
Twitter, through hundreds of cell phones on board the vessels, described the attacks in terse tweets from bloodstained decks. These tweets were passed back and forth between twitter sites throughout last night, as they aggregated incoming news from many early sources.
The Turkish video feed from the large cruise ship, where most casualties occurred will become iconic, even as the IDF releases their night vision videos that seek to purport the IDF was responding to a "lynch mob" as it opened fire on dozens of unarmed civilians, attempting to defend themselves from a brazen, illegal act in international waters.
Norman Finkelstein’s 2009 book about the 2008-2009 Gaza invasion is titled This Time We Went Too Far. It is an apt title. Many of us have experienced how friends or relatives finally stopped straddling the fence over how Israel conducts itself, as we and they witnessed the barbarity of the IDF assault on schools, hospitals, clinics, fire departments, bakeries, dairies and houses in the besieged Gaza enclave.
This time, the IDF went too far in ways that may be pivotal. Juan Cole, writing this morning, observes:
It is worth noting on Memorial Day that the Israeli attack deeply complicates the task of the US military in the region. It is a propaganda boon for Sunni extremists and Shiite activists such as Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, and for the Taliban in Afghanistan. It undermines the authority of the Egyptian and Jordanian governments, which have US-brokered peace treaties with Israel, treaties that are deeply unpopular with ordinary people in both countries. That some demonstrations are being held in front of US consulates and not just Israeli ones tells us who will get the blame for Netanyahu’s machismo.
Turkish-Israeli relations, already in an abysmal state, might never recover. Turkey has recalled its ambassador to Israel. The attack on several NATO-related vessels, in international waters, and without provocation, as noted above, is unprecedented. Turkey will be right to bring this before the NATO North Atlantic Council, which meets about once per week. The United Nations Security Council is meeting right now about the attack, with the Secretary General having already made a harsh statement.
If the flotilla was actually moving away from the coast when boarded, after having responded to IDF enquiries regarding intent and course, this is a lost cause for the Israelis to defend. They have no claim that their response was appropriate.
Some, if not all, of the vessels were giving out position reports up to the boarding. The record of these is indelible. The Turks will surely bring this fact up to the North Atlantic Council this week, and it may have been brought up today at the UN Security Council.
A Daily Kos Diary, analyzing NATO responsibilities regarding Turkey in this matter, has hundreds of comments, Here is the key part of NATO doctrine that might pertain directly to actions after this attack:
Israel’s attack on the MV Blue Mamara, a Turkish vessel, means they just attacked a member of NATO. According to the NATO Charter, Article 5
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
If you think there is wiggle room in that definition, you would be mistaken. Article 6 is explicit about where attacks will trigger responses. Vessels in the Mediterranean Sea are mentioned explicitly.
The Israeli Prime Minister has cut short a North American trip that was to conclude with a White House meeting Tuesday. He’s had to return home to prepare for the Third Intifada, and to attempt to salvage diplomatic relations with a number of counties besides just Turkey.
Within the American progressive community Israel has always had and still has staunch supporters of every action by the IDF or Israeli government. But those numbers were severely diminished by this highly criminal attack. But, as a commenter at Mondoweissobserved this morning:
There are now 4 diaries on the rec list at Daily Kos condemning the Israeli piracy. Even during Cast Lead, this didn’t happen.
Other lefty blogs that generally avoid discussing Israel/Palestine issues at all will, should they continue to blind themselves in this matter, lose readers and influence.
A very important article recently appeared in the New York Review of Books. In The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, by Peter Beinart, the author explains in detail how the large family size and emigration into Israel of ultra Orthodox inhabitants and their growing influence on internal Israeli politics will inevitably force young American Jews who are liberal to forsake support for the Zionist state and its brutal expansionist goals. The article has caused quite a stir, to say the least.
Israel has succeeded, in last night’s attack, in further isolating itself as an increasingly rogue nation. Some are even predicting an implosion there, similar to those of Apartheid South Africa, or of the Warsaw Pact communist governments.
Two things are certain though. Twitter, as a driver of non-MSM instant information has come of age.
And firedoglake, thanks to Siun and our commenting community, has once again led the way in live blogging a pivotal moment.
Twitter allows any account holder to create public or private 'lists' on his or her page. On Twitter, a 'list' is an automatically refreshing stream of tweets in real time. While there are many types of people using Twitter for many different purposes, one large easily identifiable group consists of people and organizations who specialize in providing current content.
I've taken advantage of all these Twitter feature to create on my page there six (6) lists, each reflecting one of the six content areas on which Starting Points research blog focuses. All six are set to public. One list, southeast-asia, is ready-to-view, and should be accessible to all (logged-in 'twerps') with one click on its name here. For persons interested in Southeast Asia, t's a vastly more stimulating experience to read these tweets than anything one can find on places like Yahoo Groups, the whole of Facebook, or even Google News and Google Blog Search.
IT had all the elements for the perfect tabloid gossip item — a clash between star financial journalists, big egos and a surprise ouster that had Wall Street buzzing: Henry Blodget, the well-known disgraced-analyst-turned-financial-pundit and co-founder of the much-read blog, The Business Insider, stunned the financial community last week by firing John Carney, the star managing editor of the site’s Clusterstock blog, reportedly because of philosophical differences over the site’s coverage.
The news, which was quickly picked up by the Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, who subsequently sparked an online spat of his own with Mr. Blodget, did not break in a gossip column like The New York Post’s Page Six or in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which in a previous era might have owned this story. Rather, the scoop came from a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer.
Surfing the Web after business hours one evening, Mr. Kamer ran across speculation about Mr. Carney’s job status on a Twitter post by Gawker Media’s owner, Nick Denton. After 90 minutes of phone calls to sources within the financial journalism subculture, Mr. Kamer nailed down the item and posted it on the Voice site. The lines between “reporter” and “blogger,” “gossip” and “news” have blurred almost beyond distinction. No longer is blogging something that marginalized editorial wannabes do from home, in a bathrobe, because they haven’t found a “real” job. Blogging now is a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence and an actual paycheck. As more gossip action in a variety of fields moves online, young writers who might have hungrily chased an editorial assistant job at Condé Nast a few years ago now move to New York with the dream of making it as a blogger — either launching their own blog into the big time, à la Perez Hilton, or getting snapped up by a prominent blog network like Gawker Media or MediaBistro. And although the better-known newspaper gossip columnists still churn along, among them Richard Johnson and Cindy Adams of The New York Post, and George Rush and Joanna Molloy of The New York Daily News, much of the action has moved online, with the up-and-coming players having little in common with legendary predecessors like Walter Winchell and Liz Smith. While Ms. Smith, 87 and still active, toiled in journalism for nearly 30 years before getting her own by-lined column (working first, among other things, as a typist, proofreader and radio producer), some of the newest notables in gossip are still in their 20s and only a few years removed from the days when they blogged from their college dorm rooms about fraternity hazing mishaps and the quality of the cafeteria food.
The following are profiles of nine emerging gossip bloggers, whose names came up in interviews with influential blog entrepreneurs, fellow bloggers and other journalists as potential future stars of the online world. The list, by no means exhaustive, represents a cross-section of New Yorkers covering varied beats — entertainment, fashion, real estate, finance —for a variety of prominent blog networks. Some, like Sara Polsky of Curbed and Lilit Marcus of The Gloss, are relatively new to the business, but recently installed in a position of prominence by Web star-makers like Lockhart Steele, who runs Curbed and Eater, or Elizabeth Spiers, a founder of Gawker in 2002 who has introduced a number of successful blogs since then. Others, like Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com, are popular niche players who are quickly crossing into the mainstream.
If you’re starting a high-profile blog in the already saturated, and fiercely competitive, celebrity-gossip category, you had better have an edge. And Elizabeth Spiers, who debuted Crushable last month for the Canadian company b5media, says she has a plan to differentiate her new blog from the competition, including heavyweights like Perez Hilton, who happens to have been a roommate years ago, and new sites like Bonnie Fuller’s Hollywood Life. Go young.
Crushable, run by the 29-year-old Ms. Carlson, a former Associated Press entertainment reporter, seeks to leave the bulk of the Brangelina coverage to the other guys and focus more on a Teen Vogue-ish 15-to-25-year-old female market. So look out for more news on more hunky young stars like Matt Bomer of “White Collar” and Cory Monteith of “Glee,” as well as tweens like Lourdes Leon, Madonna’s 13-year-old fashion designer daughter.
Ms. Carlson seems well-pedigreed for her job. At The Associated Press, she reported the story of the $14 million sale of photos of the Brad-Angelina twins, and last year, the story of Sean Penn’s split from his wife, Robin Wright Penn.
NOTABLE SCOOP: Reported this week that the rumored relationship between Rob Kardashian and Angela Simmons, which some gossips had speculated was a Kardashian family publicity stunt, was real, according to a source.
Short indeed is the list of fashion influencers whose journey to that tent in Bryant Park took a detour through a biomedical-engineering course load at Duke University. But that’s what Ms. Fitzpatrick, now 25, was mired in when she started Fashionologie in her dorm room in 2005 as a kind of study break. In five years, she has managed to distance herself from the infinite number of would-be Anna Wintours blogging from their bedrooms and actually made the industry insiders take notice. Fashionologie now attracts 1.5 million page-views a month, and has seen a 45 percent increase in visits over the last year, according to Ms. Fitzpatrick, and is being linked to established fashion sites like Refinery29 and The Cut at New York Magazine.
While primarily a news aggregator and style curator, as opposed to a gotcha-style gossip columnist, Ms. Fitzpatrick, is driving traffic while providing plenty of original content of late. In competition with rival sites like Fashionista, she reports from the front lines at the shows in Paris, London and Milan, and interviews designers like Alexander Wang and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy. She routinely mines online fashion forums for tips, sources and insider arcana (when Vogue’s André Leon Talley joined Twitter, you read about it in Fashionologie).
NOTABLE SCOOP: She recently reported that Alexander McQueen had done final fittings on a substantial part of his fall collection before his death.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Posted one item recently describing a Twitter account supposedly belonging to Anna Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer. But when she noticed that it linked to one purporting to be be her mother’s, which had only one tweet (“those poseurs got to stop”), she determined it to be bogus and quickly removed the item.
FOSTER KAMER: Staff writer, The Village Voice news blog, Runnin’ Scared
Mr. Kamer may cite The Village Voice’s co-founder, Norman Mailer, as a personal inspiration, but online he comes off a bit like a Wi-Fi era hybrid of J. J. Hunsecker and H. L. Mencken, delivering missives on the news media, politics and New York culture in an acerbic, knowing tone — even by Gawker alumni standards —sometimes at lengths that call to mind Op-Ed essays more than gossip items. The former weekend editor at Gawker and assistant editor at BlackBook.com, he seems to know everyone and everything about the tight-knit — some might say incestuous — New York online-gossip subculture. The big figures in that subculture consider Mr. Kamer a rising force. “He’s supremely talented,” said Mr. Steele, when asked his opinion on which rising stars to focus on for this article. “He qualifies as a must-include.”
Mr. Kamer, who started at The Voice last month, wasted little time afflicting the comfortable. An off-color wisecrack about James Dolan in a recent item about the media mogul’s rumored purchase of the Gothamist blog may have cost his paper more than $20,000 in advertising revenue; the IFC Center, a Dolan property, recently pulled a $400-a-week ad from The Voice, Mr. Kamer claimed in his blog. The square-off inspired Gawker’s Adrian Chen to joke in a recent item that his former colleague “has been busily blogging the Village Voice to financial ruin.”
It might be a reasonable price to pay for alternative weekly if Mr. Kamer can help The Voice, struggling for an identity along with most alternative weeklies in the Internet era, end up with its biggest gossip must-read since James Ledbetter in the ’90s.
NOTABLE SCOOP: The John Carney story.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: At Gawker, he ran an item about a University of Minnesota journalism professor excoriating the traditional news organizations for ignoring the Jon and Kate Gosselin story. The story, picked up from The Huffington Post, turned out to be a satirical piece written by the humorist Andy Borowitz.
No one thought the world needed another media gossip site when Dan Abrams, a former general manager of MSNBC, started Mediaite.com last July. But at least he brought in a credentialed team — including the well-known media blogger Rachel Sklar — to help him elbow his way into a crowded market. At 26, Mr. Krakauer is not only the site’s youngest editor, but also a seasoned reporter in his own right. He honed his skills as an assistant editor at MediaBistro’s influential TVNewser site, which became an industry staple under former editor Brian Stelter, now a New York Times media reporter.
He is already starting to break a steady stream of scoops, like his posts that reported that ABC was planning a major layoff in February, or the story last October that Fox News’s 3 a.m. show was getting better ratings than CNN’s 8 p.m. primetime show — a fact that Fox later worked into an advertising campaign. Some in the news media are starting to take notice. Last year, Rush Limbaugh quoted Mr. Krakauer’s TVNewser podcast with Terry Moran, the co-anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” in his radio show. The Hollywood site The Wrap listed him along with Ryan Seacrest and The Los Angeles Times media reporter, Joe Flint, on its list of “50 TV Insiders to Follow Right Now” on Twitter last fall.
NOTABLE SCOOP: His post in February about the NBC cafeteria’s fried chicken menu in honor of Black History Month had Wanda Sykes joking about it on Jay Leno that night.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Last August, reported that Fox News’s Twitter account had been hacked and littered with nasty comments about Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly — a juicy scoop, except that the account was a hoax.
Success is often just being in the right place at the right time. So it was perhaps fortuitous that Bess Levin’s former co-editor at this sharp-fanged financial gossip site, John Carney, left it for Ms. Levin to run solo in the fall of 2008, just as blood was starting to flow on Wall Street. Since then, Ms. Levin has elbowed her way into an exclusive and still heavily male club, becoming a must-read not only for $250,000-a-year-bonus investment bank drones wondering which boss’s head is about to roll, but also among the corner-office types themselves. Financial powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, as well as hedge fund managers like Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, have been known to visit the site.
In February, Dealbreaker was named one of the 10 best Wall Street blogs by The Wall Street Journal’s David Weidner, who wrote that “Dealbreaker is full of Wall Street snark and has a potty mouth to boot.” Of the 10, Ms. Levin’s was only one of two written by a woman (though a few are anonymous), and certainly the only one by a woman who was 25 and never worked on the Street.
NOTABLE SCOOP: After BusinessWeek published a profile of Mr. Cohen in 2003 that referred to, but did not show, party invitations that his wife sent out of the prominent but discreet hedge-fund manager dressed up in a king costume, the invitations entered into Wall Street lore, sight unseen. Ms. Levin finally dug up an image of the regal invitation and ran it last November.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Published an “unfounded rumor” that a major hedge fund’s prime brokers were threatening liquidation at the height of the financial mess in late 2008. It turns out the rumor was indeed “unfounded,” so she quickly removed it under pressure.
The Gloss, a fashion and beauty site that also focuses on career, dating, women’s issues and culture, is another new site in the growing b5 media stable that was overseen by Elizabeth Spiers, a challenge of sorts to Jezebel.com. Ms. Marcus, 27, is its highly regarded editor. Before taking over at Jewcy.com, an irreverent blog about Jewish issues and culture, in 2008, Ms. Marcus founded SaveTheAssistants.com, a forum that gave beleaguered assistants a place to sound off anonymously about their jerk bosses, like the one who stole a book from his assistant and gave it to his girlfriend. The site grew out of her grueling experience as an administrative assistant for a media company.
The site, which she later spun off into a book, attracted attention on National Public Radio and CNN.com, which compared the tales on the site with those on “The Office”: “Bosses like Michael Scott do exist and employees have to deal with them every day,” the article reported. “The good news is they don’t have to commiserate alone.” Even though Ms. Marcus has never named the company that inspired the site, its management still threatens to sue her, she said. “There’s a saying where I come from: ‘if they’re shooting at you, you’re doing something right,” the North Carolina-bred Ms. Marcus said. “I think about that a lot as a gossip writer.”
While Ms. Marcus and Ms. Spiers acknowledge the inevitable Jezebel comparisons, they also bristle. The site, which focuses on fashion and beauty as much as the latest from the feminist writer Cynthia Ozick, aims to be lighter, Ms. Spiers said. “The Gloss is more playful, it’s funnier,” she said of her site, which relies heavily on fashion and beauty as well as stories about bigger women’s issues. “Jezebel is more Ms. Magazine. The Gloss is not a humor site, but humor is one of its key components.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: A recent Gloss item about tensions between Tinsley Mortimer and her sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer, was picked up by Page Six.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: It’s early, and no major strike-throughs yet, although the site did take some heat from fashion bloggers for not doing more to get the other side on a recent post about an alleged sexual overture by the photographer Terry Richardson toward one of his models.
A Columbia Law-educated former corporate lawyer from Hollis, Queens, whose previous professional apogee was founding a high-end laundry and dry-cleaning service, Mr. Mwangaguhunga came to blogging in his third decade of life, a little late to qualify as a prodigy. But that doesn’t seem to have held him back. In four years, his site, which focuses on the urban culture industries, now attracts a following of five million unique visitors a month; traffic grew by 125 percent last year alone. His items are routinely picked up by sites like TMZ.com, enhancing his reputation — which he is perfectly happy to encourage — as the Matt Drudge of African-American entertainment.
And lately, mainstream journalists and sites are starting to pay a lot more attention. Mediaite.com, the media gossip blog, called him one of the top online blog editors of 2009 and explaining: “The site, which covers black celebrity gossip, boasts an enormous readership and regularly breaks big stories. To wit: they called Lady Gaga’s decision to pull out of Kanye West’s tour a day before it was reported elsewhere, and — if this can be called a scoop — they were the first to run the infamous nude Rihanna pictures.” Meanwhile, the site’s first post about Chris Brown’s assault on his former girlfriend attracted 100,000 hits in its first few minutes, Mr. Mwangaguhunga said.
Last year, The New York Beacon, a newspaper that focuses on African-American issues, praised his “significant reach in the vastly ignored urban community.” And Mr. Mwangaguhunga himself seems supremely confident about his site’s future: “If done properly, I don’t see any reason why MediaTakeOut can’t be as popular as TMZ.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: That news about Lady Gaga.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Announced the birth of the N.F.L. player Vince Young’s daughter, before paternity tests showed that the child was not his.
MAUREEN O’CONNOR: Weekend and night editor, Gawker
Talk about coming of age in the Internet era. Ms. O’Connor, 25, has never had a journalism job that even remotely involved a print product, having started at Princeton blogging for the IvyGate, a popular gossip blog about the Ivy League. “Our bread and butter was the scandals and follies of Ivy League students and faculty — hazing bloopers, secret societies, campus controversies,” said Ms. O’Connor, who tracked campus stories like that of Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who stirred a national controversy with her hoax project supposedly involving aborted fetuses, during her time there.
After graduation, Ms. O’Connor landed a job at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast as a home-page editor, and then, in November, started as weekend editor for Gawker, the Nick Denton site that has been the launch pad for nearly a whole generation of blogosphere stars, including Choire Sicha and Jessica Coen, who served the online managing editor for New York Magazine before recently returning to Jezebel, a Gawker Media blog.
Ms. O’Connor is off to a strong start at Gawker. Her lengthy obituary of the heiress Casey Johnson — “among the first celebutantes to decamp to Hollywood in search of 21C fame,” she wrote — attracted 100,000 hits in January.
NOTABLE SCOOP: In January, she began an “investigation” into the White House budget director Peter Orszag’s hair — a rug or a barber’s misfire, you be the judge — that became a fleeting Internet meme in its own right.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Took Fox News to task over a typo in a chyron (a term for the graphics at the bottom of a TV screen) identifying former the Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth as a “congresswoman.” Too bad Ms. O’Connor misspelled the word chyron in the post.
Curbed, the real-estate blog that attracts two million page views a month, is a something of an addiction for many in a town that is (still) addicted to real estate, even after the crash. Ms. Polsky, 24, is its newest voice, an understudy to longtime editor Joey Arak and Lockhart Steele, the site’s founder, who is one of the most influential blog personalities in town, and thus a star-maker of sorts. Ms. Polsky, whose prior experience consisted of a year as an editorial assistant at Real Deal magazine, is up against stiff competition. The field is dominated locally by older, established real estate professionals, like Jonathan Miller of the Matrix, who is the head of a major appraisal company,; and Douglas Heddings of TrueGotham, a long-time broker. Even Jonathan Butler of chief competitor Brownstoner used to run a hedge fund. The big rivals are generally “written by people who are in the industry,” she said. “They can write about how brokers work, or what the statistics say. We have more of a laypersons’ approach.” But unlike bloggers of old, this Harvard graduate is not above old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, like the time she trekked out to Greenpoint in November to watch a developer silence the gavel at a major auction of new condominium units when early sales on units priced up to $599,000 started selling in the $200,000s. Like the best bloggers, Mr. Steele said, “she’s got the jaundiced eye, that I’m always looking for, but it’s not knee-jerk negativity.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: Polsky posted an item about the townhouse in TriBeCa that was once designated by John and Yoko’s as the “embassy” for their conceptual country of Nutopia, hitting the market for $3.25 million; the item got picked up by Beatles fan sites around the world.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: No whoppers, but mistakes happen, like the recent item where she mistakenly identified the firm behind the renovation of the developer Adam Gordon’s Jane Street town house.
When Yahoo announced earlier this year that it was shuttering GeoCities, an online community of user-created Web pages from the early days of the Internet, the response was more mocking than mournful. "So Long GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed" read one PC World headline. When it's remembered at all these days, GeoCities is an Internet punch line, with its amateur code and garish color schemes (one programmer friend termed it "an animated-gif-athon"). But it was a hot startup in the mid-1990s. With its user profiles and pages organized by topic, the service was a precursor to online networks like Facebook, MySpace, and accessible blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress. And, much like those sites, it is owned by a private corporation that has ultimate say over what happens to information, photographs, conversations, and interaction that occurred within that space.
GeoCities began in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI), a California company that offered free Web hosting and development tools. Users could claim space for their Web pages in a variety of thematically organized "neighborhoods," (including "Sunset Strip" for rock and punk music, "Wall Street" for personal finance and investing, and "Area 51" for science fiction). These neighborhoods were run by volunteers known as community leaders who helped patrol for inappropriate content and, according to a 1999 CNET article, offered new users "suggestions to jazz up their pages." BHI renamed itself GeoCities in 1995 and sold the idea that when you joined the service, you weren't just getting a Web page; you were joining a community of users.
The geographic nomenclature of GeoCities gave those new to the Internet a familiar shorthand for how social interaction could unfold. Sure, the tools might be different, but the concept of neighbors and like-minded groups of people, would, GeoCities promised, operate the same online as in the real world. Our desire for community is an insight key to many successful online ventures that have come after. Facebook lets users "become a fan" of bands, magazines, and businesses, join groups that petition for health-care reform, and organize high school reunions. Blogs organize themselves into like-minded groups known as rings, even holding "carnivals" where all bloggers involved publish entries on a set theme.
The demise of GeoCities is not just the disappearance of a gif-riddled online ghost town--it's the death of a pioneering online community. And it's a reminder that we should think critically about who owns online spaces, how they are managed, and what happens when they are razed.
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GeoCities pages were proto-blogs. "People updated them very frequently," says Alice Marwick, a doctoral candidate at New York University who studies social media. "I think you'll find that personal homepagers of yesteryear are bloggers now." GeoCities was packaged for inexperienced Internet users, and by 1998 it was the third most-visited site on the Web. Jason Scott, who along with a group of around 15 volunteers called the Archive Team is working to archive GeoCities, says the selling point was ease of use: "Users were offered a worldwide audience, and the ability to say things any way they wanted to."
Other online platforms began to spring up, and soon GeoCities became a fond memory for most users. Blogger was introduced in 1999 (and purchased by Google in 2003), making it easy for anyone to start a blog. MetaFilter, a community blog, was launched in 1999. The social networking site My-Space was founded in 2003. These services also marked the entrance of a very public form of socializing--where, unlike email or listservs, the conversation, and content, was accessible to those not part of the conversation. In offering a platform for creating online identities, GeoCities started a trend that has been replicated by companies ever since.
But once those online identities are created, are they the property of the users or the corporations that host them? David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, calls corporate-controlled spaces like GeoCities and Facebook, "faux commons." For him, true online community spaces are defined by users having control over the terms of their interaction and owning the software or infrastructure. Corporate spaces come with "terms of service" agreements that lay out the rules users must abide by and what control they agree to surrender in exchange for using the product. "Oftentimes corporate-controlled communities are benign, functional, and perfectly OK," Bollier says. "It's just that the terms of services those companies have or the competitive pressures of business may compel them to take steps that are not in the interest of the community."
Consider the case of Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. Ludlow ran a newspaper for the virtual community The Sims Online and was kicked out of the community by the owner, Electronic Arts, for publishing accounts of theft, prostitution, and money laundering that (virtually) occurred there. Because it happened in a corporate-controlled online space, his speech wasn't protected. As Ludlow told an interviewer, "The platform owners have responsibilities to care for those communities and see that they are not harmed."
Bollier agrees. "At the point where the business model becomes tethered to a happy community, you have to reach an agreement about how you are going to interact. If you piss people off too much, they are just going to flee the site." When GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo in January 1999, the new corporate overlord immediately began to clash with users. That June, Yahoo changed the terms of service for the site, claiming the right to full ownership of anything users posted to their pages. By December, Yahoo announced it would disband the popular community-leader program. The changes should sound familiar to anyone who has followed recent tempests over privately controlled social-networking sites. Facebook made a similar change to its terms of service this past February, causing uproar among users already annoyed with a redesign and a short-lived feature that broadcast users' purchasing habits. Under pressure, Facebook reversed the decision within weeks.
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The decay of an online social space cannot always be pinned on corporate ownership. Online communities tend to mirror the shortcomings of the real world--racism, exclusivity, and class privilege. In a presentation at this year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, social media researcher danah boyd asked what really separated users of the older My-Space from the newer Facebook. MySpace, started by the advertising company eUniverse as a rival to Friendster, has always had a low bar for entry, allows users to remain anonymous, and enables more customization of profile pages. Facebook, by contrast, was born at Harvard as an online version of freshman--orientation "facebooks." It slowly opened admission to other Ivy League universities, then most colleges, and finally to the public at large. While both sites enjoy about 70 million unique visitors, in recent years wealthier, more educated users "were more likely to leave [MySpace] or choose Facebook," boyd said. "Those who deserted MySpace did so by 'choice' but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic." She continued, "What happened was modern day 'white flight.'"
In other words, despite some declarations that MySpace has gone the way of GeoCities, it isn't really dead. Not yet, anyway. But because MySpace, like the vast majority of social-networking sites and blogs, exists in corporate-owned space, it is vulnerable to being shut down if it is perceived as no longer having a profitable or attractive user base. Given that we are stuck with much of our digital commons existing on corporate-controlled sites, what then happens when the corporation decides to close its doors? If these are our new commons, what does it say that we abandon spaces once they are clearly marked as unsophisticated?
Scott says the Archive Team's efforts have proved to him the worth of Geo-Cities. "A lot of people see GeoCities as this sea of amateurish, poorly written Web sites. I understand that thinking; I certainly don't want people to think that I'm saying GeoCities is an example of the best the Web could be, but I do think it's an example of what the Web was." Scott says while he's pulled up plenty of pop-culture fan sites, he's also found meticulously detailed outlines of Roma history and documentation for products and software manufactured during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The better-known Internet Archive has announced it, too, is working to archive GeoCities. (Yahoo got in touch with it about preserving the pages.) Still, it's a stark reminder that just because something is published on the Internet doesn't mean it will last forever.
Yahoo has now set an official date for the closing of GeoCities--October 26, 2009--but the question of how we protect and archive the history of our interaction in the digital commons is still unanswered. As the Internet continues to evolve, we will be forced to decide which left-behind digital communities to preserve. "There is a very real chance of this digital culture just disappearing from our lives, and there's not really any formal mechanisms in place to store or aggregate this knowledge, which is really a shame," says Marwick. "There need to be more public efforts to store and archive."
In a keynote address at a 2001 conference on preserving digital media, science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling observed, "Bits have no archival medium. We haven't invented one yet. If you print something on acid-free paper with stable ink, and you put it in a dry, dark closet, you can read it in 200 years. We have no way to archive bits that we know will be readable in even 50 years."
He added, "Tape demagnetizes. CDs delaminate. Networks go down."
Image by FriskoDude via FlickrJohnAMacDougall #Burma #Monitor: #Water #shortage returns to crisis-hit regions: http://bit.ly/cNRNyJ via @addthis #DVB
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, calls corporate-controlled spaces like GeoCities and Facebook, "faux commons." For him, true online community spaces are defined by users having control over the terms of their interaction and owning the software or infrastructure. Corporate spaces come with "terms of service" agreements that lay out the rules users must abide by and what control they agree to surrender in exchange for using the product. "Oftentimes corporate-controlled communities are benign, functional, and perfectly OK," Bollier says. "It's just that the terms of services those companies have or the competitive pressures of business may compel them to take steps that are not in the interest of the community."