You may have more Facebook friends as the years go by, but when it comes to your close friends, you lose about half and replace them with new ones after about seven years, new social research suggests.

Read more about it here.

Chinese censors blocked access to Twitter and other popular online services today , two days before the twentieth anniversary of the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Read more about it here

Independent film is thriving on television thanks to video on demand

Read this article about films and video on demand.

from : http://www.economist.com

CANNES was quiet this week. Although the stars and the paparazzi went through the usual red-carpet routine, there was less extravagance and a smaller contingent of film-buyers than usual. Yet for makers of independent films, that was not the end of the world. In their business the action increasingly takes place not on the French Riviera but in American living rooms. Tricky, intelligent films are finding a home in the least glamorous corner of the television business.

Getting independent films into cinemas, never easy, has become much harder in the past year. Some specialist distributors, such as Warner Independent Pictures, have closed and others are buying fewer films. The credit crunch and the strong dollar have cut foreign sales. Meanwhile cheap digital-video cameras and editing software have produced a flood of content. Some 5,500 films are chasing buyers in Cannes this year. Last year just 606 new films were released in American cinemas. Many lost money. “The economics just do not make sense,” says Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films, an independent distributor.

Hence the rapid growth of an alternative. This year IFC will release about 100 films “on demand”, meaning they can be called up for a fee in most households that get their television via cable or satellite.

The reason for the rush is that, for low-budget films, the economics of video on demand do make sense. Cable companies, which take a cut when they sell a film, help with advertising. Mr Sehring says IFC makes about as much when a film is sold on demand as when a punter buys a cinema ticket, even though the ticket costs almost twice as much. He reckons he recoups his costs and returns money to filmmakers more than half the time—not bad for films that might otherwise have disappeared without trace.

It also makes sense to concentrate on a single marketing push. Heavy advertising helps keep blockbusters in people’s minds. But small, independent films are easily forgotten.

EPAThe action is on TV

By launching their creations on cable, filmmakers must give up the dream of creating a hugely profitable surprise hit like “Napoleon Dynamite”.

Distributors are learning what kinds of films are best suited to video on demand. Eamonn Bowles, Magnolia’s president, says it helps greatly if films are susceptible to brief synopsis. That means well-known names and obedience to genre conventions.  Documentaries may be better suited to the internet, since it caters so well to special-interest groups.

Whether accessed via cable television or the internet, video on demand is likely to grow. America’s suburbs are becoming much more diverse places, with more ethnic minorities, more people with degrees and more gays, according to Gary Gates, a demographer at the University of California, Los Angeles. The potential audience for independent films is thus dispersing beyond the places where independent cinemas are concentrated. Not everybody lives near an art-house cinema, but almost everybody has a remote control.

This graph presents how the Internet is used according to your age. It explains quite clearly who does what on the Net according to one’s age.

Do you agree with this graph ? What do you do online ?

Are you a creator ? A critic ? A joiner (do you often join networking sites ?) Are you a spectator or a inactive ?

Dear Facebook users,

Dear pupils, dear students

Be careful !

As oral exams are coming (BTS students , you know what I mean ! TSTG pupils : one week + Easter Holidays and we’re done !) you should be very careful about Facebook !

FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.

The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.

Researchers have discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.

About 83% of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, to keep in touch with friends and organise their social lives.

“Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon.”

You can read the full article here

MySpace is now losing popularity as Facebook and bebo are the “places to be” .  MySpace suffered a drop in visitor traffic last month and is now less than half the size of its younger rival, Facebook. MySpace’s loss of status as the cool place to be is an object lesson in the notoriously fickle internet, where today’s cultural icon is tomorrow’s passing fad.

MySpace had 124 million monthly unique visitors last month, a decline of 2%, according to the marketing research company comScore. Facebook, by contrast, racked up 276 million unique visitors, an increase of 16.6%.

MySpace is clinging on to a marginal lead over Facebook in America but trails badly in Europe. In Britain, Facebook overtook its competitor in September 2007, the comScore data shows.

Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester Research, said: “In the last 12 months Facebook has extended its dominance in every territory in Europe.” However, he added: “I’m not convinced that it’s terminal for MySpace. The battle isn’t over yet.”

from : http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspace-facebook-bebo-twitter

Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user. That staggering growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Read more about it here

Check out this funny video about Twitter (no excuses, there are subtitles in French !)

Musicians including Robbie Williams, Annie Lennox, Billy Bragg, Blur’s David Rowntree and Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien said last night that the public should not be prosecuted for downloading illegal music from the internet.

Read more about this issue here

What about you ?

Do yo often download music from the Net ?

Are you for or against illegal downloading ?

The personal details of millions of people have been stolen from one of the UK’s largest recruitment websites in potentially the largest data theft ever in Britain.

Hackers accessed the confidential information provided by 4.5 million people registered with Monster.co.uk and now hold their user names, passwords, telephone numbers and email addresses. The company said other information including client birth dates, gender and ethnicity had also been taken, along with “basic demographic data”.

Fears were growing that hackers may have gained access to user bank accounts, since many people use the same password and email address to access multiple websites.

read here