Here's an interesting piece by Boris Anthony about the way that with a lot of the free social networking, bookmarking, or blogging sites we use, we're effectively working for companies for free. They - those that survive by advertising revenue - need our content. We often hear that we shouldn't complain if the service is free, but looked at like this, it's not free. We're paying for it with our time and labour. And mostly that works just fine, so long as we don't have complaints about the service. When we do, though, remember that we don't have to be handing them our cash to be giving them something of value.

So what? What are these people doing with your data? It's pretty simple: they use it to drive advertising revenues.

Here's how. I mentioned structure and context. When you publish something, share it, you try tell a story; you labor to package it up, give it meaning (semantics through communication technologies, like language) and you place it on the web within a context, be it via categories, tags, links to related information. You are organizing data.

To folks like Google and Yahoo!, that is worth gold. Literally.

Before I continue, lest I be labeled disingenuous, I should make clear that I am NOT railing against all this. I use Flickr every day--more like 300 times a day; it's my #1 destination, almost as often as my email inbox--and I manage weblogs that sport Google Ads and Technorati tags and del.ico.us links and all that stuff. I just want to try to make sure people actually realize what is going on.

We are all working for them. For free. That's how it's "about we". It's not a "media revolution", it's a reversion to feudal medievalism. "Voluntary servitude" it's been called (back in 1548!)

The counter argument is "but they are providing a service which in order to survive must sustain itself economically somehow, and you free information people are the first to yell "information wants to be free" and so it is and we can't rely on subscription or pay-per-content schemes." Totally fair. And services like all the above mentioned all do fairly decent jobs of providing ways to export and retrieve your data. One way or another, you gotta pay to play, right?

The malaise remains however: they are profiting from our ignorance (or forgetfulness). Whether it is ignorance of their actions or ignorance of your abilities (to do any of this yourself in a de-centralized way) or rights.

The Nipplegate story has been breaking out all over. I won't give all the links I've found here, just a few pieces.

The Register - LiveJournal Kerfuffle
Customers are Always - LiveJournal Members' Feedback is Not Important
Blogging Times - LiveJournal Restricts Breastfeeding Photos

And, Is it art or is it pornography? (since classic art, including the Virgin Mary, is also covered by the default userpic bare bits ban).

Tags: blogging, social, livejournal