My Space? Your Space!

The amount of friends I have that use MySpace seems huge. The many invites I receive by email made me wonder: is MySpace really the online community I want to be part of? Early 2005 I joined MySpace, thinking it might be my kind of thing. I created an account and got me some friends. By July 2005 I wasn’t so sure anymore. Republican pro-war media tycoon Rupert Murdoch ‘bought’ the community. MySpace has a huge potential for his corporate advertising. In the US Murdoch has a long history of supporting the Republican Party and was a close friend of Ronald Reagan. Murdoch’s papers strongly supported George W. Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Murdoch’s publications worldwide tend to adopt pro-American views. During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq for example, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapersd worldwide editorialized in favor of the war. Now, would there be another online community for me to be part of, without having to feel as though I’m meeting my mates in an online McDonalds? Yes, of course! There are tonnes of social networking sites on the internet, all with their specific audiences. The programmers can go to Advogato, new agey, hippie, tree-hugging freaks to Zaadz and people who care about environmental and human rights issues can try NGO based TakingITGlobal. However a new exciting development is in the pipeline. Programmer Michael Chisari has for some time now been working on an open source social networking project called The Appleseed Project. ‘ The Appleseed Project is an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model. Apart from that, Appleseed will also have a strong focus on privacy and security, as well as a commitment to seeing the user as an online citizen, as opposed to a consumer to be targetted. This is in stark contrast to current social networking websites, who rely heavily on ad placement and data mining of their users. ‘ Ah, now that sounds like the kind of place I’d like to meet up.

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Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

[NL] Ik heb in de rechter kolom een aantal ‘RSS feeds’ aangemaakt. RSS is een systeem waarmee ik zoals hier automatisch de koppen van nieuws artikelen van verschillende Indymedia websites op mijn website kan plaatsen. Het is onderverdeeld in Notts Indymedia (voor nieuws vanuit Nottingham en omstreken), UK Indymedia (nationaal en internationaal nieuws vanuit het Verenigd Koningkrijk), NL Indymedia (Nederlands nieuws) en ‘Global Indymedia’ voor een overzicht van onafhankelijke nieuws berichten vanuit het Global Indymedia netwerk. De 10 artikelen worden automatisch vervangen voor nieuwe. Dus zo kan iedereen op de hoogte blijven van wat er zoal hier in Notts, de UK, Nederland en elders in de wereld gebeurt, maar waar je niets of weinig over in de normale media zal vinden. Voor meer informatie over RSS, zie: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webfeed

[EN] I have added a few ‘RSS feeds’ in the right column. RSS is a system which is used to automatically show the headlines of one website on another and have them automatically updated as new articles appear. The feeds are Notts Indymedia (for news from Notts), UK Indymedia (national and international news from the UK), NL Indymedia (Netherlands) and ‘Global Indymedia’ which gives the global headlines from the entire Indymedia Global network. The feeds will always show the latest 10 articles and will be automatically replaced as new ones appear. This way you can easily read about things hapenning in Notts, the UK, NL and beyond, that are unreported in mainstream media. For more info on RSS, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed