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If you’ve been reading news about India or Pakistan, or the Middle East, Salman Rushdie being knighted by the Queen, you may have seen photos featuring a young Islamic man who has come to be known (at least in some circles) as “Islamic Rage Boy.” In almost every photo, this bearded man is clearly agitated, yelling into the camera, waving his fist in the air, etc. And it’s not until you look at a site like SnappedShot that you realize he shows up in picture after picture, about different events, always with the same expression.

Photo-journalists like nothing better than to have a photo of riots or protests, and whatever group Rage Boy belongs to seems happy to oblige. There’s a recent photo of him in a group of Islamic protesters during the recent worldwide “Day of Rage” against Salman Rushdie being honoured (since the author is still the subject of an Islamic fatwa, or death sentence, as a result of insults to the Prophet Mohammed contained in his book The Satanic Verses). Last fall, he was striking almost the exact same pose during protests over comments that Pope Benedict XVI made about the Prophet during a speech. There are also wire photos of what appears to be the same man protesting the publication of anti-Muslim cartoons in a Danish newspaper, and the use of the Prophet’s face on a playing card, and a visit by President Bush.

Rage Boy has become such a popular icon of Islamic fundamentalism that author Christopher Hitchens uses him as a metaphor in his latest column at Slate.com. In true Web icon style, he even has his own T-shirt. And blogger Mike Elgan of The Raw Feed compares Rage Boy to Everywhere Girl, a young woman named Jennifer Chandra, whose stock photo has become ubiquitous in online advertising, as chronicled by The Inquirer in Britain and several other outlets. Her blog is here.

(Note: Just so we’re clear, this is not meant as a judgment of any kind — positive or negative — about the validity or sincerity of any specific Islamic or Muslim protest, cause, or viewpoint. I just thought it was interesting. If anything, it’s a comment on the laziness of wire-service photographers and/or editors)

Update:

Mike at The Raw Feed notes that Islamic Rage Boy has now been unmasked as Shakeel Bhat, a 31-year-old former armed militant.

It’s interesting to see that a market for Facebook applications — or widgets — is developing, although the prices are still small. In one of the latest transactions, Inside Facebook notes that Slide.com (run by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin) has bought the app Favorite Peeps for a reported $60,000. Another site, FaceWatch, has also written about the purchase — and Josh Catone has a look at the phenomenon at Read/WriteWeb. Update: Fred Wilson has a good post up about it as well.

Favorite Peeps apparently has over one million users and was developed by Dennis Rakhamimov, a software engineer at a company funded by Peter Thiel — another PayPal co-founder, who is also an investor in Facebook. Inside Facebook notes that the deal values each user at less than five cents, compared with the $25 per user paid by Viacom for the Xfire gaming site and the $36 per user paid by News Corp. for MySpace. Another Facebook app, Extended Info, was recently bought by a travel company called SideStep — although no purchase price was disclosed. The creator of the app, Trey Philips, just finished his third year of university and said he put the widget together in a few hours at the Facebook F8 hackathon. Within days it had 60,000 users. VentureBeat has also noted the rise of the Facebook app-buying market.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0pROzHY5M&w=425&h=350]

Although I hate to jump on the whole “Day The Music Died” thing — which I think is a little over the top — I find it interesting that while a whole bunch of Web radio companies, including Yahoo Music and Pandora, are turning off their streams in order to protest the increase in licensing fees for Web broadcasting, Last.fm has decided not to, which has caused some consternation in the blogosphere, including this post at TechCrunch by Duncan Riley.

Riley says that the Last.fm decision could risk a backlash from users, and in a follow-up post at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington raises the issue of whether the company’s decision has something to do with it having become part of CBS, the media conglomerate that bought it for $280-million not too long ago. Last.fm, in a blog post in its defence, says: “We do not want to punish our listeners for our problems, period.” The company argues that royalty rates are a fact of life, and that because it is based in the UK it has had to deal with them for a long time, etc. It says the industry should fight for fairness, but that turning off Internet radio even for a day “is just plain wrong.”

While the idea that users should come first is an appealing one — and companies like craigslist.org have certainly prospered by making it a mantra — Last.fm’s argument seems a little disingenuous. If the doubling of radio royalty rates takes effect (Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries has a nice overview of the issues, as does the SaveNetRadio site), small streaming companies could go under. That would obviously leave Last.fm in a pretty sweet position.

I’m not saying that’s why Last.fm made the decision it did. I don’t know the company or the founders, so I can’t judge. I’m just saying it looks kind of fishy — especially when Yahoo and RealNetworks and others have joined the protest. Turning off the stream for a single day doesn’t seem like a huge issue to make a point, and I would bet that Last.fm’s users would probably support the move.

(Incidentally, Pandora has been inaccessible to Canadians for more than a month, after the company turned off access to Canadian IP addresses because it couldn’t afford to reach licensing deals with all the record labels for Canada as well as the U.S.)

From Paul Kedrosky comes this video clip of Niklas Zennstrom — co-founder of Kazaa, Skype and Joost — giving a presentation at Zeitgeist.

http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?embedId=3106042&appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/7062http://www.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf

Matt Marshall over at Venture Beat has a post up about Friendster with a “returning from the dead” kind of vibe: Matt points out that the site — which is kind of the poster boy for early social-networking success, followed by equally rapid failure — has had what he calls a “massive” 40-per-cent jump in page views in May, to 9 billion (Facebook gets about 11 billion a month).

Of course, Matt also explains most of the reason for that growth by saying the site has adopted similar techniques as are used by Facebook and MySpace — which generates a mind-boggling 3 billion page views every day — including forcing you to click multiple times to get anywhere. Is that something to be proud of? Not in my book. There’s also a table in Matt’s post that tells a different story — and what I think is a far more worthwhile one when comparing sites: it’s a table of unique visitors at the different social networks.

Over the past six months, Friendster’s unique visitor numbers have grown by about 30 per cent, while MySpace’s have grown by about 20 per cent. And Facebook.com? Over 100 per cent in the same period, and close to 30 per cent in the last month alone. To me, that’s the whole story right there — something I wish Megan McCarthy had pointed out at Valleywag instead of just pointing to Matt’s post. I wish we could get away from the focus on page views.

Danah Boyd, a sociologist and researcher in the U.S. who specializes in youth culture and online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, has posted a draft version of a new paper she is writing on what might loosely be referred to as “class divisions” between the two popular social networking sites. Although she says that the differences between the two audiences are not strictly class-based, there appears to be a clear difference between teens who gravitate to one versus the other.

For the most part, Boyd says, the younger users on MySpace are what she calls “subaltern” — a term meaning subordinate, or lower in station — in the sense that they are outcasts in some way or another, either because they are involved in a social sub-group of some kind (i.e., they are gay, or goth) or they are a member of a racial or cultural group that is non-mainstream (i.e., Hispanic, Asian, etc.). As she puts it:

“The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college… they are primarily white, but not exclusively.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

Boyd admits that some of these differences are likely a result of the ways in which Facebook and MySpace evolved. The latter started as a social network for music fans to share information about their favourite bands, whereas Facebook started as a social network that was restricted to university students and faculty — and therefore has had a collegiate type of appeal ever since.

The different approaches taken by MySpace and Facebook extend to design as well — MySpace is much more chaotic and colourful, while Facebook is more clean and austere — and therefore the ways that the two sites are perceived by their users is different too, Boyd says:

“Teens who use Facebook see MySpace as “gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens.

That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year.”

Boyd has a blog post with comments about the paper here, and some of the comments are well worth reading.

Update:

Nick Denton injects some of his patented Valleywag skepticism here. And Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla was at a recent presentation at the Harvard Berkman Center on Internet and Society that Danah gave about her research, and he has an extremely comprehensive set of notes if you’re interested in more detail. And Danah has posted her own thoughts on the reaction her post has gotten.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer is yes. But I still think it’s interesting to see that LinkedIn is planning to open its network in what appears to be an attempt to “platformize” it the way Facebook did — at least according to a tip that the site All Facebook got (and to a report from Dan Farber at ZDNet). Will it work? Who knows. But I think without it, LinkedIn is probably doomed to be the new Friendster, or at least to be overtaken by Facebook.

In a way, I think Facebook is what LinkedIn could have been if it had taken a different road, and tried to become more of a social network — instead of just a series of digital business cards linked by dotted lines, with no real functionality apart from sending an email (I already know how to do that, thanks). In fact, LinkedIn often seems to spend as much of its time preventing you from doing things as it does actually helping you to do things. Or perhaps there was no way for LinkedIn to have become anything like Facebook, since LI started from the business end of the social curve and Facebook started at the university student end — a much better place to start a foundation, I think.

MG Siegler thinks Facebook should buy LinkedIn, which is not a bad idea (Ashkan ponders this as well). And Dave Winer has an interesting suggestion: someone should not only open up their network, but become the operator of a digital identity service — OpenID style — that could be used anywhere. Jeremiah Owyang has some thoughts along those lines as well. Maybe if Facebook tried that, it might get a better reception than the times Microsoft has tried to do something along those lines.

I apologize to all of those who may have already seen and heard about him before, but I only just got a chance to check out Paul Potts, the cellphone salesman and former supermarket shelf-stocker from Wales who won the Britain’s Got Talent show with a mind-boggling rendition of the Puccinia aria Nessun Dorma. Someone mentioned it at work last week, but I didn’t get a chance to see the video clips until now, and they are incredible.

Start with the semi-final performance, and then check out the winning performance (singing starts about 4 minutes in), and if you want to see more there’s a clip of Paul on NBC’s Today Show. There’s no question that a big part of what caught the public imagination about Paul is his underwhelming appearance — somewhat pudgy, with bad teeth — and his shy, unassuming personality, coupled with a tremendous operatic tenor voice.

There was some controversy when British newspapers reported that he took opera lessons and even performed for Pavarotti, and had performed with a local opera company. But Potts said he paid for those lessons out of his own pocket and that the opera company was volunteer. After being diagnosed with a benign tumour and fracturing his collarbone falling off his bike, he was deeply in debt and took a job at Carphone Warehouse.

Now he is $200,000 richer and will be performing for the Queen and the Royal Family at the annual Royal Variety show.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA&w=425&h=350]

This is a follow-up to an earlier post about the controversy swirling around Microsoft paying bloggers — including Mike Arrington, Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, Richard MacManus and Fred Wilson — to provide quotes for an ad campaign about being “people ready” (at this point there’s a fair bit of irony in that phrase, which should probably be changed to “blogosphere ready” — which Microsoft clearly is not). People like Frank Shaw of Waggener Erdstrom (Microsoft’s PR company) see this as just another swarm in the blogosphere echo chamber, but I think there are important issues at stake.

John Battelle says (if I read him correctly) that it’s important to experiment with new forms of conversation, and that the primary issue in this case was disclosure, which Mike Arrington takes him to task for, since he sees it as foisting all the responsibility onto the authors in this case — or “throwing them under the bus,” in Mike’s colourful phrase (the comments on Mike’s post have other opinions, including a fairly snotty one from Rogers Cadenhead). Some have argued that this whole affair is much ado about nothing, since “advertorial” and endorsements occur all the time — including radio ads with TWiT’s Leo Laporte, as Scoble points out (and there’s some more discussion worth reading in Scoble’s comments).

One thing to remember, I think, is that ultimately all the metaphors — comparing this to magazine advertorials or radio ads or Tom Cruise pitching scotch in Japan or whatever — fail because we’re talking about a relatively new medium. Yes, it’s true that TechCrunch.com and GigaOm.com are a lot like magazines, and that makes Mike and Om a lot like journalists (and of course Om has actually been one, and arguably still is) and so people expect them to behave in certain ways. Is that fair? Maybe. Maybe not.

In a lot of ways, we’re watching what is effectively a new medium develop its own way of dealing with issues of credibility in real time. Whenever there’s something like Edelman and Wal-Mart, or Microsoft and the Ferrari laptops, or even PayPerPost, it brings up the same questions: How do we judge someone’s credibility? How do we know whom to trust? It’s something I get asked all the time by people still grappling with the blogosphere.

As my friend and fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman has suggested — in comments like this one — I think every blogger effectively negotiates a trust relationship with his or her readers every time they write a new post, or submit a quote for an ad, or agree to an endorsement. That’s a lot more complicated and messy than relying on a masthead to carry the freight for you, but at least it puts you in control of your own fate.

The only thing to remember is that trust is a slippery slope — by the time you’ve lost ground, it may already be too late.

Rafat Ali and the team at PaidContent have been putting up video clips from their Economics of Social Media conference, a conference I would very much like to have gone to. One of the latest clips is from a panel I definitely would have attended had I been there: Vivian Schiller of NYTimes.com, Kara Swisher of the WSJ, Rich Skrenta of Topix.net and Ken Stern from NPR talking about social media and “old” media.

The panel talks about how they approach the Web, whether there is such a thing as “citizen journalism,” the financial pressures on newspapers and traditional media, whether Google is friend or foe, and a bit about Kara Swisher’s new site AllThingsD — which is a joint venture with gadget guru Walt Mossberg and is owned by Dow Jones but separate from the WSJ. There’s a transcript of the panel at PaidContent, and the video is embedded below.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/271552597

I haven’t posted anything about the current “blog storm” over Microsoft’s ad campaign involving FM Publishing (which started with this post at Valleywag) because I wanted to take some time and think about it a bit — and in the blogosphere, waiting even a few hours seems to be an eternity 🙂 We’ve got a whole spectrum of opinion out there about the propriety of “A-list” bloggers providing quotes for Microsoft to use in advertising: Mike Arrington, for example, is poo-poohing the whole controversy.

Paul Kedrosky is also leaning towards that end of the spectrum — although he admits that he now thinks the decision to provide a quote was probably unwise. And Fred Wilson seems to see it as a mountain built from a molehill as well. He takes Nick Denton of Valleywag to task for being “old school,” and not recognizing that bloggers might want to participate in a “conversation” with advertisers. Om Malik, meanwhile, has been beating himself up about it and has apologized profusely for his decision to take part.

I appreciate Mike’s point — the FM ads are obviously ads, and the company has done the same thing with Cisco and other companies, which never became the subject of controversy (perhaps because no one realized they even existed). So no big deal, right? Except that I think there is a deal — maybe not a big deal, but a medium-sized deal. And as usual, my friend Tony Hung puts his finger on it in his post: this is not a “conversation” the way we would normally think of one, as much as Fred wants to make it one.

Let’s imagine it this way: If I’m talking to a bunch of people in a bar, and an advertising guy working for Coke comes up and tries to change the subject to the idea of “refreshment,” and says that he plans to tape-record my comments and use them on a billboard, then I am going to react pretty negatively to that idea. That’s not a “conversation” the way I would define it.

And for Mike and Om to take part in an ad campaign — to lend their words to Microsoft’s ownership of a slogan, as Tony notes, does seem more than a little awkward given the role they are trying to play in new media. Fred and Paul have slightly different roles to play, as my friend Rob Hyndman notes in his post on the subject, and therefore different considerations to make.

I haven’t lost any respect for Mike or Om (or Paul or Fred) as a result of the campaign, but I still think being involved was probably a mistake. Scott Rosenberg of Salon, who has been around the block a few times as far as online media goes, has some thoughts that are worth reading on the subject.

Does regular fishing not provide enough action for you? Try this: shooting Asian carp — some of which can be up to 20 pounds and several feet in length — with a bow and arrow, as they fly through the air around your boat, disturbed by the sound of the motor. The fish can jump as high as six or eight feet in the air, and on some trips more fish jump into the boat than are shot with arrows.

Boaters have been injured by the flying fish, and there have even been reports of deaths. Asian carp were apparently introduced into Illinois as part of an attempt to control the growth of plankton, but they escaped and are taking over the habitat from indigenous fish. Be sure to watch the video long enough to see the part where they’re fishing at night with glow-in-the-dark arrows.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyPaxIpoyM0&w=425&h=350]

John Duncan, the former managing editor of The Observer in Britain, is a newspaper consultant who writes a blog called The Inksniffer, and has lots of interesting things to say about what the industry should be doing. In one of his latest posts, however, I think he does more harm than good — or rather, he starts off on a good foot and then goes off the rails (to mix a metaphor). The post is entitled How Internet Metrics Promote the Myth of the Dying Newspaper, and his argument is that poor Internet traffic measurement makes the paper-Web balance look worse than it really is.

He is quite right about that, of course. As I have mentioned before (most recently in this post), Internet traffic rankings from all of the major firms — Compete, Alexa, comScore, Nielsen and Hitwise — are flawed in all sorts of ways, and combined with a continuing obsession with page views rather than unique visitors, it’s easy for Web audiences to look larger than they really are. And if John had stopped there I would have been totally onside. But after going through the numbers with admirable dedication, he arrives at the conclusion that “in the UK there were 310,788 people buying the Guardian or Observer on average each day in April 2007 [and] there were 270,576 reading guardian.co.uk online.” Not bad, right?

But then, he says that “We need to compare readers to readers, not readers to purchasers,” and falls back on what has become accepted wisdom in the newspaper business: that anywhere from three to five readers look at every purchased copy of a newspaper. In other words, the Guardian gets to multiply its readership by three at a minimum, which gives the paper more than 970,000 readers and online only 270,000.

As I mentioned in a comment on John’s post, this is complete rubbish — some of those copies might be read by two people, or maybe three, but plenty of them are read by no one. Steve Yelvington agrees with me, as he points out in a comment and on his own blog. He says: “the notion that a newspaper’s daily print sales figures should be multiplied by some factor to derive actual readers is wishful-thinking crap.” As Steve says, if we are to get anywhere, we need to be clear about what we’re talking about.