News Corporation Sells MySpace for $35 Million

June 29, 2011, 2:31 PM

By BRIAN STELTER

MySpace, the long-suffering Web site that the News Corporation bought six years ago for $580 million, was sold Wednesday to the advertising network Specific Media for roughly $35 million.

The News Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, had been trying since last winter to rid itself of the unprofitable unit, which was a casualty of changing tastes and may be a cautionary tale for social companies like Zynga and LinkedIn that are currently enjoying sky-high valuations.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/news-corp-sells-myspace-to-specific-media-for-35-million/?ref=technology

Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age

Human knowledge is based on memory. But does the digital age force us to remember too much? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that we must delete and let go

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-delete-forget-digital-age

Google Takes Aim at Facebook

This week Google is silently launching a new social network the search giant is calling Google+. Brian Ries rounds up the early impressions—from its similarities to Facebook to privacy concerns.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/29/google-reactions-to-google-s-new-social-network.html

Happy Birthday to me :)

DAY OFF INNIT

Leaving Twitter

Want to leave Twitter? Why not pre-order Grace Dent's book How to Leave Twitter... I just have.

"Three years ago columnist and author Grace Dent joined new social network site Twitter, mainly as a place to dump her surplus one-liners, rant about terrible TV and post mildly amusing pictures of her cat wearing glasses. But as every ‘re-tweet’ and ‘Follow Friday’ saw her audience figures soar by thousands, Dent found herself centre-stage in an all-consuming highly addictive social network revolution. One where the gags, gossip, scandal and backstabbing literally never stop. Here Dent takes a hilarious, acerbic look at what’s really going on in Twitterworld; who’s actually tweeting, who’s really reading your tweets and what’s behind the 140 character lies they tell. She looks at the highs and grotty lows of twitter addiction, the shameless social climbers, the friends you’ll make and the ones you can’t get bloody rid of, the barefaced bragging, the shameful celeb-stalking, and the truth about ‘twanking’, twitter cliques, angry ‘twitchfork mobs’ and dealing with trolls."

Haze-on-Why

I have been away at Hay-on-Wye for Hay Festival, the Hay Poetry Jamboree, Elysium's Bus Stop Cinema International Film Festival and the bigger and better How The Light Gets In. As always with Hay it was partly business, partly pleasure with much overlap. Apart from chairing Event 276 at the Elmley Foundation Theatre with Niall Griffiths, Cynan Jones and Christien Gholson, and sitting in pubs, tents and cafes I spent my 8 days of Hay doing a fair bit of research on the book... which meant going to things like this:

1. Once Upon a Time the End: Jesse Norman, Lars Iyer, Kabir Chibber.
Event [196] | Wednesday 1 June 2011 12:00pm 
Venue: Globe Hall | http://www.howthelightgetsin.org

From rolling news to Twitter, attention spans are shrinking, and substantive messages are sharpening into slogans. Will postmodernity see a distillation of literary meaning into fewer (better?) words, or will our ability to tell big, expansive stories be destroyed by glib brevity, leaving us at the mercy of blurbs, stings, tweets and zingers? Politician and philosopher Jesse Norman talks fast and loose with philosopher-blogger Lars Iyer and PORT editor and New York Times writer Kabir Chibber.


2. Philosophy Session: Visions of Disaster and Perfection with John Carey, Paul Kingsnorth, Kevin Warwick. (Andrew Copson chairs).
Event [260] Friday 3 June 2011 6:00pm 
Venue: Globe Hall 

From Atlantis to 1984, visions of utopia once shaped the political landscape. What new visions, from technological golden age to environmental apocalypse, do today's thinkers foresee for the 21st century? Oxford scholar and broadcaster John Carey, environmental journalist Paul Kingsnorth, and cyborg and scientist Kevin Warwick consider new visions of disaster and perfection. In association with the British Humanist Association.

3. Live Session: HotDocs: Peep Culture
Event [326] | Saturday 4 June 2011 10:00pm 
Venue: The Stage @HTLGI

Peep Culture plunges the lonely and ornery pop culture writer Hal Niedzviecki into reality TV and the internet in an effort to understand how human communication, friendship and social connection are changing.

4. Philosophy Session Caught in the Net? Ben Hammersley, Brett Kahr, Daniel Miller. 
Gabriel Gbadamosi chairs.
Event [331] Sunday 5 June 2011 10:30am 
Venue: Globe Hall 

From Facebook to Twitterati, Second Life to the blogosphere, the internet has transformed the way we socialise, learn, and experience the world. But has it also diminished meaningful interaction and traded real life for fantasy and trivia? Wired editor and creator of podcasting Ben Hammersley, psychoanalyst Brett Kahr and anthropologist Daniel Miller explore the pleasures and perils of the internet.

I also really enjoyed seeing Gary Shteyngart and Hanif Kureishi at Hay Festival. See Gary's award winning book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfzuOu4UIOU  I have his book next in my reading pile.

Also, in tech reading, these:

guardiantech Guardian Tech 

 by Soozerama

Charlie Brooker: If the internet gave free back rubs, people would complain when it stopped because its thumbs w...http://bit.ly/mLBeI4

guardiantech Guardian Tech 

 by Soozerama

How the smartphone is killing the PC http://bit.ly/iFcJOU