Decius wrote:
MySpace gets into the competitive censorship game and quickly learns that they very much do not have control of the thing they just bought.

I am reminded of a line from Alien Resurrection, "You think you can tame them?"

I enjoyed this turn of events because it should me the so-called "new media" can resist crap that "old media" companies can pull. Murdoch and crew views MySpace as they view TV. It has content which maybe they don't directly create. The content attracts an audience. They sell advertising space to present to that audience. They take demographic samples of our audience to better sell our ads.

However, Fox and other TV studios *always* control the content of the content, because they want to tone and trim the type of audience they have. If content is objectional, old media simply edits or even removes the content. See the "Ellen" "Roseanne" "Family Guy" "Playmakers" and any number of other events as an example of this practice.

But with MySpace, the audience is the content creators. They revolved when the studios tried to pull their traditional shenanigans. I would make the argument that MySpace is an excellent microcosm of what the Internet should have been: a lot of bitchy teens with nothing of substance to read; a bunch of intellectually questionable folk who claim to be geniuses; some interesting tidbits here and there; some shady stuff most parents would not want their kids exposed to; some downright illegal things.

The difference between MySpace.com and the larger Internet is that with MySpace.com the ratio of content creators to content consumers is many orders of magnitude greater. This has some interesting and cascading side effects:

1-MySpace reacts to censorship threats much more effectively than the Internet. Because instead of reading some obscure article that says that Kazakhstan is censoring political humor, you personally find your words were removed from a website. Companies can less afford to censor their social networks than DNS registars. The Kazakhstan registry makes peanuts off your site and cares nothing about your traffic. News Corps loves your site and because even if only you visit it, they are serving ads to you.

2-MySpace will have more "scenes," "niche markets," and "sub-genres" than the larger Internet because more of the users will say "[issue] isn't being address and its easy for me to fix that." Further, the censorship protection (while not bulletproof) enables people to truly express their interests without revealing their idenities (WHOIS info enforced by law is scary).

3-MySpace's low barriers of entry for participation and feature set means it will attract more users that traditional web publishing. Maybe people will branch off, but creating and publishing to a Blog is much harder than creating and writing to MySpace. Userbase snowballs so more users continue to join. Again, (some) censorship protections.

4-MySpace is a better representation of Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web than the WWW is because of the content creators to content consumers ratio. Granted the world-edittable features aren't their yet, those can be added for "friends" and other MySpace specific issues.

MySpace: A better WWW than the WWW.