1. Joi Ito named new MIT Media Lab Director.
Joichi Ito, well-known thinker, writer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur who has sat on the boards of Creative Commons, Mozilla, Technorati, ICANN, Twitter, Six Apart, and Flickr,has been named the new director of the MIT Media Lab.
Having personally seen Joi pioneer so many areas over the past 20 years, especially in the fields of social media, it will be very interesting to see how he brings his unique perspective to the cutting edge of academia. We expect to see the Media lab under Joi’s charge leading the way in unexpected directions.
Read more at the New York Times
2. World of Warcraft-Like Order & Chaos MMORPG rolls out in the App Store
Order & Chaos is a 3D MMO (Massively Multi-player Online) game drawing inspiration from the hugely popular World of Warcraft.
MMO games have in many ways been the most cutting edge online communities, with users’ actively interacting and utilizing communication and social tools as an integral part of the game experience. With the increased exposure of gaming mechanics to a wider audience via bringing these environments mobile, we expect the current ‘gamification’ of content and services will be a strong trend.
Download the app and try it out.
3. YouTube movies vs iTunes vs Netflix vs Hulu
YouTube will shortly be launching an on-demand movie service, which will charge people to stream movies from most of the Hollywood studios. The Google-owned site’s 130 million monthly users will be able to pay to watch movies as they come out into the DVD market; it is the first serious foray by the company into mainstream movies and charging money for video content.
The movies will be available on the same day and date as they can be rented at video stores or iTunes, far ahead of other subscription streaming services such as Netflix. It will be interesting to see if YouTube partners to offer premium TV programming in the future challenging Hulu’s territory.
Good coverage via the LA Times
4. Klout
Klout measures influence on topics from across different social media platforms. It allows you to track the impact of your links, recommendations, and options across a variety of social media platforms.
It collects data about the content you create, how people interact with that content, and the size and composition of your network. It then collects the data and breaks it down in an easy-to-analyse way.
Tools like this cater to one of the drivers of social media – status. The ability to monitor your social ‘influence’ is definitely a handy tool in keeping tabs on how your social footprint is doing.
Check out your Klout score here
5. Survey Says 21% of PS3 Owners Considering Moving to Xbox 360
With the recent security breach on the Sony/PSN, a survey in the U.S. has found that 21% were considering selling their PS3′s in favour of an Xbox 360. 89% were concerned that their personal data had been stolen in the breach and 65% said their trust in Sony/PSN had been “greatly affected”.
This Sony/PSN security breach highlights how strongly people feel about the security of their online identities and personal information and how important it is for companies and organisations that hold people’s personal data to have extremely robust protections in place. It is said that this event will cost Sony $US24 billion.
Read PC Magazine’s full story.
