Thursday 25 November 2010

Commercialization, Googlization and Globalization of The Pirate Bay



This movie touches on the topic of commercialization, googlization and globalization of the infamous torrent-tracking website: The Pirate Bay.

To create this movie I have used The Wayback Machine (WM) as an interface to the Internet archive found at archive.org, Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Ripper found at the Digital Methods Initiative website, and a Firefox extension/addon called GrabThemAll.

Thank You for watching this Video.

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBNbTDdSsxk

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Samurai Champloo Indoor Wallpainting



This is an old one.. Forgot to drop it when I redesigned my blog.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/welpaa#p/a/u/1/bPI-pyw3Fkg

High5 for Charli, Karol n Wełpa.

Rasta.

Monday 22 November 2010

War on Google

Abstract

This paper concerns the issue of googlization of the Internet. It focuses on the study of Google search engines from three countries: Global Google representing Americanization, in opposition to the British and Polish engines. Various theoreticians have proved that google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome has enormous power over the user. This study exposes how and to what extent is Google globalizing local information cultures.

Introduction

The issue of googlization is taking a central spot in nowadays debate about Americanization. Various influencing theoreticians have proved that Google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome often affects how we perceive the world around us. This enormous power gathered by just one company raises many questions, as Google is taking over more and more firms each year.

“Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines had enormous influence on us all. They can shape what we read, who we listen to, and who get’s heard. Whoever controls the search engines, perhaps, controls the Internet itself.” (Grimmelman, J (2008/2009: 940)


One could say that since Google has become a corporate giant, the search engine started to convey messages dependent on various factors, making the corporation a globalizing force that drastically affects the Internet as a medium. According to Grimmelman:

“Call this problem the Google Dilemma. Google has the ability to shape its search results to prefer some websites over others. Indeed, whatever choice it makes – alphabetical, by link count, by politics, by whatever – will result in some sites being on the first page of results and others not.” (Grimmelman, J (2008/2009: 944-945)


Following the notion presented by Grimmelman, the main purpose of this essay is to investigate Google’s local search engines in search of globalization biases. I will conduct the study by analyzing three Google domains (Global, British, Polish), which will be followed by querying all three Google’s with the same phrase in language used by each country. The main target of this paper will be answering the question whether Google is a globalizing machine?

Does each query return global or local sources? How are those sources positioned? To what extent is the British and Polish Google Americanized/globalized? Is any of them glocalized, and if yes, how and to what extent?

Method

In order to describe the sample it is most important to remind that three different googles will be taken under consideration. The British Google and the Polish one will serve as a basis for the analysis in search of Americanization of the search outcome. The international or rather American Google will be seen as a measure for the previous two. This will enable to show how the same query in different cultures, and may give results that are more than ‘linked’ to each other, especially in terms of Americanization.

I have chosen those particular countries for various reasons, coming both from my language skills, as well as from the desire to generate a perfect sample. Choosing Britain and Poland in relation to America, gave me an advantage of having a group that is characterized by both a fully economically evolved country and an evolving one. This gave me a possibility to expose the process of globalization of Google on two different levels. Other important aspects describing the sample group can be found in the language used. Since Britain and United states use English as their native verbal communication, Poland in this case will stand as a counterweight for the exposure of the process described above.

The term that will be used to query the global and two local Googles is ‘war’ (‘wojna’ translated into Polish). I have chosen this particular word for multiple reasons. The first one relates to the universality of the word, as wars have struck humanity since the beginning of mankind. Each war has it’s own history and stories. This will probably remove the international bias of the query, giving each search outcome a chance to produce results typical for each country. The second reason why I have chosen ‘war’ as a perfect word to fit each of the search boxes is the recentness of the topic and its strong connection to journalism. This would give each country a chance to present its own recent view on the issue.

Before conducting the study, I find most important to discuss how should we perceive globalization carried by the search engine.

According to Richard Rogers, googlization is a “political-economy style critique, considering how Google’s free-service-for-profile model may be spreading across industries and cultures” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18). Following this notion, I will search both local Google queries for sites of, one could say, global origins. The idea is that local google search engines will try to boost global or American sites up the query. This related directly to what is described by the same author as Back-end googlization, where he claims that “(…) the power of search engines lies in the combination of its ranking practices (source inclusion in the top results) together with the users’ apparent ‘respect’ for the orderings (not looking further). Google’s model also relies on registrational interactivity, where a user’s preference as well as history are registered, stored and employed, increasingly, to serve customized results” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18-19).

Other important aspect of this study focuses on the following questions: What will be defined as Global? What will be defined as local? In this case global will mean sites of American origins, probably listed in the google.com query. While focusing on the definition of local, I perceive a small problem rooted in the language of two googles. As English language will be dominant across the two platforms, defining local British sites will be particularly problematic. In cases where the URL addresses will not prove the origins of a website, I will look at the content of the sites, trying to determine whether it is rooted in American or British culture. The definition of Local will therefore focus on the cultural origins, country’s history and a general national bias transmitted by each site.

Trying to get the results as unbiased as possible, I deleted all the history and cookies from the Firefox browser. While analyzing all three queries, I looked at the first fifty results of each search, but as described by the quoted theoreticians, the most important results should come from the first pages of each search to which the potential viewer is exposed at most.

Results

Due to the simplicity of the study, there were no major complications at all. While analyzing the produced outcome (appendix 1 and 2) the first notable fact is that Wikipedia takes the first two spots for each of the queries. The second point of high influence can be found by focusing on both British and global Google, where in both cases Warhammer Online EU and Warhammer Online US can be found on the first pages of both queries. On the other hand, Polish Google does not include any of these sites in the first fifty results for the query. Similarly to Warhammer, Internet Movie Database and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are also positioned on the first results pages of both queries. Catholic Encyclopedia appeared on the first page of the British Google’s query, and it was repeated on the second page of the global search, situated on the 11th position. This repetition of websites was extremely common for the global and UK’s Google, where 31 out of 50 websites appeared on both lists (appendix 2).

Appendix 3 exposes some interesting facts about American websites taking over other countries’ Google search engines. Google.com has 41 websites categorized as American. The Polish Google has 44 results that can be marked as typically Polish. These two can be of good contrast to the British engine search results, where only 11 sites can be categorized as purely local. Combining the outcomes of appendices 2 and 3, one can also notice that out of the 31 sites that reappeared in the British query, 28 were categorized as American sites.

The last part of the analysis divided the content that appeared in all three queries into categories (appendix 4). This enabled me to state whether the websites that did not reappear in the Polish google, were of similar subject. I have divided the websites according to the following categories: War related (pink), info and search (lime), games, books, music, movies (orange) and News (blue). While looking at the produced table, the most notable point of interest is the domination of info and search websites in the first half of each query. Out of first 25 search results google.co.uk has 7 web pages categorized with lime color, google.pl gives us also 7 responses, and google.com shows 10 websites of the same category. The second most dominant category is games, books, music and movies; where both the global and British Google list 8 related websites each (4 on the first page of each query). The Polish Google exposes only 5 results of this category, but similarly this grouping dominates in the first half of the search. News websites tend to occupy the second half of all three queries. Additionally, the most interesting fact can be seen while looking at the War related sites, where neither the British nor the American Google does include any of those on the first results pages.

Discussion

The conducted study pointed out some interesting facts about the issue of googlization of the Internet. Each of the analyzed countries did prove that there is an influence of the American web on the rest of the world. Even though Polish Google search engine did not expose much Americanization (not counting the Wikipedia taking the first two positions in the search), it exposed small similarities in terms of the structure of search results. Polish Google can be seen as well glocalized, where the content of the query gives an outcome which is very similar in terms of sites categories, but different while looking at the links. Because of this, the difference in the outcome of links can be seen rather as influenced by the language barrier.

Opposing the Polish version of the most popular search engine lays the British Google that produced tremendously different results. The British engine can be seen as infected by American values. This can be seen in the enormous amount of repetition of American sites in the British search, but can be also found while looking at the similar positioning of websites across both English language searches. All this proves that Google is globalizing its local Internet search engines. This may happen slowly and affect the web step by step as in the Polish example, but in cases where there is no language barrier Google.com takes over local webs and imposes American values upon them.

References:

Rogers, R., 2009, "The End of the Virtual", Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA;

Grimmelman, J., 2008/2009. "The Google Dilemma", New York Law School Law Review, 53:939-950

Appendices:

Appendix 1: Search outcome list



Appendix 2: Reappearance List



Appendix 3: Local Websites list



Appendix 4: Categories list

In and Out - Censorship report on World of Warcraft Gold Farming Websites in times of Virtual Currency Ban in China

Abstract

This report concerns the issue of Chinese government forbidding virtual items trade and exchange, and their gold farming companies bypassing this law. It deals with Internet censorship in the Republic of China, and focuses on unfolding the described problem by applying it to examples drawn from one of the most immersive virtual worlds. All this is explained by a study conducted on the censorship of websites, and a discussion of findings related to the issue.

Introduction

The emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, opened a completely new branch for economies all around the world. This particular branch of trade via gaming started probably as soon as first virtual items have been crafted. In time, changing real money into virtual currency became even more popular, flowing alongside the intense evolution of the Internet and the MMO gaming industry. Soon after, the range of virtual economy started to cover not only gold and items, but also characters (powerleveling), vehicles (mounts), animal pets (companions), giving an opportunity to ‘boost‘ one’s avatar with in-game achievements, reputation, skills, etc. Richard Heeks from Manchester University points out the importance of certain historical aspects surrounding the rise of virtual economies: First cash payments in multiuser dungeons, and the appearance of ebay.com (Hunter, 2006 and Lewis, 2006 in Heeks, R., 2008).

World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying game (MMORPG), produced by Blizzard Entertainment, one of the world’s largest gaming corporations. It consists of more than eleven and a half million players from Europe, America, and Asia, giving the company billions of dollars of income each year.

Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China became an important issue for virtual world explorers since the Chinese government banned virtual goods trade within the borders of its realm. The incident that happened by the end of June 2009 did not generate much attention at the time. Even though the decree of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce may have affected millions of people who make their living through gold farming, minor blog and press releases appeared on the web.

According to the Ministry of Commerce all this is supposed to prevent virtual goods affecting the real economy:

"The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain
exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and
services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services, the

Ministries said (Claburn T., Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).

Same author provides with some quantitative data, as he explains that virtual currency trade in China exceeded an amount of several billion yuan in 2008, which is around 146 million dollars, and is meant to be growing by 20% each year. He also quotes Richard Heeks’ study exposing that the virtual trade business employs hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, producing income ranging between two hundred million and one billion dollars (Heeks R.,“Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on Gold Farming“, 2008; in Claburn T., Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).

All this proves that virtual goods economy, surrounded by a governmental ban, having an extremely vast and diverse ecosystem of users, and large amounts of money involved; is in a way a key factor in the debate concerning Chinese Internet censorship. This study is going to prove how does the Chinese government enforce its rules upon such a widespread industry.

Methodology


To conduct the study I have chosen a sample of forty websites from around the world. Because I wanted to include websites that are commonly accessed by the users, all of the domains were chosen on the basis of an outcome of a google search. The first twenty sites were chosen from the list generated by google.com, and the second part of the sample group was chosen from google.cn, excluding the duplicated websites from the previous search. This made me choose the sample from the first 2-3 pages of each of the used regions.

While searching for a sample group I queried both google searches for the sentence “Buy WOW Gold”. I realized that queries like “Buy Gold”, “Buy Virtual Gold”, produce a much poorer outcome of the search. Since World of Warcraft is one of the dominant virtual worlds in which I am particularly interested, adding the word “WOW” improved the validity of the study by making the list related to an exact environment.

I have chosen my sample according to some specific rules. The first and most important one was reliability of the content. While looking at this aspect of the sampled websites, I tried to pick ones that seemed not to be Internet scams or cons. I looked at the system of payment for the virtual goods, and if it was in any way disturbing or suspicious, I abandoned the site marking it as unreliable and I have not included it in the study. I also analyzed the websites by the graphics used: if the design of a site was not related to either the game in which it operated, nor exposing
the link to virtual goods trade, I also left the site behind. Fortunately most of the accessed sites from the first pages of each google search passed my reliability test.

The second aspect was based on the range of the company’s work. This means that all of the chosen sites had to supply virtual gold for at least one game, which in my study was World of Warcraft. It is important to add here that many of the companies responsible for virtual goods trade, deal items on many more platforms than just one game. Furthermore, each of the games or platforms that can be used as a basis for virtual goods trade is based in more than one place in the world. In this case, each game will have multiple servers on which it is placed, and multiple locations around the world. All this made me choose my sample group of websites based on the range of their sale, so each of the websites had to sell virtual gold to at least one game (in my case World of Warcraft), on two continents (Europe and United States) to at least one server. According to my definition, to get included in my sample such a gold supply group had to fulfill the above requirements (To view the complete list of websites from the sample divided between the ones accessed by google.com and google.cn, please see appendix 1).

After creating the sample group I have run it through the Censorship Explorer program which I accessed through the Digital Methods website. This allowed me to check whether any of the sites from the target group were blocked in China, via running it through three different Chinese proxies. I inserted each of the URL addresses into the Harvester, run it twice for each proxy to be sure the analysis is done correctly (addresses of the proxies can be found in appendix 2, 3, 4 and 5). After setting up the program to check whether the sites are blocked or not, I have analyzed the generated HTTP response codes and produced results.

Results:

There were barely any complications while the study was conducted. The Censorship Explorer ran each of the URL addresses correctly: each website scan produced a response code, the country of proxy was China, and there were no time-outs. This happened for all of the four scans.

Still, no matter how simple the study seemed to be, it produced very unexpected results. Each of the HTTP response codes for the first and last scan stated “1.1 200 OK”, which means that hundred percent of the analyzed websites were fully transparent to the viewer.

The only problem that occurred was linked to one of the chosen proxies not responding correctly (Appendix 3). One of the websites did not produce any response code, two gave a connection-failed response, and the rest responded with a server error message. The second scan through the same proxy produced the same server error for the whole sample (Appendix 4). Since I was looking for a client error message, those two scans can easily be discarded due to proxy failure.

Since all of the sites produced positive response codes (Appendix 2 and 5), one can state that Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China does not cover sites that deal virtual goods and gold.

Discussion

Since the findings can be perceived as unusual or unexpected, I find it extremely important to discuss why the Chinese government did not ban the access to goldfarming websites. I believe that there are certain facts that lie behind the occurred phenomenon.

The first one may relate directly to the new Chinese law, and is much similar to what Heeks describes in the article by GamePolitics.com:

“This [new Chinese law] therefore is not about what gold farming
clients do: use real money to buy these virtual currencies; it’s the mirror
image. And it’s not about the major trade in gold farming such as
World of Warcraft, which relates to other types of virtual currency. And
it’s not about buying/selling in-game items. And it’s not about the
power-leveling of avatars. Bottom line: it’s not about gold farming.“
(Heeks, R. 2008 in GamePolitics.com)

Still, this explanation and definition of the author’s ‘Mirror Image’ is not fully clear. The notion carried by Heeks can be seen as opposing to what was said by Claburn in the introductory paragraph of this paper. If this particular law restriction is not about farming, but about the exchange rate that may affect China’s economy, farmers themselves had to find a way around the system. Similarly as described by Claburn in relation to gold farming and various companies‘ attitude towards it, smartly built operating systems may be the factors that drastically affect the fail of the ban on virtual currency trade. According to the author:

“Game companies typically forbid gold farming but committed virtual
currency traders find ways around such rules. Some game companies
have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built
virtual commerce into their game infrastructure“ (Claburn T.,
Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).

In this case, what I find particularly important to add is the thought of Dean Takahashi, which proves that Gold Farms as companies are built on a very smart and careful basis, commonly located outside of China’s boarders. In relation to why this specific law is so hard to enforce, Takahashi points out the factor of technicality:

“The practice of trading virtual goods for real money is easy to make
illegal, but hard to enforce. The gold farmers may not be affected...
because of a technicality. Most of China’s gold farmers, who operate in
sweatshops with dozens of fellow farmers, operate on servers on
foreign soil. The government can only control what goes on with
domestic servers.“ (Takahashi, D. GamesBeat, 30th June 2009)

Still, the most important fact exposed by the study and the target sample analysis is that all of the analyzed companies sell gold outside of China. If all the gold farming Chinese firms are located outside of the boarders, and they sell virtual currency to other countries, it is much probable that the Chinese government cannot do anything about it. This discussion exposes that there is an obvious confusion over the Chinese law regulations, presenting how in-game gathering of virtual resources bypasses a not fully operational restriction.

Nevertheless, some positive aspects of the study can be found while looking at the article by David Barboza in New York Times, where the author quotes an email received from one of the most influencing theoreticians of virtual and MMO environments:

“This action shows that at least one government is concerned about
the way virtual worlds challenge its control of society. (…) As virtual
currencies take over more and more purchasing power, control over
the effective money supply shifts from the central bank to the game
developers.” (Castronova, E., in Barboza, D. 30th June 2009)

References:

Barboza, David, 30th June 2009, “In China, New Limits on Virtual Currency”, New
York Times
;

Claburn, Thomas, 29th June 2009, “China Limits Use Of Virtual Currency”,
www.informationweek.com
;

GamePolitics.com, 1st July 2009, “Is Gold Farming Really banned? Confusion Over
China’s New Virtual Currency Rules”
;

Heeks, Richard, 2008, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold
Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies
of Online Games“, University of Manchester
;

Ministry of Commerce, 29th June 2009, “China bans use of virtual money for trading
in real goods”
;

Takahashi, Dean, 30th June 2009, “China’s crackdown on virtual goods transactions
could ripple through the game economy”, GamesBeat
;

Other sources:

♦ Internet Censorship Explorer
link: http://tools.issuecrawler.net/beta/proxies/

♦ HTTP response codes list
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

Appendices:

♦ Appendix 1: List of sampled websites

List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.cn):

http://www.2moonsdilvip.com/
http://www.beautifulwowgold.com/
http://www.gamegoldme.com/
http://www.wow-powerleveling-wowgold.com/
http://www.goldteamsale.com/
http://www.bye-wowgold.com/
http://www.ugamesale.com/
http://www.mywowgoldsite.com/
http://www.yoyo-gold.com/
http://www.wowlion.com/
http://www.wowgoldfirm.com/
http://www.wowgold4s.com/
http://www.mmoshop.eu/
http://www.wow-goldstore.com/
http://www.wowgoldfed.com/
http://www.gamesworth.com/
http://www.wowgolddig.com/
http://www.wowgoldcow.com/
http://www.mywowgold365.co.uk/
http://www.wowgold-cheapwowgold.com/

List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.com):

http://www.gold4power.com/
http://www.hisgame.com/
http://www.itemgarden.com/
http://www.wow-gold-team.com/
http://www.ugamegold.com/
http://www.game2guide.com/
http://www.zyy.com/
http://www.susanexpress.com/
http://www.wowgold2k.com/
http://www.worldwarcraft-gold.com/
http://www.wowgold-europe.com/
http://www.wow-cheapwowgold.com/
http://www.game4world.com/
http://www.power-level.net/
http://www.helpwow.com/
http://www.guy-game.com/
http://www.gdpchina.com/
http://www.offgamers.com/
http://www.wowgoldbank.nl/
http://www.wowko.com/

♦ Appendix 2: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 118.122.85.215:80
(China)


♦ Appendix 3: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 60.28.81.194:80
(China) – scan 1



♦ Appendix 4: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 60.28.81.194:80
(China) – scan 2



♦ Appendix 5: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 220.248.34.26:80
(China)

Saturday 6 November 2010