Gated Communities, mp3 blogs and the Future of the Social Internet.

As you may have heard, an mp3 blogger has been cease-and-desisted for hosting mp3s on his server. It’s happened before but this time he’s in the UK so it’s a little closer to home, although his hosting service is in the States, so I guess that’s moot, although the letter sent to his host was from a London address – it’s all so complicated in this global world…

This is another long post in which I look at the concept of gated online communities and speculate how moves like this might make such an environment the essential norm. I think it’s interesting but your mileage may vary.

I’ve been running an mp3 blog for a few months now. I remember when the whole thing started with the odd blog here and there posting up mp3s and it all seemed a little reckless, not just from the legal standpoint but the threat to your bandwidth (if you’re interested I’m limited to 2 gig of transfer with my account – if I go over I get charged a fair sum, which happened a couple of years back when I left a Betty Page movie on my server). But then suddenly thousands of mp3 blogs emerged and with the notion of safety in numbers I joined in. Initially I posted just the one track half expecting hundreds of downloads. I got about 30. So I started leaving three and then five up at any one time and I’m still only getting 30-50 downloads per track. I started doing the Radio show in December and that gets about 80 or so downloads, probably because it’s a more automated procedure (and because Warren Ellis inexplicably recommended it). In other words I’m barely a blip on the radar.

And that’s a good thing. Not only can’t I afford to be be serving thousands of large files a month but I don’t want to be. Those figures indicate to me that the mp3s are being downloaded by my regular readers plus a few people who just subscribe to the mp3 feed. The obvious analogy is I’m DJing a party in the upstairs room of a pub. I’m not broadcasting to the world.

However, I am hosting “infringing files” which “have not been authorised for this kind of use.” At any time a friendly letter could be sent to my web hosting company and this site could be shut down. I don’t think it’s likely (because I’m barely a blip amongst thousands of other blips) but it’s a possibility.

So, what to do? Like I say, I’m not too worried at the moment, but let’s say I am. I want to share music with my regular readers, who I consider friends in a warm and gooey but nicely distanced kind of way, but I don’t want to bring down the legal wrath of the record industry. What do I do?

I go underground. I set up a section of my site that is password protected and only allow access to people I know, based on their commenting activity on this site or others, to be trustworthy. I stop search engines from indexing that part of the site and make it clear to everyone with access that this is only going to work if you don’t talk about it.

Or alternatively I just check that any tracks I post up are available on the usual p2p networks and just tell people to get them from there, which most of them are. A case in point is Mike Troubled Diva‘s Singles of the Year series of 90 posts. He’s not hosting any infringing files but if you want to listen to any of them you’ll find most on Gnutella or Kazaa or whatever. Which is a pretty major point. If you stick an mp3 on you website you’re not radically altering its availability. All you’re doing it making it fractionally easier for a small number of people to listen to. Pretty much everything that’s commercially available is also available on p2p networks for nothing.

But that’s not the point I’m crawling towards. A while back the notion came to me that the major growth area for the social internet is going to be closed or “gated” communities. The most productive and enjoyable areas of the net tend to be those that are somehow exclusive – closed membership sites like the fabled FilePile and invite only mailing lists are the obvious ones, but also places where there’s some barrier to entry, such as LiveJournal when it was invite-only (which I think corresponded with the period when it really found its purpose and matured as a service – correct me if I’m wrong) or a forum with a high jargon quotient where only those who understand the subject properly can get involved. I’d also consider new and bleeding edge social environments to be part of this – I often wonder how long it’ll be before Flickr, as a lovely social environment, is ruined by its inevitable popularity. Believe it or not, the concept of the “blogging community” used to mean something because there weren’t that many bloggers and on the whole they were nice people. Now when people talk about the blogosphere they really mean their personal blogosphere of 200 or so sites with theirs in the middle. There is no wider blogging community, which is why media reports about the “phenomena” don’t quite ring true.

Why are these closed or new environments preferable? Firstly they don’t tend to have idiots (as defined by the participants) involved. Anyone doing stuff that doesn’t fit with the community rules can be kicked out relatively easily. Secondly they’re not open to automated attacks by spammers either because they can’t get access or because a new community doesn’t tend to be populated by the gullible. And thirdly, in the case of the closed ones particularly, because you can get away with pretty much anything.

Which brings us back to mp3 blogs and “micro-sharing” (to coin a phrase). This stuff is going on and it’ll continue to go on. The current wave of public mp3 blogs is really just a leak into the open from underground activity that’s probably more rampant than most people realise. The difference with the mp3 blog thing is that it reaches out to new audiences (even if it doesn’t always actually hit them) and that’s the important thing that will be lost if mp3 blogs are chased back underground due to technically correct but realistically irrelevant copyright infringements.

You can picture social activity online like waves on a beach. The sea is the underground, the sand is the public sphere. The underground activity reaches out into the public via blogs, forums, mailing lists, photo sites, syndicated feeds and the like until it gets bitten by idiots, spammers and lawyers, when it retreats back into private. But the will is there, so it reaches out again, and again. I intend to stay on the beach as long as possible but I fear that eventually the underground will become securely networked to the level where I’ll never need to venture out again. I think this might happen because file sharing has been an important motivating force in the shaping of the modern internet. People will always share their music and ways will be developed for them to do so safely, and once they’re there with their sharing communities the rest of the social internet will follow. And then we’ll have a two tier internet, or something along those lines, and that’d be a bad thing.