If you read my link blog you’ll find out why the Internet is silent today (most music playing and Internet radio sites are taking the day off to protest far higher fees).

You’ll also find a variety of other interesting (or possibly not) things including links to my Steve Ballmer impression on the Jason Calacanis show tonight. Doing that freaked out Maryam and Patrick.

I should explain a little bit more about how Jason did his show. We were using a new Internet video app called Operator 11. What is it? Well, it’s like a videoconferencing application where multiple people can join in. You see a live chat between both participants and audience members. Anyone can be added into the conversation live. Jason was using it to produce his show. He could play clips, choose cameras, and choose which audience member gets to talk in the live show. You could watch it live, or later on like on Russell’s blog.

Sam Sethi on Twitter just told me there’s a competitor, called GlobalIPVideo, that is in alpha stage (Operator 11 crashed on us during the show, so these things are pretty brittle. Jason hinted that he was going to invest in Operator 11 to help them buy more servers and such).

Anyway, the video arena is just exploding. Tomorrow we’ll have up some videos of Jaman and Kyte that’ll show off other innovative video services.

This shows that live video streaming services veodia.com, Justin.tv, Ustream, and Blogtv.com are going to have competition and lots of it.

danah boyd wrote a humdinger (viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace) last night and now is surprised that she got more attention for her writings, which she says were NOT up to her standard well-thought-out, well-written analysis.

Here’s why I was interested in her paper last night where some of her other, more “researched” writings just leaves me cold.

1. It clearly defined a conflict. And a big one at that between two classes of people.
2. It fit my already pre-defined stereotypes. My brother, Ben, for instance, is on MySpace. He’s a blue collar kind of guy. His MySpace page? For the bar, Benny’s Tavern, he owns in Virginia. Actually, I’m partially responsible for the belief that college students dislike MySpace. When I gave a speech to a class at San Jose State University the entire class said they switched from MySpace to Facebook since leaving high school. Of course these kids totally fit into danah’s post last night.
3. Most of danah’s posts are written for an academic audience. Put a little simpler: they are information dense and hard to get through. The one last night had a breezy, conversational feel to it. It was more approachable than her usual writings. I think that in our RSS “J, J, J, J” fast track world we just give up on posts that are too academic and not interesting to us as humans.

Oh danah, do you forget that we live in a world that pays 1,000,000 times more attention to Paris Hilton in jail than we do to whatever our President is doing? And you wonder why your article yesterday got so much attention? You hit the same nerve that Paris Hilton does.

One other thing, though. Danah’s previous work made her an authority on the topic (yeah, we do pay attention to her denser, more academic work, and even if we don’t word gets around that danah is doing the deepest thinking on social media and culture out there). That’s another reason why this got pushed around so many conversations today. It was danah’s perfect media storm.

Teresa Klein says that I’m silly for adding everyone to Facebook as my friend. She also notes that if you value your privacy you should make sure that your Facebook profile isn’t open to my membership. Actually I agree with her on that point. Me? I am leaving myself wide open. I’ve already had some really interesting conversations and renewed friendships because of my Facebook openness.

I just took a quick look through my friends list and guess that I’ve actually met about 25% of the people who’ve added me to my friends’ list. It’s an amazing list of people, by the way. There’s CEOs, developers, CTOs, geeks, and many more interesting people. I want to go through now and leave notes on how I know each of you, if I know you.

I’d love it if you also add how you know me, even if it’s through reading my blog.

Teresa, it might look silly to you, but at Gnomedex I’ll show you why it’s not so silly for people who have audiences to invite them onto Facebook.