Monthly Archives: October 2010

Online Piracy, The Ancient Art Of Digital Publishing

Digital piracy is a common aspect on the web, and Internet users are sometimes or even often part of it because an act of piracy is easily done. There are several sharing activities where piracy is involved such as peer-to-peer sharing, usenet groups, and emailing your favourite song to a friend. These acts of data sharing are mostly low-level and…


Puzzling Infinity

In memory of this month deceased Benoît Mandelbrot – mathematician, godfather of fractals and the most well-known fractal the Mandelbrot set – I would like to pay respects to the Mandelbrot, in 3D! The phenomenon of fractals itself is already mind bending, a geometric shape with unlimited detail and recursion as in the Droste effect. But in 3D the…


Social Media and Revenues: Where’s the Profit?

The information economy that the Internet has facilitated has given rise to some interesting new problems for entrepreneurs and investors as well as webdesigners and creators. When your product is dislocated from material instances, how do you identify demand or a target audience? How do you market and define your service within a dense field of competing, free alternatives? How…


Vampire energy

Vampire energyIn the spirit of Halloween, I’ve dug up the worn down topic of Vampire energy. Vampire energy? Does that have something to do with people that wear you down and drain you from energy? No, that’s Energy Vampires. Vampire energy is another expression for wasted standby power, which sucks (hence the vampire metaphor) energy without you being aware of it…


Music and Bits and Marketing

As a follow up to my previous post about the Music and Bits conference, I wanted to cover off on the other topic of the day, marketing.  Out of the five companies who presented two of those, Top Notch records and TopSpin media, discussed the current landscape of music marketing for artists and bands.

Top Notch


I Played Kinect, and I Liked It

During my recent travels I came across a demonstration for the Xbox 360 Kinect in the Zurich Hauptbahnhof railway station. For those that don’t know, the Kinect is Microsoft’s latest peripheral for the Xbox 360 that allows gamers to interact with the console without the need of a controller. The Kinect is a sensor bar with a built in…


Ai Weiwei: How a Chinese Artist Uses the Internet To Protest

Reading an interview with the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in the weekend magazine of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, I was instantly drawn to his faith in the democratizing power of the Internet. More than once Weiwei, who is probably best known for his work on the Olympic Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, stressed the importance…


MADONNA R.I.P ?

Some thoughts on mock-up obituaries in view of the New Media Research Seminar’s start.

A fatal car accident. Thousands of cameras capturing the scene. Millions of mourning fans. Breaking news: Madonna has passed away.


Commons-based peer produsage? Rethinking online production.

The Internet, and the emergence of Web 2.0 in particular, have been celebrated for their liberatory potential, setting free the individual consumers once bounded by industrial inertia. We only need to take a quick look at the Arctic Monkey’s success through the social networking website MySpace to conclude that potentially, everyone can become famous with hardly any costs or…


Apple Is Chasing The Largests.

Apple Inc. is becoming on of the most powerfull sellers and producers of smart phones. According to DC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker Apple, that came up on October 28, 2010, has went up and joined three the biggest phones producers, namely Nokia, Samsung and LG Electronics. The American multinational corporation that designs and…