On the website googlizationofeverything.com, theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan states that the current web is dominated in several ways by search engine Google. Google related sites and ‘Googleware’ like Google Books and Google Earth and the video channel YouTube. In a lot of countries, Google is by far the most used search engine; in the Netherlands, Google…
Aphorisms, Haiku’s, SMS, Twitter
“What are you doing?” This basic question of Twitter can easily be answered in the limited 140 characters a ‘tweet offers. They key characteristic of the famous microblogging site, it’s short message length, actually isn’t really new. The history of the use of short texts goes way back; an early example of it can
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In the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, of Saturday September 26th, there was an article (Dutch) on a new Dutch website: Yunomi. This website is stated to be a ‘platform’ for women, with articles about fashion, beauty and lifestyle. Visitors of Yunomi cannot only read these articles, but also participate by writing articles themselves and communicating with…
Even though the site Wikipedia itself is the most known project of the Wikimedia foundation, there are several sister projects that are interesting and worth of researching. There is, for example, the Wiktionary, which is, quite obviously, a dictionary, but also less common projects like Wikispecies, a ‘free directory of life’ that…
Les Immatériaux is the name of the exposition the well-known theorist Jean-François Lyotard held in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 1985. At the exhibition, a digital interactive catalog, written by several writers, was shown. This experimental encounter with the computer was one of the first pieces of collaborative electronic writing, and showed the optimistic view of Lyotard and his co-authors upon a future without material objects: an immaterial world. Computer and other digital technologies would be the tools to establish this dream, so Lyotard amongst others mused.
The most popular social networking website in the Netherlands is Hyves. It’s similar to Facebook or MySpace, but far more used in Holland: since it’s founding in 2004, the number of users has grown explosively and today Hyves has more than 8.9 million accounts. That’s more than half of all Dutch inhabitants! Hyves
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