Author Profile

  • Frank Molenaar
  • Url: http://upupdowndownleftrightleftrightBAstart.wordpress.com
  • Posts: 9
  • About the user: Born in 1986, Frank graduated from Stedelijk Gymnasium Arnhem in 2005. After a year off studying art history at the Vrije Universiteit decided to join the Media and Culture New Media department. For his bachelorproject he worked for Westergasfabriek to create a GPS game based in the Westerpark. Very sceptical and highly nostalgic, Frank is an avid doomsday specialist, conspiracy theorist and classic nintendo game collector. Also served in the salvation army as m60 machine gun operator. Enjoys: Orwell, Adams, Thompson, Vonnegut

Author Archive

Sciencemappr: Trying to unleash the hypertextual potential of the Web

Frank Molenaar | 04 May 2011, 12:01 am | tags: , , , , , , , ,

Last week I already pointed out the amazing significance and potential of the Internet to organize, structure and index all knowledge gathered across the globe. Rather than an indirect library of indexes and references, the web is equipped with the possibility to reference directly and instantly. This takes care of both the physical as well as the psychological issues that…

Scientific referencing and hypertext: The necessity of a visual overview

Frank Molenaar | 20 April 2011, 1:08 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , ,

This entry is meant as an introduction to the tool my group and I are developing for our Datavisualisation class. We will be trying to geographically map the rise and diffusion of different research fields over time. The reason for wanting to see these developments are diverse, but one of them derives from the increasing amount of (academic) information on…

The console wars, back to the 16bit era

Frank Molenaar | 29 October 2010, 7:10 pm | tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Bits. Eight of them or sixteen meant a world of difference to me when I was a kid. I didn’t know what a bit was and actually I still don’t. I tried looking it up but it’s a very tech savvy story I will never be able to reproduce here myself. But luckily it doesn’t appear to matter anymore since…

This Post is Best Viewed in Microsoft IE

Frank Molenaar | 18 October 2010, 2:55 pm | 5 comments | tags: , , , , , ,

Every web devoloper runs into this problem at one point and sadly, usually very often. Markup language that doesn’t get translated by certain web browsers. Negelence of the software developer to web standars etc. are still occuring more and more. The browser wars of the late 90’s between Netscape and Microsoft are now named the first browser wars. In this era of the world wide web it still seems logical that all the parties involved were still trying to define the rules of the playing field and therefor not entirely sharing the same web standards because of differing interpretations of what would be most efficient. Remember I’m talking about the period from 1995 onwards, when the World Wide Web was still up for grabs and nobody had heard of Google yet and most people didn’t even own a PC or were not connected to the internet.

TwitterActivism

Frank Molenaar | 11 October 2010, 2:48 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , ,

Activism has been around for centuries: Revolts, revolutions, coups, etc. have taken place through the entire course of human history. These countercultural movements have always been in need of some sort of platform to get organised on, be it a marketplace, postal pigeon or an underground resistance newspaper, the need for communication in these resistance movements has always been one of their key aspects and usually the success rate of the entire operation depended on whether or not the communication lines were utilized properly.

Expertise vs. Wikiknowledge

Frank Molenaar | 04 October 2010, 11:51 am | tags: , , , , , ,

Tuesday morning 10 o’clock: Workday as usual. I’m working on some notification plug-in for the forum on the website I manage for VOS/ABB – an organisation looking after the interest of people working in and managing public primary- and high schools in the Netherlands – and all of a sudden the entire team for market and communication barges through…

Surfing the Web of Trust: Couchsurfing

Frank Molenaar | 27 September 2010, 3:13 pm | tags: , , , ,

Social networks come in a wide variety on the World Wide Web. There’s the generic social network focusing on sharing info and multimedia with your friends (like facebook), professional sites (LinkedIn), forums, collaborative blogs and so on. Most of these sites serve the purpose of staying in touch or getting in touch with people you met off-line and want to…

Book Review: “Abstract Hacktivism” by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås

Frank Molenaar | 20 September 2010, 1:15 pm | tags: , , , , , , ,

Every social or cultural change in which we view the world is debatable. Everyone has his or her own opinions on how the world is perceived and which parts are important in that. That is fine, that is interesting, that is what – in the end – makes us all human: We perceive things through our own eyes and we try to make sense of it all and convince other of our ways of thinking. Sometimes people try to write down the things they observe and publish them: Abstract Hacktivism is an example of this.

How do you like them Apples?

Frank Molenaar | 12 September 2010, 9:00 pm | 5 comments | tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Apple is back from the dead. How does Apple try to get on top of Microsoft? How do they take this advertising war and how are they promoting their products? Apple has a very strong fanbase and they have some pretty unique products but how do these hold up in the end? Are they really as revolutionairy as Jobs and his colleagues claim and is the way in which they try to win people over from other OS’es to Mac valid or are they basing it on stereotypes and myths?