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anomaly assemblage attention span book review Bruce Sterling design FLOSS future Googlization interview napster NPoV open standards privacy proprietary short shorts skype social networking spam topology

FOSDEM 2011: MilkyMist Open VJ Platform

The field of VJ (visual jockey) is an increasingly prominent aspect of live performance, especially in the relatively “quiet” physical performance of electronic music. Clubs such as Winston Kingdom in Amsterdam run commercial Windows based VJ software in undynamic...
By John Haltiwanger on 02/05/11 1

Grammars of Process: Agency, Collective Becoming, and the Organization of Software

Despite years of theorization, a concise definition of what constitutes a medium remains elusive. A practice-based case study in generative typesetting leads to an analytics of becoming that highlights the external dynamics of media. Rather than the referentially recursive...
By John Haltiwanger on 09/17/10 0

Bringing the Libre: An Interview with Free Software Developer Jon Phillips

At the recent Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels, I had the lucky pleasure of meeting Jon Phillips, a man with seemingly as many projects in a given moment as he has fingers and toes. Just a few of his...
By John Haltiwanger on 07/12/10 1

Graphics con Libre: Designing tools for design outside and beyond the proprietary

Though I’m following up quite late, I wanted to list highlights of the presentations I attended at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels (about which I’ve blogged before). While I strongly suggest you look at the recorded presentation archive...
By John Haltiwanger on 07/10/10 1

Libre Graphics Meeting: FLOSS Design Conference in Brussels (27-30 May 2010)

Tomorrow I will be attending the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels. This conference is both free as in beer and free as in relating to the best projects the free, libre, and open source communities have to offer in...
By John Haltiwanger on 05/26/10 2

Galloway: The Medium is an Interface

... Interface and media may be two names for the same thing. From the viewpoint of McLuhan and the concept of re-mediation, media are merely containers that encapsulate other pieces of media. This can be seen as an “onion”...
By John Haltiwanger on 05/11/10 1

The Coming Codec Storm

Perhaps you’ve heard of the new < video > tag in HTML5? The first major new version of HTML since HTML 4 in 1997 (how many Internet years are there in a dog year, anyway?) contains several new tags...
By John Haltiwanger on 05/05/10 0

Gambling With Open: A “How Bill Gates Made Money” Moment

Bill Gates is to new media as Rupert Murdoch is to old media--an atavistic force of economics, mad gambling, and vector misdirection. And right now he is lobbying hard to remove key provisions regarding open standards and open source...
By John Haltiwanger on 04/02/10 2

Future Reflections: An interview with Bruce Sterling

Today I have the pleasure of presenting you with a short interview with Bruce Sterling. Bruce was kind enough to say "we'll give it a shot" to an e-mail interview when I cornered him at the bar after the...
By John Haltiwanger on 01/12/10 4

Git Virtue?: Github and Commons-based Peer Production

Github, online beginning in 2008, has quickly changed the face of source code hosting. Called “social coding” by participants and commentators alike, the site has propelled the adoption of distributed version control systems (DVCS) in general, and git in...
By John Haltiwanger on 11/01/09 6

Paranoid of the Proprietary: To Skype or Not to Skype

Today at the eComm conference, Sten Tamkivi presented an informative range of statistics of Skype use. Some 8% of all telecom “minutes” are routed by Skype as of last year. This is a huge portion of the total for...
By John Haltiwanger on 10/29/09 0

The Mighty Morphing Short Shorts

Literature has been shrinking. No, I'm not referring to the decrease in readership demographics, but about “new” literary forms that sprang up in the 1990s. What will be referred to here collectively as short shorts are narrative works characterized...
By John Haltiwanger on 10/10/09 1

What Social Network?

Perhaps I'm jaded. Perhaps I'm a nostalgist. Perhaps Facebook isn't the most sinister CIA operation yet. But somehow, I cannot stop from thinking that the "Web 2.0" as we know it today is an accident of history, an effect...
By John Haltiwanger on 09/27/09 6

Could a subtractive analysis be used to test NPOV?

While WikiScanner is an important tool that advances critical inquiry regarding Wikipedia, it is not exactly user friendly. In addition, by acting as a catalog of edits with little information attached in its results list, the tool falls short...
By John Haltiwanger on 09/19/09 1

Anomalous Assemblages: A Review of The Spam Book

The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, uses a relatively unique approach to add to the discourse surrounding critical understanding of the...
By John Haltiwanger on 09/17/09 1