Author Profile

  • Philip Man
  • Url: http://www.philipman.net
  • Posts: 14
  • About the user: Technology should be centered around a meaningful experience: understand behaviour not technology, think people instead of device and. Don’t make products, make experiences. Like Huxley said, “to give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means.” Technology changes fast, but people do not. The fun part does not happen in the device, but on the road from the screen towards the mind. The challenge is to understand the user’s motivations; what drives him or her, culturally and psychologically? People often don’t know what they want until you show it to them. My main ideas involve developments in new media technology and I am particularly interested in how new media is inherent to new ways of communicating, to what extent that requires and generates new kinds of data and how this can be used to improve relations between people. I like the challenge of difficult problems and to act as an idea catalyst /

Author Archive

Google Search Plus Your World; seems to be the next big move in a long and painful war

Philip Man | 14 January 2012, 7:49 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , ,

So, what is going on on the interwebs? Well, in the social and search segment, things are getting heavily mixed up. Google finally uses its monopoly to push Google+ with its Search Plus Your World. Basically, the search results will get personalised even more than before, based on your G+ account. These personalised results will appear in the organic search results. Next to that, if you search for a person or brand, Search Plus Your World will show G+ accounts before Facebook Pages or Tweets. I can hear you say ‘duh, obvious move’, however, lot of people act surprised and start panicking. Strange.

How Gamification Triggers Facebook in Being on Addictive Game of Sociality

Philip Man | 28 September 2011, 1:15 pm | 3 comments


I wrote a thesis about the new trend of gamification and specifically the gamification of the social networking site. With the gamification of the social network I am not speaking about the invasion of social games like FarmVille, but that the act of social networking itself has become game-like. For who is interested, it is available here.…

Narrative Structures in Data Visualizations to Improve Storytelling

Philip Man | 03 May 2011, 9:00 am | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , ,

Interactive data visualization has emerged as a complete new field within journalism. Large editorials like The New York Times, The Guardian, the Economist, the Washington Post all have special teams dedicated to data visualizations only. However, in the recent years, the storytelling potential of data visualizations has been debated.

What Data Visualization Can Learn from Game Design

Philip Man | 19 April 2011, 9:38 am | 2 comments | tags: , , , , , , ,

When reading articles and books on data visualization, the focus is often on ampiflying cognition by using external (visual) aids. In this blogpost I attempt to conduct a kind of meta-analysis on data visualization by looking beyond the content of the visualization and concentrating more on the intrinsic motivations of the user.

Data Visualisation: World’s Facebook Friendships

Philip Man | 14 December 2010, 4:29 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , ,

Wondering what a visualisation containing a few dozen million friendships on Facebook would look like?

Paul Butler thought of the same and took a shot. He says that visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle. Local friendships was of…

War 1.0: The Internets Fight Back. Pirate Bay Helps His Friend Wikileaks

Philip Man | 08 December 2010, 12:47 am | 1 comment | tags: , , ,

It may be clear that Wikileaks is under heavy attack. Established (governmental) institutions are doing everything they can to boycot Wikileaks by cutting every source they have such as internetservers and even money funds. Including is Paypal who has deleted the Wikileaks account in an attempt to silence and destroy the site.

The Internets fight…

Is Google Going To Ruin The E-reader’s Party?

Philip Man | 19 October 2010, 9:15 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , ,

“Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis.”

The above quote is from Joseph Licklider stated in his famous article ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’ written in 1960. However, seeing how increasingly more books are getting digitized and the number of digitally published books is still growing, it is save to say that his romantic paper vision did not come true. Yet, he did understand the importance of the computer

Tweet, Tweet, Twitter Journalism

Philip Man | 13 October 2010, 7:50 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , ,

The role of the journalist has been changed, or some would argue that it is not there anymore. How is democracy functioning with all the social media around us? Twitter is a powerful tool for politicians to get in contact with the public, but where is the journalist?

Facebook Launches Three Key Features To Protect Privacy

Philip Man | 07 October 2010, 9:18 pm | tags: , , , , , ,

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg has listened to all the nagging about how Facebook is violating the privacy of their users. On the live press-conference of Facebook yesterday, Zuckerberg announced a few features that the social networking site will introduce in order to protect the privacy of their users, or at least give the users more control on how their personal data is being published. This isn’t the first time that Zuckerberg is complying with the complaints. The hardcore privacy killer Beacon had a nice run before it came across heavy resistance of the users and immediately put offline. At the conference, Zuckerberg introduced three major changes that will focus on the fundamental problem of privacy and information regulation. Here we go.

Please publish my thesis and make it true

Philip Man | 07 October 2010, 2:55 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , ,

We were told to start a Wikipedian adventure. Create an account and contribute to the knowledge of the world. The English Wikipedia has almost 3,5 million entries, so coming up with a term that no one has thought of writing about seems to be a great challenge. Luckily for me, I have been writing and thinking a lot about a specific way to study the personal data retrieved from social networking sites, which is called post-demographics. It is a new way, beyond the occasional demographics, to assess and define people and guess what, no Wikipedia entry has been made for it!