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Digital resistance: A brief introduction to decentralized data-right movements

Digital resistance: A brief introduction to decentralized data-right movements

This post provides a brief introduction to collective organization as a form of resistance, whose ambition is overcoming technological determinism and creating new paths to re-define our relationship with “new” technologies, connecting the labor and knowledge of so many...
On the Road Trip Mixtape

On the Road Trip Mixtape

I grew up listening to albums from beginning to end. Each of my CDs had a character of its own, presented as a cohesive piece over the course of a half hour or more. Songs flowed in a narrative bound by mutual...
The Digital Book: curating emails via the EPUB format

The Digital Book: curating emails via the EPUB format

During the first block of the Spring semester, a group of MA New Media students took part in the elective The Digital Book. This course aims to contextualise the rise of digital publishing in theoretical terms, focussing on themes...

Open-access journals: First Monday leads by example

At a time when publishers, academics and libraries are struggling to navigate a new publishing landscape, some are turning to Internet scholars to lead the way. First Monday is “one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet,...
Open Knowledge and Visual Information

Open Knowledge and Visual Information

Open knowledge takes root What exactly is at stake with the advent of open knowledge and widely shared information? Let’s take ourselves back just over a decade to a time in which information and especially creative information was being...

Towards openness – A study about open design and its translation from theory into practice

For anyone interested in design, open source and open design, my recently finished (june 2012) MA Thesis is available for download here. Below is the thesis’ abstract: Following the course of web 2.0, user-generated content and open source software; design...
SNS research proposal; Flickr

SNS research proposal; Flickr

Now that the use of social networking sites has become pervasive in our daily lives, the deluge of images floating around in the cloud is growing larger then ever. The Internet has moved from a mostly text-based medium to...
Book Review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

As a follow up of his first book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky now present to us the concept of Cognitive Surplus. In previous years of this so called “new world”, criticizing the Television became a common thing. The...

Master New Media; a logical choice.

The first week at the Master New Media was interesting and it gave a good view of what we will do in the upcoming year. It is nice to see that the classes consist of so many students from...

Re-evaluating the cultural industries

With the rise of the Internet, ‘creative content’ has become an increasingly debated concept with regard to its nature, availability and legality. Within each of these respects severe changes have been seen which altogether have dealt a significant blow...

Hacking the Bogota Book Fair

I knew that especially Camilo was up to something, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was yet; something with tiles and hacking the Bogota book fair, but the how or what remained in the dark. So driven by...

Michael Edson on the Smithsonian Commons

This is a blogpost originally posted on the Economy of the Commons Blog. Michael Edson, director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution and Smithsonian Commons talks about how the Institute will make all Smithsonian resources...

Simona Levi – “Power is always using the name of freedom to do the nasty thing”

This post was orginaly posted in the Economy of the Commons conference blog: Last, but surely not least in the session of “Critique of the Free and Open” is Simona Levi, multidisciplinary artist, director of Conservas and arts festival...

(Pro) – Active Archives: Celluloid Remix – Annelies Termeer

Annelies Termeer presents the Celluloid Remix online video contest organized by EYE Film Institute Netherlands and Images for the Future. In this 7 years during project four public archive institutes digitize, save, preserve and share the Dutch audiovisual heritage...

Eelco Ferwerda Talks About Open Access in Academic Publishing

Eelco Ferwerda, the president of the recently established Association of European University Presses, has been involved in electronic publishing...

Fail and Prejudice: Using Inkscape as an alternative to Illustrator

I was already familiar with Illustrator (CS3). However since it’s been a while ago, I thought I could use Inkscape without prejudice. Think again. The point was to make a head upside down, half filled with blood, dripping out....

The Era Of The Digital – a lineage

The Daily We ‘The principal threat to the Richmond Daily News, and indeed to all newspapers small and large, was not competition from other newspapers but radical changes in the overall ecosystem of information.’ As Clay Shirky explains the...
Non-commercial licensing on Creative Commons

Non-commercial licensing on Creative Commons

What would life be without Bach? Far from any discussion of the aura, the only reason I have ever heard Bach is that his compositions have been relentlessly copied, passed down the generations, re-interpreted, re-adapted for new instruments (piano,...

Is micro blogging the future for writers?

Micro blogging gained a lot of success over the past few years. With the arrival of web 2.0 there was a need for a new form of writing. Long articles and ongoing features were not what people wanted anymore....

Book Review: ‘The Public Domain’ – James Boyle

The Public Domain - by James Boyle'The Public Domain' - Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, by James Boyle is an attempt to tell the story...

Nasty Old People and a CC Licence

Sweden is famous for lots of reasons. Like for their food, their furniture and their women. They are also known as the biggest pirates in the world. Not on the open sea, but online. The Swedish Piratebay is one...

Changing Turn in Copyright Debate: Cultural Industry is to Move

Many theorist have already expressed their concern with the current copyright system; Simon Frith (1987), Lawrence Lessig (2002), Yochai Benkler (2005), Hal R. Varian (2005), Chris Anderson (2009) and many others. A lot of their arguments are based on...
#Picnic09: The Creative Commons Special in Amsterdam

#Picnic09: The Creative Commons Special in Amsterdam

The Creative Commons special, hosted by Paul Keller and Donatella Della Ratta, focused on three examples of organizations using Creative Commons (CC) in a positive (and hopefully a lucrative) way: Al Jazeera, Beeld en Geluid and VPRO.
Hybrids for the Commons

Hybrids for the Commons

Our notion of the commons hails from England, where a maze of paths precluded farmland from encroaching on collectively-owned sites, allowing people to trade, gossip, and entertain each other. These sanctioned areas were only shut down if they weren’t...