Michael Dale Explains the Benefits of Open Video Platforms
Michael Dale is an advocate for open standard and free video formats for the web. The past two years he has lead...
The Exquisite Digital Corpse
Year: 1925. Place: Rue de Château no. 54, Paris, France. Characters: André Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. Plot: A group of surrealists invents a collaborative storytelling technique called cadavre exquis (the Exquisite Corpse) named as such...
E-books – The Black Market. Can We Stop It?
Along with the growth of the popularity of e-books as well as iPad, e-reader and other devices that allow for reading digital publications on the screen there is a huge increase in books piracy, what causes enormous losses for...
Twitter Research: What To Study and How To Study It
A quick glance at the Twitter research bibliography compiled by danah boyd shows that Twitter is increasingly being seen as a serious object of study within academic circles; on the aforementioned page there are 69 Twitter-related journal publications, conference...
The World’s Mood in a Box!!
"...A way to get a glimpse of the collective human consciousness as an extension of my own. Something that I don't have to continually check or poll, but instead, like a part of my body, it will tell...
The Dark Side of Twitter
Amongst many for and against internet as a public sphere Paparachisi (2002) comes up with very important characteristic, I would like to focus on here. Namely, the potential of the internet to bring people from diverse backgrounds together, which...
Wikipedia University – designing the new student
The main criticism on Wikipedia is the lack of transparancy in the background of the users. How can we know whether a certain user is a professional with an academic background (which would confirm the reliability of the article)...
Greek Wikipedia calls for Βοήθεια (Help)!
Geert: "Yes, you can write your Wikipedia post in your own language"
Me (not saying that aloud of course): "Finally! This is going to be a piece of cake"
Well... it wasn't. Instead I could describe it like a nerve-breaking, patience-challenging...
A Canadian Wikipedia Adventure
When contributing to Wikipedia it is always best to stick to what you know. The concept behind the world’s largest online encyclopedia is that everyone has valuable accumulated knowledge that should be shared, on what is essentially a global...
A for Effort
While searching for a subject to write about on Wikipedia, every word I came up with already existed. So I thought about the example that was given, and decided to write about the history of the Amsterdam Dance Centre....
Botting, Plotting and Multiboxing
A short entry on people botting, people plotting, bots multiboxing, and virtual goods adverts in games. Includes a MOVIE!
Excerpts of audiovisual astronomy
In the first systematic study about movie stardom and its heavy influence on early mass culture, Edgar Morin (1957) argues that during the golden studio-age Hollywood was able to dramatically change the ritual function of the mythical universe: by...
MIN(D)ING Your Data
Last week, ‘surveillance and control’ was the theme the Masters of Media-students were debating about. Theorists as Michel Foucault, Deleuze, Galloway and Thacker and Chun passed the revue. With the articles of the last three theorist there was some...
Virtually Yours! The Meteoric Rise of Virtual Game Goods
In the space of just over a decade, virtual game goods have gone from being a black market cottage industry to an extremely successful business model for gaming and social networking virtual goods industries. This evolution, caused by player...
Does Facebook Rule? Ideas For The Future.
Facebook is everywhere. It connects 500 millions of people around the world. No doubts, it is an effect of purposeful endeavours of those who stay behind the success of the platform. It is becoming more and more interconnected into...
The Customer is Always Right (or at least able to convince the Internet masses they are)
With the dominance of social networking, user generated content, and the ability to comment on just about anything, web 2.0 has changed the way consumers interact with corporations, especially when they are pissed off. Many corporations are performing the...
Advantages of having a ‘Second Life’ – a short essay on how MMO Games may change the World
What are MMO games? Massively Multiplayer Online games are a fresh genre to the gaming industry, as all of them require a strong and stable Internet connection. This particular branch of gaming is becoming more and more popular due...
Social data analysis – Information visualization and participatory culture
Researchers in all areas of human knowledge are overwhelmed with data. Through the process of sensemaking, in which information is collected, organized, and analyzed, new knowledge is formed and further action is informed. We must make sense of data...
Information visualization, not only an academic practice?
The definition by Card et. al. of information visualization as “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition (1999),” is the basis for many. But there are also parties involved from outside the academic...
Astroturfing on Wikipedia
As Wikipedia is currently the number 7 most visited website in the world according to Alexa, and a major source of information for all layers of society, it makes sense to engage in a critical review of its benefits,...
Book review of “Against The Machine – Being Human In The Age Of The Electronic Mob” by Lee Siegel
Lee Siegel was born in New York in 1957 and has Bachelor, Master and Master of Philosophy degrees from Columbia University. While working as a staff writer at The New Republic, an American magazine on politics and the arts,...