Tag Archives: Microblogging

Fail Whale: Studying Discourses by Means of Twitter

It’s a bit difficult to study Twitter when you’re not on it. Hence I log in with the user account I’ve created a while ago, 18 months ago to be exact. Again, I don’t really get the excitement. Despite the airy web 2.0 graphics interface, the service feels rather claustrophobic, enclosed. Twitter seems at first nothing more than a…

Forums are dead… long live Twitter? – Music artists in a new age of connectivity

If there’s one element of the Web 1.0 era that seems to have survived the age of social networking of today, it must be forums. But for how long? In the world of music, professional musicians seem to have been hesitant of participating on forums due to the lack of user standards. The abundance of swearing, low level of profession,…

While I see, I microblog

Microblogging, everyone is doing it, ‘normal’ people like us and ‘very important’ people like politicians, the Dutch Queen and celebrities. We share with the world what we are doing at the moment, or what is on our minds. According to Akshay Java, Tim Finin, Xiaodan Song, & Belle Tseng in their article on why…

Tweet Me Some Revolution

Create the change, become a Twitizen, fight injustice and eff the system. Revolution here and revolution there. Everywhere we hear about how social media and micro-blogging has brought about a tremendous change in the organization of social movements and political activism. We constantly get to hear about the so worn out issue of “Twitter Revolutions” all around the world and the news praising the immense effect that the influential social media movement is having on governance and political change. But where exactly is the revolution?

Microblogging = Micro-education?

Since the beginning of the Twitter hype, I was wondering what the value of Twitter is. Can we possibly learn anything from or through microblogging? Is it useful for companies to encourage lifelong learning? Or can schools and other institutions improve their education with microblogging? Until now I haven’t found an answer for these questions and until now I still…

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. There was a need for shorter form of writing. Online publications of papers became brief summaries about news events. There…

Dissemination of Social Network Sites

Social network sites are very popular within media studies. They are common research subjects. How often did you refer to Facebook or LinkedIn when writing an article? There is not one way to explore the universe of social media. But what direction do you need to go to reach that academic level? Is a Marxist approach necessary…

The Anti-Googlization: How Alternative Search Engines Find Their Way on the Web

On the website googlizationofeverything.com, theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan states that the current web is dominated in several ways by search engine Google. Google related sites and ‘Googleware’ like Google Books and Google Earth and the video channel YouTube. In a lot of countries, Google is by far the most used search engine; in the Netherlands, Google…

The Twitter Effect

For all those feeling nostalgic about the good old days in which search engines were not based on algorithms but actual people doing the work; your human side of the search engine is back.

On Lazytweet you can ask questions or search through a database that provides answers by other users through Twitter. Works terribly bad, and seems…

Foursquare: Are the benefits of locative social media limited to cities?

FourSquare has recently been described by bloggers as the next great micro-updating service – a geolocative platform that could compliment and even overcome Twitter.  Some are even guessing that with its built-in impetus to visit local businesses, it may…