Tag Archives: profiling

Book Review: The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser

The Filter Bubbler refers to the personalization processes taking place on the Web, which shape what content you see and more important what content you don’t get to see. Big players like Google and Facebook feed you what they think you want, based on secret profiles of you to which you have no access. In short, you may end up in a bubble of fabricated interest, based on your personal profile of which you have no control and which you cannot correct. This book addresses these personalization processes and what their future implications might be, ranging from the doing of good to the pure evil.

Vriendjespolitiek.net: research into post-demographics

Since 1998, and on paper since 1989 (Stemwijzer 2008), general elections in the Netherlands have spawned a variety of so called voting recommendation machines. These systems typically ask the user to answer some questions after which they offer the user a voting recommendation, based on the compatibility between his or her answers and the political parties. The questions are…

The University of Amsterdam’s ‘Great Man Theory’ on Wikipedia

Together with Erik, I’m working on a Digital Methods project called ‘Repurposing the Wikiscanner‘, where we try to adopt the infamous tool for uses other than scandal hunting. We’re still working on it, but here’s a nice preview. So far it seems that, compared to other universities, we at the UvA still support a ‘Great Man’ view…

Big Brother Award of 2007 goes out to … You!

Friday the 21st of September, the annual Dutch Big Brother Awards were held at the Balie in Amsterdam. It was organized by the – unfortunately no longer existent – Bits of Freedom, an organisation which came up for your digital civil rights.

The Big Brother award went out to You, the Dutch civilian, who according to the jury…