New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Really that Bad? A case study on the fifth best-selling album of all time

The Atlantic recently published a stimulating critique in which music journalist John Murph questions the real legacy of Michael Jackson’s seventh and hailed studio album Bad.

By Steven Boegborn on 10/17/12 Comments Off

Interview: Laurentiu Pop (HTTPool) on Digital Advertising

Laurentiu Pop is Managing Director for HTTPool Romania (part of the HTTPool Worldwide network) and has been passionate about digital for nine years. He started as a junior ARBOmedia, one of the biggest adnetworks in the country. Then he...

By Diana Necula on 10/17/12 Comments Off

The Prosecution of Jokes on Social Media: Lets Ask the Audience.

Last week a 19 year old man from Lancashire in the UK was found guilty of section 127 of the Communications Act; a British law which makes it an offence to send any message that would be considered ‘grossly...

By Matthew Elworthy on 10/16/12 1

The Power of Social Media: Oil, Palm Trees and the Pedobear

Who doesn’t love social media? Facebook has recently celebrated more than 1 billion active users (becoming one the biggest countries in the world), Twitter has the power to put politicians on the throne or to throw them out in...

By Alex Manole on 10/16/12 2

“PIRACY IS A CRIME”. Or maybe not?

The case The recent ruling for ACAPOR case in Portugal-which is being analyzed further down-made me think about the online piracy legislation and a slight, but definitely not insignificant, alteration of it, that is currently taking place. Are the...

By Eva Anagnostaki on 10/15/12 1

Progress, hope, change and OBEY: Technological reproducibility in the digital age

PROGRESS, HOPE, CHANGE and Obama. These words got intertwined during the 2008 presidential campaign of Barrack Obama. The correlation factor: OBEY and the reproducibility of art in the age of digital reproduction. The following is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s...

By Charly Landman on 10/14/12 1

O’Reilly at PICNIC 2012: Give-and-Take on the Internet

SHARING CULTURE VERSUS CAPITALISM Since its beginning the internet has been designed as a sharing platform for information exchange without the regular borders of time and space. Free from all the constraints of the offline world information could...

By Richard Zimerman on 10/05/12 1

Stack Exchange: crowdsourcing at its best

Have you ever asked a question on the Internet? Probably, yes. What platform did you use for this purpose? There are many options: Google, social networking sites or special Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers. But can we always trust...

By Daria Koreniushkina on 10/05/12 Comments Off

The Medium with the message

Medium is a newly announced publishing platform initiated by the Obvious Corporation. With Medium, the founders of Twitter and Blogger are “rethinking publishing … from the scratch”.

By Steven Boegborn on 10/04/12 Comments Off

Helping Neighborhoods Get Social Again. Or not?

Every good idea is a solution to a problem. In the case of San Francisco based start-up Nextdoor the problem is that neighbors no longer get to know each other and truly communicate. The small-scale social network is trying...

By Ineke Scheffers on 10/04/12 Comments Off

Postagram – Reality is Awesome!

When was the last time you’ve sent someone a postcard? And not just over the e-mail e-cards that go directly to people’s spam folders, but the good old days genuine postcards brought home by the postman. In the age...

By Alex Manole on 10/03/12 2

Book Review: Media Life by Mark Deuze

“media are to us as water is to fish.” By Seah KIM and Mihaela Naftanaila This is the way Mark Deuze starts his new book Media Life, which he presented last Thursday evening at...

By Seah Kim on 10/01/12 Comments Off

A New Media Advertising Solution for a Classic Brand: Mercedes-Benz Romania

There’s Mercedes-Benz and there are other cars. I’ve always been an admirer of the German super-brand, not only for its outstanding four-wheeled pieces of art, but also for having a spectacular history and the power to constantly re-invent itself....

By Alex Manole on 09/10/12 Comments Off

Why Led Zeppelin isn’t recommended for a Led Zeppelin cover band

The thesis, on which I recently graduated, has been my most thorough academic venture yet. This blog post offers a brief account of how my BA dissertation, titled “Off the record: Reconstructing the rationale behind Last.fm’s social music recommendation...

By Steven Boegborn on 09/10/12 Comments Off

So you think your a journalist?*

It started off as a protest, a personal objection to the poorly made yellow journalism we all come across on a daily basis. Being called a “grammar nazi” so many times before certainly has its perks. At first, you’re...

By Vicentiu Dinga on 09/10/12 Comments Off

Collages by Broken Kindle Screens

A collaboration between artists Sebastian Shmieg and Silvio Lorusso, this project examines and documents 56 images of broken Amazon Kindle display screens that result in quite astonishing pieces of collage art. In an era of highly advanced computing technology,...

By Geoff Kim on 09/09/12 1

Molecule F – A Story of Online Success in Romanian Fashion

“If you would concentrate the entire Romanian fashion inside a capsule, you would have as a result Molecule F, a small, but refined part of the Romanian design“ (www.molecule-f.com). This quote defines best what Molecule F, the first online...

By Diana Necula on 09/09/12 1

The Problem With Advertising-Driven Content

It’s been almost 20 years since the web made its grand entrance into the lives of average consumers. It was around that time the internet was also opened for business and companies started assessing it for its profitability. Initially...

By Richard Zimerman on 09/09/12 1

Have we forgotten, WE are the internet

The internet beast “What technology wants”, a tellingly title of the most recent book by Kevin Kelly. As if technology is an autonomous living being possessing an own will. Although Kelly is more nuanced than this (for a book...

By Alain on 09/08/12 2

Gigapixel photography – a new vantage point

If you enjoy roaming the virtual streets of Google Maps’ Street View, take a deep breath and dive into the unique visual experience of “Gigapixel photography”. A gigapixel photograph is, mathematically speaking, an image that consists of one billion...

By Bozhan Chipev on 09/08/12 1

Getting real

“We have lived through more than half a century of being constantly told that the future of food was artificial, the future of books, newspapers, medicine and school was virtual. And that we would soon deal entirely with computerized teachers...

By Patrycja Szumacher on 09/08/12 Comments Off

[Thesis] You Can’t Squeeze Blood From a Stone. Why ACTA Isn’t Beneficial for the Media Industry Either.

Love to watch your shows online? Like to create Nutella memes to get on the hot page of 9GAG? Want to rock out in your bedroom on Gangnam Style to put it on your YouTube Channel just like Keenan...

By Ineke Scheffers on 09/07/12 Comments Off

The experience of launching an online service in Russia and smart trust

“Technique and technology are important, but adding trust is the issue of the decade” Tom Peters, business author Let’s play a game: try to find inappropriate word in a line. Bears, matryoshka dolls, vodka, Red Square, KGB, birch, e-commerce…...

By Daria Koreniushkina on 09/07/12 Comments Off

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...

By Juliana Paiva on 07/12/12 72