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

Scrapebox: a new perspective on an old SEO tool

Scrapebox is a versatile SEO tool but it’s mainly known for its comment spamming functions. The purpose of this article is to show that this software offers many interesting features that could be applied to academic and market reasearch....

By Andrea Fiorentini on 10/12/13 2

User feedback and the automated News Feed

User feedback and the automated News Feed Recently, Facebook announced a change, or in other words a ‘tweak’, in its News Feed ads algorithm. The goal of this update, which is going to be effective in the coming weeks,...

By M. van Helvert on 10/09/13 Comments Off

Behind the SERP: Google’s Imperfect Algorithm

Google is undoubtedly the leader in the search engine market. Google’s algorithm, based on crowdsourcing, was the major breakthrough in the whole web search industry. Users consulting Google’s search result pages have shown a strong bias towards the first results on...

By Andrea Fiorentini on 09/12/13 1

Google Maps and Fukushima: Collective Memory and Data Visualization

As major world events unfold before our eyes at accelerated speeds, via a host of different medias how can we process these vast quantities of information? In the digital age, we consume news round-the-clock, whether we use smart phone...

By Susan Clandillon on 09/10/13 1

The Internet is now built on mass surveillance

Brought to light in recent months, the Edward Snowden-powered NSA leaks have publicized the wholesale spying efforts by US and UK intelligence agencies that undermine the very fabric of the Internet – turning it into a vast surveillance program...

By Nicholas Vieira on 09/09/13 1

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...

By Geoff Kim on 03/11/13 Comments Off

What do the web search engines “think” of the Pussy Riot case?

The Pussy Riot sentence has become the unprecendented event concerning the global resonance, compared to other news from Russia in the recent years. 86% of the world mass media have covered the Pussy Riot case, media monitor NewsEffector reports....

By Daria Koreniushkina on 10/19/12 Comments Off

[Interview] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – “Content is a king, not a Cinderella”

Many people still think they can manipulate search engines in order to get top rankings. A well-known example is the campaign against George Bush, when a lot of websites and blogs linked George’s Bush page with the key words...

By Mihaela Naftanaila on 10/15/12 3

Google and the Principles of the Semantic Web

One of the first goals of the Internet was to expand the knowledge of the users by connecting different data. However, the contemporary web is by no means comparable to this initially academic network. The web expanded unprecedentedly and...

By Lauressa Ford on 09/10/12 Comments Off

Google Web Lab: a global museum exhibition

Until next summer, a visit to the Science Museum in London can be more than a thrilling experience. Among seven floors of exhibitions, it can be found in the basement the new Google Web Lab, which is running until...

By Juliana Marques on 09/08/12 Comments Off