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Burning Questions

Is Google the always-on, silent recorder of global zeitgeist? There’s Google Trends, which lists most searched-for sites and topics in the last week, month or year around the globe. This has been a useful tool for digital publishers to...
Google Instant: instantly distracted

Google Instant: instantly distracted

A few days ago Google launched its new way of search that promised to be ‘faster than the speed of type’. Instant Search, the new way name, is sort of similar to the earlier search predictions, but this one...

The Wilderness Downtown: When New Media and Music Reinforce Each Other

Musicians are struggling, as they have always been. It seems to have to be part of the deal in one way or another. In the past decade or so however, things have gotten increasingly difficult for artists as the...

Google Books to Pay Scholars to Dig into its Digital Stacks

Google has “quietly” decided to pay humanities researchers $50,000 a year to dig into all the rich metadata accruing from its 12 million and counting library. Franco Moretti, whose “distant reading” analyzes literary trends from statistical data rather than...

The Beast File: Google

This video, created for ‘Hungry Beast‘, a news program that airs in Australia on the ABC1, depicts Google as a dangerous, pretentious, ubiquitous and ever growing advertising giant: ‘building an empire on your street, in your phone, in your...
Rethinking Googlization

Rethinking Googlization

In current search engine research the importance of Google as object of study seems to be inevitable. Google seems to be indexing parts of the physical and digital world, which we first thought to be unsearchable. Googlization, the term...
Google’s Global Dissociative Identity Disorder

Google’s Global Dissociative Identity Disorder

A lot has been written already about the local and global. Comparing this to other local Google websites and the general Global Google (google.com). But how global is this Global Google actually? Is google.com really global? Is the result...

Matteo Pasquinelli: Are We Renting our Collective Intelligence to Google?

Matteo Pasquinelli’s presentation this Friday at The Society of the Query conference organized by the Institute of Network Cultures lead by Geert Lovink, was based on his paper, Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier...

Yann Moulier Boutang @ The Society of The Query asking, “Are we all just Google’s worker bees?”

Are we all just worker bees being exploited by Google for capitalistic means? What Google is selling is not an ordinary service, but a meta-service, one that depends on human contribution. Yann Moulier Boutang likens this human activity to...

BEACON and the use of datasets in media art

When I attended at the ‘Accelerated Living’ conference as a part of the Impakt Festival (Utrecht), it once more appeared there’s plenty of academic prospect on the subjects of time and space. As the works often build on theory...

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...
Google Takes Command: Shaping the Web

Google Takes Command: Shaping the Web

Even though the web doesn’t have a central point, sometimes Google, or search engines in general, seem to form the center of this universe. Bringing together all these different websites into one database, ready to be searched. Google’s software,...

NOVA College Tour: Interview with Steve Ballmer CEO Microsoft

Yesterday evening Steve Ballmer visited NOVA College Tour. Steve Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft and is well known of his flamboyant appearances at conferences. In this interview with 500 students of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam he talks about...

A Review of: Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, Walled Garden

Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, and Walled Garden, the three books coming along in a box, picture the general look of the electronic scenery we are in through the decade. Besides interviews to several key influencers, research essays and some...

Book Review of: Search Engine Society – Alexander Halavais

In his 2009 published book “Search Engine Society”, Alexander Halavais looks at the impact of the phenomenon of search engines in the everyday online lives of Internet-using citizens around the world. Search engines have become a widely used component...

In Memoriam GeoCities (1994-2009)

Yahoo! will soon pull the plug on the once-famous GeoCities.com. The passing of this iconic Internet site is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, GeoCities (and its competitors like Tripod and Angelfire) were an important catalyst for the development of...
Wikipedia’s Datasource Google

Wikipedia’s Datasource Google

Today Erinc Salor gave an excellent presentation called Redefining Encyclopaedia’s, about his research on Britannica, the history of encyclopaedia’s and its relation to Wikipedia. He feels there is too much speculation going on at the current moment. Most critical post and...
Google Meets Mark

Google Meets Mark

Mark Kamau speaking on behalf of Nairobits (project initiated by Butterfly Works)

The most rewarding speech during the 'Surprising Africa' special at PICNIC came (according...

Wikipedia’s Criterion: Google

Creating a hoax on Wikipedia isn’t that difficult. Just write it down and save it. But it won’t take long before the Wiki-officials will delete it. This afternoon, I created a fake ‘legend’ and wrote a Wiki about it. Four hours...

PICNIC 08 – What will Google do?

On the last day of Picnic 2008, on Friday at Zuiveringshal West Gisel Hiscock, the Google’s EMEA business development director appeared with the company’s newest initiatives and strategies. Gisel Hiscock outlined company’s scheme of acting opposing the traditional approach –the...
Google Analytics: The Implications of an Easy Setup

Google Analytics: The Implications of an Easy Setup

Here at Masters of Media it is time for a redesign. As students of the new year we are encouraged not only to contribute with fresh new content to the blog, but also to re-think its shape; both in...

iGoogle Review

A few years ago I started with using iGoogle, a personalized starting page from Google. iGoogle is one of the best 100 web 2.0 applications according to Webware (from Cnet). With iGoogle you can add applications in the starting...
An Analysis of Web 2.0: ‘YouTube’

An Analysis of Web 2.0: ‘YouTube’

Introduction Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. In short, Web 2.0 emphasizes the...
“Get to the top on Google” Book Review

“Get to the top on Google” Book Review

google-book-review/">google" src="http://alessandrovalente.wordpress.com/files/2008/09/gtttog-cover-low-res1.jpg" alt="" width="109" height="145" />Get to the top on Google: Tips Techniques to get your site to the top of search engine rankings and stay there. Get to the...