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Possibilities and threats for popstars in Web 2.0

Popstars have an economic function, like filmstars. They promise a performance. They are the profit makers of the entertainment industries. From an ideological point of view, popstars maintain a myth of meritocracy. The industries and the stars themselves want...

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...

Superdudes/Sugababes: Guilty or not guilty?

Superdudes.nl and Sugababes.nl, two related websites, together form one of the biggest social networking sites in the Netherlands. Almost 60% of all the youngsters between 13 and 18 have created a profile at least once. Superdudes, not very surprisingly,...

Twitter as Discourse

On a first encounter with twitter, one may understandably think: ‘what are these twittering twats tweeting about!’ The twats bother each other constantly with utterances too short to be meaningful. A common reply is: Just try it for yourself!...

Facebook for Fun

Facebook is the second largest social network after Myspace.com in U.S. with around 60 million members. But it is the fastest-growing and best-known sites on the Internet today and taking into account its great expansion overseas it...
PICNIC 08 – Let All Things Be Connected

PICNIC 08 – Let All Things Be Connected

PICNIC-08 Let all things be connected Lecturer: Rafi Haladjian Raffi is one of the co-founders of Violet, which was founded in 2003, its main aim was and still is connecting things to the Internet and by things I mean...
Console Gaming 2.0 – Little Big Planet

Console Gaming 2.0 – Little Big Planet

Though ‘Web 2.0’ is primarily an affair concerning ‘teh intawebs’, the videogame market will strike back soon with ‘Little Big Planet’, developed for The Playstation 3 by Media Molecule. Although the game is not yet available in stores it...

Stickam an analysis

Founded in 2006 by Advanced Video Communications popularity: More then 500k visitors a month Stickam is just like most other free web 2.0 social network applications, such as Facebook and Myspace, but it differentiates itself by also offering the ability to...
Radio 2.0 – Using Innovative Technologies in the Effort to Connect the Unconnected

Radio 2.0 – Using Innovative Technologies in the Effort to Connect the Unconnected

Web 2.0 for a Global Society ? As defined by Wikipedia, the term Web 2.0 “encapsulates the idea of the proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content.” Tim O’Reilly, often recognized as the first person to coin the...
Watching You Watch Me!! (…on Facebook)

Watching You Watch Me!! (…on Facebook)

The Web 2.0 application FACEBOOK analysed through FOUCAULTS PHILOSOPHIES ON SOCIETY. WARNING|DANGER: With this knowledge a consciousness is created with which people become aware about the possibilities of people watching/observing/monitoring people, both virtually as in the real world.
‘Whisher’, Opening Up the Internet?

‘Whisher’, Opening Up the Internet?

A short analysis of Whisher, a web 2.0 application. With the tagline ‘Building the world’s largest WiFi network’ the goal of Whisher doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. Whisher tries to create a global and dense WiFi network with...

‘Worth1000’: Artists 2.0

Products of post modernity, made by volunteers are gathered in a big online commercial community: Worth1000. Mash-ups, parodies, manipulations made by Photoshop are submitted in contests and are rated in this digital musuem of amateur art. With Photoshop, everybody...

Web-Kare Review

Last week a new sort of web 2.0 application was launched in Japan. Web-Kare (Web-Boyfriend) is a social networking site for Japanese girls, which allows the girls to date a virtual boyfriend. There are four cartoon boys to choose...

Does the DailyMe Dissolve Our Social Glue? Analysis of a Web 2.0 Application

The term ‘Daily Me’ was first coined in 1995 by author and MIT Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. Law professor Cass Sunstein took up this notion in his book Republic.com published in 2001 (he also wrote about it in the...

Surf Around the World! An Analysis of ‘couchsurfing.com’

Couchsurfing is a non profit organisation based primarely on volunteers and donations. It is a site for people who want to meet new people and travel cheap. The site only works because there are mostly non opportunistic people on there,...
Review: Beter Internet… Yeah Right!!

Review: Beter Internet… Yeah Right!!

This is a critical review on the book "Beter Internet" which is the fourth in a series of books on the social changes that the internet brings about. This relatively small book contains four interviews on the theme Web...

Review ‘Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good’

Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (Sarah Lacy) Sarah Lacey, columnist for BusinessWeek, thoroughly describes the stories of young entrepreneurs who created groundbreaking new websites like Facebook and...

POLITICS: WEB 2.0 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Written for the Institute of Network Cultures Crossposted at Institute of Network Cultures Weblog Download PDF (full text including pictures) On April 17th and 18th 2008 the department of Politics and International Relations at the Royal Holloway University of...
Getting the Most Out of My China Trip

Getting the Most Out of My China Trip

It has been a while since I wrote my first post on international expansion of Chinese Internet companies and my experiences here in China. I wrote the post during a train ride from Guangzhou to Shanghai. A lot has...
Video Vortex: Curating Online Video

Video Vortex: Curating Online Video

This part of the conference is dealing with curating online video and was moderated by Vera Tollmann. The main question was why filmmakers and artists working with moving images don’t occupy Youtube as the perfect way to archive and...

Video Vortex: Thomas Elsaesser on ‘Constructive Instability’

'Constructive instability' is how Condoleeza Rice described the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in the summer of 2006. It's a term that brings to mind tropes of globalization - maybe a synonym of precarity, or the state that produces a desire for...

It’s the definitions, bloggers.

Lately I've been taking a shovel to the Internet Archive, looking for material on the history of blogging. It used to be that a query for 'blog history' would return a number of would-be Spanish civil war buffs, but...
Rivers of Reputation

Rivers of Reputation

This post will be about Lifestreaming, or Data Streams. “Lifestreaming, in essence, is a site dedicated to collecting and publishing online activity – all in one place. In its most basic definition, lifestreams are information aggregators that funnel...

Here comes another bubble…2.0

America’s housing market is having troubles, oil is getting ridiculously pricy, and good american patriots would rather have euros than their beloved greenback. The impending doom of the internet business market, just like in 2000, is making a buzz...