Masters of Media

From Geo to Neo: Can NeoCities Provide a Creative Utopia for Contemporary Web Culture?

Established in 1994, one of the most popular websites worldwide by 1997, and bought by Yahoo! For $3.57bn in 1999, the US branch of GeoCities closed in 2009. Hailed as a structural precursor to the socially centred web as...

By Cristel Kolopaking on 10/09/13 1

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

We Are Here: Locating micro-social dynamics of mediation

We Are Here (Dutch: Wij Zijn Hier) sums about 220 refugees that are actively searching for security and shelter in Amsterdam on a daily basis. In their very first blog post, they have stated their core objective: We are...

By Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez on 10/09/13 Comments Off

We Are Dread: A Review of the Dread Exhibition at De Hallen, Haarlem

By Lani Shadduck & Lucy Chinen “Dread trembles in my pocket. Dread chirps incessantly. Dread flashes and bounces. Dread summons me a hundred times a day to pay attention to my phone or my laptop, and stiffening...

By Lani Shadduck on 10/09/13 Comments Off

Scrum project management: The Commune between the Cathedral and the Bazaar

Scum is a framework that has been used to manage complex adaptive problems. Scrum is particularly popular in software development and in digital media projects. Characteristic to Scum is its iterative and agile approach in contrast to classic more...

By Joram Binsbergen on 10/09/13 1

The Innocence of Infographics

Interactive infographics are becoming a major trend in data visualization. Infographics are a relatively new way to simplify complex stories, data and findings. They can be very useful in organizing a large amount of information in an easy...

By Sander van Haren on 10/08/13 Comments Off

3D printing: How far can it go?

3D printing – a mind-blowing process which might bring the future so far that science fiction stories might become reality. This technology becomes more accessible to the average user every day, but is still questioned a lot. That...

By Indre Lauciute on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Are You Ready To Get Tinderized?*

How Are You Looking Online Today? Looking for a date but too shy to approach anyone face-to-face? Lucky for you, the market for smartphone apps that connects people from a distance is rapidly extending. One of those apps is...

By Ihab Khiri on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Porn 3.0

An online platform to crowd-fund porn production? This not-so-silly idea has been the subject of much online talk, from tech specialists to webzines but even more serious newspapers, especially after the launch of GoGoFantasy or the more famous Offbeatr. This Kickstarter for...

By Matthieu Foucher on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Bang With Friends – are the ‘hook up’ sites the future of dating?

By Annika Kuyper and Jakub Dutka Bang With Friends is a casual sex app, launched in January 2013. How does it work? It is dead simple. The app connects to your Facebook account and downloads your friends list. Subsequently,...

By Jakub Dutka on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Flipboard: the tasteful social curation

News consumption has somehow taken a different path since the development of RSS feed, but how is it different? And why? Let’s look at this fairly recent application, Flipboard, to answer those questions. Flipboard is a free social...

By V Weydert on 10/07/13 Comments Off

De Correspondent: New Media in News Media

After months of media attention and a very successful crowd funding campaign, De Correspondent (Dutch for The Reporter) was launched the 30th of september 2013. It is presented as a journalistic platform, which supplements rather than substitutes traditional mainstream...

By Leon Meuwese on 10/07/13 Comments Off

SteamOS: Openness & the Future of Gaming

Valve Corporation recently announced their own operating system streamlined for games called SteamOS. With SteamOS Valve wants to bring their popular online gaming platform Steam (with 50 millions accounts) into the living room. Valve already had developed an interface,...

By Michael Kerssens on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Tinder: Readily Combustible Material

“Readily combustible material, such as dry twigs, used to kindle fires.” Tinder is the new application that tells you if the people you like/ want to sleep with like you too. All you have to do is download the...

By Jonne-Marie Bouman on 10/06/13 2

Duffy on Bowie – Foam

Review – Christoph Rauch & Gustavo López New album recently released, almost 50 years on the road. Simultaneous exhibitions sold-out over the world. 2013 is definitely David Bowie’s year. The chameleon artist, keeps surprising his fans and critics with...

By Christoph Rauch on 10/05/13 Comments Off

Crowdfunding indie games, catering the long tail.

The latest trend in gaming is definitely the abundant supply of indie games releasing across all platforms. Indie Games are games created by small studios who usually consist of only a few people. They are generally released on digital platforms...

By Wannes Sanderse on 09/16/13 1

Open knowledge? Spain must try harder

In our times, hackers like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden are the talk of the town. We could define them as sorts of Robins Hoods, heroics outlaw that “rob” information from the elites and give it to everyday people...

By Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez on 09/14/13 Comments Off

Global Internet Censorship – ACTA

The internet as we know is a place with limitless accessibility and constant access to all shareable online information within an open exchange where media exist and co-exist in the way of informing and entertaining. It also means to...

By Christoph Rauch on 09/13/13 1

Watch Me If You Can (1 of 3): Anonymous and Secure Browsing

This is the first post in a short series on how to remain secure and anonymous online. Part one will cover internet browsing, part two will cover communicating online, and part three will cover file transferring and downloading. Parts...

By Philip Anderson on 09/13/13 Comments Off

Internet Imperialized

In 2010, Google.cn redirected users to Google.com.hk. Google released an official blog post announcing that it would no longer censor search results for Chinese users. The decision proceeded an allegation that U.S. companies (Google included) had been attacked by...

By Samantha Carter on 09/12/13 1

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

FRAND

The research that I did for my bachelor thesis (‘FRANDS. Who are they and what do they do?‘), focused on the so called ‘frand community’. In this first blog post of mine, I would like to introduce the concept...

By M. van Helvert on 09/12/13 Comments Off

#VemPraRua

How the use of Social Media platforms can mobilize a whole nation and transform the history of a country “Vem pra rua, porque a rua é a maior arquibancada do Brasil” The sentence above was extracted from the song...

By Gustavo López on 09/12/13 3

Website defacement and the ethos of the unknown

Website defacement (along with practices like distributed denial of service attacks and password cracking) is one of the most frequently deployed methods used by hackers. Perhaps the most infamous example of this practice is the defacing of the PayPal...

By Jakko Kemper on 09/12/13 Comments Off