Eelco Ferwerda Talks About Open Access in Academic Publishing
Eelco Ferwerda, the president of the recently established Association of European University Presses, has been involved in electronic publishing...
Government Works in the Public Domain – All Your Tax-paid Content are Belong to Us
The Free Culture Research Conference last month 8-10 October (2010) devoted one of its panels to the notion that governments should explicitly release public materials – data, photographs, film – to the public domain. The moderator was Mathias Schindler...
Geert Lovink: ‘Critique of the Free and Open’ Keynote
Here’s my long-due report on Geert Lovink‘s keynote speech at the Free Culture Research Conference that took place in Berlin 8-10 October (2010). You can also read more on the conference website. As Lovink described it in his keynote,...
Resistance to Locative Media: Google Germany
The Germans proof that castles in the skies can be actualized. A real act of resistance to power has been put . More than 244.000 German internet users requested Google not to photograph their houses for Google Street View. The...
#You’re fired
Thoughts and funny incidents on… contemporary ways to lose your job ( via Blogspot/ WordPress, Facebook, Twitter) There are many valid reasons for an employee to lose his job: the pretense of economic crisis, the company closing down, the...
Flash Drive In The Wall?
Check out the newest project of Aram Bartholl, a creative artist and writer on new media, who in his works blends urban landscapes, art, technology and media. He is building a series of USB dead drops in New York City....
What are the trends in e-learning?
While I was wondering about the right topic of my master thesis, I was thinking of technologies that might have the biggest impact on e-learning in the future. That means, that I don’t want to write about Second Life...
Exploring the Zone of Alienation
Please, allow me to indulge myself. Let me tell you a tale about a book, a film, a series of video games and what is perhaps the world’s eeriest man made disaster area. I’ll even throw in a bit...
Online Piracy, The Ancient Art Of Digital Publishing
Digital piracy is a common aspect on the web, and Internet users are sometimes or even often part of it because an act of piracy is easily done. There are several sharing activities where piracy is involved such as...
Puzzling Infinity
In memory of this month deceased Benoît Mandelbrot – mathematician, godfather of fractals and the most well-known fractal the Mandelbrot set – I would like to pay respects to the Mandelbrot, in 3D! The phenomenon of fractals itself is...
Vampire energy
In the spirit of Halloween, I’ve dug up the worn down topic of Vampire energy. Vampire energy? Does that have something to do with people that wear you down and drain you from energy? No, that’s Energy Vampires. Vampire...
Music and Bits and Marketing
As a follow up to my previous post about the Music and Bits conference, I wanted to cover off on the other topic of the day, marketing. Out of the five companies who presented two of those, Top Notch...
I Played Kinect, and I Liked It
During my recent travels I came across a demonstration for the Xbox 360 Kinect in the Zurich Hauptbahnhof railway station. For those that don’t know, the Kinect is Microsoft’s latest peripheral for the Xbox 360 that allows gamers to...
Ai Weiwei: How a Chinese Artist Uses the Internet To Protest
Reading an interview with the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in the weekend magazine of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, I was instantly drawn to his faith in the democratizing power of the Internet. More than once Weiwei, who...
MADONNA R.I.P ?
Some thoughts on mock-up obituaries in view of the New Media Research Seminar’s start.
A fatal car accident. Thousands of cameras capturing the scene. Millions of mourning fans. Breaking news: Madonna has passed away.
Commons-based peer produsage? Rethinking online production.
The Internet, and the emergence of Web 2.0 in particular, have been celebrated for their liberatory potential, setting free the individual consumers once bounded by industrial inertia. We only need to take a quick look at the Arctic Monkey’s...
Apple Is Chasing The Largests.
Apple Inc. is becoming on of the most powerfull sellers and producers of smart phones. According to DC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker Apple, that came up on October 28, 2010, has went up and joined three the biggest phones producers,...
Fail and Prejudice: Using Inkscape as an alternative to Illustrator
I was already familiar with Illustrator (CS3). However since it’s been a while ago, I thought I could use Inkscape without prejudice. Think again. The point was to make a head upside down, half filled with blood, dripping out....
Pet animal 2.0: Neopets
If blogs are Foucauldian confession than this is mine. I used to play Neopets. Nine years ago I’ve created an account to be recognized in Neopia as “Mareline”. My virtual pets, luckily a user is only allowed to have...
Music and Bits and Startups
Last week I attended the Music and Bits conference, which is the pre-conference for Amsterdam Dance Event. The conference touts itself as “an exploration of music and technology” and by all accounts I would say that was accurate. Of...
Be afraid of Google?
A week ago I went to a lecture about The Googlization of the Global street by Siva Vaidhyanathan. The lecture was at “de Balie” and organized by Open. With Googlization Siva mean the process of being processed rendered and...
Free For $8
The New Museum of Art in New York City is currently hosting an exhibition carrying work from 23 artists titled “Free”. The show explores: “how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public...
Impure: a user-friendly visual programming language from Bestiario
Last week, Barcelona/ Lisboa –based company Bestiario presented the audience of VisWeek 2010 with their latest information visualization programming language, Impure, an initiative to help democratize the Web by presenting Internet citizens with a flexible, easy to use tool...