What Social Network?
Perhaps I'm jaded. Perhaps I'm a nostalgist. Perhaps Facebook isn't the most sinister CIA operation yet. But somehow, I cannot stop from thinking that the "Web 2.0" as we know it today is an accident of history, an effect...
Chinese Cyber World: A World in Itself
Let’s start with an interesting conversation between a Chinese (C) and a westerner (W): W: Oh, it is so nice to meet you! Do you have facebook? C: no. I am sorry. W: Do you have MSN? C: yea,...
Photos from the first New Media MA Graduation Day
Tuesday the 22nd of September was a big day for both graduating New Media MA students and New Media studies itself. The first official graduation ceremony (which were previously held together with Film and Television studies in Mediastudies) marked...
Pecking in the Picnic
Yesterday was the last day of the PICNIC event, and even though the "main course" was only acessible to conference ticket owners, there were still plenty of activities to be... 
Digital activism: using social media to change to world
Online social media nowadays seem like perfect tools for initiating social change in the world. Anyone with a certain goal in mind can reach large groups of individuals, spread awareness, raise a fund and get people to feel involved....
Hybrids for the Commons
Our notion of the commons hails from England, where a maze of paths precluded farmland from encroaching on collectively-owned sites, allowing people to trade, gossip, and entertain each other. These sanctioned areas were only shut down if they weren’t...
Recommendation vs Consumption in the social networks
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine published The Long Tail article in October 2004 to describe an statistic feature of some statistical distributions that affect to current and future business models. Since then, traditional marketing field has became totally...
Are you a nerd, a geek, a dork or a dweeb?
In a new media class at the university everyone always has some kind of addiction. There are students who are addicted to games, some who are addicted to blogs, others to dating sites or stream-videos and chats. Eventually, they...
Wikipedia – Anyone can edit? Actually, no.
On the mainpage of Wikipedia.org you can read, “Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. I would like to contest this. I am anybody and I was not able to make a Wiki. What happened, you might ask....
Sexuality and Wikipedia
Foucault argued that political power and coercion is not only exercised by our government but also by institutions which we don’t immediately see as political, like our education or our healthcare. I would like to add Wikipedia to that...
Wikipedia = reliable
A lof of comments on the reliability of Wikipedia are getting old. These questions do not really concern Wikipedia, but the question: What is a usable source of information? Wikipedia is off course a unique example, but is it any...
Wikipedia: A Corporate Hub?
Few years ago, Dutch snowboarders tried to create an entry in Wikipedia for BigAirBAG, a Dutch brand of air cushion that can be used to absorb the impact while landing freestyle snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking, BMX, etc. tricks. The entry was deleted after an editor noted that the company is...
Wikipedia material ?
Before this assignment I knew nothing about posting to Wikipedia, I’ve only been a reader. I just found out that it is actually quite difficult to simply add an entry to this online encyclopedia. In the past I once...
Researching Wikipedia: Activity Streams & Document Network Location
Wikipedia is quickly emerging as a research object. Considering the incredible amount of (meta)data Wikipedia contains there are legions of possible ways to do useful Wikipedia research. Today, I would like to talk about the possibilities and benefits of...
Wiki’s Political Point of View?
A conflict usually has two or more oppositional factions. They all have their own reason for this conflict, they all have a different point of view on this conflict, and most important; they do not agree with each other...
‘Useless Content’ – Part 2
This week assignment for New Media Practices was writing an Wikipedia entry. Although this clarified a lot about Wikipedia and its policies, the job caused me a lot of frustration. I wrote an entry about the Brazilian NGO I...
‘Useless Content’ – Part 1
‘Wikipedia is not a valid source’. That’s a common critique on the online encyclopedia. Erin Harty from the University of Idaho stresses that the information on Wikipedia doesn’t have any academic background and that it ‘is not really an...
Wikipedia: a Social Playground
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an interesting product of the Web 2.0. Wikipedia asks its users to actively participate, add and change the content of the website, in order to create a knowledge database which is more up to...
The Bold Sisters of Wikipedia
Even though the site Wikipedia itself is the most known project of the Wikimedia foundation, there are several sister projects that are interesting and worth of researching. There is, for example, the Wiktionary, which is, quite obviously, a dictionary,...
Astroturfing on Wikipedia
As Wikipedia is currently the number 7 most visited website in the world according to Alexa, and a major source of information for all layers of society, it makes sense to engage in a critical review of its benefits,...
The semantic web versus Wikipedia?
From the day of birth of the Wikipedia project, the online encyclopedia has been a highly controversial case. The debates range from information accuracy (including the inquiry of the information-knowledge relation once again) to the pyramidic usermodel (often undermined...
Response to sarahnats: What is Causing the Decline in Wikipedia Participation?
This short article is a response to sarahnats’ article “What is Causing the Decline in Wikipedia Participation”? You can see this short article as a further extension of her argumentation structure and my own experience of adding information to...
The Wiki Beehive
Generally Wikipedia is praised for it’s collective driven overload of information. “Britannica’s biggest errors are of omission, not commission. It’s shallow in some categories and out of date in many others. And then there are the millions of entries...