Wiki-vicissitudes
Within minutes after publishing the entry was removed from Wikipedia. Apparently copyrights had been violated.
(Dutch) Het is niet toegestaan teksten van andere websites te kopiëren. Wikipedia kan hierdoor in de problemen komen, zie ook Wikipedia:Auteursrechtenschending. Uw artikel Gegevens lichaam wordt daarom verwijderd van Wikipedia.
Groet, Tûkkã 29 sep 2007 11:59 (CEST) (deletion-log of Wikipedia)
I have later resolved this issue by refering ostentatiously to myself. Tûkkã (the moderator) issued that, according to Google, the wiki-entry had strong similarity with a bachelor thesis. ArnaudH also made a reference to the location of my bachelor thesis… So, is Google a strong authority or was it just the preferential search-engine of the moderator? Either way, to my opinion, the most interesting finding was the strong presence of ArnaudH. He was also very much involved in moderating a different entry of my colleague student. Is this just a coincidence or is the Dutch Wikipedia ruled by a regime of only few fanatics?
The preceding couple of days, it has become extra clear that Google has become a very important source for defining our Truths. Not only Laura’s Spin-Plant (first Nettime post here) but also the 911truth.org issue, which Erik wrote about here and here , are unmistakable examples of this. I want to add 13 more (glitched) by Google produced new alternative “Truths” here.
Together with Erik, I’m working on a Digital Methods project called ‘Repurposing the Wikiscanner‘, where we try to adopt the infamous tool for uses other than scandal hunting. We’re still working on it, but here’s a nice preview. So far it seems that, compared to other universities, we at the UvA still support a ‘Great Man’ view of history – and the present, for that matter. Here’s the cloud with emphasis added (click the image for the large version):
As part of Open-Search, I was invited to participate in the Forum on Quaero at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie in Maastricht, September 29 and 30, 2007. The purpose of the forum was to question and investigate the European intentions to build a search engine and, broader, to investigate the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to information search and access. It turned out to be a critique on centralized search engines and a plea for systems like Open-Search: decentralized, open and privacy respecting. My elaborate report and impression of the two day forum on Quaero can be read at the Open-Search Blog.
Last Friday, I attended Creative China, a partner event at Picnic 2007. One of the main topics of this seminar was the use of Internet versus government regulations and Internet restrictions in China. The Internet is by no means a tool for self-expression, if it was up to the Chinese government to decide, but in reality, Chinese users are vehemently looking for ways to express themselves, to challenge authority and as a way to find freedom within a restricted space.
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Met het produceren van een Wikipedia entry kan je vele kanten op. Nu wist ik van het forum van mijn vroegere studentensportvereniging dat er over ‘ons’ nog geen pagina bestond. Al heb je dan een site op het internet, de vraag is of je wel bestaat als je afwezig bent op de alleswetende Wikipedia. Ik nam het zekere voor het onzekere en het bestaan van Saurus was in een wip zeker gesteld. (more…)
As you might have heard Radiohead dropped its major label and put its new album online for download. This is not a new strategy but what is interesting is that they don’t sell their music through iTunes for $0.99 per song or $10-12 per album but through their site only. They are moving the legal download music industry into a new direction. The album doesn’t have a fixed price but you pay what you wish.
This link
and here is another one, on the dutch Wikipedia
is part of a larger research assignment for the masters of media course in amsterdam, where new (and old) media are critically researched, viewed and responded on. Besides a theoretical approach, a very important part of this course is to also to ‘field research’; active generation and involvement in the new media landscape.
Currently, the ‘truth-value’ of wikipedia is researched. Where does knowlegde here come from, and who writes it? is it really the emergent ‘wisdom of the crowd’ or is it just a few nerds editing on everything? By creating semi-false, but true-linked wikipedia entries, one can find out how and how fast articles are checked, re-edited or discarded and, moreover, on what grounds and authority?
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Hoe makkelijk is het om berichten op de Nederlandse variant van Wikipedia te plaatsen? Wie bekijkt de nieuw aangemaakte pagina’s? Wat is waarheid volgens Wikipedia? Met deze vragen in het achterhoofd heb ik op woensdag 26 september een pagina over de Spinplant of Bossius Rodricus aangemaakt. Voor de aandachtige lezer, nee, deze plantensoort bestaat niet. Het idee hier achter was om uit te vinden hoe lang het duurt voordat een pagina over een niet-bestaand onderwerp wordt ‘gevonden’ en wat hier dan mee wordt gedaan.
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28 & 29 september were two days full of ‘big urban games’. Together with the Picnic festival several games from all over the world were played on the Westergasterrein and other places in the city of Amsterdam. Luckily I was there for two whole days and had my share in all the fun. Two games definately stood out for me and one other just needs to be cited :)
/ Collectic
Imagine people running around with a PSP in their hands, pushing all the buttons as fast as they can and not really noticing what happens around them. This could be players of the Collectic game :) The players need to collect several different ‘objects’ that appear on their screen because of local wi-fi points. While being busy collecting the objects, at the same time a game of tictactoe needs to be played with the collected objects, to earn points. It is too complicated to explain the whole game, but it is definately the best version of tictactoe I’ve ever played. More information can be found on: http://www.pixelsix.org/collectic/ Also on the maker Jonas Hielscher, whom all the credits go to!
Slashdot is regarded as a highly innovative website. It has been very popular for many years and is currently holding the 33rd position in Technorati’s top 100 of popular blogs. The site has been around since 1997 and is regarded as one of the first blogs, before there even was such a thing as a blog. Slashdot is a newssite for nerds. The extended title pretty much says it all: “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” Slashdot is widely known for the so called Slashdot-effect. As written in Wikipedia:
“The Slashdot effect is the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from the technology news site Slashdot linking to underpowered websites.”[1]
Slashdot is also famous for its moderation system. The system is quite complex. I would like to expand on it a little.
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At Picnic, September 26 I visited a Partner Event named Quality Time, organized by the Stimulerings Fonds where a presentation was given by the Stifo@Sandberg workshop. Stifo@Sandberg started six years ago when designers and filmmakers were paired up with the intention of influencing both artistic practices. In this demo session the best work from the series was showcased. The idea was to engage the audience in a discussion on the future of the media and for the international panel (including Frank Boyd, Katie Salen, Matt Adams, Ferhan Cook and Michel Mol) to give feedback on the presentations. Martijn de Waal moderated the morning.
The three cross media projects presented were Herinnnerdingen.nl (memorythings) van Boudewijn Koole en Ryan Oduber (produced by de Jongens van de Wit/VPRO), BeperktHoudbaar.info van Sunny Bergman en Debbie Mollenhagen (produced by Viewpoint Productions/VPRO) en Kika en Bob van Colette Bothof en Vincent Bal (produced by Submarine/NPS). (more…)
Thursday and Friday the European Bloggers (Un)Conference was held at the PICNIC conference and festival. Cory Doctorow attended for an hour to answer questions from the audience about Boing Boing. A lot of these questions concerned the business model and commercial side of the famous blog. Boing Boing is often mistaken for a magazine but it is a blog that is not concerned with making the most money possible. The question of what the revenue of Boing Boing is is not answered with numbers but with the statement that it makes a pretty good living for the four of them. They have a marketing company that handles the commercial side for them.
two-day public program on RFID and things to come.
19 & 20 OCTOBER 2007
DE BALIE AMSTERDAM
http://www.debalie.nl/recallingrfid
It’s in travel documents, building passes, pet animals, clothing stores, libraries, public pools, theme parks and prisons… and yet only a few of us know what RFID is. RFID (radio frequency identification) uses radio waves to identify people, animals or objects carrying encoded microchips. For government and industry, RFID signifies economic innovation, while for the futurist it marks the next stage in digital connectivity. RFID’s pervasiveness will only increase in the years to come, forcing shifts in perceptions of the public sphere and private domain.
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Problogger belongs to Darren Rowse who is a professional blogger and has started more than 20 blogs. He started this site to tell others how to make your blog more succesfull. The content of the blog is very much related to the goal: making a better blog and making money from it. All it’s articles are tips for a better and rewarding blog. (more…)
Update: 911truth.org reappeared in Google’s search returns on October 7. No explanation has been put forward yet, but this second coming has been nicely documented and visualized on the Issue Dramaturg [added 10/10/07 by Michael].
About a year ago Richard Rogers, Marieke van Dijk, and I made the Issue Dramaturg, a tool to display a site’s Google rank per query. Today, whilst preparing for the public form on Quaero I checked our query on 9/11 again. Every day we query Google for 9/11 and see which sites have what rank for that query. Normally 911truth.org has a very high rank in Google for this query. Since the 17th of September 2007 however, their rank has declined very fast. On the 20th of September 911truth.org completely disappeared from Google! 911truth.org is an important source for information about 9/11. According to Wikipedia,
[911truth.org,] The 9/11 Truth Movement is the name adopted by the loosely-connected organizations and individuals that question the mainstream account of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. […] The common proposition among all of the movement supporters is that what they call “the official account” of the events of 9/11 is not true, and that the truth has been covered up by high-level officials and the official investigators.
Below you can find a screenshot of the Issue Dramaturg documenting the decline in Google rank for 911truth.org:
911truth.org itself says this about it:
It seems absolutely clear Google has purposefully removed 911truth.org from their search engine. Is this the same Google whose mission statement includes the goal “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Uhm, maybe only sort of universally accessible?
… Talking about a well documented case of Google censorship… I am constantly reminded why we started Open Search – a distributed peer to peer search engine which is set up to avoid search engine manipulation, censorship and profiling.
extract: By comparing the activity of blogs on social websites with the activity of the persons ‘behind’ the blogs, I am trying to make a picture of the different uses of these social sites. And meanwhile looking at the difference in presentation. How does a blog present itself on something like FaceBook; as being a person or does it clearly state that it is let’s say a fansite for that specific blog. Or in short, which type of face is given to the blog…
by Minke Kampman
BoingBoing: A Directory of Wonderful Things is a groupblog that provides a mix of Web humor, art, politics, gadgetry and unicorns (and plenty more). It is probably the only blog popular enough to receive its own backlash. I used to visit BoingBoing on a regular basis, nowadays it fills my feed reader.
BoingBoing started as one of a number of San Francisco based magazines (including Wired and Mondo 2000) that, over the years, have contributed to the public imagination of new media and their possible uses. Detailing its history may reveal insights, for example, into some of the continuities between Webs 1.0 (the virtual community) and 2.0 (the online social network). I am thinking of something along the lines of Fred Turner’s work in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture (my review of which is here).
My analysis, though, is relatively hasty and qualitatively different: I look only to aspects of the blog’s form, its content and its makers, testing each for their specificity. This takes the form of three short studies, and assumes that readers are already somewhat familiar with the blog (for proper introduction, including some of the history, see the wikipedia article). It is by no means exhaustive, and is more a first step for me in learning how to do this kind of analysis on the Web. (more…)
Projects are ready to be prototyped and build. This monday all participants are working individually or with a small number of people on parts of the projects. You might think a “hackers camp” only includes hardware and software hacking and tweaking. Today there was however some old style building going on with hammers and saws. Transforming our hackers into wood hackers.
Read the rest of the post at Mediamatic
This workshop is technical. It should include RFID. However, the aim of the projects is to make something for people. After some great technical and sometimes geeky first ideas for the projects, in the morning session we looked at the projects individually to see if we can twist the concepts into something more social. The aim is not only to create cool hardware and software gadgets, because the number of geeks that want to know how it actually works is small. Rather, the projects have to be meaningful to the audience on a personal and social level.
Read the rest of the post at Mediamatic
Julian Bleeker from Near Future Laboratory presented “Mobzombies” at Picnic Academy 2007. Mobzombies is a hand-held videogame that is enabled by motion awareness. In the game, the user functions as a human joystick and (literally) runs away from the zombies displayed on the hand-held portable screen.
Friday the 21st of September, the annual Dutch Big Brother Awards were held at the Balie in Amsterdam. It was organized by the – unfortunately no longer existent – Bits of Freedom, an organisation which came up for your digital civil rights.
The Big Brother award went out to You, the Dutch civilian, who according to the jury is the biggest threat to privacy. Because of the indifference – “I don’t have to hide anything” – and the disinterest at who looks to your personal data, the civilian is responsible for the demise of privacy in the Netherlands. Where Time praised ‘You’ last year as person of the year, de BBA-jury warns you with this price for the ease with which you take far reaching intrusions to your privacy for granted.
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Today my RSS feed list provided me with an interesting link that directed me to the coverage of the latest Diesel fasion show. It is not that I am particularly interested in Diesel clothing, on the contrary, but I am interested in the new holographic techniques they have used during their fashion show in combination with displaying the new collection.
The technical part of the stunning 3D show was made by Clas Dyrholm and Peter Simonsen from Vizoo, a Danish company that develops and produces new media with “edge”. At the Vizoo website a lot of other project are mentioned and described. They call the free-floating holograms ‘advanced video design’ and several movies are available to show the truly stunning effects the technology can achieve. (more…)
In this post I’m analyzing two blogs that get into new media in ‘the black continent’. The black continent… that’s how Erik Hersman called Africa in one of his personal most loved posts on his blog, the white African. A romantic name for the once so mysterious continent that everyone knew so little about. Butt, while most of African mysteries have been mapped out by modern day science and media (even the whereabouts of the illusive source of the Nile is known) Africa consists to be the black continent, quite literally that is:
africa by night
Africa has a population of approximately 933,448,292 people. That is almost 15% of the world’s total population. Fron those 933,448,292 Africans only 33,545,600
are using the internet. That is only 3.6% of the entire African population. Only 3% of the worlds internet users come from an African country. When we take a longer look at the stats we notice that most of the African internet usage comes from the relatively richer countries in the far north and the far south of Africa(see the stats). This contradicts with the words of Kofi Annan, who said that:
…we must match the powerful new tools with the people who need them most.
(edusite) Because of this contradiction and the impact new media technology (if properly implemented) could have on the third world I chose to write my blog analyse on two blogs that get into new media in Africa.
ANALYZED BLOGS (more…)