BLOG ANALYSE (in progress): “How social software is being (mis)used by high-rated blogs.”
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
For the choice of blogs I made use of the top 10 of “most linked to” and the top 10 of “most favorited” blogs of the lists of popular blogs on the Technorati site (23 sept 2007);
MOST LINKED TO ON 23-09-07:
01 “Engadget” by WeblogsInc
02 “Boing Boing” by Mark Frauenfelder
03 “Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide” by …
04 “Techcrunch” by Michael Arrington
05 “Breaking News and Opinions on The Huffington Post” by Arianna Huffington
06 “Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done” by …
07 “Ars Technica” by Ars Technica, LLC
08 “Mashable! The Social Networking Blog” by Pete Cashmore
09 “Daily Kos: State of the Nation” by …
10 “Blog di Beppe Grillo” by Beppe Grillo
MOST FAVORITED ON 23-09-07:
01 “Boing Boing”
02 “Blog Tips at ProBlogger – Make Money Online Blogging” by Darren Rowse
03 “Techcrunch”
04 “Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done”
05 “Engadget”
06 “PissingInTheTent.com” by dailyrants77
07 “43 Folders | Personal productivity, life hacks, and other cool…” by Merlin Mann
08 “Make Money Online with Dosh Dosh” by Maki Maki
09 “PostSecret” by frank warren
10 “Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide”
As some of the blogs are mentioned twice, there will be 15 of them in total to analyse. The name that sometimes is mentioned behind the blog is of the founder, person or company behind the blog. The type of analyse I want to make here is a comparison between the activity of the blog in social software sites and the activity of the person behind it. I have looked for active accounts of both the blog as well as the person behind it. You will find the results at the end of this post.
There were some findings that were very suprising to me. I will go through them one by one in a non-specific order. But first I would like to aknowledge the fact that it is very possible that the persons do have accounts in social software (were I say they don’t), but not under their own name. This is not relevant for this specific analyse, because where I am looking for is the ways they present themselves in relation to the blog. And if they choose to present themselves under a pseudonym, then that already answers the question.
One blog that clearly stands out of the rest is PissingInTheTent.com, here I couldn’t find anything on either the blog or the person (which uses a screenname). ‘Maki’ from DoshDosh does the same, but he remains traceable. ‘Maki’ just chooses not to give out his last name, but does reveals information on himself and what he does. Everything on ‘PissingInTheTent’ or ‘dailyrants77’ leads to profiles that haven’t been filled in. Clearly we are dealing with the only one hat is solely a blog. Nothing more and nothing less. The writer just wants his message out there, but doesn’t feel compelled to tell about himself. Even the emailaddress you can send comments to leads to an unpersonal website. It wouldn’t have made a difference if it was Hotmail or Gmail. Clearly he/she really doesn’t want to be tracked down and remains literally faceless (both as blog as well as person). I was a bit reluctant to this, because of the results of the other blogs. I even tried a second search on this one, under the name ‘FreedomBlog’. Again no results.
My conclusion on this one is that either he does his ‘marketing’ through a different channel or he has a group of very devoted fans. But he makes no use of the social software that I’ve looked at.
So we come to DoshDosh, which I’ve already mentioned. One of the two blogs that prefer not to give out their real name. Although enough to know that he’s male (he points this out on both his Flickr account as well as on the blog) and from Toronto, Canada. And he is very much into manga. He clearly uses the social sites for functional reasons; his Flickr accounts holds the pictures he refers to on the blog and Digg seems being used for research and ideas. Interesting is that he chooses the blogname for the Flickr account and ‘Maki’ for his digg account. One could ask whether he sees this as being the same thing, seeing the fact he uses the same picture for both accounts. Both the name ‘Maki’ as ‘DoshDosh’ don’t give me anything on personal information. Though by lifting a tip of the veil, he succeeds in giving it a bit of a personality.
He makes use of the options social sites present him with, but makes no misuse of them. I am getting back on the difference between use and misuse later on in this post.
Beppe Grillo does the exact opposite almost of what DoshDosh does. It’s not even a question whether he makes a difference between the blog and himself. This is who I am and what I have to say. Of course this is an easy conclusion when you give your own name to your blog. But even by doing so, he could have chosen to remain faceless. He doesn’t (with exception of his YouTube account, but this one hasn’t been used very actively). So that leaves us with MySpace and FaceBook. MySpace is very clearly being used for leading people to his his website; his subtitle is his url and he has 11885 “friends”. In FaceBook he has a personal account, to see this one you have to become friends first. And there is a sort of fanbased group called ‘The Beppe Grillo Appreciation Group’. So although he uses his own name for his blog and shows his face everywhere, he seems very conscious about what he uses with which purpose. His face and name may be the connection, but the MySpace-Beppe seems to be the ‘blog’ and the FaceBook-Beppe is the ‘person’. This is given the fact that the fan group isn’t iniated by himself. Or at least I hope not.
So that is a ‘yes’ on the use of social sites and a ‘yes’ on mis-use, but only on his face for using it as a marketingtool for his blog. Which is actually pretty smart in different ways. It instantaneously becomes very personal and trusthworty for people when they have a face to connect the information with. With a logo or so, it takes time for people to link the logo to the information. As soon as the link has been made, it works very well. But there often is a small incubation time.
Arianna Huffington uses her own name, but alters it by adding ‘post’ to her last name to make the difference between her and the blog. And this seems to work for her. The blog’s MySpace account appears to be an addition the blog. With a very clear strategy, for instance she has a mere 76 friends. But the friends that are on top of the list are all candidates for the Democratic nominations in the 2008 presidential election. One could say this MySpace is one big advertisement towards the blog. It has been adjusted in such a way that it doesn’t even look like a regular MySpace account anymore. With exception of the title that appears in the browser: “MySpace.com – Huffington Post – 57 – Vrouw – California – www.myspace.com/huffingtonpost.” Her technical staff probably haven’t found a way yet to adjust this as well.
I’m not able to access her personal FaceBook account again without first becoming her ‘friend’. She makes use of her name, but not so much her face. Although it appears on the MySpace account, it is always in combination with the name of the blog or something else. And not in the way as Beppe Grillo does it, making his face the face of the blog.
Darren Rowse does the same as Huffington and Grillo in the sense of connecting his face with his blog. But in an inconsistent way. For example, in his MySpace accounts he uses the same picture (from a different angle). And what’s noticeable here is that ProBlogger (or “Darren”) has only two ‘friends’, while “Darren Rowse” has 220 ‘friends’. So you could say he is not misusing the site for the blog. But is this really? Since he doesn’t really distinguishes himself from the blog. But back to the use of pictures; the ProBlogger-FaceBook account uses the logo to represent the blog instead of Darren’s face. So he goes a bit back and forth between the use of his face and that of the logo to represent ProBlogger. A video on his personal YouTube (but which clearly is set up for the blog) called “Differentiate Yourself as a Blogger” helps to understand this. He recognizes the fact that the picture of himself on the website has gotten so much recognition: “(…) that picture has become associated with my brand.” and “(…) it distinguishes me and my blog.” So much recognition even, that it almost replaces the actual logo. The choice of words reveals a lot. It wasn’t completely intentionally, but he aknowledges the fact that his face is the brand and he makes use of this. It is all about making money out of blogging, so this is one way to go. Choosing the face over the logo, simply because it seems to work.
Pete Cashmore seems to make use of the fame of ‘Mashable!’ so people can find him. At least that’s the case with his LinkedIn account, where the name ‘mashable’ leads to his personal account. That’s about it what you can find in these sites on him. ‘Mashable!’ however has a name to uphold as the Social Networking Blog. You can see them play with this in different ways. Their MySpace account says to have 1536 trillion ‘friends’, which is pretty incredible seeing the fact that MySpace only has about 200 million accounts. They actually have 1536 ‘friends’. At Twitter you see them post an url back to ‘Mashable!’ in most of their posts. They basically link back to the website in everything they’ve signed up for. Except for maybe Digg, but most of the posts they digg is one of ‘Mashable!’
Peter Rojas (Engadget) and Gina Trapani (Lifehacker) share the same strategy. With the blog they’ve got lots of accounts in different places of which almost all of them link back to the blog. And they personally also have lots of accounts, but of which none link back to the blogs. If they do link somewhere, it is to their personal websites. If you compare that to the approaches of the blogs above, it is almost as if Peter and Gina are saying that they’re not merely bloggers. And if they were to connect their name solely to that project, it wouldn’t cover the rest anymore. To show off how allrounded they are, so to say. They clearly differentiate the person from the blog in the way they present themselves.
I wouldn’t say that Frank Warren (PostSecret), Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos), Ken Fischer (ArsTechnica), Nick Denton (Gizmodo) and Mark Frauenfelder (BoingBoing) share the same strategy. But they do seem to share the same preference of beholding their name for their personal use. It looks like this is the case, because they are virtually absent in the social sites that I’ve been looking through. Except for an occasional FaceBook account which I cannot access or Frauenfelder’s LinkedIn account. So, not only do they differentiate the person from the blog, they even differentiate the person from the web. They don’t hide their own existence like ‘Maki’ and ‘dailyrants77’, but they don’t feel the need to showcase themselves more than is necessary. They probably do recognize the fact that as soon as a name is stated somewhere you (or the blog in these cases) will be taken more seriously instead of when you make use of screennames. But it is of no benefit to the blog whether the reader knows that you like to play golf in your free time. So what they are actually doing is making very efficient use of the social sites.
ANALYSE:
Account = Non existing.
Account = Existing, but chances are it’s a different person.
Account = Existing & right person, but not very active.
Account = Yes!
Account = Yes, but without url (with some Facebook accounts I couldn’t get hold of the exact url).
BLOGS
01 Engadget: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
02 Boing Boing: YouTubeFlickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
03 Gizmodo: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
04 Techcrunch: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
05 HuffingtonPost: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
06 LifeHacker: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg, MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn.
07 ArsTechnica: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn.
08 Mashable: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn.
09 DailyKos: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn.
10 BeppeGrillo: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
11 ProBlogger: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
12 PissingInTheTent: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
sub 12 FreedomBlog: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
13 43Folders: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
14 DoshDosh: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
15 PostSecret: YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
Person / Company / Otherwise
01 Peter Rojas : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
02 Mark Frauenfelder : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
03 Nick Denton : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
04 Michael Arrington : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
05 Arianna Huffington : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
06 Gina Trapani : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
07 Ken “Caesar” Fisher : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
08 Pete Cashmore : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
09 Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
10 Beppe Grillo : (same name as blog, so see the results above)
11 Darren Rowse : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
12 “dailyrants77” : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
13 Merlin Mann : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
14 “Maki” : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
15 Frank Warren : YouTube Flickr del.icio.us digg MySpace Twitter FaceBook LinkedIn
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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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.
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.
In this post I will try to show that Nietzsche’s thoughts and aphorisms are still relevant in a modern Web 2.0 world. I have chosen a quote which I think is surprisingly true in the age of internet and maybe became even more true when online social networks started to take flight.
“Der Irrsinn ist bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes, – aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel.”
Madness can be rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 156
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Life Planetarium cosmic stars by Virtual Media planets tai chi relax chill
Inspire Space Park – Ultra chill space destination in Shinda
Shinda 60, 201, 218 (PG) inspire space park
Would Nietzsche have liked it? Probably yes. Doing the Jelly at Shinda, a planetary in space located in Second Life, where you can tai-chi, float and slowdance while snowflakes worn on pelvis shattering around and where indeed, God is very much dead.
In his first book, Die Geburt der Tragodie (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) Nietzsche discusses the Greek tragedy.
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Nietzsche on Wikipedia:
Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.
It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends”
This quote applied to current weblogs/ blogculture what would be Nietzsche’s philosophical view on this web2.0 experience? Assuming this statement, would he approve of this personal medium as a way of expressing oneself?
What Nietzsche meant by this quote was that a writer must not think only of himself during his writing for his product must be read by others too. That way, his text will speak to more people and his books will be read more. (more…)
The Citizen Lab has just released “Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide” (pdf). This guide is intended for the non-technical user, providing tips and strategies on how to by-pass content filters worldwide. It is now in English but they are busy making translations into multiple languages.
This guide is released as part of a wider effort to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogue about such practices. The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge, and the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University.
If you want to stay up to date on current internet censorship research and news, have a look at the internet censorship explorer blog.
A few days ago I read a remarkable story in the paper about the readers of an infamous and rebelious website/blog called Geenstijl that was able to mess with the election of the best Dutch slogan ever that was initiated by het Genootschap Voor Reclame (GVR). Because Geenstijl mobilised a great amount of people to vote for their pick of the 20 pre-nominated slogans, the slogan ‘Wij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eend’ (‘We at Toilet-Duck advise Toilet Duck’) turned out as the winner with 46% of the 12,500 votes.
This wasn’t the first time the website and its readers were able to mess with online ‘democratic’ polls, elections or contests. Two months ago Geenstijl has intervened in an opportunity for dutch people to come up with a subject for a new informative add by Stichting Ideële Reclame (SIRE). Even though this time Geenstijl did not succeed in their ‘trick’, the idea of the promotion of sausage with a picture in it did lead the contest for a short while.
The first time Geenstijl has showed its co-operative ‘muscles’ and has their members to mess up a contest, was a contest initiated by Dorito’s crips. People were able to name their own flavour and vote for names other people had come up with. Naturally Geenstijl named their flavour Geenstijl, the members of the website did the rest and so for 1.5 years GeenStijl-crisps could be bought in all supermarkets in Holland.
What do we call this phenomenom of en masse teasing behaviour and where did it originate and is there an international term? I have checked the Geenstijl site and ofcourse everybody is very proud to have taken part in the Toilet Duck election, but nobody has realy coined a term for an action like this. On de Volkskrant blog they call it a joke, and on several other websites it is simply called an evil campaign. The only relevant term that is provided on the Geenstijl website is the word they use for members of their site; they are called ‘reaguurders’. Also when I search for early non-Dutch comparitive examples I am not able to find anything. This might be due to the fact that in Holland a relatively small group of people that is into messing with polls, contests etc. is not so widely scattered as for example the online community of bored and rebelious people in the U.S. So is this a typical Dutch thing or are there non-Dutch examples of this phenomenom?
Although I think the ‘en masse voting for (against) something’ is in this case done in a very funny way, the question rises why do people take the effort to co-operate for weird meaningless causes? Geenstijl says it starts these actions because it wants to indicate that online-votings are not reliable and that online-votings are too easy to manipulate. When we look at the background of Geenstijl and the general content on the site, this explanation seems a bit hypocritical; in the past they showed that they never have a purpose or mission (besides making money) unless they are asked for one.
And what the actual reasoning of the voting group of members concerns; my innitial thought is that for the first time the power of the ‘mass’ becomes visible in a very concrete (and in this case childish) way; Geenstijl members and participants can actually see their immidiate power on screen and ofcourse when others are complaining about it, it becomes even more fun. In other words: Geenstijl readers love to feel the force of co-operating with the only reason of gaining as much negative attention as possible. The media ad to this sense since all big newspapers have written about it on-and offline and cases like this have even been broadcasted on TV.
There is not much that can be done in order to avoid or fight the meaningless use of co-operation by Geenstijl. We can only sit back and watch (maybe laugh about) actions like the vote for the not so good Toilet Duck slogan. Since everybody is allowed to vote; it is a democratic election and Geenstijl has the full right to do what it does. I haven’t seen any lawsuits concerning matters like this, but when more important election get disturbed by rebellious blogreaders, this might change in the near future.
<update> I bumped into a term called “troll” today and it strongly reminded me of this post. I checked out the term on Wikipedia and the general definition sounds: ‘a Troll is someone who intentionally posts controversial or contrary messages in an on-line community such as an on-line discussion forum with the intention of baiting users into an argumentative response’. It seems to me that the behaviour described above is almost the same as that of ‘trolls’ with the only difference that in this case ‘trolls’ co-operate with eachother. Pieter-Paul (added: 05/10/07) <\update>
I am proud to announce that I have joined the Blog Herald. The Blog Herald has been blogging about the blogosphere since 2003 and has since become an established source in the blogosphere. I have been reading the Blog Herald for a while now and was absolutely thrilled when they asked me to write for them. I will be joining an excellent team of bloggers including Lorelle VanFossen, Tony Hung, Chris Garrett, (founder & ex-Blog Herald/now TechCrunch-blogger) Duncan Riley and more.
I will be blogging about blogging and blog software from an “academic” point of view. My first series of posts will be related to my upcoming thesis on Blog Software and the Act of Blogging.
You are welcome to read and comment on my first post at the Blog Herald: “Rethinking the Blog as Database“
A few weeks ago, I was watching Paul Bennett, who was one of the guest speakers at the annual TED conference. He, as a creative director, was propagating new ways in thinking of problem solving and solution finding. Doing so by trying to think “out of the box”, as he said. That inspired me into writing this post: Rethinking cooperation.
When we collaborate, each of us contributes special powers (trumps) to raise the efficiency or quality of the collective effort as a well oiled chain. This type of cooperation could be problematic if a key member decides to split, because we are depending on each other’s effort. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, so this could jeopardize the collective effort. Why does, in this example and in many other projects, the collective rely on such a fragile structure? When the individuals pass on their knowledge to their colleagues, they will obviously loose their trump and become replaceable. The collective effort will, on the one hand, benefit from this, because it does not rely on the contribution of one individual anymore. But, on the other hand, the individual looses its competitive advantage and becomes replaceable. Could there not be a way for the two interests to converge?
Maybe we could find a solution, when we take a look beyond sociology into the realms of data management and push ourselves into thinking in metaphors. Hard drives can work together in several combinations (RAID-0 / -5). Each of these combinations have different aims (qualities). RAID-0 combines speed with quantity, but jeopardizes the integrity of the data. Hence, to jeopardize the collective effort when a key member splits. RAID-5, for many companies is the most reliable and fastest solution for data management. A few hard drives are ’sacrificed’ to maintain the greater good (Every member of a project has, besides its own knowledge, a little bit of knowledge of the other members). The RAID-5 solution does not work as fast as RAID-0, but is more reliable. (RAID-5 as a metaphor, could be labour intensive, but could spare a project member).
This brings me to the notion of ‘free cooperation’, which I will go into later on…
With: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Friedrich Kirschner and Daniel van Gils.
The lecture was meant as an introduction to the workshop given by Mediamatic on games as tools, but also as an inspirational talk to all involved/ interested in film making and new media.
First to talk was Friedrich Kirschner (zeitbrand.net and moviesandbox.org), with an introduction to his framework of comparing game-play.
In traditional board-games like RISK, the rules of the game are quite straight-forward (world domination) and the game-play is limited to the game-space (in this case, the actual cardboard)., So the limits of your ‘adventures’ and fantasy lay within these boarders, where games like LEGO offer a lot more game-play possibilities by taking away the limited games-pace. Since Friedrich experiences the well-known problem that he ran out of Lego-pieces, a form of abstraction was used in order to create more stories (a one-piece as a persona etc.).
Now the rules of the game are made by the player’s own perception of reality;
In comparing these two forms of gaming, Friedrich phrases:
simulated play (RISK) vs. creative play (LEGO).
This introduction is followed by a schedule (which I unfortunately do not have visualized) on game-play, where elements like AI, rules, assets, human input, physics engine combined are ‘making’ the game.
In mmorpg‘s, for instance, the AI function is already eliminated, because now, the computer does not create and manage the rules anymore, the players do.
Now in this case, we do not have to follow the rule again that guys with handkerchiefs and black suits are bad guys, and army-boys are the good ones; we can now question these rules, stop shooting each other and e.g. start dancing within the game.
Also, when I see my screen as a camera viewpoint, I can start making movies of us dancing and share these videos (birth of Machinima).
When people started doing this, some of them also discovered the possibilities of modifying the engines of games like Unreal and Quake run on.
Now, is this still game-play, or is it more?
MovieSandbox
Where this modifying of game engines is quite a task, Kirschner developed an open-source tool that lets you interface with game engines in order to create your own movies very easy. He shows this by creating a character within Unreal that talks when Friedrich talks in the microphone (lip-syncing) within a couple of mouse-clicks. Also, he is making the very important link to physical computing, where he demonstrated (amongst other things) a WII-mode to draw 2d and 3d within MovieSandbox.
Taking it even a step further, the tool is also networked, so one can imagine working collectively over the network on movies, characters or levels, using their own physical input device, combining real-world assets (like a picture of you, or a your room etc.) directly into the game!
The nice thing is that all this ‘intelligence’ is already embedded within the game engine; the tool is merely an interface to these possibilities; making them useful without having to be a c-programmer.
This will give the user lots of options for ‘creative play’.
Daniel van Gils
Is also experimenting with using games for more than gaming. Having a game-design background as well as a programming background, he realized that a game engine is a very stable piece of software that can be used more a lot more cool things than merely gaming. Think of museum installations, performances, VJ-ing, but also interactive documentary making.
Daniel also creates his own open-source interface software for a game engine (Quake 4 and Doom 3- compatible).
Since games are event-based, this provides an interesting way to interact with the game engine by e.g. a midi-input tool.
The main power of using a game as tool for Daniel is to create quick prototypes and cross-media experiments
Amongst more recent performances, Daniel did a gig on DEAF, and made a interactive documentary with children for VPRO’s villalive.
Both Friedrich and Daniel will guide the games as tools workshop organized by Mediamatic for the Cinekid festival in order to let movie-and documentary makers have some experience with the power of new media, creating not only concepts, but also working prototypes/ proof-of-principles of these concepts.
or where the personal meets the political
I’m not a believer in simple “non-hierarchical” or “free” structures,
Because there are always rules, responsibilities, structures of decision making and so on — the question is, which ones
Brian Holmes, May 2004/October 2005 [FREE COOPERATION AND AFTER]
Cooperation, co-operation or coöperation [1] is the practice of individuals or larger social entities working in common with mutually agreed-upon goals and possible methods, instead of working separately in competition, and in which the success of one is dependent and contingent upon the success of another…according to Wikipedia.
Cooperation in daily life can be seen as a way of dealing with relationships, issuing things like supplementation, taking charge, giving space, arguing, fighting and inspiring where multiple people working together to achieve one goal or different goals. Christopher Spehr now coined the term free-cooperation in contrast to forced cooperation as a reflection on a political utopia.
So one could say you have to bring utopia back to the kitchen, and it has to work there, and the rules of the kitchen have to be the rules of bigger cooperations – and not the other way round.
Spehr articulates the freedom part of cooperation in three points: freedom of negotiation, freedom of refusal and freedom of movement. This political utopia Spehr is talking about, is certainly interesting but also evokes some questions. The first one is about the use of the word utopia.
According to the Wikipedia the word derives from the Greek οὐ no, and τόπος, which means “no place” or “place that does not exist,” as well as “perfect place”.
The term is sometimes used pejoratively, in reference to an unrealistic ideal that is impossible to realize, and has spawned other concepts, most prominently “dystopia”. Maybe it would have been interesting if Spehr did not use utopia but eutopia as in the sense of being a positive utopia, different in the way that it means “perfect” but not “fictional”.
Maybe Spehr uses this word very aware and is he reflecting on free-cooperation mainly as an intellectual thought experiment. I find this hard to believe, especially since Spehr’s body of thought is so much based on real life problems and concrete facts of production and distribution.
The words of Brian Holmes do illustrate this with what he calls a classic toast of free cooperation:
And now part of our job as activists, everywhere, for years still to come, is to push these bastards out along with their ideas and their values and their geostrategies and their legal procedures and their organizational models and their modular management and their cynical Gucci ties and their bloodsucking IP ideologies, not to mention their start-up opportunism and shameless cooptation of practically any art that glitters. Vampires go home!
In Spehr’s utopia anyone can at any time question and changes rules and leave the cooperation easily. As a utopian idea, this is certainly interesting, but I was wondering, could I work or live this way? Don’t I want trust and devotion for at least the time a project is running? At a certain starting point you make the mutual decision you want to do a project together and this ensures continuity.
Isn’t this the same reason people decide to marry, so they say to eachother they don’t want to split at the first point of disagreement, but they want to make a commitment to eachother? This brings me to another kind of cooperations, those who are not chosen but developed organically. These cooperations, for example the artist team L.A.Raeven, very thin twin sisters who have their bare existence and relationship as topic, follow rules which are not designed but are developed within the family, under social pressure and through time. The questions I like to pose here is if they could alter the rules in this cooperation and to what extend are they free to do this? It seems like, before being able to adjust the rules, you should first alter the source where they come from: the individual relationships with eachother and their family. Here we approach Spehr’s example of the kitchentable as being the example for the big cooperations.
Besides the question if cooperation is chosen and if humans are free in general, Spehr explains that cooperations in this utopian politics could be free once there is no force. What are the instruments used in this forced organizations, what kind of levels of force exist in society and what is needed for every group that wants to liberate itself and fight this. The different levels of force can range from direct, material and brutal force, different sorts of economic force which use dependency, and social force like discrimination. Besides this, Spehr mentions the control of the public (who can speak an who can not) and the fact that the more dependent you become of a situation the less free you are in acting against it.
According to Spehr -in reference to Baudrillard’s producer-message-consumer model that should be destroyed in order to cause social change- we have to dismantle the instruments of domination and abandon the idea of using them for better things. We have to bring down these instruments of force and have to find better ways of cooperation and negotiation. Free cooperation should not dictate how societies are structured it should enable large groups and movements to learn, experiment and to adjust their forms to the problems they face.
Spehr is questioning the sustainability of free cooperation within the economic concept. Is the concept not just based on the condition that everybody has enough to eat and has a decent living? When taken the Wikipedia as an example of a force-less cooperation, we can see how the freeworking editors, who helped the pipesmoking Encyclopedia Britannica writers collectively out of work, can do their editing because they are paid at other jobs. Spehr is convinced that this is not the only situation where free cooperation should work: When big capital and big companies can split, join and fuse when they like, why could not the people who work there doing it for themselves. Besides this, we should even start to include people from outside the cooperation and stop excluding people. Spehr’s utopia, where rules are never fixed, needs to have one exception in order to work within the field of economy and distribution of property. Businesses should be restricted to move their companies to places where people are more obedient.
So it seems necessary to have some strict rules in this utopia, which are not negotiable and cannot be skipped.
Free cooperation is maybe not for everybody the desired eutopia. The work of L.A. Raeven and the way it originates is about forces and they may not want to eliminate them. In this work the forces are the fashion industry, society, the artscene and eachother. L.A. Raeven are using these forces to make their art and at the same time they are accusing them: They can be seen on the one hand as examples of Spehr’s ideas and fighting them at the same time. In their work, force is needed to revolve and theirfore facilitating development. Without these forces, their work would not exist. Or should we say that in Spehr’s utopia their would be no need for L.A. Raeven’s work?
In order to realize the force-less society with the utopian free-cooperation, Spehr thinks the different movements should start working together. Not only individuals need to cooperate, but the cooperations need to start cooperate:
…I think there is a lot of ideas going around in the world today that are related to concepts like free cooperation and can be brought into an interesting discussion with it. This discussion is essential, because this kind of dialogue between different ideas, different people, different groups is necessary to build coalitions and this is what we need today.
In the debate supplement of this weekends NRC Handelsblad John Gray states that the pursuing of a utopia must be replaced by an attempt to deal with reality. He thinks that the foundation of realistic thinking lays in the perception of Machiavelli that governments exist and have to achieve all their goals in a world with a never-ending disagreement that is not far from a state of war. To rethink Spehr by using eutopia instead of utopia we might need to negotiate between the utilistic approach (where the aim sanctifies the resources) and the deontology that looks at the ethical acceptability of the resources. But I doubt if Spehr would give some ground to his ideas and therefore he probably will stay at the Utopian site of the line.
Michael Wesh, known from his web 2.0 movie ‘The machine is Us/ing Us’ on Youtube (linked below) has created a new movie on the ‘Information R/evolution’ – this time focusing on the category and tag.
‘Information R/evolution’
‘The machine is Us/ing Us’
Whether you’re the latest social networking site out of Silicon Valley, or a lowly blogpost fueled by coffee, plans don’t always work out. I started writing this post with the title The Wasteland of Web 2.0, and was going to describe my experiences with Spurl and Furl, two social bookmarking services in the worst kind of disrepair. What drew me to them was not their Flickry names, but that they both lacked an icon on Mashable’s list of social software applications. This can’t even be said about their minimalist cousin, del.icio.us.
I wanted to write about the not-quite-human spam machines that fill up their servers, to the point that Spurl shut down ‘temporarily’ a year ago and has not returned. Furl is faring better, but not by much. With users saying goodbye and LookSmart cash presumably spent, the site is quickly becoming a 21st century valley of ashes. Reading over Today’s Most Popular Sites (see image), it becomes hard to tell what is spam and what is social. (( If I had to profile Furl users based on this data, I would go for depressed Grad students with rockstar ambitions. )) With tongue in cheek I was going to take the practical problem of dying social software and turn it into something more existential.
While this all seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend the weekend, I soon had doubts. Was this useful criticism, or would it just recycle some well-known laments, such as the claim that Web 2.0 produces nothing but noise? My post had ‘issues’ that needed attention.
A Keenian sense of anti-social software
The cynical view of social software would point out that the best (or most successful) applications are those that make the most use of anti-social behavior. MySpace and YouTube, for instance, advertise as much in their names. And the real emphasis with a sharing site like Flickr is less on interaction with others, and more on interaction with your own ‘stats’ – How popular are my photos? Did anyone respond to my comments? The genius of this approach is that social behavior is a second-order byproduct: Web 2.0 takes the view that the quality of social interaction is positively correlated to the level of individualism. (Remember, this is me being cynical.) There are no group accounts on del.icio.us, and co-authorship on a blogpost requires a plug-in. Instead, social behavior emerges from competition for attention (much as interaction on MMPORGs is explained by the engineered shortage of resources). So alongside Zizek’s concept of interpassivity, one could argue that software is social so that we don’t have to be. Moreover, anti-social software is the condition that produces the Spurls and Furls of the world, the sites we conveniently ignore when talking about the wonders of Web 2.0.
This is only a sample of Web-cynicism, the best-known proponent of which is Andrew Keen. It appeals to me, especially when I hear, say, enthusiastic accounts of the future of YouTube. When I asked the web video enthusiasts what they thought spam would look like in the future, they shot down my question, saying it was something Keen would ask. (They did respond, though, saying that good content would inevitably rise to the top, but that was not really an answer.)
Why sponsored debates never have winners
The cynical view isn’t the critical one, as much as I would sometimes like it to be. It relies on some notion of past social or ethical goodness, much like Andrew Keen has to argue that Hollywood was never that bad, actually. In the Picnic 07 debate between Keen and David Weinberger, moderator Walt Mossberg fell into this trap too, saying that bloggers who accept products they review are ‘compromised’, whereas traditional journalists (such as himself) are free from such restraint. Such a comment not only completely ignores the commercial underpinning of traditional journalism, it reproduces a high and mighty attitude that keeps the non-debate from becoming something useful. Obviously, this is something both sides are guilty of. In another debate with Keen, Weinberger says of the traditional media: “The mainstream is theirs. The Web is ours”.
The two sides also share a habit of making contradictory appeals to ‘the long tail’. Weinberger agrees with Keen that most of what gets put on the Web is rubbish, but then takes issue with Keen’s indictment of the most popular blogs, saying that interesting things actually happen outside Technorati’s top 100. He praises recommender culture, but not its prize products. Keen does something similar. He claims that Web 2.0 capitalizes on the narcissism of the everyday user, getting him to blabber on endlessly, but then says that very same user is too short on time to find good content, and wants better editors. Which one is it? It would be helpful if it were clearer who Weinberger and Keen speak for.
In the end, I think both are selling the same hype, that Web 2.0 is revolutionary, when the jury is still out. It makes more sense to look at continuities between yesterday’s ideals and the problems at hand. Keen argues that the Great Seduction of the Web is the false assurance that we all deserve to be the center of attention. But is this really an effect of the Web? Or is it an extension of the pop culture ‘tradition’ that Andy Warhol made visible? Does Keen really want us to blame the Web for a culture that sustains American Idol?
Failed software for useful history
So it is only with mixed feelings that I can channel Keen and talk about the wastelands of Web 2.0. The allusion, of course, is to The Great Gatsby (available as free e-book). But what Fitzgerald’s book realizes, and what takes some more thinking through in this context, is that the wasteland distracts from the actual problem. As Nick stares out at the valley of ashes from the train, on his way to New York, it is actually (his complicity in) the day-to-day circulation of capital, materials, statements and desires that gives it its life-like form. (( I read the Great Gatsby some 10 years ago. My interpretation here is probably way off, but I’m claiming poetic-theoretical-laziness license. )) What we need, now, is a critical view of Web 2.0 that gets past cynicism and into the details, that wrestles with the paradoxes of Web 2.0 rather than pressing the ignore button. A good start is Software Studies, a project already a few years in the making, nicely summarized by Matthew Kirschenbaum in 2003:
What is software studies then? Software studies is what media theory becomes after the bubble bursts. Software studies is whiteboards and white papers, business plans and IPOs and penny-stocks. Software studies is PowerPoint vaporware and proofs of concept binaries locked in time-stamped limbo on a server where all the user accounts but root have been disabled and the domain name is eighteen months expired. Software studies is, or can be, the work of fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories, and the cultivation of the critical discipline to parse those histories against the material matrix of the present. Software studies is understanding that digital objects are sometimes lost, yes, but mostly, and more often, just forgotten. Software studies is about adding more memory.
In other words, rather than fetishize Furl and see in it the heart of our Web 2.0 woes, one has to study the fringes, and follow its connections back to the land of the living. Rather than figure out its place and decide what it means, describe what put it there and show why it matters.
On the Wikipedia site itself, it does state ‘Wikipedia’ under the entry “Social Software“. But I was wondering about how social Wikipedia is in comparison with other social sites (for instance YouTube, MySpace, etc – see previous post). Because it doesn’t feel as a very sociable environment, unless perhaps when you’re incrowd (aka a Wikipedian). So what do other social sites have that Wiki does not and vice versa.
PROFILE
You can choose not to create an account, but then your IP is visible instead. But even when you make an account, it isn’t obligatory to make yourself known on Wikipedia. And many users choose not to. The part, that sets it aside from profiles on other social sites, is that there are is no question-ready-survey waiting for you. What’s your name, what kind of music do you like and how have you become a member on this site? Though apart from that, the profile does seem to have found a certain form in the so-called ‘userboxes’. Some of these you see returning on different pages, and some have customized their own. By the use of these ‘userboxes’ some profiles, or I should say ‘user pages’, tell a lot about the person behind it (see: Carterdriggs). The user pages I’ve come across, don’t tell any personal information (except for the picture on Joshbuddy). But it’s in some cases enough to give the profile a personality and see his/her motivations. What seems weird to me is that bots have user pages as well (see: Cydebot). Some of them quite extensively with Barnstars and all (see: CmdrObot), which to me seems quite pointless unless to thank the writer of the code.
BOTS
Do Bots make Wikipedia different from the other social sites. Well, in a way they do, because the users know that the bots are out there. Seen the fact that they are trackable (userpage) and visibly mentioned in the history of the pages they change/maintain. On the other hand, there is no denying that there are some pieces of code on MySpace that help users get more friends. Or to help you automate the process of adding more friends. Not to mention all the sites that offer code to ‘pimp’ your profile. Some of them, like this site, sells its product with the tagline: “Start growing your MySpace Friends with the #1 MySpace Friend Adder Bot!” And there are probably more bots out there, but that is exactly what makes the difference: we don’t know behind what there is a bot or not. Makes you think twice next time you are accepting a new friend.
RATING
When someone is awarded a Barnstar, this also will be shown on the ‘profile page'(see for example user: Joshbuddy). These are given out by other users as a sign of appreciation. And could therefor be seen the same as the rating systems on sites like YouTube.
FRIENDS
My Personal Tools are very revealing of how social Wikipedia really is(n’t). It is MY talk, they are MY preferences, it is MY watchlist and they are MY contributions. I have no friends to show for on Wikipedia. I’ve talked to a few and I’ve watched a few and one other user rewarded me with a Barnstar. But there is no list that states that I have 647 friends on MyWiki. It takes a Wikipedian to recognize who goes behind which name and who’s who. Wikipedian Rosenthal about this, in a New York Times article from januari, 2007 stating:
He associates certain user names with certain political biases, and he recalls an online dustup with someone called Slimvirgin over whether the Animal Liberation Front was a terrorist organization. Personalities can become so pronounced in these debates that some even achieve fame of a sort on snarky Wikipedia anti-fansites like Encyclopedia Dramatica, where Slimvirgin has been thoroughly pilloried. “It’s disgusting on one level,” Rosenthal said, “but it’s also funny how the encyclopedia has gotten to be more about the community behind it. And like any community, it has its drama. For people that don’t understand it and don’t have an inclination to get involved in it, it’s pretty daunting.”
And indeed, looking up Slimvirgin in the Encyclopedia Dramatica, not only is her ‘true identity’ revealed. But she’s being verbally vandalized for her whole person, not only for her actions as Slimvirgin. Patrick Byrne takes another approach at it, at AntiSocialMedia.net, where he makes a difference between Slimvirgin and the person behind it (Linda Mack).
I can only imagine the same way as there are feuds between users and wikipedians and/or admins. There have also blossomed friendships. But this I only derive from the fact that actual meetups between wikipedians have been organized.
MEETUPS
The meetups in real life are arranged on Wikipedia itself under here. A lot of other sites also calls them ‘meetup’s’, but that could also be due to the fact that they’ve been arranged by the site Meetup.com and not through the site itself, like Wikipedia does. In the context of YouTube, they are more often referred to as ‘gatherings’, emphasizing the social aspect of the happening.
HIERARCHY
Again I would like to refer to the New York Times article from januari, 2007. The hierarchy of Wikipedia is quite clear described here:
— a kind of rudimentary institutional hierarchy. Among the 4.6 million registered English-language users are about 1,200 administrators, whose “admin” status carries a few extra technical powers, most notably the power to block other users from the site, either temporarily or permanently. Those nominated for adminship must answer an initial series of five questions, after which other users have seven days to register their approval or disapproval. Above the admin level are the cheekily named “bureaucrats,” who are empowered to appoint the admins and will do so if they deem a user consensus has been reached (the magic number is somewhere around 70 percent approval). There is also a level above the bureaucrats, called stewards, of whom there are only about 30, appointed by the seven-person Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. The higher up you go in this chain of authority, the humbler the language they use to describe their status: they compare themselves frequently to janitors or, more tellingly, to monks. There is an unmistakably religious tone to this embrace of humility, this image of themselves as mere instruments of the needs and will of the greater community.
Now this is really something that sets Wikipedia apart. In this aspect, it is more of a community than lets say Flickr with its pro-accounts, or MySpace with their band-sites or YouTube with its produces-accounts. These names at Wikipedia are names that the user in one way or another, except for having to pay for it, has earned. And that comes with a certain power. I think this is more like a community, because is always a form of hierarchy in communities. And as the phrase goes: “It takes a village to raise a child.” In this case it would be: “It takes a city to maintain Wikipedia.” And so it has, so it has already.
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Filmmakers are in general quite conservative. Their love for high quality image, 16 mm, 35 mm, big screenings and Hollywood attraction is usually overshadowing the curiosity for developments in the area of new media. This is a shame, especially because new media techniques involve a whole new way of filmmaking, avoiding top-down approach of production and enhances freedom of choice on subjects. There are though at the moment some interesting experiments going on. The first project I want to mention is Swarm of Angles.
Swarm of angles is the first open source film project. It is funded, crewed and distributed completely on the Internet and the idea is to find 50.000 individual subscribers (The swarm) each contributing £25 to the production.
The general idea is, that every subscriber can be part of the decision-making process or even be artistically involved when ‘enough talented and skilled’. Matt Hanson is the initiator of this project. He is founder of the Onedotzero Film Festival and filmmaker and author. He has labeled this project the first Cinema 2.0.
This project is a short cut for me to make a feature film, but also a way to redefine filmmaking methods, and legitimize a whole new model of making ‘bigger media’ that will work for a new generation of content creators. This type of participate content is the missing link between the top-down approach of traditional media creation and the bottom-up nature of user-generated content.
The system used for producing the film is in short:
1. Fund the project. Call for collaborators. Publicize and create marketing materials. Gather the first 1000 members through targeting niche online communities and parts of the blogosphere. Develop the project and infrastructure. Start script development. Open the project up to more members.
2. Film. Collaborate. Develop scripts using a ‘wiki‘. Crew through The Swarm. Funding drive for pre-production/production/post-production. Create marketing and final materials.
3. Flow. Master materials. Create spin-off materials. Publicize. Burn. Upload. Seed. Download. View. Remix. Share.
At the moment two scripts are being developed: The Unfold and Glitch. One will be chosen by ASOA members to be produced. According to the official website, A Swarm of Angels is likely to be thriller based with soft sci-fi elements. The scripts are being developed via the project forum The Nine Orders. Here members can keep themselves posted about current developments on production and scripting and votings takes place here too.
Swarm of Angels wants to use the increasing power of the blogosphere and the social Internet to engender mass collaborations and promote Creative Common’s copywrite. They want to create a new model filmmaking where there is no need for copy protection and the distribution will be by bittorrents and podcasts. Swarm of Angels is a non-profit project. Once the film is finished, it will be distributed for free on the Internet. Members have already agreed that any excess profit made, will be used for developing a next project.
Nice thought, only, the Swarm of Angels do not answer the question how the participating filmmakers should pay their rent while working on the film. Does filmmaking has to become even more a hobby than it sometimes already seems to be?
Another question is, if it is possible to create an interesting film out of a democratic process. Probably not. 50.000 people voting on script decisions can hardly develop any consistent artistic vision. But this is not the issue here, I suppose. The film created will be ready for remixing, free to be used for everyone. This new way of –remixing cinema- filmmaking is definitely getting done with the role of ‘the author’ as the almighty father of the story. Power is giving to the DIY user who can take the film to pimp up his online profile or use it any way he likes. In this case, there is still an almighty father namely Matt Hanson, who did set the rules in the first place and will probably do so again if things were going the wrong direction.
By the way, subscription is closed right now, end of phase two is achieved, 1000 angles are already in. the only way to get in now, is by personal invitation only. For the rest of us, we have to wait till the next phase. Interesting marketing strategy? Or is it just because the crew is taking a break…
A totally different 2.0 cinema project is Four Eyed Monsters. This project is made by Susan Buice and Arin Crumley and was entirely financed by multiple creditcardcompanies.
While working on the film, they were showing episodes on Myspace TV and eventually they showed the whole film online for free on YouTube and Myspace. All together, they were in debt, according to the website www.foureyedmonsters.com for a 100.000 dollars. Now they use the Internet as a fundraising system afterwards by raising a community. One thing really did get them going was a contract with http://www.spout.com/foureyedmonsters. For every subscriber on sprout, they receive 1 dollar. The counter is right now already on 47,104 subscribers and their first 3 creditcards could be destroyed (what was filmed and posted as well off course).
Another way the filmmakers are giving publicity to their film is the way they encourage users to request a screening, and if enough people in a particular place requested the film the producers organized a screening. They even held a screenings in New Yord and yes offcourse in Second Life too.
They encourage videobloggers to respond on their film too, to build an even bigger community of interest around the film.
Interesting is the link on their website to http://bravenewtheaters.com/. This is an initiative where any independent filmmaker can send in their film in search for little theatres, sometimes with just one chair (!) to screen their films. Also anybody can subscribe himself as being a host for new films. I am not sure until what extend this system is already working, but the concept is certainly charming.
In short you could say that Susan and Arin are using the new media circus very well. Just as in the music industry they use their finished product to generate money on an alternative way by offer it directly to its audience, without intervention of broadcasters or studio’s. For the content of the film itself this seems not to make a big difference. It’s a lowbudget adolescent lovestory, made by two independent, narcistic, talented and inventive young people. Interesting is the way the film is continuing in order to create more income. The difference between their real lives and their film persona’s are blurring, and they keep recording and publishing small things of their lives to keep the community alert and interested.
The big difference between the Swarm of Angles project and Four Eyed Monsters is that besides the latter is actually finished before the audience gets involved, they do sell DVD copy’s in order to pay they creditcard debts. Their audience is just participanting in the distribution part, and not in the creation part. It mainly functions as some sort of a marketing tool towards other company’s while the couple is getting famous: Youtube eyeballs increasing, screenings on big festivals, invitations to debates on new media developments and reviews in the New York Post. They did well.
What can we say in general about this so-called cinema 2.0 besides the democratic possiblities? In the first place it seems to be about generating money, without having the censorship of big studio’s and broadcasters. It gives direct access to a huge amount of people. This way of producing is partly possible because of the material: cheap digital camera’s with a considerable high quality, desktop editing and easy uploading and distributing on the web makes it for almost every individual with the right drive possible to become a filmmaker. Fundraising online is proven to be a way to find money and to make unexpected and interesting cooperations.
I am curieus though, what kind of influence it has on the content of the films itself. Are we still going to watch more and more Si-Fi films and love stories, or will the message of the medium eventually change by its applications.
Last Friday, November 2nd, the New Cultural Networks conference named ‘You Google my second space’ was held in the Openbare Bibliotheek of Amsterdam. The conference was organized by Stifo@Sandberg. There were a variety of speakers with different backgrounds. The overall theme was networking and the different implications of the subject.
The first lecture was given by Arjo Klamer, economist and working at the Arts and Culture department of the Erasmus University. His main question was about the differences in economics and culture and how to bridge the gap between these two. An excellent summary of the lecture is written by Anne Helmond and can be found here.
Shu Lea Cheang was next. Her lecture was titles ‘Mesh Mash Smash’ and contained an overview of some of the projects Cheang is working on. For example ‘Babylove‘ and ‘Tramjam‘. According to my own idea she meant to say with this lecture that ‘platforms’ or collaboration between people could create great things. She mostly works in groups and the projected she showed to us are products of these cooperations.
The third speaker was Régine Debatty from the weblog We Make Money Not Art. Again, this lecture is wonderfully summarized by Anne with beautiful pictures to visualize the lecture.
And after the break it was time for PIPS:Lab. Before the end of the break we already sneaked into the room. People were busy preparing the show. 
Young men were walking around in grandma-costumes and seemed to have a lot of fun. A man was riding around in a wheelchair, a guy walked with a stuck and an enormous bumb on his back. Just to give an impression.
The idea was to introduce a new community named DieSpace. An internet community for people that have passed away. The outside of people is the interface. The soul is digitalized and will be the engine. Together they are a digital representation of yourself, which can live on forever. PIPS:Lab introduce various applications during the show. For example the ‘musical communicator’ that allows people to make their own music accompanied by images of their self. More about Diespace and the project can be found on the website.
Ned Rossiter gave a lecture about networking and some of the dangers that come with it. In a dazzling cloudburst of information he tried to say that in his ideal world, there are no more networks. One great point he made is that people can make ‘friends’ online but never see their enemies. Take for example Hyves. You can search for people and make them your friend. But why can’t you look for your enemies? There is an enemy on Hyves but it is never present. The whole lecture can be found here.Another great lecture from Ned Rossiter about ‘Organized networks’ can be found here.
And last for me this day, although some more people gave a lecture including Geert Lovink, was Monique van Dusseldorp. Her lecture was named ‘No more interactive media’. Networking is not about how many people you know, but how many people know you! After introducing herself with this saying, she shows examples of what networks can do. The paradox of Flickr. As a user you have to pay to put more pictures on there but as a viewer the content is all free. Also Youtube, Skoeps and Twitter are mentioned. What is interesting about these applications differs per group of people. Media industries these days know what to do with all this information and turn it into a market.
All the people that spoke at the conference had really different approaches of networking, according to their field of work. All together this was a really interesting day full of networking, art and fun!
Photos from the New Cultural Networks Conference by Anne Helmond. More on Flickr.
In a series of attempts to shorten posts, a ‘light’ post: In my quest to investigate into alternative interfaces and other ways (than traditional pc setup red.) of representation and manipulation of data, one aspect to look at is public (intelligent) spaces. One example I found this week, during the GLOW-festival. This festival is taking place in the city of light, Eindhoven.
The home-town of Philips was once the center of innovation concerning light and lighting systems. Where now most of the production has moved away, innovation is slightly returning returning. A small glimpse of post-light bulb era is given, with buildings and streets as interface, as the city this week is now a stage for over 30 (interactive) light-art installations in public space. Go check it out! (pictures by Eric Toering).
Official pictures can be found here.
For the next few days Apple will rule the blogosphere.
All of that had to do with the keynote presentation Steve Jobs gave at the MacWorld 2008 conference. It started yesterday, and what struck me is that from the beginning of the actual speech all major gadget and apple-fan sites started liveblogging.
Within seconds of the words leaving Jobs’ mouth, entire blogposts were being produced with added screenshots of the presentation. I know this isn’t particularly new, but I saw it on several sites and the thing I liked about it is the speed of which every blog tried to out-scoop the others.
I followed three sites quite closely, being Engadget, Gizmodo and Macrumors, and with every press of the F5 button new content appeared on my screen. But the same content threefold, now I know they don’t really have a choice to not blog about it, but there is no actual
honour in blogging about this, because they are equally fast, the pictures are similar and the content is the same. The new content was gathered at a MacWorld feed-page and then quickly edited to regular blogposts, all withing seconds or minutes.
The biggest thing about the conference was the new MacBook Air, preceded by speculation long before the keynote fuelled by the mysterious catchphrase: ‘There is something in the air’. Wired Magazine quickly came forward with ‘inside information’ about what would be a new, thinner MacBook. Which was submitted to Digg shortly thereafter and labelled ‘inaccurate’. As it later turned out they were spot-on with the screenshots, but of course Apple could not confirm anything at that time.
Looking at Digg today shows the Apple dominance in the top stories, where 8 out of 10 stories were Apple related. In this post I wanted to point out the frenzy concerning new Apple gadgets (though it looks absolutely amazing and I definitely want to hold one and pet it, in my opinion the MacBook Air is nothing more than a very sleek gadget and slowly but surely the excitement is fading on other blogs as well) and the impact it’s creating on the blogosphere.
Dutchcowboys also wrote something (in dutch) about the massive impact the keynote had on the internet and Twitter in particular.
Do you think Participatory Culture is all about friendly cooperation? Fans flocking to Star Wars conventions or squad based play in the latest MMORPG? The Participatory Culture session at the international Video Vortex conference in Amsterdam, proved that practices such as “cutthroat capitalism” also belong in this category. And how can, from an Asian instead of a Eurocentric perspective, the changing concept of authorship be understood when everyone can build new meaning upon an original work? This session provided practical examples as well as theoretical context.
Tilman Baumgärtel: Cutthroat Capitalism in South East Asia
First presenter Tilman Baumgärtel, currently teaching at the College of Mass Communication of the University of the Philippines in Manila, discussed piracy and intellectual property in South East Asia. Having organised the Asian Edition conference, which deals exactly with this subject, Baumgärtel can be regarded as an expert on these ‘social economics of piracy’. Surprisingly, however, these questions do not involve Internet and P2P data communication. Baumgärtel explains: ‘Asian piracy is still largely based on disk because there aren’t a lot of fast internet connections and modems’.
To give the audience an impression of the context, Baumgärtel shows a trailer of Malaysian film Ciplak (translation: Fraud). This independent film deals with the subject of piracy and it is one of the few comedies that is accessable to audiences in the region, also because indie films usually deal with ‘more serious subjects’. In the production process of Ciplak, creativity was necessary because of the low budget. For example, everyone worked on the movie free of charge, a camera was bought that came with 10 free mini-DV tapes and IKEA lamps were used for lighting.
Malaysian piracy started in the 1980s with the advent of VHS pirating and continued in the 1990s with VCD pirating. Baumgärtel: ‘Piracy started as a counter-movement against poor distribution. In Europe you can find almost anything, in Asian countries, however, films are hard to find.’ Only Hollywood films, or films starring Jackie Chan, make it through to cinemas and the legal distribution circuit. Baumgärtel: ‘This changed with VHS and BetaMax piracy. Some of the film makers feel that they are so indepted to the pirates, that this group is already thinking about contacting pirates so they can use their distribution channels. Internet is not a factor in this yet because of low speeds’.
These distribution channels are inventive and constitute a grassroots movement. In order to provide consumers with product, fishermen are smuggling masterdisks in the belly of tunafish. Global piracy is a consequential response to global economy, Baumgärtel: ‘The recent process of privatization has taken its part in facilitating piracy’. And continuining: ‘This is globalization from below. It is not about legal organisations, but illegal outfits. This movement represents globalized business and takes advantage of infrastructures. It is the counter image of legal illicit globalization we are seeing right now’. A term Baumgärtel mentioned in response to questions afterwards, perhaps exemplifies this movement most vividly. This is about ‘Cutthroat Capitalism’.
Ana Peraica: Food markets and copyright infringement
In her presentation, Ana Peraica, freelance curator and theorist mostly engaged with video and new media, gives an analysis of the growin archive of illegal material with a focus on Croatia. Why this region? Peraica: ‘Croatia is a really interesting region, because piracy is not really regarded as a crime’. She continues: ‘The problem of copyright was introduced to Croatia in 1991, before that it was still silent online. Today you can find illegal copies, for example, on the food market’.
On a more personal note I came across this example on a recent trip to Split, Croatia. Boulevards were crowded with stands selling illegal copies of the newest computer games and Hollywood films. Once installed, games were often older versions of the same franchise and films turned out to be bad recordings of cinema screens. Peraica: ‘I would like to show some examples in my presentation today, but the problem is that this would be illegal here. There is no agency that hunts down piracy in Croatia, they simply don’t bother about objections of copyright’.
Continuing, Peraica asks herself the question: ‘Is everyone who possesses a video camera and publically exposes video, automatically a video artist?’ Both an interesting and strange case, exemplifying duality in this question, is that of Croatian popstar Severina. She recorded a pornographic video of herself that got published online without her consent, she claimed copyright and stated that is was video art. Severina’s lawyer also stated that home video pornography is video art. The court’s response was that it was nothing innovative and therefore not video art. Severina lost this case, but at the same time she saw her popularity rising. The lawyer also put forth that it was invading privacy, the court responded by stating that she recorded it herself.
‘What is still video art?’ Peraica continues. Does it have to be innovative and perhaps even elitist? Peraica: ‘Popular culture is recycling elite culture, but is it still art?’ In her final words, Peraica concludes that is hard, if not impossible, to define art as something downloaded from YouTube versus institutionalized art.
Dominick Chen: Redefining Authorship from an Asian perspective
In his presentation Dominick Chen, who leads Creative Commons Japan and is JSPS Fellow Researcher at the University of Tokyo and NTT InterCommunication Center, aims to propose a redefinition of authorship itself: ‘How can we gain understanding of data generation and distribution in the light of systems?’ And more specifically, how to go through this Eurocentric idea of individual authorship, or commons? Chen aims to redefine the ‘commons’ from an Asian point of view. Especially with regards to the chain of creativity, where Asian culture differs greatly from its European counterpart.
Chen starts with an example of piracy and participatory culture in India: ‘When you buy a DVD in India, through a Chinese hack, you can get three stories: English, Chinese and Indian. Because translation of subtitles is really bad, you get three different stories based on one film’. Another example of a big Japanese market where you can secondary work of comics, anime and novels, Chen: ‘ There are about 50.000 participants who are selling product themselves, they gather to buy eachothers works that have been derived from original works.
The result is ‘fifty million Yen of economical effect in just three days’. Contributing to an original artwork, going from monologue to dialogue, is an essential part of Japanese culture. Chen: ‘Creativity is considered as reflective to the original author, contributors don’t care about being part of the chain of creativity’. This is exemplified in the fact that on Japanese Wikipedia, 80% of users are acting anonymous. This is the exact opposite of Wikipedia use in the United States. Chen: ‘This chain of creativity, based on anonymity mous is very characteristic of Japanese culture.
Looking back, Chen remembers 2007 firstly as the year of the fight between users and existing shareholders of the broadcasting industry. Secondly, 2007 saw the birth of the metadataplatform, which Chen calls ‘a critical point in classical User Generated Content’. Envisioning 2008, Chen firstly sees an explosion of open contents and, secondly, the rise of the ubiquitous platform of data and creation, such as the iPhone and the Nintendo DS. A third essential vision for 2008 is the recursive stratification – indefinite division into subgroups- of web API with the appearing of “API’s of API’s”. Fourth, Chen predicts a ‘war over openness, which platform can be more open than the other one?’
As an example of Japanese culture and the chain of creativity mentioned earlier, Chen shows Japanese videosharing service Nico Nico Douga. By analyzing this video service, Chen wants to clarify what creativity is in this whole situation. He concludes that comments are ‘becoming constituents of the original work, affecting both authorship and spectatorship. It is a shift from dialogue to symlogue, because narrative control is shared and over time content is nurtured, fermentative’. As examples of symlogue, he mentions M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands, where both hands share narrative control and are also fermentative of nature. On Nico Nico Douga, a movement has emerged that uses original material and builds upon it by using, for example, the VOCALOID sound plugin.
Chen emphasizes that he doesn not want to focus on horizontal effects, or the chain of creativity, but he asks himself the question of ‘how to open this up on a vertical level?’ For a recent exhibition, Chen cooperated with a well-known Japanese author, who wrote a new book on the spot. New chapters could be downloaded through the Internet. Chen: ‘Normally it is considered embarassing to show how a writer writes. By showing this process, a new relationship between reader and author is created’. Chen also shows a recording of twenty-four hours of editting on a single Wikipedia page. This ‘opening up of revision’, is what Chen regards as the next step in opening up the ‘commons’. It exemplifies the ‘open ecology of digital contents’ and ‘fermentative ecology’ that Chen mentions in his final words.
Report by Twan Eikelenboom
All photography by Anne Helmond
Richard Grusin has a video up called 1-20-09. Along with some others, Grusin has ‘entertained’ the fear that the Warner act of 2007 will keep George Bush in office next year (something Bush could do relatively easily and arbitrarily by claiming a state of emergency based on classified information). Grusin is putting his theoretical concept of ‘premediation’ to the test, wondering if the exposure of this scenario can pre-empt it, actually eliminating the possibility of it occuring. If premediation was able to make the Iraq war seem like a foregone conclusion, can this same tactic be used to fight back?
via Shaviro
The presentation given by Jan Simons is called Weddings, Cities and Colors via tagging.
Simons has performed a short study into user generated content and user generated indexing. With a background in cinema and narrative, Simons is interested in tag activity and the problems of tagging in searching an ideal model of readers/speakers. Very often these models are defined on introspection, where it is assumed that minds of other people work just like your own. The internet and 2.0 provides us with the way users of the internet think and relate; it gives us traces of their thinking. What If tags that users attach could tell us something about how the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ actually works?
Simons presents a rapid-prototyped- kind of research, a proof of principle via Flickr. Flickr was chosen as object of study due to its tagging system which is a blind tagging system (so no recommendations. the tags used are really thought of by users themselves. Flickr also gives a tagclouds and provides clusters of tags. Lots of prelimenary research is already done in this sense).
The main question is how people categorize their thoughts and experiences. Within folksonomy he trouble is to know what users actually mean – do they have the same concept of the words and the content they put on flickr? Some problems with terms concerning tagclouds are mentioned (NYC NY and New York, for instance, leading to thesame content).
Within a tagcloud only nouns (no verbs) are used. The most popular tags in a graph creates a powerlaw graph. The most popular tags are japan, NY and wedding.
Tags are messy categories. Polysemy is a major problem (e.g. place-names) as well as synonemy (e.g. fall, autumn, city and urban) and homonomy. It gives an unrelated meaning (e.g. rock meaning stone, but also a music genre) The level of categorization is also a problem (from generic to specific). Another obvious problem is that of spelling. San is often used for instance, but what does it mean? San Francisco, or San Diego? San is split up, the same occurs with New York; New becomes a tag.
There are also users who abuse tags. One user for instance used all the popular tags from flickr and hooked it to his photo. Flickr says: use more than one tag to increase its searchability. He did, very literally. Other types of misuse are that of adding very strange tags in order to avoid censorship. This misuse pollutes the tag system. There is a difference in “in” and “about” England, for instance. Tags are unreliable as guide.
Simons continues by talking about the approach in looking at tags. Tags as labels for things, or names for objects or places. When you look at correspondence, tag and tagged – nouns and adjectives – tell something about the properties of the object. Tags are never used in isolation. Lots of users use Flickr as a backup system for their own pictures. (as a kind of life insurance). This private use is often used without tagging. This also pollutes the tag system.
Categories of tags:
1 geographical tags. names of countries (largest cat.) states cities,,. where california is the most popular.
basic level terms are most commonly used
2. by events. Querying via events (christmas, holiday) shows activity that is linked to that event.
3 by nature of the object.
These are the most used categories.
About tag semantics: most popular is temporal metadata that is copied with the picture (the camera holds this information).
This gives an argument structure (time, location, event).
A distinction exists between nuclear arguments (core) and satellite argument (more general). Via this information, one can see that they follow a very basic semantic structure.
In order to complete the categorisation, a distinction is made between states and events. Within events, there is also the event of making the picture (picture of an event or of a state. where to put this?). Now we can distinguish the manner of photography and the instrument. Another problem now is polysemy: does color say something about the picture or the objects in the picture? If you apply linguistic analysis to tags, we see that tags are highly structured and very consistent. They follow a pattern of natural language. This is very important in understanding and interpreting the content (in this case, pictures). This could tell us a lot about what users conceive of the world via their pictures/ videos.
Q&A: users give meaning to pictures, narratizing it. The idea is that inner speech evokes mini-narratives.
How can we use the semantic results from this research? Simons replies that Flickr was used as a research objects due to it being concised and accessible (more than YouTube). This research shows that users have a more sentence-like approach to tagging than just labeling. This is what it shows, possibly one could project this onto youTube, although youTube is a different medium.
Vocabulary of the amateur photographer? Isn’t that what this research shows? Simons replies: Yes and no, events do happen a lot around the photograph itself. Tagging is biassed by activity that users have in common on Flickr, which is in this case photography.
Picture by Anne Helmond