43 things
Browsing through 43 Things is intended to give you inspiration on goals yet to achieve and stimulate you to realize at least one. However some people will feel down and helpless, they are reminded of their infinite debts, their broken dreams and a life without prevailed aspiration. I don’t belong to the latter group. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it is to set 43 aims in my life, there is yet so much to be done. Most of the forty three things I want to do are a little over the top, things like winning an Oscar or being on the cover of Time Magazine seem only able to be attained when I set my priority accordingly and lower my attention on 42 other dreams. I recon realizing this is one of the effects that makes 43 things so superb, you learn to set priorities and are pushed to think of the right way in getting there.
After making your preferred selection of things to do, 43 things offers to remind you on a regular basis (weekly/monthly/yearly) to get to work (and ultimately spamming your mailbox with 43 unaccomplished objectives every week). You are supposed to rank your 43 things according to it’s its importance. I haven’t done so yet. I guess ordering 43 things takes the most time and will provide an intimate sketch of one’s profile. 43 things tells allot about someone. If I would take 43 things seriously and organize my to-do-list accurately, I would spend a whole day reflecting on my life, persona and future. I would also be strategizing ways to achieve my goals in an order that would fit the order of the to-do-list. My unwillingness to spend a day investing in perhaps a flourishing future perhaps says more then anything else.
When an aim has been fulfilled you can show others with what way you managed. Maybe one day I’ll manage to manage my management tasks.
43 things is a site that is built on the principles of tagging, rather than creating explicit interpersonal links (as seen in Hyves and Friendster). 43 Things was launched on January first 2005, by the Robot-co-op, a small company based in Seattle founded by prominent blogger Erik Benson, Daniel Spils, and former Amazon.com and Microsoft executive Josh Petersen. The site was developed using the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails framework.
Wikipedia as band promotion? Maybe, it sure makes your band better searchable on the internet. I added an entry to the Dutch Wikipedia about the band I play in, check out the entry at Wikipedia NL.
Of course Wikipedia is no Myspace in terms of bandpromotion and marketing, but an addition of your band with pure factual information (forget about putting in a ‘we-want-to-play-do-you-have-any-gigs-for-us’) can help people find some background information on what you’ve done in the past.
Besides that I also edited the Dutch entry on Virtual Reality, which is actually far from complete. Just for starters I added an example of virtual reality in fiction: William Gibson’s Neuromancer. What bothered me was the amount of what seems like random information on topics like Virtual Reality, I don’t even know where to begin to clean it up and just tell the plain facts instead of some random thoughts of people on the subject. Just as an example on how it should work, here is a link to the English post on Virtual Reality.
I also made a start with a Dutch Wiki about Cyberspace, the term coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer.
Under construction
CafePress is an online retailer that produces and dispatches a large variety of user-customized products on demand. Opening and operating a basic CafePress shop is free. After creating a shop, you can proceed to select products and upload files, such as images to print on t-shirts, bags, bumper stickers and more. This can be graphics, catchy quotes, etc. The cool thing about CafePress is that you don’t have to worry about production, distribution and storage.
CafePress also has an affiliate program like Amazon. When someone you refer makes a purchase, you can earn up to 20% of product sales.
The marketplace at the social network Hyves is an example of online collaboration. Theorist C. Shipley makes a distinction between cooperation and collaboration: “Collaboration is a much less involved affair [than cooperation] in which sole, independent participants advance separately.” The pages display a web of classified advertisements. Through the marketplace the members of the social networking website can make full use of the dynamic space by exchanging products, knowledge and services.
Joe Trippi seems like a cool, idealist guy who is very fanatic for the good cause, in this case the democratic party and issues like healthcare and poverty. His growing up and getting into politics reads like a novel; you almost start feeling the same as Trippi during all his ups and downs. Miserabely failed campaigns, opportunistic candidates, personal problems,nothing is left unspoken.
Trippi is a experienced campaigner and so there are a lot of things to be learned from this book. The way it handles new technologies though might turn out to be a bit too optimistic.
Trippi tells how the Howard Dean for President campaign got involved in using the internet as a means of getting popular around the country. After initial distrust by the candidate himself and his staff a cooperation with the website MeetUp.com turns out to be such a enormous succes that Trippi gets a carte blanche. They start a blog and organize meetings for Meetup.com-members all over the country. At the end of the year a larger sum of money has been donated to Howard Dean than to any democratic candidate in history.
The book is very interesting to read, but maybe for the wrong reasons. The look-behind-the-scenes is amazing. At one point Trippi tells the story of a candidate who makes a pro-choice ad, and then decides he might as well make a pro-life ad as well; the filmequipment is paid for anyway! Secondly, the story of a candidate getting more and more popular, breaking records, and then finally making a fool of himself in front of millions of people reads like a boys book. The messian messages of democracy coming back, people getting involved again and the old elite getting blown away sounds, only two years later, a bit old fashioned though.
The problem with Trippi’s look on the developments in the Dean campaign might be that he was too close, and got too caught up in the enthousiasm of everything that now he thinks we’re at the dawn of a revolution.
The revolution will not be televised, but we’ll sure ass hell be able to see it on
YouTube…
Click here if clicking on the picture gets you nowhere
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The complete title is: An Army of Davids. How markets and technology empower ordinary people to beat big media, big government and other Goliaths.
Glenn Reynolds is a professor in Law at the University of Tennessee. He is a well-known blogger and his blog can be found here: http://www.instapundit.com/ . His main interest are advanced technologies and individual liberty.
I found the book “An Army of Davids” rather difficult to read, because I missed a structure in the book. Before reading the book I read the summary of the book on the cover and that did not provide enough help to guide me through the book. A lot of chapters had nothing to do with empowering the common guy, in my opinion. And that made it hard to read.
“Gatewatching” is a fairly expanded study on collaborative publishing of online news. Bruns describes the practice of journalistic gatekeeping which refers to a regime of control over what content is allowed to emerge from production processes in the media. The alternative for the traditional gatekeeping is provided by gatewatching, which is defined as “the observation of the output gates of news publications and other sources, in order to identify important material as it becomes available.” Gatewatching enables many users to participate in the publishing of online news.
In my presentation about Guy Debord’s article Theory of the Dérive I would like to argue that the current trend of Urban Exploring is based on the dérive, but that it differs from it on the following levels:
- The accent lies on normally inaccessible place whereas the dérive is usually based on accessible places.
- The accent on normally inaccessible places has the consequence of it often becoming an illegal practice. The dérive is in that sense quite innocent.
- In Urban Exploring there is a big emphasis on recording the urban exploration by filming or photographing it.
My presentation on Marshall McLuhan’s The Galaxy Reconfigured from his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy. As an introduction, here is a quote from a great interview with him from Playboy Magazine in 1969. The whole interview can be found here: www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm
PLAYBOY: You seem to be contending that practically every aspect of modern life is a direct consequence of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.MCLUHAN: Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional cultural matrix while showing him how to pile individual upon individual into a massive agglomeration of national and industrial power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until today, when the electronic media are at last demesmerizing us. The Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of Marconi.
Download The Galaxy Reconfigured
-At the bottom of this post, you can find interesting links which explain the meaning of commonism-
We have received a question from Mieke Gerritsen, who has made a beautiful graphic design with the word “Commonism” on it. She has made this design and wondered if the word “Commonism” is already being used in one way or another.
Well to answer this in a new media kind of way: the best way to find out whether a word already exist is to use the word as a search string in google. When I typed commonism in google, I received 9110 results. The strange thing is, however, that this morning I searched at google.nl as well and I received nearly 9500 results, so apparently the search machine has been updated and broken links have been removed?
‘Twas only a matter of time ‘fore we addressed the issue of censorship, methinks. Here’s a fairly amusing video (song) about it. Apparently there are quite a few sites who don’t like the FCC:
National Coalition Against Censorship
Fire the FCC
FreePress.net
The latter site links to sites such as SaveTheInternet and Stop Big Media. Hooray for internet revolutionaries!
It all started in 2001 when Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian journalist living in Canada, published a how-to-blog guide in Farsi (Persian). By doing this he started what can be considered as one of the most thriving sub-cultures in the blogosphere. Iranians love blogging and this is not strange if you realise that about 70% of Iran’s population is under 30 years of age and highly educated. However, it is remarkable considering the fact that freedom of speech in Iran is non existent. (more…)
The thirty year old game industry is peaking at this moment and the top of the mountain is still far away. Also in the Netherlands the future seems nothing less then positive. Games have become new territory for researchers. In the corridors people are already dropping the term ‘game studies’. Contemporary research areas are the interaction between the virtual and the real economy, violence in games, gender studies, narrative, psychological impact, and the game industry itself. The latter is the fastest growing industry in the world. The game industry has surpassed the film industry.
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According to Netcraft the internet has more than a 100 million websites. This news was brought to my attention by the newsbar in my gmail account, which let me to the Tweakers net website where google apparently found the news. I then googled (!) Netcraft and found the same news article there!
THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
University of Ulster:
Chair: René Glas
Thursday, November 16, 2006
16:00 – 18:00
P.C. Hoofthuis, room 104
Spuistraat 134
Drinks following the lecture
at Ovidius
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At around 10:15 the usual suspects started showing up, including my fellow master students (some of us are aware that a 10 a.m. start means 10:30 in conference-speak). Geert Lovink (see photo) opened the proceedings as laptops took over the podium. Ned Rossiter (see photo), whose new book was presented a little while ago, reminded the crowd that we are here to look at creative industries in ways that are not covered by policy-makers. To see the issues that may have slipped through the cracks. We need to ask the right questions: what is creative labour? What are the conditions? How can we solve the problem of precarity? (More about precarious workers later on).
The title of the second session is Economy of Design. In this context Mieke Gerritzen & Teun Castelein presented the Artvertising project of the Sandberg Institute.
The project is based on the Million Dollar Homepage which is an idea of student Alex Tew. He sold a million pixels on his website for $1 each to pay for his degree. The visual result of his homepage was a huge fragmented landscape filled with logos. This visual landscape is not new to us, it actually has a long history from cave art to frescoes to Times Square. As Marshall McLuhan put it: “Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century“
In the second part of the second session Economy of Design Rogerio Lira, graphic designer and former student of the Sandberg Institute presented his project “Love-work: autonomous research in progress.”
His work is about the dynamics and interaction between people, the media, their emotions, their relationships and their creative processes.
Mark Poster is a professor of history at the History department of the University of California. His special academic interests are: European Intellectual and Cultural History; Critical Theory; Media Studies. Last year we have read one of his articles “Foucault and databases” for another one of our classes.
For our new media theories class we’re reading literature about locative media and that’s why we are reading Poster’s article: “Digitally Local Communications: Technologies and Space”
The article can be found here:
http://www.locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?cspaces;poster
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Creative labour as the basis for a critique of creative industries policy- David Hesmondhalgh
At this presentation Hesmondhalgh would to like think about how an analysis of creative labour might contribute to critique. Therefore he suggests three critical approaches to creative labour:
1. NICL: This term was created by Toby Miller, who adapted the concept of this theory from the Marxian idea of New International Division of labour (NIDL). This theory of Toby Miller can be found in his book Global Hollywood 2 . In this book Miller explains various ways in which the NICL principle gets translated into the public domain, such as the use of cheaper sites overseas for animation; the harmonizing of copyright law and practice.