Masters of Media

This week I took my fist shaky steps on the Wikipedia. I was supposed to because of this week’s assignment, but I wasn’t quite enthusiastic. Wikipedia barbarian as I was, I thought it would be quite easy to create and edit pages. I was thus a little bit laconic about it. Before this week, I never understood people…

Where the internet and greater new technologies before have military origin, nowadays technologies and implementation are developed and financed by private companies and organizations. Even the backbone of the internet has become privatized, as part of its protocol, DNS, is now largely accessed by going through private parties such as Verisign, the administer of .com and .net TLDs. This was…

The policies and text regulations that are presented by Wikipedia, display a very different form of politics, the debate falls on the aspect of RELEVANCE. It is all very complicated, yet also very simple. Their requirements are seemingly reasonable; no entries about one self, your friends, your relatives, your own establishments, or the company you work…

Micro blogging gained a lot of success over the past few years. With the arrival of web 2.0 there was a need for a new form of writing. Long articles and ongoing features were not what people wanted anymore. There was a need for shorter form of writing. Online publications of papers became brief summaries about news events. There…

Computing interfaces have come a long way over the years. I think we can all agree that the mouse and keyboard of our current day pc’s is highly preferable to the tape spools and cable jacks of the WOII era beasts like the Colossus. With the fairly recent integration of practical touchscreen interfaces into devices such as the iPhone, a long dreamed of vision of advanced haptic interfaces seemed one step closer to reality.

Everyday users of Twitter users provide the world with us with of tweets on topics differing from what they ate, how they feel to what music they listen to. This is a great source for researchers who want to look deeper into certain topics of interest. The question is only how to organize and present all this information and…

Since the beginning of the Twitter hype, I was wondering what the value of Twitter is. Can we possibly learn anything from or through microblogging? Is it useful for companies to encourage lifelong learning? Or can schools and other institutions improve their education with microblogging? Until now I haven’t found an answer for these questions and until now I still…

We were told to start a Wikipedian adventure. Create an account and contribute to the knowledge of the world. The English Wikipedia has almost 3,5 million entries, so coming up with a term that no one has thought of writing about seems to be a great challenge. Luckily for me, I have been writing and thinking a lot about a specific way to study the personal data retrieved from social networking sites, which is called post-demographics. It is a new way, beyond the occasional demographics, to assess and define people and guess what, no Wikipedia entry has been made for it!

Sitting in class, I had just created my account on Wikipedia. Within minutes somebody had altered my biography on my personal user page. Luckily, it was the person sitting next to me in class who had successfully fooled me, but that’s not the point here. Imagine someone else being able to alter your biography on Twitter, or your personal information…

The emergence of MMO gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, gave us a new way of socializing with people from around the globe. Twitter is one of the most popular microblogging websites, and as a social networking system it covers most users in its domain, but this aspect is not the only one that links Massively Multiplayer Online games to social networking platforms.

Sometimes, things going smoothly can be very disappointing. It seems strange and contradictory, but there you have it. Writing my first Wikipedia article I had expected to experience first hand the community driven process that defines the wiki platform. I had expected to interact with other editors, to partake in the democratic, decentralized writing process that is the foundation of…

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg has listened to all the nagging about how Facebook is violating the privacy of their users. On the live press-conference of Facebook yesterday, Zuckerberg announced a few features that the social networking site will introduce in order to protect the privacy of their users, or at least give the users more control on how their personal data is being published. This isn’t the first time that Zuckerberg is complying with the complaints. The hardcore privacy killer Beacon had a nice run before it came across heavy resistance of the users and immediately put offline. At the conference, Zuckerberg introduced three major changes that will focus on the fundamental problem of privacy and information regulation. Here we go.

In the past few years, a lot of research efforts have been directed towards topics that gravitate around Wikipedia, be it trying to determine the motivations of users to contribute with their own content, the proper use of Wikipedia in academia etc, but according to Pnina Shachaf and Noriko Hara in a recent number of Journal…

6.060.000 results reports Google on the query “back door”. Another common two word object such as “kitchen table” has 4.470.000 results. I would say a back door is pretty elementary, and pretty much everyone uses it in their daily routine, it is therefore quite horrific to find out that “back door” did not have its own wiki page! Therefore I…

If u have nothing to hide why should you care?
Public to monitor CCTV from home

I think the most of you ever heard of the famous story of Orwell “1984″. Its about an inhuman state, a state that is under the control of the other, The Big Brother.

Surveillance of the public became common in our…

Introduction

After the attacks on September 11 2001 America started their “War on Terror”. One of the targets in this war was of course Iraq, because Iraq was creating Weapons of Mass destruction (WoMD). This “news” spread around the world like a burning fire, and soon a lot of people just assumed Iraq was dangerous and should be…

Share it, enjoy it and post another one. One of the most ideal moments in the day of an admin social networker as myself, is the regular discovery of a good, short and  entertaining video clip. This particular discovery is most commonly pursued on the likes of our darling Faceboook. As jubilant as is make me to see that…

Projects like the Pulse of the Nation show that visualized information might be the only way to quickly make sense of Twitter and its users. It takes a specific approach to research New Media Practices in this fashion, very different from the more traditional humanities type inquiry. The novelty of a project like Pulse of the Nation lies in…

Create the change, become a Twitizen, fight injustice and eff the system. Revolution here and revolution there. Everywhere we hear about how social media and micro-blogging has brought about a tremendous change in the organization of social movements and political activism. We constantly get to hear about the so worn out issue of “Twitter Revolutions” all around the world and the news praising the immense effect that the influential social media movement is having on governance and political change. But where exactly is the revolution?