Masters of Media

Since Darwin’s On the Origins of Species the idea of evolution through natural selection has been used in a variety of disciplines, even in the field of media studies. Different types of media are born (being a technical invention) and can become obsolete or converge into new media forms. As the evolution of media goes on, will alternative ways of usage lead to new services, and maybe make Twitter obsolete?

Because of its simplicity, people have found many ways to make use of their Twitter account. On a personal level, by sharing their daily thoughts and things that annoy them, for gossip purposes, by following celebrities, or on a professional level, by showing the world what they are doing and generate attention for their products. On a personal level, I…

Discard your police scanner, since 5am this morning and for 24 hours only, the Greater Manchester Police have been logging every incident live on Twitter. What’s got them all atwitter? According to their website they want to raise the public’s awareness of ‘the complexities of modern policing, which often aren’t fully appreciated.’ By publishing events real-time as they unfold they hope to give the general public insight into how social issues are increasingly taking up a large proportion of their duties and draining public funds.

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to spare. Blog Action Day is upon us, and this October 15th, the world is taking to the web and talking water! Tweet me some water? Not possible. But we can talk water. It’s a problem and a big deal.

Did you know more people have access to a cell phone…

Being disappointed by certain facts of various remakes of games is an extremely common feeling for a nowadays gamer. Especially while living in times where technological evolution outruns the concepts of game-makers. As smaller companies struggle to come up with new ideas and innovative game designs, corporation giants are constantly remaking old games...

Garcia Marquez would describe it as “Macondo”. Magic surrealism in Latin-America, more than being a novel, is a daily reality.

With incredible admiration on the impact of New Media on the society I have been following the big brother tragedy of the Chileans guys stuck  680 m deep.

Wednesday 13 is the date, all the news media…

You’ve heard all of the jargon  – “get connected,” “stay connected,” “connect with friends and family,” etc., etc.  Any one of these phrases could be applied to Twitter, Facebook, blogging or you local cell phone carriers marketing tactics.  Clearly this is a rhetorical question, but at what cost do we pay to sign up for said services?  What’s the benefit? …

Data theft, child pornography, spying on governments and spreading destructive computer viruses. When thinking of the term 'hacking', we usually think of internet crime, computer breakdowns and some geeks sitting in front of their laptop looking for a fresh kill. However, for those who think of themselves as 'hackers', hacking means something completely different. It's about creatively playing with technology, challenging the status quo of things and exploring the world. Did you know that you can hack your own life? I didn't, but I learned about it yesterday at the conference named “The Future of Hacking” organised by the Club of Amsterdam in collaboration with the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.

@MA_Mel ahaahh nice my twitter makes you smile. If only it made men undress too!!10:17 PM Aug 4th via web from Garment District, New Yorkin reply to MA_Mel

Mentioning your whereabouts, describing your breakfast, sharing links, and replying to other users, then perhaps sharing some more links, these are all essentials within this raid of commentaries shared…

The replacement of printed text by digital text might strike us as another carefully manufactured revolution, but those who have had a lifelong use of communications and media technologies surrounding them  might not be as intimidated by this transition as their elders. The malleability of  texts makes perfect sense to them, traditional books, rigid cumbersome rectangle devices, do not.

According…

Firstly, I need to say that I love to read and I love technology. So isn’t an e-reader the perfect combination of both? Isn’t it the perfect compromise between the small screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch and the chunky format of a regular book? In my opinion, yes! I believe that in the future the e-reader will be…

What did the web crawler say to Wikipedia? I'll update you later! So the question is … just how much later?! The reason I'm wondering is because there seems to be a discrepancy between just how fast Wikipedia bots/editors can shoot down vandals and how fast Google refresh actually changes to reflect this correction on the search engine.Today I was doing some research on new game technology and in particular, on a famous game developer who was showcasing it. I typed in the name of the developer in Google search engine and up pops (amongst other things) a Wikipedia link to the developer's page. Except it wasn't quite how I'd imagined the page information to appear in a search engine.

Let's say it is Friday night, 7pm. All shops are closed and every normal working person went home to enjoy the weekend. Some people are heading home for dinner with their families, others are having drinks with friends. And then comes the Big Bang: Paris Hilton and her dog die in a car crash. Most certainly, tomorrow's newspapers are going to write about it. And even more sure, everyone will already have read it online or watched it on the news. And this is just one of the several reasons why tomorrow's paper is already so - oh, so yesterday today.

Let me tell you a story about my sister. Isn’t that a good introduction to a blog, share a story with complete strangers online involving private family matters? Though she may not like it, I won’t give her name or anything, and more importantly, I have this feeling that a lot people these days resemble her situation and we’re still…

What would life be without Bach? Far from any discussion of the aura, the only reason I have ever heard Bach is that his compositions have been relentlessly copied, passed down the generations, re-interpreted, re-adapted for new instruments (piano, electric guitar, moog), and let to remain free in the public/sonic

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The death of the book has been foreseen:  Several sources have predicted the demise of the book as we know it, like a modern Nostradamus. However, this is not the first time in history that we have heard this prediction. The introduction of the radio was also supposed to kill the book, as was the advent of …

Definition of a book: a number of sheets of paper, parchment, etc. with writing or printing on them, fastened together along one edge, usually between protective covers

Definition of an e-book: A small, portable device onto which the contents of a book in electronic format can be downloaded and read.

But will both remain existing in the future?

In this…

Whether they are hard or soft cover, thick or thin, large or small, heavy or light, old or new, owned or borrowed – the traditional book exists in all shapes, forms and genres. The e-book lacks this spectrum of physical appearances. While the rise of the e-book as the book’s successor is often debated from an economic point…

Something has changed in the fashion industry. Since 2002 blogging about fashion started and has become more and more popular. In 2003 fashion blogger Kathryn Finney of the Budget Fashionista was invited to the New York Fashion Week. A year later Fashiontribes was being invited and seated forth row at shows like Bill Blass. In 2008 Tina Craig and Kelly Cook of BagSnob.com were seated second row at shows like Diana von Furstenburg and Oscal de la Renta. In 2009 famous fashion bloggers were seated front row, even a 13 year old blogger named Tavi Gevinson could be found front row of shows like Marc Jacobs Rodarte and others.

If you have been reading my recent post about my Inkscape adventure you know that this adventure didn’t go quite as well as I expected it to go. I must admit that this was mainly because of the fact that I couldn’t work on my regular working-machine and therefore ended up frustrated and fed up with…