Masters of Media

How two big cities only separated by the small (and during summertime very smelly) Sham Chun River can resemble such a huge difference is remarkable. With the one being a Special Administrative Region and the other a Special Economic Zone they both have a ‘special’ status within the People’s Republic of China. Obviously I’m talking about Hong Kong and Shenzhen.…

Make life living , start an affair today!

Attention cheaters, adultery has been legitimized..online that is. There are websites for most things imaginable and that includes online dating sites encouraging extra marital affairs.  These are sites created to bring together like minded people, like minded in the primary sense of looking for a special someone outside of…

As China is famous for their copied and rip-off products there is no difference in the digital sphere. Services and platforms that we have learned to love, resent or can’t go without also exist within the borders of China but only for the national market. Google became Baidu, Facebook became Renren, Foursquare became Jiepang. As social media develops and comes…

With the case against Ratko Mladic underway, the collective blind spot developed by the Dutch for the massacre of Srebrenica is again taking central stage in news coverage.  The argument for a supposed blind spot may be backed up by analyzing the Dutch Wikipedia entry on the Srebrenica massacre, this post offers two visualization tools that can help doing this.…

Unlike Google Maps, Russia’s Yandex Карты is much more tourist friendly in that it does not blur your face away when you have been caught on camera! Yandex does not seem to uphold an evenly strict privacy policy as Google is imposed to do. A big help, as it assists me in taking touristic…

This is part of the final paper I submitted for the course “Culture of Spectacle”

17.000.000 articles. 91.000 active contributors. 270 languages.

No matter what words one would choose to describe Wikipedia, numbers cannot speak but the truth: Wikipedia, which was set out as an “experiment” in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, nowadays constitutes the largest free,…

Image ‘Mark Zuckerberg elysee france Nicolas Sarkozy e-G8‘ by Admond filed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence

Two weeks ago, leaders of several nations gathered to discuss worldwide challenges at the G8 conference. Prior to this event, French president Nicholas Sarkozy organized for the first time the e-G8 conference. Here, the focus was

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As a result of the “pacification” project through the implementation of a “peace police” (UPP) in Rio de Janeiro, which is intended to combat (armed) drugs trafficking and decrease violence in the favelas, the Baile Funk (Funk party) has become criminalised.

This is part of the final paper I submitted for the course “Culture of Spectacle”

As shown in the previous post, the “anyone can edit” philosophy of Wikipedia is often viewed with great skepticism in academic circles, while its collective intelligence function model is occasionally treated as a threat to authority, individuality and creativity.

In…

Margreet Riphagen is the Institute of Network Culture’s project manager and the editor of the Theory on Demand book series. Here she explains TOD project’s background and how it operates as action-oriented research – and also proof the exploding possibilities for publishing today.

Can you explain the ‘On Demand’ part of the Theory On Demand project?
We decided…

Over the past few weeks I have situated myself in Berlin on a mandate to take in and absorb all that is the music culture here.  On a mission to discover the heartbeat of the European music industry, I haven’t had to look very far to gain my experiences.  The only other two cities in Europe that I have spent…

Last week I attended Visualizing Europe, a one-day conference where a very interesting and diverse group of data visualization experts and designers talked about the power and potential of data visualization.

Below are some notes and comments on some points presented and issues debated in the conference:

• Use cases for data visualization: explorative versus communicative

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Yiannis Giannarakis is the general coordinator of the “I participate in Wikipedia” campaign, which aims at the development and enrichment of the Greek – language Wikipedia. The initiative, launched in January 2011, is supported by the Greek-language Wikipedia community, the Greek Ministry of Education, the Greek Free/Open-Source Software Society (GFoss) and the Greek Research and Technology Network (GrNet).

Here,…

You can read part I of the interview here.

The existing community & the new users

Usually, the users are the ones who approach Wikipedia. With this campaign, however, it is the Wikipedia community that approaches the public. What is the difference between the experience offered to the user by an organized effort and…

You can also read part I and part II of the interview here: PART I, PART II

Wikipedia & Greece

In your presentation of the campaign in TedXAthens, you mentioned that “through Wikipedia, Greece can claim a better place on the digital map”. What would that mean in practice? What could…

This is an interview with Markellos Stevis, an administrator of the Greek-language Wikipedia and one of its most prolific editors. Markellos participates actively in the “I participate in Wikipedia” initiative, a campaign that aims at the development and enrichment of the Greek – language Wikipedia. Here, he shares some of his observations about the experiential workshops that were held as…

If one were to compare the Netherlands to the United States on just a topical issues alone it would seem like oil and water.  The obvious differences, are well, just that – obvious (no need to discuss coffee shops, socialism and the red light district here).  As an expat and self proclaimed geek, the thing that I have found to…

03/08/2011, 08:20 am - Schiphol airport. Holding a small handbag in one hand and a packet of cinnamon cookies in the other, I was waiting to check in for my flight to Tel Aviv, Israel. From Tel Aviv I would take a shuttle taxi to Haifa, where Wikimania 2011, the annual international…

Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, had a very difficult task to accomplish: in 25’ she had to report on the Foundation’s activities during the year 2010- 2011, but also to treat the attendees to a sneak preview of next year’s action plan.

She did not have to try hard, however, to electrify the audience.…

The Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) connected with the journal Leonardo) recently announced the results of its competition for top MA and PhD abstracts submitted to its English language database from scholars around the world.  Korsten’s abstract for her thesis, “Reversed Remediation. How Art Can Make One Critically Aware of the Workings of Media” (New Media MA, UvA, 2010) was…