Twitter is the biggest microblogging community to be found in cyberspace, here people write their (short) thoughts and upload them to the website: "Twitter, which was created by a 10-person start-up in San Francisco called Obvious, is a heady mixture of messaging; social networking of the sort associated with Web sites like MySpace; the terse, jittery personal revelations of “microblogging” found on services like Jaiku; and something called “presence,” shorthand for the idea that people should enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence." (new york times).
Some of the twitter post can be seen as new aphorisms with sometimes interesting massages. (The word aphorism denotes an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and easily memorable form. (wikipedia)) Most of them aren't though, they only tell were someone is, what he or she is doing or they quote some news that just happened. But if you search for them, maybe some people actually do have something important to say. You just get so lost in all the twitter posts, it's hard to find stuff you would want to spend time on reading. So why twitter and not read real blogs you definitely like?
Twitter has been studied by Akshay Java et al. (2007), in their research paper "Why we twitter" they explain the different kind of twitter users. They've looked at every post made on twitter for 2 months in 2007. They concluded there are 3 types of twitter users: information sharing types (followed by many), information seeking types (follow many), and friendship-wise relationship types (follow and followed by the same people). This paper gives a good overview of how people twitter, but no why we twitter. Why do we feel the need to tell the whole world what we are doing? Who cares? Apparently, We care! We read strangers posts and expect them to read ours, but why? Maybe this is more a philosophical question, are we looking for a new way of proving and confirming we are alive? Or is it a psychological question, is twittering modern narcissism? Do we all want to claim our 1 second of fame? As YouTube has become so big now no one will ever watch your video, on twitter people will read your post as it shows up for sure.
I think maybe these deeper layers of why our society is changing (partially) into an online community have to be examined and thought upon before you can say Why we twitter. Mister Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist, says some nice things about our network society: "My biggest concern is that we live in a period where we are technologically overdeveloped , but socially underdeveloped. While the economy is getting global, the networks between people are getting more socially fragmentized. More networks come into being that sometimes can work better than big vertical organisations. This wasn't a plan, it is an autonomous power that can't be stopped. You can easily access all these new networks because of the information technology, but you can get thrown out just as easily." (link to interview (Dutch)) Maybe here is a link to the twitter phenomenon: people want to fit in somewhere, they want to feel they are part of this network society and so show themselves online as much as possible to not be forgotten or thrown out. A new meaning to Marshall McLuhan's quote "the medium is the message" comes into life: being on the Internet just to be there, not to have important messages but just to use it to secure you are part of this new network society.
zaterdag 11 oktober 2008
My photo on Wikipedia!
We were asked to try to create a page on wikipedia, to see how this works and to see if it would get accepted. Most entries from people in class were deleted very quickly for different reasons (no references on Google, no correct lay-out), but mine is still on there! I created an entry for the dutch sailingboat "Kolibri", with a picture of me on this boat, so now I will forever be stored in this online encyclopedia. It was not too hard to make this entry except that the rules are very user unfriendly to read and how to upload a picture has taken me 2 hours...
See my entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolibri_(sailing_boat))
(and edit!)
See my entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolibri_(sailing_boat))
(and edit!)
donderdag 2 oktober 2008
Superpowerpoint cinema: Eboman!
Yesterday I visited the Nederlands Filmfestival and attented a lecture on new media/the future of film. Speakers were Brue Sterling and Anne Helmond and Eboman. I really liked the presentation of Eboman (Jeroen Hofs), he looks a lot like my nephew so that was a bit weird but he showed some nice video's I'd like to share here:
Strangerfestival performance
Exhausts music
he also showed a sampling of the debate between Mc Cain en Obama, it was so funny please check it out:
Debate in one minute
Strangerfestival performance
Exhausts music
he also showed a sampling of the debate between Mc Cain en Obama, it was so funny please check it out:
Debate in one minute
Keep an eye on Obama
A guy from the U.S. was so fed up with his Obama sign being stolen from his garden he has put a webcam in his garden to check on it. Now all over the world people keep an eye on this sign through a live videostream.. Funny!
Nieuwsbericht
Videostream
Nieuwsbericht
Videostream
maandag 29 september 2008
Is couchsurfing.com a communitysite according to Danah Boyd?
In her research paper "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship", Danah Boyd makes explicit what the features of a social network are and what their purpose is. I decided to check if these features are present in the couchsurfing community to see if this is a real SNS (social network site) or a kind of hotelbooking website. The characteristics a SNS should contain according to Boyd include things like: the website must "Allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system."
These features can all be found in the couchsurfing community. You have to make a profile, preferably with a picture, you can see which users are your friends and what kind of a relationship you're involved in and you can see their relationships as well. You can leave messages for eachother and see some personal information about your friends and about your friends' friends. So from this definition couchsurfing definitely is a Social Network Site.
In her essay Boyd actually mentions couchsurfing as a YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service." (a qoute from Clay Shirky). So she certainly thinks it is a Social Network Site. But does the site act up to all of the other features she decribes? Boyd argues the term Network in "Social Network Sites" is preferred over "Networking" because: ""Networking" emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC)." Maybe here is the difference from most communitysites and couchsurfing, as couchsurfing is especially to meet strangers and use this network to find a place to sleep. It is not as she says to meet people you already know but especially to meet people you dón't already know and aren't in your (extended) social network already. But, you cán make friends after you have met them in real life and see their friends and they can see yours, so this makes it a bit confusing, after meeting people this site does work as a SNS. You just have to go through a bit more trouble finding friends since you don't know them yet. On the other hand, maybe this is just a website to take advantage of eachother, trying to sleep for free in the city you're visiting. This would make it more of a market place or hotel booking website. The slogan of the site would implie different though: " “CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding. As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal."
So maybe between Network sites and Networking sites there is another genre which is in between of a dating site, a Networking site and a Network site. Where people can meet, not just for love or friendship but also for new experiences and of course for accomodation. You can meet friends here without the intention of seeking for a new friend and you can check out these new friends and their networks. You can see links and relationships between other couchsurfers while your goal is to find a place to stay.
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
These features can all be found in the couchsurfing community. You have to make a profile, preferably with a picture, you can see which users are your friends and what kind of a relationship you're involved in and you can see their relationships as well. You can leave messages for eachother and see some personal information about your friends and about your friends' friends. So from this definition couchsurfing definitely is a Social Network Site.
In her essay Boyd actually mentions couchsurfing as a YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service." (a qoute from Clay Shirky). So she certainly thinks it is a Social Network Site. But does the site act up to all of the other features she decribes? Boyd argues the term Network in "Social Network Sites" is preferred over "Networking" because: ""Networking" emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC)." Maybe here is the difference from most communitysites and couchsurfing, as couchsurfing is especially to meet strangers and use this network to find a place to sleep. It is not as she says to meet people you already know but especially to meet people you dón't already know and aren't in your (extended) social network already. But, you cán make friends after you have met them in real life and see their friends and they can see yours, so this makes it a bit confusing, after meeting people this site does work as a SNS. You just have to go through a bit more trouble finding friends since you don't know them yet. On the other hand, maybe this is just a website to take advantage of eachother, trying to sleep for free in the city you're visiting. This would make it more of a market place or hotel booking website. The slogan of the site would implie different though: " “CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding. As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal."
So maybe between Network sites and Networking sites there is another genre which is in between of a dating site, a Networking site and a Network site. Where people can meet, not just for love or friendship but also for new experiences and of course for accomodation. You can meet friends here without the intention of seeking for a new friend and you can check out these new friends and their networks. You can see links and relationships between other couchsurfers while your goal is to find a place to stay.
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
dinsdag 16 september 2008
Surf around the world! an analysis of Couchsurfing.com
The website http://www.couchsurfing.com/ was founded in 2004 by four guys interested in traveling and meeting new people and cultures. Nowadays the Couchsurfing community contains 725,731 members, of which 73.5 % is between 18 and 29 years old. The site represents couches in 231 countries.
Couchsurfing is a non profit organisation based primarely on volunteers and donations.
It is a site for people who want to meet new people and travel cheap. The site only works because there are mostly non opportunistic people on there, everybody hosts and travels.
The mission of the project stated on the website is as follows:
"CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding. As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal.
CouchSurfing is not about the furniture, not just about finding free accommodations around the world; it's about making connections worldwide. We make the world a better place by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge that cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents and cultures. CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world! "
One girl from Prague has multiple people over EACH day! She must be a filantropist because couchsurfing is not about moneymaking. It is helping out strangers, offering them your bed and show them your city. Reciprocity is very important in this lifestyle. If you host people you will get good reviews and those reviews help you to get a couch if you go travel yourself. The fact that these reviews are a major issue assures you, I think, that only (or at least mostly) wellwilling, peaceloving world improvers will use this website. You can see most are caring for the environment, they have rules like: if you stay here you have to recycle.. And they have philosophies on their profile like: "Helping others is my pesonal choice, I cannot expect, that they will help me, but i always hope." This makes me very happy, to see all these warm, no worries, loving people together on one website. It is more than just a website to score a free bed when you're on holidays, it's a meeting place, a community for people with like minded points of view of this world.
One thing that does concerns me though is that there are many males on there, 51,4 % is male, 40.5 % is female, rest are several people. Are guys more hospital than girls or do they search for girls to come and sleep over? This is a question that draws agaist the idea of couchsurfing but I couldn't help but wondering. To be more sure about the ultimate Internet question: is the person he/she says to be online really that guy/girl, you can your profile "Verified", this means you transfer a minimal amount of money to the couchsurfing company and that way they can check via your creditcard information if you really are who you say you are. Also the references and the vouches you can give people help you tot trust the people using this great initiative.
Then I came across a blog which is completely tearing down the couchsurfing project: http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/07/20/couchsurfing-20-is-dead/ . They don't think it is a web 2.0 application since they've hired more staff who need to be paid and still use volunteers for programming but not letting them co-decide in decisions about the website. One volunteer who worked for the website a long time says Couchsurfing has become a corporation who do what they want without listening to its users/volunteers, he writes: " Unless, of course, one regards CS as a corporation, and the management has absolute authority to do what they will and volunteers are just “hired” help who should just be thankful for the opportunity to work for such a respected international corporation. This was NOT this spirit of the community that brought CS back from the crash, but something precious has been lost along the way." So the non opportunistic website it seems to be is changing and maybe becoming less web 2.0 than before. Still, users are the ones making this website possible, it's still free to use and the website functions as a platform/community website like a web 2.0 application should. Another blog about the question if couchsurfing.com is using it's volunteers has a comment from someone saying it is just about the question of making CS open source or not, which they decided to do not, this commentator understands the CS corporation for wanting to protect their work and not make it an open source application. (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17)
The people on the blogs refer a lot to another "couchsurfing" website: http://www.bewelcome.org/, this one actually ís open source. I'll check this one out as well and see if I can find the differences and at which one I will earlier find a place to stay in Prague in Decembre ..
Couchsurfing is a non profit organisation based primarely on volunteers and donations.
It is a site for people who want to meet new people and travel cheap. The site only works because there are mostly non opportunistic people on there, everybody hosts and travels.
The mission of the project stated on the website is as follows:
"CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding. As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal.
CouchSurfing is not about the furniture, not just about finding free accommodations around the world; it's about making connections worldwide. We make the world a better place by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge that cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents and cultures. CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world! "
One girl from Prague has multiple people over EACH day! She must be a filantropist because couchsurfing is not about moneymaking. It is helping out strangers, offering them your bed and show them your city. Reciprocity is very important in this lifestyle. If you host people you will get good reviews and those reviews help you to get a couch if you go travel yourself. The fact that these reviews are a major issue assures you, I think, that only (or at least mostly) wellwilling, peaceloving world improvers will use this website. You can see most are caring for the environment, they have rules like: if you stay here you have to recycle.. And they have philosophies on their profile like: "Helping others is my pesonal choice, I cannot expect, that they will help me, but i always hope." This makes me very happy, to see all these warm, no worries, loving people together on one website. It is more than just a website to score a free bed when you're on holidays, it's a meeting place, a community for people with like minded points of view of this world.
One thing that does concerns me though is that there are many males on there, 51,4 % is male, 40.5 % is female, rest are several people. Are guys more hospital than girls or do they search for girls to come and sleep over? This is a question that draws agaist the idea of couchsurfing but I couldn't help but wondering. To be more sure about the ultimate Internet question: is the person he/she says to be online really that guy/girl, you can your profile "Verified", this means you transfer a minimal amount of money to the couchsurfing company and that way they can check via your creditcard information if you really are who you say you are. Also the references and the vouches you can give people help you tot trust the people using this great initiative.
Then I came across a blog which is completely tearing down the couchsurfing project: http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/07/20/couchsurfing-20-is-dead/ . They don't think it is a web 2.0 application since they've hired more staff who need to be paid and still use volunteers for programming but not letting them co-decide in decisions about the website. One volunteer who worked for the website a long time says Couchsurfing has become a corporation who do what they want without listening to its users/volunteers, he writes: " Unless, of course, one regards CS as a corporation, and the management has absolute authority to do what they will and volunteers are just “hired” help who should just be thankful for the opportunity to work for such a respected international corporation. This was NOT this spirit of the community that brought CS back from the crash, but something precious has been lost along the way." So the non opportunistic website it seems to be is changing and maybe becoming less web 2.0 than before. Still, users are the ones making this website possible, it's still free to use and the website functions as a platform/community website like a web 2.0 application should. Another blog about the question if couchsurfing.com is using it's volunteers has a comment from someone saying it is just about the question of making CS open source or not, which they decided to do not, this commentator understands the CS corporation for wanting to protect their work and not make it an open source application. (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17)
The people on the blogs refer a lot to another "couchsurfing" website: http://www.bewelcome.org/, this one actually ís open source. I'll check this one out as well and see if I can find the differences and at which one I will earlier find a place to stay in Prague in Decembre ..
vrijdag 12 september 2008
Book review Volume: Destination Library
This edition of Volume is all about the future of libraries. Guided by editors, Rem Koohaas, Mark Wigley and Arjen Oosterman the nice thing about this book-magazine is that the subject is adressed from so many different fields of interests. Librarians, scientists, researchers, teachers, the Googlebook director, they all have a say in this piece of work discussing what a library is now and what it will look like in a few years from now. The first to speak is Gerald Beasley, a librarian, his opinion is vey pro library, keep this place, make a mixed economy of collections and services offered in physical and digital formats. The next article is written by Director of Marketing & Communications at Summer Search Nicola Twilley and architect Geoff Manaugh who write the library as a building might become like a museum but the things people do in labraries will continue as an activity online instead of a place. More people come to speak about the future of libraries and they all have interesting says about this, some say libraries will stay, some say they will change into a place where people will not only consume but also produce knowledge. Questions that come back in each of the articles from the different people are: Is the library become useless now every piece of information will be available digital? How would a library look if all media would come together? what will be the job of the librarian? In between the articles written about these kind of questions examples of art and voluntary project in relation to libraries have a place in the book. Some nice pictures of old and modern libraries make the book very nice to glance through the pages. Editor Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect who owns a researchcentre that works on things like identity, culture and organisation. Ole Bouman studied architecture history and is the director of the Dutch Architecture Institute. Mark Wigley also is an architect, he was born in New Zealand. Wigley was awarded the Graham Foundation Grant in 1997. In 2005, Wigley founded Volume Magazine together with Koolhaas and Bouman. A collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO Rotterdam and C-lab (Columbia University NY), Volume Magazine is an experimental Think Tank focussing on the process of spatial and cultural reflexivity. The magazine aims to explore "beyond architecture’s definition of 'making buildings'" by presenting global views on architecture and design, broader attitudes to social structures and created environments; and embodies progressive journalism. This book is interesting for everybody wondering what the digital age will have in store for us in the relation to libraries, books and education. The book is easy to read, nice to watch and interesting also for laymen in the new media field.
links:
http://www.olebouman.net/ blog Ole Bouman
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/architectural-weaponry-interview-with.html an interview with Mark Wigey about the Volume issues and architectural discussions.
http://architecture.about.com/library/weekly/aa042200a.htm a phototour through the works of Rem Koolhaas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_uOKFhoznI
some links about library 2.0:
http://library20.ning.com/
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_2.0
links:
http://www.olebouman.net/ blog Ole Bouman
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/architectural-weaponry-interview-with.html an interview with Mark Wigey about the Volume issues and architectural discussions.
http://architecture.about.com/library/weekly/aa042200a.htm a phototour through the works of Rem Koolhaas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_uOKFhoznI
some links about library 2.0:
http://library20.ning.com/
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_2.0
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