Last night I was interviewed by the great guys from WordCast about my research on WordPress, teaching social media and blogging classes and personal blogging experiences. We talked about the tight relationship between blog software and search engines that caused the implementation of the nofollow attribute on comment links in an attempt to combat spam. This deal shows one of the main differences between blog services and self-hosted blogs as the latter allow users to subvert the defaults by installing a dofollow plugin.

We also talked about my social media addiction that started in 1995 and about being offline. In contrast to the early days of the web it is very hard to be offline nowadays. We are nearing an era where being offline is a choice instead of being online. Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student on social media, actually developed the application Freedom for our era “in which our computers resist encroachments of connectivity.” I’m guess I’m not the only social media PhD student for whom being offline doesn’t come naturally.

Listen to the whole episode: WordCast Conversations 8: Anne Helmond on SEO and Social Media

The Digital Methods Initiative, a collaboration of the New Media & Digital Culture program at the University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation, is organizing its 4th annual Summer School for advanced B.A. and M.A. students, PhD candidates as well as designers, artists and programmers working in the area of online media research, broadly conceived. This year’s edition of the annual Summer School is dedicated to “foundations” in digital methods. One set of foundations includes the question of the status of Web data. Often considered messy, dirty and incomplete, under which conditions may Web data be seen as robust? Another set of foundations concerns the idea of the Web as virtual, representational or otherwise having a special, ungrounded status. Can one only study online culture when one’s site of research is the Web? Where does online cultural studies end, and social and cultural research begin? The third set of foundations strives to codify the otherwise tacit knowledge required for online research. On top of formulating research questions, the purpose of foundational research skills sessions is to present strategies for compiling URL lists, building source sets, making issue and key word lists, designing queries and undertaking other core prep tasks, prior to tool use. Further foundational sessions include training in reading and interpreting search engine results and other standard Web device outputs.

Under-explored Spaces by Digital Methods

Special attention will be paid to under-explored spaces and subspaces online. Explored spaces by digital methods include hyperlink networks, IP numbers, archived website collections and previous states of the Web, top-level and second-level domains, search engine returns, social bookmarks and related tags, the spheres, national Webs and filtered content, social networking profiles, wikipedia article edit histories and tweets related by hashtag. Of the under-explored spaces, there are the classic ones, as well as those which may resist current tools and methods. In the former category of course there have been portions of the Web thought to be unreachable by crawlers (the ‘dark web’), another relatively untouched by humans (the crawled-only web), a third not to be captured (the ‘ephemeral web’) and the fourth one that no longer exists, the dead web. (Placing the robots.txt exclusion on a website now flushes the site’s stored history in the Internet archive.) However, the focus in the Summer School is on spaces currently garnering attention for their democratic potential, such as the comment space as well as the overlay or annotated map space, and exploring their potential for social and cultural research.

Digital Methods Training Certificate Program, 28 June – 9 July 2010

The Digital Methods Summer School has a certificate program. It is a two-week intensive training and skill acquisition program which runs, every other weekday, 28 June to 9 July 2010. The certificate program is recommended for those researchers with limited exposure to digital methods to date.

Digital Methods Advanced Projects Program, 9 August – 27 August 2010

The Digital Methods Summer School also has an advanced program. It is a three-week undertaking, meeting physically Mondays and Fridays, with an ongoing commitment, where researchers propose and carry out projects, from research question and query design to methodological operationalization, tool use and visual and written output, including narrative and presentation. Each week has a dedicated theme, and is facilitated by advanced Amsterdam-based Digital Methods researchers. Thematic projects may include explorations of the comment space, real-time results, activity in social media, comparative Web space temporalities (such as static, real-time, periodic and irregularly-paced), as well as the creation of Web collections for the purposes of historical research.

Applications

To apply for the Digital Methods Training Certificate Program, 28 June – 9 July 2010, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods training would benefit your current work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application “DMI Training Certificate Program.”

To apply for the Digital Methods Advanced Projects Program, 9 August – 27 August 2010, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods have benefited your work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application “DMI Summer Advanced Program.”

To apply for both programs, please write a letter explaining your overall affinity with digital methods work, and include your CV. Mark your application “DMI Summer Full Program.”

Selection of participants is based on the fit between candidate interests and available skills and expertise. Selection is also based on commitment to full attendance as well as your work in digital methods. Please be advised that we may contact you for additional information and request a conversation in person, by phone or by Skype (whichever is most suitable).

Please send applications to Esther Weltevrede, Digital Methods Initiative, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, info {at} digitalmethods.net. Informal queries should be sent to Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam, rogers {at} uva.nl.

Deadline for applications is 3 May 2010. Responses to be sent on 7 May 2010. Conversations in person, by phone or by Skype will be held on 10 and 11 May. Circulation of finalized participants’ list on 12 May.

Logistics

Participants must arrange their own travel and accommodation. There is no fee for participation in the Summer School. Space is limited.

The Digital Methods Initiative acknowledges the generous support of the Science Faculty, University of Amsterdam, and Platform Beta Techniek, http://www.platformbetatechniek.nl/.

Previous Digital Methods Summer Schools, 2007-2009

The Digital Methods Summer School is in its fourth year. The third Summer School in 2009 treated media attention formats, Wikipedia as space of controversy, repurposing Google for social research and methods for Internet archive research, including “conjuring a past state of the Web.” The second Summer School, which coincided with the 10-year jubilee of the Govcom.org foundation, was dedicated to the turn away from user studies, and also produced the video, commenting on Google’s 10-year anniversary, “Google and the politics of tabs.” The IP Browser, recently shown at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona, is also a product of the 2008 gatherings. The first Summer School, in 2007, sought to establish the study of natively digital objects, how they are handled by dominant web devices, and whether the “methods in the media” may be repurposed for social and cultural research.

Related project URLs

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, participates in the EU project facilitated by Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris, http://www.mappingcontroversies.net/.

DMI researchers also participate in the ATACD network, the EU project facilitated by Celia Lury, Goldsmiths, London, http://www.atacd.net/.

About

Reworking method for Internet research, the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is a collaboration of the New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam. Its director is Richard Rogers, Chair, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, and its coordinators are Esther Weltevrede and Sabine Niederer, PhD candidates in Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

I just finished reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis and was rather disappointed. I saw Jeff Jarvis speak at the Next Web 2009 and he is an excellent speaker and certainly knows how to entertain his audience with stories. However, as a writer I am not so impressed. The book is filled with numbers and figures of revenue, clicks, marketshare etcetera. On top of that it doesn’t read like a coherent argument.

Jeff Jarvis at The Next Web 2009

Please note that this is not a book review but a collection of notes of everything that I got out of this book for my research. I tried a new notetaking system for my research: Evernote. Instead of underlining passages I took pictures of relevant paragraphs with my Google phone, the Nexus One (the pictures in this blog post are taken with my Nikon D90) and directly uploaded them to Evernote. Evernote makes my notes available everywhere and it applies text recognition to everything that I upload so my pictures become searchable.

Evernote text recognition

Life is a beta

In both the Perceived Freshness Fetish and Identity 2.0 I describe the web 2.0 culture as a beta culture. I would like to argue that web 1.0 was always ‘Under Construction’ while web 2.0 is always ‘In Beta.’ The main difference is the disruption of the updates for the user or visitor. Websites that are ‘Under Construction’ are unfinished or are in the process of being updated. They bear signs of inaccessible construction sites that depict roadblocks. It is a disruptive update process. Services such as Google’s products that are in a perpetual beta state are invisibly being updated. Platform updates do not go unnoticed to users (as can be seen in the case of privacy settings in Facebook and Google Buzz), but it does not immediately disrupt their webflow. Updates are less disruptive because they are being performed in the backend instead of the frontend.

The term beta is also a social construct in the Google world similar to the Under Construction signs indicating “I’m sorry” or according to Jeff Jarvis a way of not having to say sorry:

“Beta” is Google’s way of never having to say they’re sorry. It is also Google’s way of saying, “There are sure to be mistakes here and so please help us and fix them and improve the product. Tell us what you want it to be. Thanks.” (Jarvis 2009: 91)¹

Google’s products often start in Google Labs before they graduate for public use. The next step is usually a few years in beta which in Google terms means that the product is mature enough for public launch but that it may come with flaws. In the summer of 2009 Google decided to remove the beta label from its major products:

Today we’re paving the road. We’re taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite. (Rahen 2009)²

Recent Google experiments are launched in Google Labs or labelled with a Preview label instead of a Beta label, as in the case with Google Wave. Beta, as Google’s way of not having to say sorry, seems to have disappeared. However, the introduction of Google’s new service Google Buzz forced Google to publicly say sorry to its users. The service, similar to Twitter, was introduced overnight without the infamous beta/preview logo. It just appeared as a new feature within/on top of Gmail. Its default privacy settings revealed a list of contacts of “people you email and chat with most.” After complaints from users about the sudden publication of their contactlist Google admitted the ‘Buzz social network testing flaws‘ to BBC News. Products are usually extensively tested with friends/family or a relatively small set of users in a private beta. Buzz was launched without these tests and users immediately pointed to its privacy flaws. While Google considers our life to be a beta where experimentation is key, Google Buzz showed that its users base is not quite ready or interested in living life as a beta.

 

Life is a beta

1. Jarvis, Jeff. What Would Google Do? New York: Harperluxe, 2009).[↩]
2. Sheth, Rajen. “Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises.” Official Google Enterprise Blog 7 Jul 2009. Web. 26 Feb 2010.[↩]

The Web Ecology project published the first study (an initial survey) on the new web hype ChatRoulette where a user is randomly paired with another user for chatting. Randomness in the informational web can be found on Google with its “I’m feeling lucky” button, on StumbleUpon with its “Stumble!” button and on Blogger with its Next Blog link. Randomness in the social web is less common but may be seen in the practice of adding random contacts or ‘friends’ in order to gain more followers (which is often considered to be a marker of popularity).

One of the main research questions of “How does the structure of ChatRoulette shape general modes of participation and cultural practices on the platform?” led to an interesting conclusion:

The technical code of ChatRoulette plays a key role in influencing the culture fashioned on the platform. However, unlike other structure for community creation on the Web like Facebook or Twitter,ChatRoulette enforces social rules that depend on the inverse proportion between the temporal and the social: as more time is spent with one user, you encounter fewer other users. ChatRoulette prioritizes the one-on-one (or, group-on-group) relationship that other social networks bypass when they strive to collect larger and larger groups of friends, colleagues, followers, etc. (Alex Leavitt & Tim Hwang 2010)

The code of a platform restricts and allows for certain social interactions. At first sight, ChatRoulette seems to be a platform for random and short-lived communication with the popular next button. However, the underlying code of the ChatRoulette platform privileges longer communication with a single person. In contrast to social networking sites where status seems to be measured by the amount of friends, ChatRoulette prioritizes one-on-one relationships.

My first ChatRoulette session (with support from my colleagues in the background) was actually with a Dutch guy who read about ChatRoulette in the newspaper this morning:

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Femke Halsema

Last night @FemkeHalsema, leader of GroenLinks parliamentary party, hosted a Twitter party for her followers. Five hundred people attended #twist in Pakhuis de Zwijger. The idea of the party came from Queen Beatrix’ annual speech in which she repeatedly stated that online communication forms are bad for our offline relations, that they lead to weaker social ties and promote anonymous hate activity. In his speech, columnist and blogger Bert Brussen, mocked the Queen for sending a telegraph STOP to our Olympic medal winners STOP

The theme of the evening was ‘A Free Web’ and also marked the launch of the GroenLinks campaign Wanted for downloading against criminalizing downloading. An evening in pictures:

Femke Halsema

Bert Brussen

@The_Ed

@Rutger_zelf @tomroes Geenstijl.tv

@alidestorm @globalistaa

@lalalalinder

Femke Halsema

Thank you, Femke Halsema!

All my pictures from #twist on Flickr.

Page info for Twitter.com

In Firefox hit -i or control-i for Page Info and go to the Security tab to view your own Privacy and History of the page. How addicted are you?