Mediamatic is organizing a three day mapping festival where Esther Weltevrede and I will present our research on the Dutch blogosphere at the Mapping Ignite evening.

“Map Fest takes place at Mediamatic on July 6, 8 and 9. Map Fest brings together kindred spirits to explore, create, define and oppose maps.”

Day 1 is Mapping for Change. Day 2 is Mapping for Clarity with our Professor Richard Rogers. Day 3 is Mapping Ignite with super-fast-speedy-wonderful lightning talks including one by Esther and me!

Come and join us!

Sneak preview. Snapshot of the Dutch blogosphere 27th June 2010, with a marketing & technology blog cluster:

Snapshot of the Dutch blogosphere 27th June 2010, with a marketing & technology blog cluster

Photo: 2010 Jöran Maaswinkel (@JeeeM) Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0

On Tuesday we celebrated the book launch of Frank Meeuwsen’s Bloghelden, a history of the Dutch blogosphere from 1995 to 2005, at SETUP in Utrecht. I was asked to give a presentation on a project Esther Weltevrede and I are working on: Mapping the Dutch blogosphere over time.

Photo by danischouten

In his article ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’ from 2003 author Frank Schaap distinguishes two types of bloggers in the Dutch blogosphere: the lifeloggers and the linkloggers.¹ These two types of blogs, the lifelogs and the linklogs, have very specific and different linking patterns. Anno 2010 we can distinguish a new type of blog: the platformlog.

The aim of this study is to map changing blogging practices within the Dutch blogosphere. This may be done by looking at changing linking practices and studying the linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere.

Method

• Create a startlist of URLs. In this casestudy we compiled a list from experts: Arie Altena, Gert-Jan Lasterie, Frank Meeuwsen's Bloghelden book, Merel Roze's article on the Dutch Blogosphere in Schrijven Voor Het Web, and Frank Schaap's article. In the future this list will be supplemented with the Webloglijst (an early semi-manual Technorati) and Nedstat top 1000 weblogs’ statistics.
• Create hyperlink networks over time with the Issuecrawler.

Preliminary findings

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Hyves and other social media platforms appear as important actors within the network. In this sample of May 2010 Twitter is the dominant platform in the Dutch blogosphere receiving 34484 links from the crawled population. In 2010 social media platforms receive the most links from the crawled population indicating their prominence on the web and in the blogosphere. Claim: We have moved from a bloggers A-list to a platform A-list consisting of a top three of: Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. The linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere anno 2010 is characterized by social media platforms.

Maps

Click on the maps to download a hi-res PDF file (around 800K).

Social media platforms in the Dutch blogosphere

Dutch Blogosphere on 18 May 2010

Further research

• Look up URLs in the Internet Archive and create a special collection by archiving them. Visualize hyperlink networks over time with Gephi.
• How do linking practices change and which clusters emerge? When do the social media platforms arrive?
• Diagnosing the current condition of the early Dutch blogosphere.

Slides in English & Dutch

1. Frank Schaap, ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’, Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs < http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/links_lives_logs.html> [[↩]

I was honored to be invited by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of St. Gallen to participate in the expert-workshop “Research Methods in the Digitally Networked Information Age” in Brunnen, Switzerland from 10 to 12 May 2010.

Rob Faris and Christian Sandvig

On Tuesday Christian Sandvig and I moderated the “Evolution of Methods” panel in which we addressed two topics: 1. banditry (Sandvig) and 2. the volatility of methods (Helmond).

Banditry

Christian Sandvig proposes banditry as a metaphor for looking at the evolution of methods. We need to celebrate the bandits and ask ourselves how we can become better bandits in order to take banditry seriously. What methods can we borrow or which methods would we like to steal from other disciplines? In line with the banditry metaphor I would like to add a biological notion of evolution to this idea by taking into account the parasitic and symbiotic way of transferring methods or taking them from other disciplines. Banditry in that sense could be considered a parasitic method of transferring methods.

Gerhard Buurman notes that banditry has a negative connotation, it’s an angry action which often involves a victim. Instead of thinking about the evolution of methods from a banditry metaphor it might be more useful to think through the notions of translation and evolution.

Does transferring methods from one discipline to another involve a translation? Different disciplines use different definitions complicating the interdisciplinary movement of methods. Adopting methods should ideally involve the process of cultivation: “to improve by labor, care, or study.”¹. Cultivated methods have been transferred from the environment or object of study originally applied to and as such are “no longer in the natural state.”²

The volatility of methods

The web has a focus on freshness (see The Perceived Freshness Fetish) and an update culture and as such “Internet methods are incessantly volatile due to the update culture of the Internet itself.”³ Digital methods may be volatile if we build tools (scrapers, crawlers, plugins) on top of devices that change.

There are different data gathering methods: The API is the polite way of gathering data and scraping could be considered the impolite way of harnessing data: “You can arrange digital research methods on a spectrum of niceness. On the one hand you use the industry-provided API. On the other you scrape Facebook for all it is worth.”⁴ APIs often limit which information you can retrieve and the amount of information you can retrieve. APIs bring back the notion of scarcity in the digital age which is often considered to be the domain of abundance. According to Chris Anderson in ‘The Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance’ “clearly abundance (AKA “plentitude”) is all around us, especially in technology” but the limit on API calls show differently. The Twitter REST API allows general users only 150 requests per hour. Once you pass this number you are temporarily ‘banned’⁵. For developers this can be expanded to 20000 requests per hour by whitelisting your IP address or account but maintains update and followers limits. Social graph/social network analysis applications build on top of Twitter using the API like Wow.ly and Mailana still very often hit the API limits. Another important aspect for researchers is that the Twitter Search API is limited: “We also restrict the size of the search index by placing a date limit on the updates we allow you to search. This limit is currently around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow.” Artificial limits cause a scarcity in retrieval methods.

APIs often change which has major implications for the applications built on top of them. In a worst case scenario applications may stop to function, especially if the platform providing the API fails to notify developers. Gowalla developer Ben Dodson wrote an extensive open letter to Gowalla about their lack of communication in API changes:

The major problem with the API is its fluid and changeable nature. Whilst we accept that any application will inevitably have bug fixes and changes, an API is supposed to provide a stable endpoint on which third party services can rely on. (Dodson via Techcrunch)

In a ‘perfect’ networked information ecosystem an API is open and stable for developers and researchers to be able to rely on the continuity of tools.

In the case of scraping a seemingly simple interface change can also break the tools built on top of them. This happened to Scroogle, “serving up privacy-friendly Google search results,” which was built on top of google.com/ie. When Google decided to discontinue IE6 support the google.com/ie page automatically redirected to http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html and Scroogle stopped working. Scroogle has since been brought back to life with the help of its users.⁶

So how can we address the issues of volatile methods caused by the ephemerality of the web? Martina Mertz introduces the notion of plastic methods, methods that are not solid, and methods that can monitor change. Urs Gasser calls for methods that can learn themselves. Sandvig notes that the pace of science is different than the pace of the web. Can scientific methods keep up with the pace of the web?

Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig at the workshop

1. “cultivating.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010. Merriam-Webster Online. 17 May 2010 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cultivating>[↩]
2. “cultivated.” WordNet Search. 2010. 17 May 2010 <http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=cultivated>[↩]
3. Helmond paraphrased by Sandvig[↩]
4. Helmond paraphrased by Sandvig[↩]
5. banned implies that you cannot access Twitter but your Twitter activity is actually ‘frozen’ until your rate limit is over[↩]
6. Tuesday evening, thanks to some help from a trio of Scroogle users, Brandt was able to replicate his setup via another page – google.com/search – by adding an extra parameter (“&output=ie”) to the url. “It appears that both methods,” Brandt says, meaning the old and the new, “amount to the same thing.” Metz, Cade, ‘Scroogle scrapes back to life’, The Register, 2010 [accessed 17 May 2010].[↩]

This post is the first in a short series exploring my hypothesis of RSS as the technological foundation of Web 2.0 for my PhD research. I have had the honor of talking with Dave Winer about my research and to pose him some questions. I would like to thank him for his time, thoughts and provoking new ideas for my dissertation.

The terminology of RSS

Naming conventions of formats, protocols and standards by Microsoft and Netscape show how they perceive the web. When Microsoft named its Channel Definition Format (CDF) it illustrated how Microsoft thought of the web as a static thing that could be defined through and fixed in Channels. The <channel> element nomenclature by Netscape is still visible in the RSS protocol.

Netscape originally named its “channel description framework for their My Netscape Network (MNN) portal”¹ RDF Site Summary (RSS) reflecting similar ideas transposed onto the web as something that can be fixed and summarized. RDF was “Netscape’s way of thinking static.”² It was later renamed into Rich Site Summary (RSS) and included elements from Winer’s ScripingNews format but the new name still illustrated Netscape’s thinking about the web as a static thing. When Netscape dropped RSS support Dave Winer picked it up and renamed it into Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to name it into something that it actually was: The RSS protocol as “a way of detecting changes.”³

As I previously described in ‘The Perceived Freshness Fetish’ the web currently has a focus on fresh and updated content on websites. Changes were often manually indicated with “last updated” date displays or by placing the “new.gif” image next to the new or updated content. In 1995 Javascript was an important step in automating when a website was updated with for example the Last Modified Javascript:

<script language="JavaScript"> <!---//hide script from old browsers

document.write( "Last updated "+ document.lastModified );

//end hiding contents ---> </script>

The detection and notification of changes on websites to third parties was automated by RSS. It is a way to detect changes and as such RSS is not necessarily  reverse-chronological as we know from the blogosphere where changed and updated information is presented in a reverse-chronological order.

1. Dornfest, Rael, ‘XML.com: RSS: Lightweight Web Syndication’, XML.com, 2000 <http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/115> [accessed 23 April 2010].[↩]
2. Winer 22 April 2010[↩]
3. Winer 22 April 2010[↩]

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 notion of following is anthropological or ethnographic. Bruno Latour: “Follow the actors.” Now we follow all sorts of things: object, medium, money. Why follow the medium? It has to do with a particular research practice: a new medium offers new spaces and objects and new opportunities arise. For example studying the commentspace as a subspace of the blogosphere. If we were to remediate the commentspace it is potentially some kind of lively, productive area for organizing voices and mobilizing citizens. A new space for organizing or issue making. One could stay in that mode no matter which new space arises, however, Richard Rogers rather looks at the specificity of the objects of that space and asks how the devices handle them and see if we can learn, repurpose and make findings. Political scientists/students embrace the commentspace as the new hope. However, the commentspace is being ignored by devices by the implementation of the nofollow tag. The commentsphere is a messy space for engines. Engines and humans ignore it but the users are subjected to the engine regime of nofollow. What to do? Digital methods are a new recipe for new spaces: look at digital objects, how do the devices handle them? Analyze, learn and repurpose.