Last Monday we started our DMI Summer School with the Digital Methods Training Certificate Program where we discussed the “Foundations for Online Research with Digital Methods.” Please head over to the Digital Methods Initiative blog if you want to keep up-to-date on our talks and projects:

1. Pre-Foundations of Digital Methods
2. When words are “keywords”: Query design and other digital methods
3. Lippmannian device: “Making an Issue Cloud”

I’m not a big fan of Google’s new result page which seems to favor freshness and a ubiquity of entry points over relevance. Or, in other words, it is increasingly referring to itself (Google News, Updates, YouTube) for results as may be seen in the following picture:

Let’s look at the ranking of the results:

1. Google News Results
2. Google’s best friend Wikipedia (hitting Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button more than often sends you to a Wikipedia entry. Or as Mathys from Mobypicture stated: “When Google is out of luck (when it doesn’t know where to send you after hitting the “I’m feeling lucky” button) it will send you to Wikipedia
3. A “plain” website.
4. Realtime results from the Updatesphere. Note that these updates are constantly refreshed so that there is always something moving.
5. Shopping
6. Images
7. Video

There is only one “plain” website listed on the first half of the page. All the other entries refer to Google’s subspheres like News, Updates, Shopping, Images, Videos except for Wikipedia. By showing a variety of results from its other indices it is becoming self-referential.

It’s no news that Google Google loves fresh content and especially updates. With its many indexing deals with popular micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca it has access to a big amount of new and fresh content. At the end of 2009 Google started displaying status updates in their results and shortly after Google officially welcomed the updatesphere as a subsphere of the web that can be searched. This subsphere has now penetrated the Google front page, along with Google’s other subspheres.

In “organizing the world’s information” Google is becoming increasingly self-referential.

Literanita is a literary evening at De Nieuwe Anita in Amsterdam where writers and poets present their work. The theme of the third edition was politics with the Dutch elections coming up in a week.

Hugo Logtenberg

Tomas Ross

Robert Junius

Arjen Lubach

More photos on Flickr.

With members of the Digital Methods Initiative we participated in Hack de Overheid where we created a mockup of Tikkr. Tikkr displays the pulse of media spaces and the pace of issues across different media spaces. Our concept won the third prize, woohoo! Notes and slides from our presentation are located below the photos. All pictures from Hack de Overheid are located on Flickr.

Tikkr

The web may be seen as having different media spaces or spheres which have a different pace and where authority is established differently. For example, an issue may be discussed on Twitter and not in the news. On top of that, an issue may “jump” from one media space to another. Until now there has not been a visual overview of where an issue is discussed on the web, its pace, or pulse, and how it may syndicate to other spheres. Tikkr provides the pace of different spheres where an issue is discussed and provides us with a media pulse.

It is aimed at (data-driven) journalists and political parties. Sources are important for journalists and on the web we can find new authorative sources (what the web considers to be authorative, namely: retweets on Twitter, likes in Facebook). There are no pre-defined authorative sources, there is an emerging authority of sources. For political parties it allows you to track your issue, locate where it is and where it is not!

What is the pulse of media spaces: when and where do issues arise? What is the relation of sources across spaces? We can locate hot and cold issues: An issue is published in the news, picked up by Twitter, the dying of an issue > the ticker stops ticking. Where do issues originate and where do they travel? Where is the primary source? Cross reference of sources: Where does an issue resonate most?

Slides

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> [[↩]

Last night the first public election debate was on live television. Fortunately RTL offered a livestream of the debate on their website for those of us who don’t own a tv. The debate itself was almost unbearable to watch with politicians constantly interrupting each other and throwing corny oneliners at each other. The #rtldebat became a trending topic on Twitter as well as two of the participating politicians: Rutte and Wilders.

As I’ve previously told, Twitter has increased my engagement with politics since I no longer own a tv. Backchannels on Twitter during live events or live debates in the Netherlands are very active and contain a nice balance between commentary, humor and cynicism. And last night it included commentary of politicians who weren’t invited to this particular debate.

The debate from last night was filled with tons of clichés and one-liners and was hard to watch without either the power of relativity, humor or cynicism. That’s why I came up with the bullshit bingo consisting of all those worn-out one-liners. I tweeted the picture during the end of the debate and it became a trending picture on Mobypicture.

My picture ended up on tv in a short segment on the election debate:¹

Full clip on the RTL website.

1. All copyright goes to RTL but they don’t offer embed codes and since they used my picture without my consent I guess I can publish this small clip for my friends and family without their consent ;) [↩]