I just came back from La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris which is dedicated to “Révolutions Numériques.” It is a newly opened centre in Paris which “explores all forms of digital culture: film-making, animation film-making, theatre, dance, circus, music, visual arts, design, graphic design, motion design, musical film, architecture, computer programming, software art, web, games, fashion, etc. As well as all those which we haven’t named yet…” The current exhibition is about Post Digital Monsters as part of the Picture Plasma festival. The new centre states it “targets the 15-35 year old, digital generation, who are the main consumers and players in the field of digital culture” but during my visit the 5-10 year olds were well represented as well. I guess you’re never too young to love post digital monsters :)

The fourth floor was dedicated to DESTRUCTION ET RÉASSEMBLAGE in the form of a tribute to defunct media, circuit bending, and glitch art including installations by Dutch artist Gijs Gieskes.

More photos from Paris on Flickr.

All the best from Amsterdam.

Check out my Pinterest board for the templates and inspiration and my Flickr set for the results.

Victor Schiferli en Peter Zantingh

Philip Huff

Victor Schiferli

Lolies van Grunsven

Peter Zantingh

Publiek in de Nieuwe Anita

Stephan Enter

Dennis Gaens

Meer over de literaire avond in de Nieuwe Anita op de website van Literanita. Meer foto’s op Flickr.

The Bookstore is a residential project involving fifteen artists in the Kolenkitbuurt, Amsterdam.

Bookstore project by Suzan Kolen

Kelly Kerssens – The Bookstore Project

The Dado Collective, Bos en Lommerweg.

The Products of Monkey Love. Vocals and guitar by Andy Jackson.

331WEST loves BoLo

Lex de Jong – initiatiefnemer Boloboost

Vloeistof Enzo serves cocktails in 331WEST

Mevrouw Mariska Hofman-Gáspár

Mevrouw Mariska Hofman-Gáspár, 101 jaar en al 70 jaar woonachtig op de Admiraal de Ruyterweg, was een van de deelnemers van de Bos en Lommer Kunstroute op 8-9 oktober 2011. Ze exposeerde al eerder in het museum Jan van der Togt in Amstelveen, maar toonde vandaag enkele van haar werken in haar eigen buurt.

Tijdens het weekend van de kunstroute opende galerie-koffiebar-winkel 331WEST aan de Admiraal de Ruyterweg 331, een mooie nieuwe aanwinst voor de buurt. Er is heerlijke koffie, gratis wifi, een mooie lange tafel om aan te zitten (werken) en ze verkopen er BoLo merchandise. Vloeistof Enzo zorgde tijdens de opening voor heerlijke cocktails.

De gehele Bos en Lommer Kunstroute fotoset staat op Flickr.

Links:

BoLo-K, de Bos en Lommer Kunstroute website.

BoLoBoost blog, het blog om op de hoogte te blijven van Bos en Lommer.

The Bookstore Project, organiseren ook evenementen, zoals filmavonden.

331WEST op Facebook.

In my previous post I wondered if social sharing services are breaking the web with data-rich hyperlinks and today I would like to pose that social sharing services are breaking search. Let’s assume the following scenario: You search for Facebook “proprietary protocol” in Google Web (the “regular” Google) and are presented with the following results:

While we are used to skim through the results for the most relevant results, the social buttons produce an artifact that disrupts the search index. A result titled “Is VTP a proprietary protocol of CISCO?” is the fifth, unrelevant, result and is only shown due to the fact that they are using a Facebook social button on their website.The social buttons are flooding the index with keywords such as Facebook, Twitter, Share, Add that as a side-effect of sharing technologies. Because of the high penetration of social buttons this may also disrupt research practices on the web.

The following example shows what happens when you search for the keywords Facebook homosexuality in Google Scholar.

None of the shown results are relevant for my query and are shown because of a Facebook social button on their website. Social buttons are producing an artifact that disrupts search.

Social sharing services such as Summify allow users to subscribe to a daily digest of stories that have been shared by their Twitter and/or Facebook users in what they call a “summary of your social news feeds.” In the process of tracking shared links on social media platforms, these sharing services are renaming and transforming the shared links. A link to Dave Winer’s article on “Facebook is scaring me” in Summify’s daily summary no longer directly points to Dave Winer’s blogpost, but instead the URL has been renamed to a Summify URL and the blogpost is framed in a Summify toolbar.

Summify renames http://scripting.com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe.html into http://summify.com/story/Tn3zdo3fhyiIAD6A/scripting.com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe.html

By rerouting all hyperlinks through their service they are able to gather statistics on shared stories and track how many times a story has been tweeted, liked and shared, and of course, clicked, which is not visible to users but to Summify only. They are creating data-rich links because the link does not only refer to the location of the source on the web but also carries quantitative metadata and possible affective metadata, think for example of the possible new Facebook intentions of ToRead and Want. Short-url services such as Bit.ly operate on the same principle: By transforming hyperlinks they are creating short but data-rich links.

What bothers me, as a researcher, is how this framing of the sharable web may break hyperlink analysis and affect research.

Look for example at the LinkedIn digest which provides me with the “Top Headlines in Internet, Online Media.” LinkedIn also renames the headlines’ URLs into LinkedIn URLs and presents these headlines in a frame with a LinkedIn toolbar on top.

LinkedIn toolbar and frame

Because LinkedIn renamed the original URL into a data-rich LinkedIn URL, this is the URL we will now be working with, whatever action follows next. This seems disastrous, not only for services such as Delicious, but also for researchers because the original URL will now also be saved (and possibly shared) as a LinkedIn URL, a Summify URL, or any other service that renames URLs. I am a URL purist and I want to save and share the original URL and not a renamed URL but many users will simply share or save the URL they are presented with. This means that tracking the original URL is no longer sufficient for analysis if the URL is also shared and saved as different URLs.

On top of that the LinkedIn URL is either badly formatted or Delicious is not able to interpret it correctly. In any case, attempting to save an article I discovered trough the LinkedIn digest to Delicious is impossible as it attempts to save the generic “http://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=”.

Failed attempt to save a bookmark on Delicious

Finally, some websites such as the New York Times do not allow their content to embedded within (social-sharing) frames which breaks the user-experience:

Should I be worried as a URL purist and researcher about social sharing sites and short URL services renaming URLs?

This post is part of a larger series that looks into the status of the hyperlink in Web 2.0.