The PICNIC organization offered 25 researchers a free pass to the conference and asked Digital Methods Initiative researchers Sabine Niederer and Anne Helmond to organize an informal seminar where everyone could meet and present their research to fellow researchers. At the end of the conference they asked the researchers to write a short essay or paper with reflections on the conference or one of the topics in relation to their research.

Thank you to all who participated and we now present you the essays online:

Mapping the Physics of the Web by Esther Weltevrede
Cyberculture, Here and Now by Michael Stevenson
Post-Demographics by Erik Borra
The “Long Now” of PICNIC08 by Andrea Fiore
Formalism and the Real -(time) Social Web @ PICNIC08 by Rachel O’Reilly
Social Gaming: the next big thing? by Pieter-Paul Walraven
Feedback society by Taina Bucher
Open innovation at PICNIC2008 by Thieme Hennis
Reflections on PICNIC by Kjen Wilkens
The Future of Virtual Worlds by Rene Glas
A Picnic Sampler by Sonja Kerkhoff
Let’s disconnect at Picnic by Marije Kanis
PICNIC08 Report by Helene Zuili
Games Go Social by Sonja Utz
Status, Use and Trends of Open Content Models in the New Media Industry by Peter Troxler (podcast)
Reflection on the PICNIC conference by Linda Adrichem
Dutch Extravaganza by David Boardman
PICNIC 2008: Three Days of Miracle and Wonder? by Edward A. Shanken

More info on the PICNIC website.

Hyves is the biggest social networking site in the Netherlands with five million members. It could be described as Myspace meets Facebook covered in with what looks like an exploded emoticon set folder. Whether or not you like an abundance of smileys, Hyves is actively used by millions of people. Hyves is a popular object of study in research on (Dutch) social networking sites. Recent research includes:

Schouten, Alexander. Adolescents. Online Self-Disclosure and Self-Presentation (dissertation in English)

Antheunis, Marjolijn en Schouten, Alexander. Hyves draait om contact met virtuele- én echte vrienden (Dutch)

Antheunis, Marjolijn. Hyves goed voor offline vriendschap (Dutch Cowboys article)

Rietdijk, Liselotte. Wat is jouw Hyves? Het communicatiemiddel van NU (Dutch)

Vos, Hanneke. Over Hyvers en ‘the networked individual’ (Dutch)

One of Hyves’ founders, Raymond Spanjar, said they applaud research on Hyves because it allows them to get to know things about the site they might not have known before. The bibliography of the Hyves book includes more research done on Hyves and social networks in general. The author of the book, Eva Kol wrote her MA thesis on Hyves at the University of Amsterdam and turned it into the first book (with its own Hyves page) on the popular Dutch social networking site.

Eva Kol started the book presentation with how she is connected to Hyves as a former employee, followed by a demonstration of the website. The main topic of the presentation and the final focus of the book is its impact on society and how Hyves reinforces existing social relationships.

The panel at the book presentation included thesis supervisor Geert Lovink who wondered if Hyves plays such an big role in Dutch society why does any form of activism seem absent? Eva responded that Hyves focuses on friends and friendships and less as a tool for organized activism. However, there are plenty of Hyves (groups on a particular topic) for NGOs and many politicians have their own Hyves profiles and groups. While the main user group is young and does not concern itself with activist issues the site could be used for it and sometimes is.

One of the founders, Raymond Spanjar, was also present and professionally shunned the “How much is Hyves worth?” question from the audience. Spanjar assured a concerned audience member that his privacy is guaranteed because Google does not index Hyves profiles. Either Google has a lot of Hyves profiles in its cache or this statement only concerns private profiles which also seem to turn up now and then. Five million people don’t seem to mind though and Hyves also has a very strong form of social control build into the system. Because friends can easily read what other friends are up to things rarely get out of hand. Users can report incidents with the “this is not OK” button as a second form of social control.

The book is not aimed at researchers but anyone interested in Hyves in general. It includes an inside view of the coming-into-existence and explosive growth of the social networking site, the functionalities use and impact of the site illustrated with interviews and stories from users.

I would recommend this colorfully designed and well priced (10 euros) book to communication studies students, new media students and anyone interested in the Dutch Hyves phenomenon (and I’m not just saying this because I know Eva from the New Media Master at the University of Amsterdam.)

More reading: Twan Eikelenboom’s report on the book presentation for Virtueel Platform.

More pictures: My Flickr set, These images may not be used without permission. Name credit: Anne Helmond // www.annehelmond.nl

But when you add the dimension of time things get really interesting. You can actually map out shifts in tag usage. Chirag Meta created a Tagline Generator “that lets you generate chronological tag clouds from simple text data sources without manually tagging the data entries.” Two nice applications of this generator are:

1. US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
   You can see a shift from “welfare” to “terrorism”
2. Microsoft’s evolution, in keywords

The word “computer” is disappearing, interesting!

It might be nice if you could focus on one word, or a set of related words, so you could follow a certain trend. What else can we do with tagclouds (except making a t-shirt out of it of course)?

This initiative was pointed out to the Masters of Media by Geert Lovink. When I read the manifesto I could identify with it, but at the same time it made me reconsider my blog. This blog is supposed to be a research tool for my Master Thesis (hence #4), but so far I haven’t written down any ideas.

So I am planning on writing down more random thoughts and maybe sketch them out to get a sense of where I am going. I am also planning on participating more on other blogs, besides our own collaborative Masters of Media blog. I have to get out of my own personal safe blog shell and participate in the big World Wide Web world!