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:
Over a year ago, on January 17 2009, I gave up my tv. I must admit, the choice was not that hard. First my tv broke down and then I moved to a new house without an active cable connection so I did not bother to buy a new tv. So, how’s life, a year after I gave up on my tv?
The last image of my tv
Do I stare less at screens? No. Do I watch less series? No. After getting a VPN client a whole world of series opened up to me. The main difference between my life before and after tv? Twitter changed my viewing interests.
The Dutch twitterscene is very active commenting on tv programs. This brings back the old gathering function of tv: everyone watching the same program at the same time accompanied with a Twitter backchannel. It made me want to watch programs I would have never considered watching before. However, following the hashtag (#) that belongs to the program, to me, is as entertaining as actually watching the show. Snarky, witty comments filling my screen. However, not owning a tv means I cannot participate unless it is streamed live.
With the turmoil around the Comissie Davids (“This independent committee has investigated the preparation and the decision-making process regarding the political support given by the Netherlands for the invasion of Iraq in the period from the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2003.”) a series of debates was held. With Femke Halsema (the leader of the GreenLeft parliamentary party in the House of Representatives since 2002) twittering live during the debate the #irakdebat Twitter backchannel got an extra dimension. Not only did she keep us up to date during the recessions, she participated in the conversation about the debate on Twitter. Never before did I watch political debates which such interest. My Twitter timeline provided me with cynical jokes, political context and supporting links and a strong politician who brought me closer to politics by providing a sense of immediacy.
Last month Google announced the launch of their Real Time Search engine. By including real time search results Google has now officially embraced the updatesphere as a subsphere of “The Web,” as may be seen in the following figures.
Fig. 1: Part of the main index
Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results
Fig. 3: The updatesphere
In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook1. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.
silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.
These actions performed on social objects2 such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.
Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:
Google Social Search and the statussphere
Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.
Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.3
social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example[↩]
For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf][↩]
Yesterday, @puur from Puur* Amsterdam organized the second edition of Twitter Tea Amsterdam. We had a lovely high tea at the Bakkerswinkel Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam with 30 female tweeps.
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