justlol, Wednesday June 11th 2008, 1:09 pm ,
Since 1998, and on paper since 1989 (Stemwijzer 2008), general elections in the Netherlands have spawned a variety of so called voting recommendation machines. These systems typically ask the user to answer some questions after which they offer the user a voting recommendation, based on the compatibility between his or her answers and the political parties. The questions are either based on the political party’s programs (Kieskompas 2008), or on its actual voting behavior in Parliament over the past few years (Politix 2008).
Since the birth of online social networking sites lots of people have, quite unconsciously, put their likes and dislikes on public display. They not only show with whom they affiliate, but also what kind of music, movies, food, or even brands they prefer.
We have developed a post-demographic recommendation tool derived from digital life software systems, while at the same time addressing them - based on the aggregated profiles of pals of political party leaders as they appear on the biggest Dutch online social network, Hyves. By providing appropriate visualizations we show both the demographics and the relations of a group of pals, and replicate the existing, arguably anti-participatory democratic, voting recommendation machines. Ultimately the goal is to raise awareness of one’s digital public self - one’s data body (Well.com 1995) - to create conscience of simple yet powerful profiling techniques, and the tools of the surveillance and control society. (Bogard 1996, Deleuze 1992). We intentionally chose to highlight the entertaining quality and lightness of peer-based behavior this society is so immersed in. In addition, this paper introduces and explains the term post-demographics (first coined by Richard Rogers in August 2007) in the context of control society.
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Popularity: 10% [?]
justlol, Sunday February 24th 2008, 12:14 am ,
Inspired by Wilbert Baan’s Interactive Story Telling Experiment and a spare hour to code, I made another system using Flickr to generate image to a story. This time the system scrapes headlines from Google News, gets significant terms from Yahoo, and then queries those as tags in Flickr. This way Flickr provides random, though clarifying, pictures to the headlines - the photo editorial is generative but often illuminating (for example, getting this picture to the Rick Renzi story). I’ve made the page scroll down automatically and reload when all headlines have been flickrified so I can have my spare screen act as an always up-to-date, but augmented, rss-reader / issue-ticker. You can try it yourself at flickrNews US or flickrNews NL or flickrNews FR. The US version works best as the Yahoo Term Extraction Service is optimalized for English.
Popularity: 58% [?]
justlol, Saturday February 09th 2008, 12:31 pm ,
Just for aesthetic fun I made ‘4 interpretations of Alice in Wonderland by Flickr’. The method is simple: load the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland, for each new word get a picture from Flickr and display it, if there already was an image for that word we’ll use that one. The result is quite beautiful and reminds one of Burroughs’ cutup method: 1st interpretation, 2nd interpretation, 3th interpretation, 4th interpretation. Kinda feels like that ‘memory’ game. How quickly can you cognitively map the images to the words they belong to and read Alice without reading the words?
Popularity: 56% [?]
justlol, Wednesday January 30th 2008, 1:01 pm ,
Last week I participated in an other artist in resident program at Montevideo, the Netherlands Institute for Time-based Arts, together with govcom.org and the Digital Methods Initiative. It was a marvelous week. On Tuesday we started without a clue on what to do, by the end of the morning we had thought of a plan: we are going to make a fully functional, yet satirical, start-up in just one week. Et voila: on Saturday we drunk champagne on the opening of our new start-up: elfriendo.com.
elfriendo is a new MySpace related service, founded on 30 January 2008, on the occasion of the International Delete Your MySpace Account Day, as a remedy.
Deleting your MySpace page is painful. You had friends, too few or too many. It had taken over your life, or you wish it had. Was your profile stale? Were you too active? The morning after International Delete Your Myspace Account Day elfriendo gives you a new look.
elfriendo.com - “Taking the work out of social networking”
These days one hardly has time to fill in one set of fields before another update request comes in. elfriendo reduces the number of form-filling steps to a bare minimum, without sacrificing quality or depth. People used to neglect their profiles, leaving them stale and deficient. elfriendo offers fresh sets of interests and an active look for your profile.
elfriendo’s business is profilization - professionalizing, optimizing and automating your profile on MySpace, the world’s largest social networking site. elfriendo is a service that keeps your profile active fresh.
√ You can have a profile generated for you on the basis of just a few interests.
√ You can create a profile on the basis of another profile, and that person’s group of friends.
√ You can tweak your profile by comparing it to another profile’s network, raising or lowering your compatibility.
elfriendo is a Web 2.0 compliant European start-up company, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Yes! Take me there
What is elfriendo?
elfriendo is a MySpace related service. It’s designed for people who have no time to fill in a profile, or would like to save time blending in with other fans of a certain interest. You can use elfriendo to measure compatibility of profiles and interests, to make a profile based on your interests, or to have a profile makeover when you feel your profile is no longer properly representing you. The outcomes are suggested fields, ready for you to tweak and customize.
elfriendo’s FAQ
Popularity: 61% [?]
justlol, Wednesday December 26th 2007, 3:17 pm ,
In general, a search engine is presented as an objective tool, although it is its underlying code which defines the possible outcomes.
An integral part of a search engine is the spelling control which suggests alternative words if it suspects that you have misspelled your search terms, prompting “Did you mean:”. However, since the early days of Usenet, misspellings have been used as a way to overcome censorship. By ignoring the suggested corrections, the misspellings can be a gateway to an alternative world.
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Popularity: 77% [?]
justlol, Wednesday December 26th 2007, 3:17 pm ,
Christmas time is mostly a homey time. After dinner and cosiness, there is time for a good movie or two. To get you inspired, here is a good list of cyberpunk movies - most of which can be found as streams through tvokay.com or alluc.org. Enjoy.
Popularity: 70% [?]
justlol, Thursday October 25th 2007, 10:00 pm ,
With the help of some class mates I wrote an extensive post about Recalling RFID at the Masters of Media weblog. It is well worth the read for anybody interested in RFID, ubiquitous computing, and privacy.
Recalling RFID was held on Friday the 19th and Saturday the 20th of October at de Balie. This unique event included presentations on RFID, debates and digital connectivity scenarios by industry representatives, academics, artists, privacy advocates, programmers and consultants. Recalling the current state of affairs and looking to the future, it turned out to be a very interesting, high quality conference.
Speakers included Katherine Albrecht (CASPIAN – Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering, USA), Bart Schermer (privacy lawyer and coordinator of RFID Platform Netherlands), Rafi Haladjian (founder of Violet company - known from the Nabaztag Rabbit, tech entrepreneur), Melanie Rieback (Ubisec researcher who invented the first RFID virus, VU University Amsterdam), Stephan Engberg (Priway/Copenhagen Business School), Christian van ‘t Hof (researcher, Rathenau Instituut), Willem Velthoven (designer and director of Mediamatic), interaction designer Timo Arnall, and many others.
Popularity: 91% [?]
justlol, Sunday October 21st 2007, 4:18 pm ,
On September 25th - 29th, the cross media week picnic07 took place in Amsterdam. I was invited by Mediamatic to participate in a RFID hacking workshop. The goal was clear: put a bunch of hackers, t(h)inkerers and interaction designers together; let them play with rfid chips and readers and make an installation for the picnic event.
It turned out to be a lot of fun. Together with David Kousemaker (Blendid.nl), Don Blaauw, Dirk Oosterbosch, Vlad Trifa, and Esther Weltevrede we tought up and made iTea. iTea is an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. (more…)
Popularity: 100% [?]
justlol, Thursday October 04th 2007, 5:56 pm ,
As part of Open-Search, I was invited to participate in the Forum on Quaero at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie in Maastricht, September 29 and 30, 2007. The purpose of the forum was to question and investigate the European intentions to build a search engine and, broader, to investigate the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to information search and access. It turned out to be a critique on centralized search engines and a plea for systems like Open-Search: decentralized, open and privacy respecting. My elaborate report and impression of the two day forum on Quaero can be read at the Open-Search Blog.
Popularity: 100% [?]
justlol, Friday September 28th 2007, 7:27 pm ,
two-day public program on RFID and things to come.
19 & 20 OCTOBER 2007
DE BALIE AMSTERDAM
http://www.debalie.nl/recallingrfidd
It’s in travel documents, building passes, pet animals, clothing stores, libraries, public pools, theme parks and prisons… and yet only a few of us know what RFID is. RFID (radio frequency identification) uses radio waves to identify people, animals or objects carrying encoded microchips. For government and industry, RFID signifies economic innovation, while for the futurist it marks the next stage in digital connectivity. RFID’s pervasiveness will only increase in the years to come, forcing shifts in perceptions of the public sphere and private domain.
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Popularity: 97% [?]
