This post is the fourth of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

The previous examples clearly showed the built-in politics of engines: there are specific rankings, specific media on which the engines work and different kinds of source sets, amongst other things.

Apart from engines with built-in politics we are not always aware of, tools can also be devised for a specific kind of politics.
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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.

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

And another little movie, just because it is fun: Roundabout scratchin’ (mov).

Now here is a cool new app!!! getdemocracy, although very american in seeing television as the ultimate form of democracy, is a very neat little app. It’ll let you subscribe to all kinds of feeds (channels) with videos and store them as a harddisk tv. It’s indeed as easy as switching on your television.

Looking forward to the allpeers firefox extension though. It’ll let you share all kind of files very easily and you can specify exactly to whom.

Recently google has anounced it’ll cooperate with the Chinese government to censor it’s search results, e.g. for the dalai lama, free tibet, etc.

some examples:

- google images returns different results if you are based in china or in an oncensored part of the world.

- video made by the Free Tibet people in New York, showing how google.cn shows the results

Time to take action: http://noluv4google.com/ is an initiative which wants to boycot google this valentine’s day.
Thanks gmc, richard for the links. I’d like to write more on this subject but my head is to muddled by snot. Maybe if i get better i’ll elaborate. In the mean time you can at least follow the links.

Update: To help understand how the results of Google.com and Google.cn differ, the OpenNet Initiative has assembled a tool that lets you simultaneously compare search results. Enter any search term, or select a sample keyword, and see for yourself the differences between a censored and an open Internet.� Tnx Auke

Tikitu brought my attention back to this neat del.icio.us feature: just tag a link with for:username (e.g. for:justl0l ;-)) if you want to recommend a link to a del.icio.us user. That user can than go to http://del.icio.us/for/thatuser and see the links recommended to him/her. (S)he can even get a personalized rss feed from it. Use it!

Who controls the information? In this modern age, search engines have a distinct influence on the retrieval of information from the internet. Your average user will, when prompted with the need to look up information, go to google and look for the pages. This gives google power: when google decides a certain topic, company, organisation or whatever is not acceptable they can keep it out of the search result. In effect, the major search engines bias what the average user sees of the internet.

In order to remedy this situation, we came up with the OpenSearch idea: a search engine that is distributed, not under central control and therefore difficult to manipulate.

Bent u de onsmakelijke bangmakerij van de particuliere stichting Brein ook een beetje zat? U kunt nu wat terug doen! Samen gaan we namelijk ‘administratieve overlast’ veroorzaken. Hoe? Stuur gewoon onderstaande modelbrief op.

GeenStijl.nl - De Stijlloze Brein Brievenactie

ebook: Eric Von Hippel’s - DEMOCRATIZING INNOVATION

Many people still have difficulty understanding why open source software projects are successfull. The Boston Globe has an interview with Eric von Hippel, a Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, on users as innovators. In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on the creativity of ”lead users,” who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends. Von Hippel shows the trend already is more advanced than is generally known, and users often freely reveal their innovations for the common good. The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others…..he also notes that the transition to user-centered innovation is hard for some companies to swallow.
The online version of the book is available under a Creative Commons license.

From Slashdot: Finnish Firm Claims Fake P2P Hash Technology

An anonymous reader writes “As reported by The Inquirer, a Finnish company known as Viralg Oy claim to have developed software that can create a junk file with the same hash as a genuine p2p download. This, according to the company, can altogether stop the sharing of copywritten files by flooding p2p networks with corrupt/junk data, which then spreads through the network, causing less and less of the original file to be available. However, with the resolve of the p2p userbase, is this software really going to ‘beat all Peer 2 Peer pirates at their own game,’ or simply prove a minor annoyance?”

yeah right, like that is going to work 4 a long time …
E.g. some bittorrent sources do content checking already …