This post is the fifth 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.

So tools have politics too. Society and internet are closely intertwined; massive amounts of data are put online each day, so Internet is often quite up-to-date. This brings us to the final part: the web as an anticipatory medium.
(more…)

This post is the third 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.

Now that we have discussed researching the political in the web, let us have a look at the politics of engines to illustrate the need for medium specific methods on the web.
(more…)

This post is the second 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.

Let us go on by applying traditional controversy research to the web. One of the media digitalized and put onto the web are newspapers. Google News aggregates and ranks stories from thousands of international newspapers. The ranking is very traditional: by date, as well as by number of readers. Via Google as an interface, access to newspapers has changed: they are searchable, faster to consult, they contain more than in your local news outlet, national and language editions may be compared, etcetera.
(more…)

A while ago I saw this beautiful map of country codes of the world:

There is however a big flaw in this map: it aims to be a map about the internet but the country codes (cctld) are scaled by population (offline) size.
Esther Weltevrede and I redid this map by querying Google for that cctld (for each cctld we did the following query: “site:.cctld” and noted the number of results returned). We then scaled the cctlds accordingly, thus answering the question “What is the size of countries’ assigned domains on the World’s Web, as Google.com estimates it has indexed?”:

Esther has embedded this in her research as part of the DMI course ‘the Webs’.

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.

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.
(more…)

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.

About a year ago Richard Rogers, Marieke van Dijk, and I made the Issue Dramaturg, a tool to display a site’s Google rank per query. Today, whilst preparing for the public form on Quaero I checked our query on 9/11 again. Every day we query Google for 9/11 and see which sites have what rank for that query. Normally 911truth.org has a very high rank in Google for this query. Since the 17th of September 2007 however, their rank has declined very fast. On the 20th of September 911truth.org completely disappeared from Google! 911truth.org is an important source for information about 9/11. According to Wikipedia,

[911truth.org,] The 9/11 Truth Movement is the name adopted by the loosely-connected organizations and individuals that question the mainstream account of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. [...] The common proposition among all of the movement supporters is that what they call “the official account” of the events of 9/11 is not true, and that the truth has been covered up by high-level officials and the official investigators.

Below you can find a screenshot of the Issue Dramaturg documenting the decline in Google rank for 911truth.org:

911truth.org itself says this about it:

It seems absolutely clear Google has purposefully removed 911truth.org from their search engine. Is this the same Google whose mission statement includes the goal “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Uhm, maybe only sort of universally accessible?

… Talking about a well documented case of Google censorship… I am constantly reminded why we started Open Search - a distributed peer to peer search engine which is set up to avoid search engine manipulation, censorship and profiling.

Cross posted on Masters of Media weblog

We were sent an invitation to talk on the Forum on Quaero in Maastricht because the

Open-Search model offers a feasible and imaginative alternative to the very issue of profit and property - and the resulting politics - apparent in commercially operated search engines now. Conditions that deserve to be mistrusted and investigated (like your practice is doing) once an internet tool, like Google, gets increasingly perceived as ‘neutral’ or part of the given infrastructure of a system. Instead, citizens need to be made aware that here, choices are to be made, and can be made.

Besides the well phrased mission of Open-Search, the conference looks very interesting.
(more…)