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.
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I was invited to give a lecture on the use of the web for documentaries in the framework of Mediamatic’s AnyMedia Documentary workshop, which forms part of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam’s doclab program. Following you can find my presentation of Saturday 23 November in written form.

Let me present myself first: I am Erik Borra, researcher and lead programmer at Govcom.org – a foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political web tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative – the New Media PhD program of the University of Amsterdam. I have a MSc in Artificial Intelligence and am preparing a MA in New Media Studies.

In my presentation I have addressed five points, which I have written out in five posts: 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.

This afternoon at the Walled Garden conference, the Digital Methods Initiative and I made a funky little website.

The concept WALLED GARDEN addresses issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities. How does this affect the (in)accessibility of information and knowledge?

Basically the question we (DMI) asked is “given web2.0 sites as walled gardens, how many of it’s content is accessible from outside that specific walled garden (platform)”. We found this service usernamecheck.com, which checks if a given username is taken on a whole set of sites.

We extended this service, in the light of the Walled Garden conference, by querying usernames for their existence in all these services. For each service where the username is taken or active, we’ll query google for the name in the service and give back a ranked list of web2.0 services ‘leaking’ information about you.

You can try it yourself at leakygarden.net.

It would be really nice to do a followup by getting a representative sample of usernames from each of these services and querying them all in a search engine for ‘leaky content’. This touches questions of which sites feed whom, which sites allow only content to come in but not to get out, etc.

In this respect others of the DMI team started tracing and visualizing data flows of information between these walled garderns - which information goes in, and which information goes out. You will be able to find their results here soon.

This summer at the Govcom.org Jubilee together with Alexander Galloway we made the ipbrowser.

The ipbrowser was conceived as an alternative algorithm, an alternative way of browsing the net. Whereas normally you jump from link to link or search the web, with the ipbrowser you only have two options: go down in the ip address space or go up in the ip address space. The ipbrowser starts at your ip address. When you click up or down (left or right) the ipbrowser scans the next higher or next lower ip address for an open port 80. When it finds one it’ll display it, thus displaying your ip neighbourhood. Although we still need to write up the theoretical part I did not want to hold it back for you. More information about the ipbrowser.

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

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…)

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

Global Internet Filtering Conference 2007

The OpenNet Initiative is holding its first public conference to discuss the current state of play of Internet filtering worldwide. The conference will be hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute and held at the University of Oxford on May 18, 2007. The conference is free of charge and open to the public.

Results from the first global study of Internet filtering carried out by the OpenNet Initiative (for which govcom.org and I made some analyses and visualisations) will be on the table for a day of discussion involving ICT development experts, speech and human rights advocates, journalists and bloggers, international laywers and scholars, and others interested in state responses to online information flows. We hope you will join us in exploring interpretations and implications of our data and helping to shape the OpenNet Initiative’s evolving research agenda.

The day will conclude with a debate hosted by the Oxford Union - Resolved: the Internet is the greatest force for democracy around the world.

Afgelopen week vroegen Karel Brascamp en Jeroen Joosse van Creative Industries.nl me of ik kon helpen bij het ontwikkelen van de backend van de orakelmachine. De orakelmachine is een installatie voor de façade van De Balie in Amsterdam. Het is een machine die zinnen van internet ophaalt rondom een zekere issue en die projecteert op de ramen van De Balie. De issues worden aangeleverd door De Balie maar kunnen ook bepaald worden door voorbijgangers dmv een sms. De orakelmachine brengt het virtuele publieke domein dichter bij het fysieke publieke domein. De opening is vanavond om 20u in De Balie maar de machine zal 2500 uur te bezichtigen zijn … totdat de lamp van de beamer stuk gaat.

Afgelopen week is ons toegezegd dat we artisit in resident worden van montevideo

Een tentoonstelling met installaties van verschillende kunstenaars die het Nieuws van Repliek dienen.
Van 24-02-2007 t/m 17-03-2007

Met werk van o.a.: Jody Zellen, Lynn Hershmann, Sean Snyder, govcom.org, Avi Mograbi, Thomson & Craighead

Samengesteld door David Garcia

Vanuit een universum van feiten beweert het nieuws ons die feiten te brengen die er toe doen. In zijn meest basale vorm, die van de vergankelijke media inhoud, kan het nieuws het makkelijkst vertaald worden als het besluit om dingen openbaar te maken. Maar welke dingen? Moet nieuws altijd de onthulling in de klassieke stijl van Woodward en Bernstein zijn die de president en zijn mannen onttroonden? Gaat het alleen maar om dit soort onthullingen, die een belangrijk iemand geheim wil houden, is dat alleen maar nieuws?

De autoriteit die de nieuws media kenmerkt is te herleiden naar de vorm die door Edmund Burke gekarakteriseerd is als ‘de vierde stand’ (the fourth estate), een machtig deel van de regering dat de basis vindt in het geloof dat ‘burgers vrij zijn zolang niets voor hen verborgen is’, kort gezegd een onvoorwaardelijk ‘geloof in openbaarheid’.
Maar ontwikkelde westerse regeringen leerden al lange tijd terug de nieuws media te temmen, zij veranderden het in een onontkoombaar theater, een interface om het publiek mee te besturen, een ruimte waar de ‘regering democratie opvoert’.
Ons collectieve geloof in de mythe van transparantie moet daarin geregeld gevoed worden met een scala aan drama dat bestaat uit onthullingen en verhullingen, die vaak de vorm aannemen van verhalen over witwas praktijken, wespennesten en doofpot affaires. Deze nep media oorlog houdt de collectieve overtuiging van de symbiotische relatie tussen vrijheid en kennis in stand.
Het succes van 24 uur nieuwsuitzendingen is gebaseerd op het feit dat wij gebiologeerd zijn door twee aanvullende en atavistische ideeën: “Alles staat met elkaar in verband en dingen zijn niet wat ze lijken. Het zijn deze twee veronderstellingen die de primaire onderdelen vormen van hoe wij over het nieuws in ‘het informatie tijdperk’ denken en hoe wij het nieuws ervarenâ€?. De waarheid ligt er… en het publiek heeft het recht het te horen!

De tentoonstelling Faith in Exposure is onderdeel van het Art in the field of New Visibility - programma. Art in the field of New Visibility is een manifestatie waarin onderzoek gedaan wordt naar de relatie tussen kunst, techniek, economie en sociale ontwikkeling.