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.

Except form being a coach at the Picnic08 Mediamatic social RFID hackerscamp, I and a couple of others made the vBird.

vBird is a social bird which likes to fly, but cannot; it needs people to help it fly. The vBird project wished to build upon the successful by poly-xelor. The vBird’s heart has two parts: a camera with a wireless transmitter and a bluetooth Arduino with a serial RFID reader, a Lilypad accelerometer, and some leds. The former streams the flight to the vBird’s nest, the latter is used to identify the thrower and receiver of the vBird (by the RFID reader and the tags of the throwers). The accelerometer detects if the vBird is being thrown, flying, or being catched; an appropriate sound is then send out through the speakers in the nest (’nice to meet you’, ‘wheeeeee’). The leds are used as the eyes.

Because we knew who threw the bird (because of the embedded RFID reader), we could upload the video fragments captured by the vBird to the appropirate profiles in the picnic network. The idea was powerful and the technique worked as a prototype. However, throwing hardware needs solid casing and a lot of stuff broke during the proces. It would have been better also to use a hi-speed camera as our current camera did not have a high enough sample rate to provide really cool videos. A couple of shots were quite nice though, of which you can find some here: with the flash interface or as a playlist of movies.

All in all it was a fun project, and we had a good team. As a prototype it worked quite well, to be fool proof it would need some tweaks. If you want to know more about the vBird, check out our page at Mediamatic. All the code for the vBird can be found here. And of course, the other teams made really nice projects too, like a physical mario cart, a google elevator contest, the ik-Run, breeders, a mobile massage couch, and more

BTW, last year @ mediamatic’s hackerscamp I made iTea, an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. In the coffee cup on top of the table, you can place your rfid tag - which is given to you at the entrance of the conference and linked to a social network - and the table will start to display information about you - like an oracle.

In response, and as an addition, to Wilbert Baans’ storytelling with public databases, I made a little twitter scraper. It indexed all twits for the query http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22i+voted%22+%2B+McCain+OR+Obama+-twitvote, up till a month ago. From November the 4th till November the 5th the script scrapes new twits for this query every minute.

A point goes to Obama if the regular expression /vote.*?obama/i succeeds, it goes to McCain if the regular expression /vote.*mccain/i succeeds, else it is undecided / unrecognized.

The result can be found at Twitter Poll. So far Obama is winning.

Update: Wilbert Baan has made theses stats into a beautiful visualization:

There is an other twitter poll on Mashable.

Update 2: I tried making a similar exit poll based on MySpace, but that query does not yield results sorted on time. Also, just like Google, MySpace only returns a maximum of 1000 results per query. Unfortunately I’m thus stuck with the same numbers, no matter how many times I will scrape it.

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.

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’.

Have you ever seen a web page unworthy of the Internet? Join the Delete from Internet movement and nominate pages for speedy removal. Help clean up the Web, one irritating flash site at a time.

Made by Esther Weltevrede, Michael Stevenson, and Erik Borra as a birthday present for our designer friend who really wanted to trash some websites. Some have called it “the sort of dangerous idea that net terrorists could misuse.” I can only ROTFL with that kind of comments.

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

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…)

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…)

From September the 22nd till the 29th, Amsterdam will host PicNic 2007. Picnic is a conference, festival, diy thingie, and much more. Although a lot of hot shots (euhm, interesting speakers) are coming and the program is quite nice, it is quite expensive (come on, +-500 Euros a day??). Fortunately there are good and sometimes free, or cheap, evening and side shows.

Best of all though, is that there will be some 1200 people carrying a RFID badge, linked to a social network. And I can play with it I was invited to join a very interesting group of people at the RFID Hackers Camp. The idea is to think up and realize 6 to 8 projects with the available hardware and data. Mjummy.