TechBlog Index

How Twitter Became a Disease - Social Networks, Information Theory and the Viral Consequence for Social and Digital Media

Published on 2009-02-25 04:00:00

In the non-conserved spread information that is received by a node or a users will continue to experience the content or information even as it is transmitted to another node or user. What is interesting about this model to social media networks is that the Non-Conserved Spread Model is extremely suitable for explaining the transmission of infectious diseases. The point here is that information in social media networks like twitter behaves like infectious diseases and in such the information/con

When Social Media becomes the Message - Fragmentation of Identity in the Age of Social Media

Published on 2009-02-13 04:00:00

Social media excels at connection people but only by specialising. By this I mean that people connect via social media not on whether they actually would like/dislike people in an everyday environment but by what they have in common. Be it an interest in stamp collection, technology or music, social media connects because of a shared specialisation between users. In the case of social media it can be the media it they have in common. Social Media connects people because of Social Media – not b

Twitter vs. Google News Search in the World of New Media: The event of DJ Khaled and Power of the TwitterSphere

Published on 2009-02-11 04:00:00

This comes down to defining events vs. news. If news is a summary of events that has happened filtered through the perception of a small number of individuals then the Google search provides news for users. If news is an event generated by user participation then Twitter offers the right platform for User Generated News. The problem with User Generated News at the moment is the information overload factor. If it is possible to let bottom-up approaches distil the information for individual users

The Expanding Role of the Consumer at the Edges of the Network - Digital Aesthetics in the information society

Published on 2009-02-09 04:00:00

From the ashes of the Californian ideology a new way of media consumption has developed that challenges former notions of the internet economy in terms of consumption, distribution and production of information commodities. These changes force us to reconsider the meaning of intellectual property, copyright and piracy within the virtual space created by computer-mediated communication. In this essay I would like to explore the relationship between the changes in the status of media commodities

Cubanisimo - A Journey into the Savage Heart of the Carribean in the year 2001

Published on 2009-01-30 04:00:00

Life is different in Cuba. When the twilight sets in the Cuban capital of Havana the street life continues unaffected. On this little tropical island in the Caribbean communism has created a weird mix of industrial culture and island beats. Before the revolution Havana was the hotspot for gangsters and other good folk of the American economic upheaval of the 1950s. They used to come down here and roam the streets of Havana and frequent the Americana, the contours of its bend neon sign still visi

Explore the debates surrounding the shift from analogue to digital in relation to the photographic image

Published on 2009-01-09 04:00:00

With the invention of photography in the 19th Century a new visual way of representing the world became available. Its realism made it a window to the world in people’s imagination and with the means to mass-produce and distribute photographic images it became a tool of representing and documenting reality available to the first mass audiences. With the greater availability of visual imagery people gained enhanced accessibility to this resource of representation. Visual imagery had before phot

Art as an Appropriation of the Urban Environment by Users

Published on 2009-01-07 04:00:00

William Gibson once say: "The Street find its own uses for Technology" - I think street art is very much the embodiment of this. Here people have found their own use for the urban landscape of brick and cement as a canvas to illustrate what meaning they gather from the world around them. The street canvas was never design with art in mind. Most of the time urban architecture is embodied with its own function and aestic. The interesting part is when users appropriate this environment for their ow

Memory, Indexing and Retrival of Information - Revised

Published on 2009-01-05 06:00:00

This subject is related to ideas about the cultural drive to accumulate, store and retrieve information efficiently and with that the concept of information overload is not far behind. With Google, Amazon and Microsoft running large-scale projects to digitalise the written word we are looking at digitalisation of our external memory that was previously written down on paper, clay tablets, papyrus among a myriad of various word containers. In the future we are not only looking at digitalising wor

The Chrome Browser – Technology for a new online dawn?

Published on 2008-12-12 03:14:00

All these technical details make Chrome a great browser but more importantly it gives us an insight into what direction that technological development in this field can gravitate towards. The concept that the browser is becoming the Operating System is the emergence of cloud computing. A lot has been talked about with regards to cloud computing and there are several dynamics currently in play that points towards that this is a growing area for web-technology and development

The Emergence of the Information Society: The USA Presidential Election

Published on 2008-11-14 11:14:00

This election campaign has been unprecedented in the use of new media and technology for production, distribution and consumption. Citizens were turned into users over the last two years enabling the emergence of the information society in terms of politics. Both campaigns had Facebook pages, websites, and all campaign ads uploaded to youtube. That is just the tip of the Iceberg. In order to understand why this happened we need to dig down into the voters. It was the voters who determined the el