Bram Nijhof’s New Media Blog

Dit is een video die ik heb gemaakt over de geschiedenis van Marktplaats. De screenshots zijn afkomstig van de Wayback Machine via Archive.org. Gelet is bij deze geschiedenis hoe er veranderingen hebben plaatsgevonden in de layout, functionaliteiten en navigatie. Waar Marktplaats tien jaar geleden een gids was, zoals dat ook in de krant werd weergeven met rubrieken, groepen en advertenties, heeft de zoekmachine een grotere rol gekregen binnen deze site.

When I was choosing to make a new Wikipedia entry for the course I chose a local topic on the Dutch Wikipedia, because there was more chance that it don’t exist. I chose to write about ‘camping Bakkum’, a camping in the Netherlands in my place of birth. When beginning to make the entry Wikipedia said that there was already an entry on ‘camping Bakkum’, but it was removed. The reason for that is that Wikpedia doesn’t want to be a camping guide. Because it was removed, then it was quite a challenge to make an entry that will survive. I thought that if I put some facts about the camping, maybe it has more value than just promoting the camping.

When researching on the internet I found that the camping was the oldest camping in the Netherlands. Also there have been some documentaries about citizens of Amsterdam who visit the camping each year. On the internet there was also information that called the camping ‘Amsterdam at the sea’. I added this information and I added information about the environment. When the entry was online the information over the environment was deleted to prevent promotional attention. I agreed with that. Also other facts where added by other people.

After a few weeks the article is still online. My questions are: if Wikipedia doesn’t want to be a camping guide, is this camping still online because of the facts I added? Has the entry value because of the fact that the camping is the oldest camping? Or is the relationship between Amsterdam and camping Bakkum an important notion for not removing the article let it stay in the Wikipedia encyclopedia? What is the line between an article in a camping guide and an article in an encyclopedia?

Twitter is micro-blogging software that allows users to report and share what they are doing or what’s on their mind. It can be useful for friends to see where you are and what you are doing and it can be a dairy with short messages. But there are some things people have to be careful for. That are privacy and insecurity matters.

In David Utter’s article ‘Twitter Your Way To Insecurity’ he tells about the insecurity of Twitter. If you send a tweet with the message “Hi, I’m out of town” then this message can fell into the hands of the wrong people. Then you can be a candidate for home burglary.

Twitter is a social networking service and like other SNS sites like Facebook and Myspace it has some similarities: privacy issues. Mischaud recommend in his Twitter research to further research privacy and surveillance matters. He was are worried about ‘ [...] the platform’s ‘open’ design and the relative ease of ‘third party’ surveillance’ (Mischaud, 2007: 35)

Mischaud states the blurring between private and public in Twitter. Things that we don’t share in face-to-face contacts are now present. Mischaud give some examples: “70 hours since my last shower” or “getting ready for bed”. Intimate and ordinary details of someone’s life are pulled out. (Mischaud, 2007: 32). People can track what you are doing the whole day and what’s on your mind.

Another aspect is when people uses Twitter on their work. It can have consequences if someone tweets that the meeting is boring. Also time and date are visible and colleges can see if someone was during the meeting only busy with Twittering instead of participating. But that’s their own responsibility. If someone is applying for a job many times the employer is tracking their profiles on social networking sites. They could also take a look at Twitter. Then they could see what you are doing all the time and they could make conclusions about what kind of person you are. That could be working out negative. They can see for example that during your student time you go late to bed and come out of bed late. And their interpretation could be that you are lazy. Also data-miners, who are “[...] collecting, analyzing and interpreting personal information” (Barnes 2006: 9) could be involved in this process. Organizations can hire them to get this information. Barnes says that data-miners uses the data of social networking sites. She talks about platform’s like Facebook, but it is waiting for the first stories about Twitter.

Companies also are making use of Twitter. Comcast Cares is an example of how to use Twitter for product innovation. They have a Comcast Cares Twitter account. In Brian Magiersky’s blog he says that Comcast Cares uses Twitter to monitor feedback of the users and track them with the ‘track’ function. They can see if people are positive or negative about the product. In this way companies can develop their product with this information. Also marketeers can use the ‘track’ function to get all the messages about a keyword. Dell is another company who uses Twitter for marketing properties. They sell computers via their Twitter channel.

Susan B. Barnes wrote about privacy and social networking sites. She did research how teenagers uses those sites and how their privacy comes in danger. She states that government agencies and marketers are collecting data about us. Barnes says: “Many people may not be aware of the fact that their privacy has already been jeopardized and they are not taking steps to protect their personal information from being used by others.” (Barnes, 2006: 4) And then she asked the question: “In an age of digital media, do we really have any privacy?” She uses Oscar Gandy’s who wrotes about the Panoption, where people are observed and controlled. There would probably no privacy. Barnes said that “[...] online social networks allow for high levels of surveillance.” And then she calls the marketers, college officials and parents who can access social networking sites (Barnes 2006: 5). She also states that teenagers freely give up personal information, because they are not aware of the public nature of the Internet (Barnes 2006: 6).

Standard are the tweets of your profile public, but you can switch that off. Then there is more privacy, but do people want that? Gloria E. Jacobs describes in her article the posting of every little event from the perspective of the blogosphere:

“[...] “thoughtcasting” (Croal 2008), which is the act of posting or publishing every little event in one’s life or thought that passes through one’s mind. Such acts, I suggest are a reaction to an attention economy (Goldhaber 1997) in which information is plentiful but attention is scarce. Or, blogging can be about creating and building relationships, participating in a community, and reflecting on experience at both the local and global levels. (Jacobs 2008)”

“Thoughtcasting” is like the messages people post on Twitter. Jacobs thinks that it is a reaction on the attention economy. Maybe posting as much as possible is a way to get attention. To get some new relationships it is handy if the user has a public profile. Otherwise, no one knows you. Then you get more followers. But do people want as much as followers? Do they want as much as attention? When looking at some Twitter profiles, some people have hundreds of followers. Some people gets a celebrity status. The only drawback is like real celebrities that you have less privacy the more details you publish about your private life. Also the more followers the more people retrieve this information.

Twitter has a function to delete tweets. Then you’ll think that the message is gone, but one the Internet nothing can be really deleted. What about the Twitter messages you imported in Facebook or what about the messages others have received? In my opinion if your profile is public you have to be careful about what, when and how you post your tweets.

Mannan, M. & P. C. van Oorschot (2008). ‘Privacy-Enhanced Sharing of Personal Content on the Web’. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1367497.1367564 (12-10-2008)

Mischaud, E. (2007). ‘Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self’. London: Media@lse. http://lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/mediaWorkingPapers/MScDissertationSeries/Mishaud_Final.pdf (12-10-2008)

Krishnamurthy, B. & C. E. Wills (2008). ‘Characterizing Privacy in Online Social Networks’. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1397735.1397744 (12-10-2008)

Barnes, S. B. (2006, September). “A privacy paradox: social networking in the United
States”. First Monday, Vol. 11 (9). http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/barnes/index.html (12-10-2008)

Jacobs. G. E. (2008). “Saying Something or Having Something to Say: Attention Seeking, the Breakdown of Privacy, and the Promise of Discourse in the Blogosphere”. http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/4_1/jacobs.html (13-10-2008)

How can we make use of all the data stored in Social Networking Sites? And how can we study those data? In 2005 Jeffrey Heer and danah boyd developed a system called Vizster. It is an information visualization system that visualizes networks within the Friendster social networking service. Within networks there can be seen how networks are related to each other and there can be searched for example for keywords or gender. Data can be visualized in different ways and they are shown in another form then how the Friendster service is displayed. New contexts will be created when visualizing the relationships or the differences between people, interests, background or gender.

The Digital Methods Initiative has done projects on Social Networking Sites. They call the use of the personal data in Social Networking Sites ‘ post-demographics’. Not only traditional data such as age, gender or income can be used, but also interests such as music, books or movies. An example question they asked is whether friends have the same interests or not.

DMI has some examples of systems that make use of the data visualization. One example is Elfriendo.com. With the tool one single interest can be related with other interests those persons have. Or the interests of the friends of a politician can be compared with another politician. It is possible to see which movies or music the friends of a politician like. All data is scraped from their profiles and this is done for Myspace. Another example is the Dutch tool Friends’ Politics (Vriendjespolitiek.net). The tool uses the Dutch Social Networking Sites Hyves to tell people what their characteristics and their friends tell about them. It gives an overview of which politician fits the best into their profile. For example different universities in Hyves differ from which politicians are most popular. So some universities or companies can be more left- or right wing. If you have a company or university in your profile then it has influence on the politician who fits the most into your profile.

The Vizster system was mend for end-users to let them discover and make them aware of their online community. With the tools described above it is possible to let users see what can be done with their information. Heer and boyd said that is was more for play than analysis. But are there possibilities now to do serious research with this data? The Digital Methods Initiative has put some questions on their Wiki. They made a distinction between the demographics as age, income and location and the post-demographics where other interests out of the Social Networking Sites are important. They asks themselves the question: When, and for which purposes, are interests a more significant mode of organizing, sorting and recommending action than demographics? This is another way of studying groups in stead of the traditional way.

Last year in the DMI I proposed a ‘Localizing Hyves’ project to map the friends of politicians into Google maps. You can see where the friends of a politician are living. You also can make a tool where you can see where certain groups or groups with certain interests are living. I think with all these amounts of data in the near future there will be new tools developed. But I think it is a challenge in analyzing and interpreting the data.

Jeffrey Heer and danah boyd (2005). “Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks.” IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis 2005). Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 23-25.

A few years ago I started with using iGoogle, a personalized starting page from Google. iGoogle is one of the best 100 web 2.0 applications according to Webware (from Cnet). With iGoogle you can add applications in the starting page which looks like widgets. Google calls them gadgets. Some examples of those gadgets are the following:

- The newest G-mail messages;
- RSS feeds from Google News and other news sources;
- Weather forecasts and information about the stock market;
- Bookmarks;
- Applications like the calculator, to-do-lists, agenda, dictionaries etc.

Different things which are implemented in the personalized page are remediations of existing things. Examples are the (analogue) clock, the agenda, calendar, the dictionary and the weather report. They all refers to older media.

I also make use of Google Gadgets for Ubuntu and these gadgets looks like Apple’s OSX widgets. iGoogle is using some of the same gadgets of the database. Both in iGoogle and Google Gadgets you can choose the gadgets from a list. iGoogle can synchronize Gmail messages so that your gmail messages are visible on this page. Also Google agenda is synchronized in iGoogle.

You can customize your webpage with templates of other users and artists, but when I wanted to create my own template I received an url error. But normally I has to be possible. You also can make gadgets by yourself and share them with other users.

The user can put the gadgets in it own order. This will mean that the gadget at the top is more visible than the one at the bottom. After using the page a while I came to the conclusion that I only used the applications at the top. First I was enthusiastic at the utility, but later I noticed that I didn’t read all those RSS feeds anymore. It is also because you have to scroll down. When you have a lot of RSS feeds there is much text on the page and the links will less attracts attention. Moreover, some RSS feeds weren’t updated.

The iGoogle page can speed up things, because it will give you a full overview of your important internet services. I’ll noticed that I didn’t have to check my email every time, because it was already visible in the starting page. Also it is like a desktop, because of the remediated utilities like the to-do-list and the agenda.

Privacy

I am always asking myself “Why can we make use of this applications for free?”. There are no advertisements on the page unless you put in a search request. On the iGoogle Privacy Notice page Google says: “When you use iGoogle, Google’s servers automatically record log information which may include information about your preference settings.” They are making use of cookies. It is to make sure that the page will be personalized with the user’s preferences. Google says they use the information in order to offer the service and to improve the quality of their service.

In personalizing the start page Google knows more about you. Then they can send more personalized advertisements to you. It could be that they use this information to personalize search requests and to offer advertisements that will fit into your profile. In the article “Google Ramps Up Personalized Search” the author explains how Google is introducing personalized search. Search results are based on your web history. When you have a Google account this history will be captured. So, when using the start page the user is always logged in the Google account and that gives Google the ability to store data about you. It could be for example that Google knows what RSS feeds you like. Then they can change the search results into ones that fits into your iGoogle page interests and they can put the right advertisements on it. iGoogle can be handy, but just like other Google products this utility is also a way for Google to know more and more about you.

The book Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The science of search engine rankings is about the technology behind the ranking of websites, especially Google’s ranking. It will give a little insight in how the Google algorithm works. In the abstract the authors says that the book serves two different audiences: the curious science reader and the technical computational reader. With my humanities background I belong to the first group. If you don’t belong to the technical group you’ll have to skip parts of the book. That’s a pity, because the book will be shortened. But in the book there are lots of interesting facts and stories.

The book is giving insight in how a search engine works. It is crawling and indexing in a continuing process. For people who want to know more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the book is also suitable. It is not a guide for optimization of websites but you’ll learn about the background of the search engine works. PageRank, where Google’s search engine is based on, works in short that the more sites links to your site, the more important your site will be. And the more important their sites are the more important your site is. It is a recommendation system. Spammers misused it but Google nowadays nows better how to deal with them.

The book also presents alternative algorithms like HITS. It will let you think about an alternative way that a search engine can work. Is the PageRank system the best algorithm? Isn’t there a better system with more democracy maybe? I think there is a chance that Google will change its algorithm where the engine is more spam resistant.

What I liked in the book where the stories in italic font. These stories where events of the past. Example stories where about censorship in China or Google cookies. About Google saving cookies the authors where critical about it. Google exists from saving peoples personal data. Like there can be another algorithm there could also be a search engine with more privacy.

I liked the glossary at the end of the book. Concepts are well explained there. I can’t review the technical part of the book because I am not that technical, but a large part of the book is mathematical stuff. What I missed in the book was a conclusion. It was mainly fragmented in little parts.

Langville, A. N, C. D. Meyer. Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The science of search engine rankings. Princeton University Press: 2006.

Marie-Jose Klaver says on her NRC Handelsblad blog that the Chrome browser is bad for your privacy. Crome has a suggest-function that will give users suggested websites when they fill in the address bar. When I tested it I filled in the word “wiki” the http://wiki.issuecrawler.net came up. It is a site where I make use of. It is another way for Google to store surfinformation of the user. Klaver says that people can by-pass this by using the InCognito-modus, turn off autosuggest or to use another search engine.

Google defines the Incognito-modus as following: “Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito won’t be logged in your browsing and download histories; all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window.”

Jason Stamper says on his blog that the Incognito-mode is an option to prevent Google Chrome from storing visitor’s data. However Stamper says, the websites you have visited still may have stored records of your visits. Also downloaded files will be on your computer. Also ISPs do have information about surfing habits.

It is common knowledge that Google earns money with the storage of user-data. They sell its data to advertisers. They store search history of users. People leave traces when they use the Google search engine. Given that browsers has the ability to store not only search engine data but also data about the addresses people type in, Google has a new tool to store more user-data. Only the Ingognito-modus is an option, but who knows which data is send to the Google servers?

My specialisation in the bachelor of Media and culture was New media. The end thesis I wrote in dutch was about the influence of new media on the birth of political scandals. Click on the link below to read the thesis:

BA Thesis: De invloed van nieuwe media op het onstaan van politieke schandalen

Welcome to my New media blog. This year I will write blog posts about New media issues. The blog is created under the authority of the master programme New Media of the University of Amsterdam. Our master students also have a common blog, The Masters of Media blog. Feel free to have a look at it.