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

Last year @ mediamatic’s hackerscamp we 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.

The misspelling generator has been updated to now also generate misspellings for google news, images, blogsearch, and video. It already did the regular web search. It now also does full l33t speak For more information about the misspelling generator see my previous blog post and misspelling-generator.org.

The misspelling generator will be on display at the Dutch Institute for Media Art in the exhibition Speaking Out Loud from 15-11-2008 till 17-01-2009.

Recently, the European Union released an overview of its allocated grants in 2007. What stunned me was the sheer incomprehensibility and the lacking navigability of the data. How am I supposed to make sense of this?
(more…)

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 unit called ‘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.”

Since 1998, and on paper since 1989 (Stemwijzer 2008), general elections in the Netherlands have spawned a variety of so called voting recommendation machines. These systems typically ask the user to answer some questions after which they offer the user a voting recommendation, based on the compatibility between his or her answers and the political parties. The questions are either based on the political party’s programs (Kieskompas 2008), or on its actual voting behavior in Parliament over the past few years (Politix 2008).

Since the birth of online social networking sites lots of people have, quite unconsciously, put their likes and dislikes on public display. They not only show with whom they affiliate, but also what kind of music, movies, food, or even brands they prefer.

We have developed a post-demographic recommendation tool derived from digital life software systems, while at the same time addressing them – based on the aggregated profiles of pals of political party leaders as they appear on the biggest Dutch online social network, Hyves. By providing appropriate visualizations we show both the demographics and the relations of a group of pals, and replicate the existing, arguably anti-participatory democratic, voting recommendation machines. Ultimately the goal is to raise awareness of one’s digital public self – one’s data body (Well.com 1995) – to create conscience of simple yet powerful profiling techniques, and the tools of the surveillance and control society. (Bogard 1996, Deleuze 1992). We intentionally chose to highlight the entertaining quality and lightness of peer-based behavior this society is so immersed in. In addition, this paper introduces and explains the term post-demographics (first coined by Richard Rogers in August 2007) in the context of control society.
(more…)

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.