For years, it was unclear how the networking site Facebook makes profit. The amount of daily traffic a site generates weighs heavily in deciding the monetary worth of a web site, but invariably, there comes a time when actual revenue starts counting and mere ‘hits’ are no longer sufficient. How does Facebook earn its money?
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(Bijdrage aan de catalogus van de tentoonstelling ‘Embody’ van Nir Nadler & Chaja Hertog. De tentoonstelling opent 8 augustus 2009 in Israel en duurt twee maanden. Nir leerde ik kennen toen ik in 2008 les gaf bij Das Arts in het semester ‘Who is I?’, dat ik had helpen bedenken en opzetten. Ik viel als [...]
[Originally published in Het Parool; translation by Anonymous, at Enturbulation.org.]
The unexpected effect of the internet is, organizing becomes easy. The costs of gathering information and getting people together have been reduced alarmingly: no printing is required, no shipping, no “snowball” list of phone numbers, no member administration, no desk clerk. Apart from that, internet enables [...]
Critique of Andrew Keen’s The cult of the amateur
Deciding upon the manner of my response to Mr Keen’s book required much, much more time than composing the response itself. It’s truly seductive to be scathing about the The Cult of the Amateur. Making an inventory of the book’s sloppy argumentation, its fallacious reasoning, its myopic [...]
[translation of my column for Het Parool: Kinderporno: niet bestrijden maar verstoppen of February 19, 2008.]
Last year October, Dutch Parliament demanded that the Department of Justice would legally bind ISPs to implement a filter that would block sites containing child pornography. ‘Providers can no longer look the other way; they should be forced to take [...]
And again, I find the Pink Ribbon campaign infuriating. Last year, after I had become acquainted with breast cancer firsthand, the campaign made me feel like a baby seal: I was treated as a cuddly doe-eyed pet that anybody who was half famous expressed their heartfelt concerns about, but who wasn’t allowed to utter a [...]
by staff writer Karin Pankhurst
Metaverse Messenger, March 21 2006
The sheer amount of casinos and clubs present in Second Life suggest that there is quite some money to be made by owning one. After all, a slot machine typically coughs up less dollars than it swallows, and additionally, popular places get so-called ‘presence money’ from the [...]
On-line friend networks such as Friendster and Friend-of-a-friend have fallen somewhat out of grace. Orkut however is different. It is soaring: less than a month after it was launched (on January 23), Orkut can boast almost 100.000 members and it seems to be discussed everywhere, both on the net and In Real Life.
Basically, it is everybody’s own responsibility to assess how much they want to disclose. Many of these on-line communities or interfaces, however, also affect other people’s privacy. Orkut however takes things a few steps further: it is a real privacy pirate. And it claims the legal right to all your content.
[I was on the board of Spamvrij.nl, a Dutch foundation that fought spam: we documented Dutch spam runs and tried to educate Dutch companies about the proper use of e-mail as an advertisement medium. Mid 2003, we developed a strong hunch that the biggest Dutch spam house, Cyberangels, was actually run by Martijn Bevelander, owner [...]
Interview about media freedom and internet censorship on the occasion of the OSCE/FOM internet conference in Amsterdam, June 2003. ‘Censorship on the net does not merely copy censorship of the classic or traditional media: it is more diffuse, less centralised, more wide-spread, and far less tangible than older forms of censorship.’
» Article FOM: ‘Censorship on [...]