Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
A mixed bag of news, posts, ideas, comments
The Looking into the past Flickr gallery and project uses a simple and effective trick. Take a period picture, find its location, go there, hold the picture at the right distance from the camera and from the landmark depicted in it, make…
Com 435, Emerging Communication Technologies (150 enrolled students), will organize in the last two weeks of April an eight team soccer tournament in Second Life. Students will play use avatars and very funny names and I will preside as Cyclops Argus. The…
The communist manifesto found its most appropriate medium: You Tube. A remixed cartoon collage brings out the best (and worst) in Marx’s little pamphlet. Personally I always found Marx’s prophetic vocation sinister and hilarious at the same time. Modernity’s most powerful man…
Second Life takes a toll on the campus administrator community. In an unmistakeable sign of linear project its members believe that the future will be 3D. Second Life, a increasigly unwielidy environment, victim of its own success, cannot be the solution to…
Google’s been strongly opposed to the whole pay-as-you-go revamping of the Internet (the equivalent of introducing toll-lanes ofn the Internet). You know, the whole net neutrality debate. At the same time, Google seems to suggest that its opposition is only pro forma.…
All 13 root servers, which act as the Internet’s ubergatekeeprs and traffic routing cops, have been attacked simultaneously yesterday. The news does not make any major newspaper frontpage today, at least not New York Times’, which regales us with a story about…
The idea of a wireless peer-to-peer backbone to replace the classic ISP has been announced and dennounced in the tech media for some time. Has its time arrived? An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but…
From The Economist RESEARCHERS in the field of artificial intelligence have long been intrigued by games, and not just as a way of avoiding work. Games provide an ideal setting to explore important elements of the design of cleverer machines, such as…
Idea of paid entries roils Wikipedia – Tech News & Reviews – MSNBC.com BOSTON – When a blogger revealed this week that Microsoft Corp. wanted to pay him to fix purported inaccuracies in technical articles on Wikipedia, the software company endured online…
What do you do when bandidos steal 4000 of your just produced and very expensive suits? You move your machiladora back to the US… Globalization can be a two-way street. (NPR story)
Because the hippies invented it as a means of “doing their own thing” MIT OpenCourseWare | Anthropology | 21A.350J The Anthropology of Computing, Fall 2004 | Readings Pfaffenberger, Bryan. “The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution…
ikbis | Capture your life, is a new user generated video service geared toward the Arabic world. A world just as modern and fascinating, if you know how to look at it, as our world…
A very interesting “blog of blogs” demonstrating the power of the Internet to decentralize and recreate the flows of information. A blog that centralizes the known source of local information from Iraq and the middle east. Mostly in English. Why the quotation…
The report is one of the most comprehensive to date, including information about ranking over time… Abstract and link There is an immense information and communication technology (ICT) gap, a “digital divideâ€, between developed and developing countries. A person in a high-income…
On 9/11 I bought the newspapers, today I will just clip this on this blog. Reports: Saddam Hussein executed – Conflict in Iraq – MSNBC.com BAGHDAD, Iraq – Three years after he was hauled from a hole in the ground by pursuing…
I found your blog while tagging my blog with SC06. I noticed that you were interested in finding the slides to Kurzweil’s keynote at SC06. I too was looking for them and found a couple of his slides on wikipedia and I…
Front Porches and Public Spaces: Planned Communities Online Susan Huelsing Sarapin Comm. 632: Online Interaction Professor: Dr. Sorin Matei November 19, 2006 Introduction Where else today but in the cost-effective frontier of cyberspace can the average person construct a community?1 With widespread…
Much of the reading for Preece this week involved evaluating communities. Surveys are a fine example of a means of evaluating. Digital questionnaires are becoming more frequent within online communities partly because of the ease associated with their completion and return. Digital…
The readings for this week mentioned the use of IP addresses as a usual component of online communities for such things as being a means to spot or discourage grifters (and to help with moderation. A trail is left by someone when…
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/technology/02compute.html
I’m not sure if this website has been mentioned before, but I thought I would bring it to the class’ attention. Purdue Online has been in existence for a few years now. It currently consists of 4, 575 members. It already supports…
Powazek (2002) stated three key issues in his book Design for Community that should be initially considered when building a community; audience, content, and community. Likewise, Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) in their book entitled Cultivating Communities of Practice spoke of a…
The members of the COM 632 graduate seminar “On-line Interaction” at Purdue University propose the following list of practical principles for designing successful on-line communities. The list is compiled on the basis of these materials: 1. Preece, fill in the rest please…
The jury is out. And it’s ugly…. ZDNet.com is downright nasty. The rest of humanity chimes in.
The readings for this week are concerned with online community membership. Some focuses are why people join communities and how can contribution levels increase. I came across a 1993 blog passage from the Blog of Collective Intellegence that focuses on an interesting…
By Susan Huelsing Sarapin Submitted on October 22, 2006 to the On-Line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2006, Purdue University Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Introduction Today, people all over the world are connected, or “tethered†(Turkle,…
It might be that someone’s password was compromised. We are getting a lot of spam comments on this blog, despite the fact that only registered users can comment and new registrations are not allowed. Existing registers, can you please change your passwords?…
Wikipedia posts this most amazing list of topics in order of their popularity. Notice the succession of topics (Wiki/Amish/Foley or Clitoris/September 11/Pokemon). There is a whole bunch of statistics here.
Here are some good ideas about how to become a better blogger. Enjoy.
I love elgg (and peopleagreggator). It’s exactly what we need. Now, it’s time to design the darn place. I really think that we need to focus on a name that is as clear to the world outside as it is for the…
What is Elgg? (It’s being used at MIT.) Described by its founders as a ‘learning landscape’, Elgg provides each user with their own weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile and an RSS reader. Additionally, all of a user’s content…
Dolphin Web Community Software
Boilerspace? Just trying to inspire…
Please bear with me as I try to communicate my thoughts. I’m quite ill today, so what I write might be slightly difficult to understand. I’ve been groping for a big, fat concept for our site, and maybe somebody can find some…
Web logs, or rather blogs, are all over the internet as a means of doing something that was once thought lost; ordinary people publicly discussing various topics. A site called Change This was created in 2004 that supports open communication among regular…
I had another “bolt out of the blue” yesterday. People really like to know that their votes are counted, and they like to know if anyone else votes the same way. We could include polls on the class site…about anything…from minor and…
David Weinberger has a blog…
Fleamarket, craigslist like environment-Robert Overlapping space, bring abstraction into the game-Zeynep and TJ Wiki-like site with tagging and mapping in a direct way-Scott Calendars and events–How do I locate what is available–Gabriel Process related information, class rating, travel board, electronic smalltown etc.–Brenda…
We were talking in class today abou the future of embodied computing and its philosophical foundations. Bill Joy, taking the path of those who believe that life is software by other means, concludes that the future could be really bleak: Why the…
As I was reading more of Weinberger’s chapter 5 this a.m., I got an idea. He says: Increasingly, a useful expert is not someone with (containing) all the answers but someone who knows where to find answers. He challenges us to point…
I thought of two other possible domains for us to use that I feel would be more recognizable than www.peteslist.org. boilerspace.com and boilerplace.com are both available (as are purdoings.com, purdueings.com, and purduesnews.com). I really like so many of the ideas that have…
The Purdue website has a very poor search engine. Our class project could have a better search engine on it that could serve the students in a more efficient manor. An embedded Google search engine could be a possible idea. The link…
One of the questions associated with the assigned readings was in reference to Weinberger and similarities associated with Rheingold or Seabrook. In the chapter entitled Togetherness by Weinberger differences are stated between the real world and web groups. I see thinking along…
Here is an Amazon.com list for those interested in social shaping of technology!
Communitas is an online journal that is a part of the wikimedia foundation. This journal involves community development for wiki with the common goal of good will. Can the term communitas really be applied to this website/fundraising project?
This is the article about the interaction between online and offline worlds that was mentioned in my paper. Calhoun, C. (1986). Computer technology, large-scale social integration, and the local community. Urban Affairs Quarterly, 22(2), 329-349.
Brenda raises numerous questions, but “WHY?” is one that I think we were trying to answer in class today. There was a word on the tip of my tongue, and it wasn’t until I read some of Perloff’s “Introduction to Persuasion” at…
I ran across this quote the other day by Alan Bennett. I’m not sure who he is, but I believe he is a writer and humorist. He said, “We started trying to set up a small anarchist community, but the people wouldn’t…
Robert Kraut and colleagues of “Internet loneliness” fame have been hacking at a research agenda focusing on stable and self-maintaining communities for some time. I ran into them looking for literature on how knowing more about your electronic environments can help you…
The man really is on the list… But so is Michael Gorbatchev, Henrik Ibsen, Albert Einstein or Michael Jordan… Silicon Valley Sleuth: Gates inducted into the Stalinist hall of fame Gates inducted into the Stalinist hall of fame Microsoft chairman Bill Gates…
Spaceaware is a research project I started a couple of years ago, which looks at how people make sense of information delivery experiences similar to the “hailing billboard” scene in Minority Report. (Remember the scene in which Tom Cruise is greeted by…
Follwing up on his smart Weekly Standard article , Andrew Keen posts on this blog, The Great Seduction, a very thoughtful comment on the Google-China debacle. The lack of guilt (doubled by an excess of guile) associated with how the cybergiant treated…
[posted by Lorraine] Joe Walther’s visit to Purdue University introduced us to a wide variety of theoretical approaches to relationships in online environments. The focus of his lectures was how people relate in online environments, or “how does communication behavior affect how…