Re: nettime commercial communism
I blogged about something similar about a year ago, Are we too poor for communism: http://douweosinga.com/blog/0407/2004Jul13_1. I now work for Google, which arguably is both a big company and a dotcom survivor and it is a case in point. Especially if you travel in between engineering offices - you visit the New York office and your badge is your passport - it gets you an appartment, free food and instant friends. At the same time, there is of course a huge difference in wealth between Googlers, depending on their stock option situation. But I think that the bottom line is that for a lot of engineer type of persons, a lot of material things are just pesky details that are not worth it to spend time on, so a situation where the company arranges for these things just makes sense. Douwe On 7/2/05, David Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is a fascinating subject. A few comments, if this thread isn't cold yet: The days of the paternalistic corporation are over in the U.S., but a handful of companies still provide a pretty warm cocoon for their employees. These tend to be some of the bigger and more elite financial companies, and so the beneficiaries tend to be pretty privileged workers, but it's still surprising what goes on at some of these places. (The top executives at nearly every company live in a virtual parallel universe that few people outside of their circle even know anything about, and those people are getting more and more lavish perks all the time, but that's another story.) ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Visual Poetry
Hi Nettimers, Google has become the measure of all things Internet in many ways. As scary as this is, it allows also for some interesting translations. I came up with this idea to let google image search translate poems into series of images. I have created a quick implementation of this idea into a windows executable. The program will let you enter a poem or any other piece of text and will then show a slideshow of images found on Google. Feel free to download, experiment and comment: http://douweosinga.com/projects/visualpoetry Regards, Douwe Osinga http://douweosinga.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Verisign
Hi, Well, last week, Verisign, the company that in the end is responsible for translating domain names ending on .com and .net into ipnumbers, i.e. machines on the Internet, decided to redirect all non existent domains to their sitefinder site. The company that was given the task of running the root of the domain name system by the Internet community, is now making money off our misspelling by putting paid links on these pages. This is a bad for a number of technical reasons, it bothers spam fighters because they can no longer distinguish between real and fake email addresses for example. Email send to misspelled domains will end up at Verisign, which is never good. Verisign was supposed to manage the domain system by giving domains out to whomever paid for it. Now they've said: any domain that hasn't been claimed is ours. But to manage is not supposed to mean to own. Visiting the http://our-integrity-so-we-went-for-the-money.com link presents you with the described page, declaring that: We didn't find: our-integrity-so-we-went-for-the-money.com i.e. making the site describing itself. There is of course something else at stake here. Slowly we're losing the right to name our environment. Trademarks, copyrights etc are invading our language with legal backup. It is one thing when one company sues another because they have similar names. It is quite another when a company tries to block a new word in everyday language (Google trying to stop the word to google by writing seize and desist letters to journalists) There are alternatives in this case: the OpenNic is an democratic system for distributing names. Maybe this incident will make more people go their way. In the end we should realize that on the Internet the user decides which name service to use. Verisign is not a given, it is a choice (and maybe not a very good one). Douwe Osinga http://douweosinga.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Drawing the map of the world stored in our collective conscience
Hi Nettimers, I have always been fascinated by maps. Maps are not only a picture of the world, they also picture out mind. Let somebody draw a map of the world and you'll get a map of her/his world. That's why Europe is in the middle of a European map, China in the middle of a Chinese map and the US is in the middle of a map from the United States. I have designed a little weblet that lets visitors collectively draw a world map. The map is drawn in yellow (land) and blue (sea). One small block, however is red. Visitors are then requested to decide whether this small block should be land or sea for the map to look like the world. By filtering visitors based on their ip numbers, different maps can be drawn, giving a picture of how people from different regions think the world look like. But that's someway off. For now you can help the project by visiting: http://douweosinga.com/projects/mindworld As you can imagine, it takes quite some clicks for a world map to appear, so if you like the project and have a website, please consider putting up a link. Douwe Osinga http://douweosinga.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: nettime Iranonymity
The deliberately generic-sounding URLs for the service are publicized over Radio Farda broadcasts and through bulk e-mails that Anonymizer sends to addresses in the country. The addresses are provided by human rights groups They're using spam for this? What a weird planet this is where a superpower buys email addressed from human right groups to spam citizens of a third world country. Douwe Osinga http://douweosinga.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime The coming Internet Ice Age
Slowly but unstoppably, the Internet is freezing over. Sites that used to be changing daily with fresh content produced by professional writers broadcast the same old news anno mid 2000 over and over, with their owners only sometimes posting a little article written in their free time. It is unavoidable. The bubble pumped so much money in the Internet that the whole info-ecosystem was growing like a rainforest on steroids, like there was no tomorrow. There was. Between the dead and frozen trees of the old days, a new and more nimble system is developing. Blogs connected through the long and thin threads of RSS have developed their own maze of complexity. Paid for content sites are growing again. Amateur communities that never where touch by the bubble frenzy, live like they did before the boom. But the great dying hasn't finished yet. The old content empires aren't all quite deserted. Some are overgrown by a myriad of pop-up, pop-under and other in-your-face advertising. It will take a while before the ice age in its full strength is up on us. Many searches for practical information still bring you to sites from 1999-2001. Two to five years old, which is okay for a lot of purposes, but what will it look like in ten years? Will the world wide web be seen as a museum of information of the end of the twentieth century? Too many old websites will devalue the whole medium. Then there is Google. It seems a power for the good, crawling the web searching for relevant content. But it won't save us from the coming Ice age, not the way Google works right now. Google sorts the web by linking. The more a page is linked to, the better it scores. But the old, dead websites are linked to a lot and they link to each other. Not only keeps Google directing traffic to these frozen dinosaurs, in subtle ways it helps the over icing go on. Bloggers like to spice up their websites with links to relevant terms, but they are often too lazy to really research something, or rather they are writing about the ice age and not about the relevant term, so they dont have the time to research this term. So they look it up on Google and paste the link to the first hit, keeping a dead ecosystem popular. Is this all bad? Maybe not. In a way it will help the new forms of information exchange and teach us that pure Internet forms just work better. - - - - - - - Douwe Osinga http://douweosinga.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
