At the recent Picnic Conference, held in Amsterdam from September 24 to 26, web epistemologist Richard Rogers presented several fairly recent Govcom.org projects in the Virtual Platform e-art Dome.
The e-art exhibition itself featured Govcom’s project elFriendo, interestingly subtitled ‘Taking the Work out of Social Networking’ and a welcome wink to the many social networking themes of the conference. The tool allows for the automated creation of full-blown MySpace profiles by merely naming three of your interests. Mining the existing resource of social network profiles further enables elFriendo to compare your interests with a wannabe-friend, or fix a complete profile make-over that will fit you in with a new crowd in no time.
Switching from the politics of social networking to the politics of the Google Interface, another approach was taken in the Google Politics of Tabs-video, of which a preview is a offered below. Rogers explained that by making use of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as a website research tool, Govcom.org has been able to visualize the ‘demise of the directory’ in the Google interface since the year 2000. In a way consistent with the current dominance of searching over browsing/’surfing’, the demise of the ‘web librarian’ indicates a change in both user behavior and search engine policy.
See what Govcom.org writes on the research of natively digital objects, or watch the original on crookedline.nl.
