shirley niemans

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.

The vertical search phenomenon has been on the rise for several years. As opposed to the ‘horizontal’, general purpose search engines such as Google, Ask.com and MS LiveSearch, vertical engines index only a specialized part of the Web. As the elaborate ‘verticals’ category at altsearchengines.com shows, recent developments are many, including engines such as Wellsphere, searching consumer health sites, BackType for finding and sharing comments and Loo2Go, the German engine that finds you the nearest public toilet. Better known examples are A9’s e-commerce search, local search engines and media type or content-related engines like Polar Rose or JobSearch.

Building on the idea that a search engine might best be developed within the context of the specific content that is offered, there have been several developments on the query side as well. OpenSearch, developed by Amazon sponsored A9, has become the standard format for search engine description documents since Firefox 2 and IE 7. The description documents tell the browser how to ‘call upon’ a search engine, defining the properties of the search box and engine on your site, such as the database it should use when suggesting search terms to your users. Any website with a search option can offer its results in the OpenSearch format, allowing for the syndication of results with those of other sites, by aggregators or meta-search engines.

One of the latest search-related initiatives is Briteclick, a start-up company that presented its tool (not an engine) at the TechCrunch50 conference just yesterday. Its main feature is the way it allows for sidebar information to become available in just one click on a keyword (hence ‘briteclicking’), without having to leave the page you are on. For instance, when using mail, one could highlight and right-click the word ‘Merlot’, choose ‘Briteclick’, and the sidebar will display a module allowing one to search a large wine database. Briteclick is set up as a free and easy to install platform that lets vertical search engines create a Briteclick module that will be displayed in the sidebar during a relevant search. With this tool, Briteclick claims to have developed an application that “simplifies the way people search and complete tasks on the web”. Unfortunately, Briteclick is not publicly available as of yet, beta testing is possible by invitation only.

Last week, Govcom.org, the Amsterdam-based creator of info-political tools such as the IssueCrawler, celebrated its ten year anniversary. As part of the jubilee, a series of lectures called the ‘Amsterdam New Media Summer Talks: Networked Content’ was organized on August 11. The program, hosted by Richard Rogers, included talks by Warren Sack, Alexander Galloway, Greg Elmer and Anat Ben-David. As the theme suggests, the Summer Talks focused on the way Web-based content is organized, be it not from a user perspective, but by analyzing the way Web devices, such as crawlers and scrapers, actively affect content delivery. Co-organizer of the Summer Talks and the week-long workshop that followed, is the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) at Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. DMI aims to develop and display tools and methods for researching the ‘natively digital’, examples of which would be hyperlinks, threads and tags. The workshop was divided into four sub-themes; Studying Software, Cyberlands, Alternative Algorithms and Networked Content.

I took part in the Studying Software group (lead by Warren Sack) where we narrowed our focus to a device-centric study of news aggregators and alternative editorial processes. We worked towards defining a system that determined the geographic location of news sources surrounding a specific issue on Google News. Our aim was to explore whether geographical distance distinguishes significant differences of opinion. For instance, when discussing the issue of the Iraq War, is there a significant difference between French opinions and American opinions? Or, given the issue of “whaling” does the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., Norway, Japan) have a significantly different way of describing the issue than does the Southern Hemisphere?

The protocol we presented at the end of the week describes a process where the input is a query (of one or more search terms in Google News) and the output is a set of colored, geographical maps. The maps show the geographical locations where one query term, for instance “North Korea”, co-occurs with a certain secondary keyword, such as “reunification”, “human rights” or “nuclear”. For instance, if the query is “North Korea” the process might determine that “North Korea” frequently co-occurs with the noun “reunification” in the news sources of North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and China; co-occurs infrequently in Brazil; and, co-occurs not at all in the rest of the world. Then, the colored map might show most of Asia tinted orange with 100% opacity; Brazil tinted orange with 20% opacity; and the rest of the world left blank. The actual scripting and testing of the proposed tool may lead to further refinements and related uses, such as the possibility to zoom in on the world map in order to get to the local sources, or to follow the development of an issue over a period of time.

Other research projects and tools realized during the Jubilee Workshop:

Nomadic Citizenship: Palestinian Cyberland goes Web 2.0
IP Browser
The Vigilance of Wikipedians