Who's car?
April 10, 2004 @ 14:48
Wired runs an article about a Volvo concept car that has been shaped by the ideas and wishes of 8 women designers and marketers (who,...
When in doubt
March 17, 2004 @ 12:48
just throw some more theory at your problems....
The rules of the game
March 9, 2004 @ 08:32
Despite pretenses of rigor, repeatability and representativity, I've always thought that scientific research is remarkably like Calvinball. Read the Official Rules here....
Hidden meaning
February 11, 2004 @ 11:09
I cannot help but make obscure references and encode (semi)private meanings into everything I write. Have a look at the very bottom of the navigation...
The 'New Working Class'
February 2, 2004 @ 17:41
I'm reading an ancient *cough* 1960 *cough* article, titled The 'New Working Class' (Lockwood, David (1960) "The 'New Working Class'," European Journal of Sociology, Vol....
The Internet is English
January 20, 2004 @ 17:57
It's time again for the 2004 Bloggies weblog awards (via Liz). There are only four non-English weblogs nominated. Three Spanish weblogs and one Portuguese weblog...
Lord of the Rings research
January 8, 2004 @ 12:28
Did you go see the third part, The Return of the King, of the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Help out some of my colleagues...
Girls, games, and advertising
November 13, 2003 @ 10:52
There's a brief interview/article with a female game developer over at the BBC new site. The article presents two frequently raised issues with regard to...
Down the toilet
October 28, 2003 @ 09:23
Yesterday I was playing Wallace and Gromit in Project Zoo and at some point I let Gromit open a door marked with a toilet symbol....
What do you read?
October 23, 2003 @ 11:08
Q: When you first visit a new weblog, what do you read? Of course, you take in the whole design, maybe scroll up and down...
Ev interviewed
October 22, 2003 @ 09:15
For future reference, an interview with Evan Williams on the future of blogging and moving to Google over at cnet.com. Q: Isn't blogging just creating...
Not@AoIR 2
October 20, 2003 @ 17:45
So, I haven't posted on every day of the conference and that, I think, is a testament to two things. One, it's really hard to...
Not@AoIR 1: Thinking about technical ability
October 16, 2003 @ 11:22
Right, so this year I'm not attending the Association of Internet Researchers' conference, that is starting today in Toronto. Needless to say I'm more than...
Reading websites, part 2
October 1, 2003 @ 15:10
In a previous post I asked for your opinion about what cues are good indicators of the "technical ability" of the author of a web...
OSI layers
September 30, 2003 @ 10:15
For reference purposes: links to explanations of the OSI network layer model. • howstuffworks.com (easy to read, different aspects in different chapters) • freesoft.org (bare...
Reading websites
September 18, 2003 @ 09:49
I have a question for the readers of this weblog. For my research I'm looking at all kinds of aspects of personal home pages and...
Recent virtual worlds links
August 10, 2003 @ 19:14
A bunch of somewhat related "virtual worlds" links I collected over the past week or so: • V6.0 update of the MMOG Active Subscriptions graph...
Gender in text
July 8, 2003 @ 16:35
The Boston Globe has an article citing Judith Butler about the performativity of gender. How often does that happen? Actually, the article discusses the findings...
Gamers are pretty normal people
July 8, 2003 @ 15:34
A recently released study by Pew Internet & American Life shows that on a whole college students who play video games, are pretty normal people....
Playing the game
July 8, 2003 @ 12:40
An AP news story is making the rounds and CNN, Mercury News, and Wired are writing it up. The story is about a bunch of...
Body image
July 6, 2003 @ 16:49
Sometimes images and texts drift together, forming a new message. Last week's Volkskrant Magazine featured an article about ideal typical body-images for women and the...
Blog census
June 30, 2003 @ 15:07
Now this is just the kind of information I was looking for! Blogcensus.net is creating a current database of weblogs, as far as that is...
Woordlog
June 26, 2003 @ 11:49
Woordlog, where they log only one word at the time. You get to comment on it though, using as many words as you want. In...
What a pain
June 24, 2003 @ 15:43
Sometimes it's the simplest things that will drive you crazy. You won't hear me say that archiving websites is a simple matter, but this is...
Online gaming documentaries
June 18, 2003 @ 10:51
Last week I discovered that there are a couple of independent projects trying to capture online gaming in documentary style. The projects I found mainly...
Not even half
June 11, 2003 @ 10:55
I'm reading some articles for a guest lecture this afternoon and I suddenly realize that I haven't even done half of what I could achieve...
Voyage of Bougainville
June 8, 2003 @ 14:00
A while ago I mentioned an article titled Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville by Denis Diderot. It's available in full online....
MMOG subscriptions
May 28, 2003 @ 10:55
An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth. A very interesting resource, putting various massively multi-player online games in a graph, plotting their number of subscriptions. Everquest...
A late response
May 27, 2003 @ 17:35
As if a week of returning fits of jetlag wasn't enough, it is being served with a chaser of slow burning flu *snirf*. Owen brings...
Classification
May 16, 2003 @ 17:55
Owen responds to the question I posed yesterday, whether weblogs are a particular type of homepage, with: Yes. Except when they're not. Classification is like...
Dutch blog map
May 15, 2003 @ 16:26
Really cool map of Dutch weblogs! The numbers in the different areas are not the number of weblogs, but the first two numbers of the...
Different
May 15, 2003 @ 16:11
Dutch and American-English weblogs are different, and it's not just the language. Or maybe it's exactly because of the language, or maybe Dutch webloggers have...
Ethnography course
April 4, 2003 @ 11:08
I just finished teaching a course in which the students did a research on representation and identity on family home pages; the final presentations are...
Researching weblogs
March 13, 2003 @ 17:55
Today I stumbled across two studies on weblogs and weblogging. With weblogging growing more and more visible, it was bound to get some academic treatment....
Mediated personae
March 13, 2003 @ 13:00
William Gibson posts some thoughts to his blog, about the scope of being able to create a mediated persona. Even in the type-and-run medium of...
Money and the imagined nation state
February 5, 2003 @ 13:43
In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson discusses the different processes and factors that contributed to the rise of the nation state. He argues that shared conceptions...
Unification and plurality
January 21, 2003 @ 08:50
Wired reports on developments in "grid computing" or how it will pretty soon actually be feasible to not only connect super computers and data centers,...
More online gaming
January 19, 2003 @ 13:18
Online Gaming - Comments and News, interview about Imperial Wars (via Slashdot). Flashbacks of Elite... Freelancer and preview at FiringSquad)...
Going virtual
January 8, 2003 @ 15:35
There.com, more here (via Slashdot)....
MMOG's
January 2, 2003 @ 16:14
Some massively multi-player online games in varying stages of beta-testing that I'm keeping an eye on: EVE Online Neocron Earth and Beyond Star Wars Galaxies...
Online gaming
December 30, 2002 @ 18:21
There's an interesting and somewhat bitter account on Slashdot about What You Really Get From An Online Game like Everquest. Also a fairly long article...
Games
December 9, 2002 @ 15:49
Another Slash rehash, this time gaming related articles: the latest part of GameSpy's Future of PC Gaming series, together with an interview with Chris Taylor...
Teaching blog
December 9, 2002 @ 13:50
Eew... it's been an awfully long time since I posted: a week! End of the year business, deadlines approaching (or having passed with a whoosh),...
Constructing/performing identity
December 2, 2002 @ 14:51
This looks like an interesting article (for future reference): Hackers produce more than software, they produce hackers (Previously The Identity Games of Hacker Culture) by...
How to cite a video stream
November 27, 2002 @ 11:52
Academics are used to citing eachother's work, quoting their interviewees, and in general referencing a wide variety of sources. As long as you attribute the...
Real virtual economies
November 7, 2002 @ 11:00
Online Game Economies Get Real at Wired and Lisbeth points to a BBC story: Everquest Fantasy Offers Real Rewards. The BBC story begins like this:...
Two Future of Gaming articles
November 1, 2002 @ 15:12
Two interesting articles at the GameSpy Future of Gaming section: Engines And Engineering: What to expect in the future of PC games and an Interview...
Official reference
October 25, 2002 @ 10:50
APAstyle.org and the section on referencing electronic sources. I can't believe they really want me to write: Author, A. A. (2000). Title of work. Retrieved...
Limited trial version
October 24, 2002 @ 16:26
Humbug! I'm trying out the Internet Researcher software that promises to create backups of websites, including pages that are launched through javascript popups, but the...
Research blogging
October 22, 2002 @ 22:23
In two months I'll be teaching again, this time a 'research seminar', where a small group of students will go from formulating a research question,...
Homepages and weblogs
October 22, 2002 @ 16:47
Quite, I'll say... If you point Google towards the domain of one of Holland's bigger providers (home.planet.nl) and you search for "blog" it returns 70...
Back
October 17, 2002 @ 12:50
Back from the AoIR conference in Maastricht. It was a great conference, good seeing everyone again, and many smart and stimulating presentations. One niggle though:...
Archiving websites for research
October 10, 2002 @ 12:37
A short while ago I posted to the Association of Internet Researchers mailinglist (Air-L), asking if those gathered there knew some good programs to archive...
Just a couple of days
October 9, 2002 @ 12:23
Getting close to the Association of Internet Researchers 2002 conference. Still loads to do....
1000 Game heroes
October 7, 2002 @ 21:56
As I'm researching the construction and representation of gender in computer-mediated environments, I bought the Digital Beauties book almost a year ago. For the best...
Xbox live
October 6, 2002 @ 16:18
A brief but interesting report by Chris Morris, a beta tester of the Xbox Live service. Unfortunately the Europeans will have to wait for it...
Matrix
September 24, 2002 @ 08:08
I watched the Matrix last night, for the first time since I saw it in the cinema. For quite a few people the Matrix is...
Back
September 23, 2002 @ 09:51
I'm back from my weeklong summerschool. We spend the preceding weekend visiting some friends and enjoying a walk in beautiful Twente and I figured I'd...
Back
September 23, 2002 @ 09:51
I'm back from my weeklong summerschool. We spend the preceding weekend visiting some friends and enjoying a walk in beautiful Twente and I figured I'd...
First :-)
September 13, 2002 @ 12:40
Slashdot refers us to the results of a hunt for the first ever use of a smiley. The Register helpfully provides us with a link...
Blog-o-sphere
September 3, 2002 @ 10:25
For future reference: Living in the Blog-o-sphere by Steven Levy....
Role-playing
August 26, 2002 @ 15:17
From a somewhat interactionistic point of view a working definition of role-playing could be: to treat other characters as if they were real and discrete...
Standard blog templates
August 22, 2002 @ 13:58
I always wonder why people choose to use a standard template for their blog. A blog is a rather personal thing isn't it? If you...
Old browsers
August 21, 2002 @ 01:47
With respect to my post about people still using version 1 browsers... they should certainly revel in the idea of being able to download the...
That happens too
August 21, 2002 @ 00:42
I feel for Henry Jenkins who got clobbered over the head on the Donahue talkshow. The public reception of the show probably wasn't half as...
Derrida
August 20, 2002 @ 21:08
The Derrida Reader by itself was not enough to keep the lid of the scanner pressed down on the unruly and springy cover of Sandy...
Took a long time
August 14, 2002 @ 09:51
Sometimes after starting to read a book, I wonder why it took me such a long time to either buy the book or if I...
MMORPGs making money
August 13, 2002 @ 17:22
Once a destination for the fringe Dungeons & Dragons crowd, the online role-playing game [EverQuest] now has 433,000 paying customers who generate $5 million a...
What is a weblog?
August 1, 2002 @ 11:20
Dave got permission to reprint Meg Hourihan's O'Reilly column What we're doing when we blog. Taking that article as a starting point, he wants to...
Cognitive Mapping im Cyberpunk
August 1, 2002 @ 10:55
Cognitive Mapping im Cyberpunk by Ingrid Lohman. Rather fragmentary, very graphics intensive page in German; many many links all around. By way of Bruce Sterling's...
New issue Game Studies
August 1, 2002 @ 10:39
The second issue of the Game Studies journal was published. Last year around this time, if I remember correctly, the journal launched, stating they'd appear...
Spacewar
July 29, 2002 @ 14:18
The origins of computer gaming: Brand, Stewart (1972) "Spacewar. Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums." In: Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972. Available:...
Gibson, Affordances and more
July 27, 2002 @ 18:46
There are some interesting posts on brightlycoloredfood. Chad Thornton's interaction design perspective on online social interaction in many ways complements the social-science perspective and interestingly...
Some links
July 23, 2002 @ 16:04
A bunch of links from the past week or two: The mod squad, Popular Science article on modding. Avatars Anonymous and Avatar Resources: chatroom avatars;...
Blogging software roundup
July 23, 2002 @ 11:56
John Hiler's long long The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup that also has some blog history in it. Hiler even mentions some software that I...
Media coverage of blogs
July 18, 2002 @ 10:40
Talking about recursivity. This blog keeps a list of media coverage on blogs....
Qualitative data analysis
July 10, 2002 @ 14:45
There's a good resources listing (mostly books) about qualitative data analysis over here....
Name spaces
July 8, 2002 @ 10:06
It's way to techy and I am truly puzzled by what this paper should have to do with a study on gender, but somehow I...
Antigames
July 7, 2002 @ 21:24
Antigames...
Halcyon days
July 7, 2002 @ 21:10
James Hague's wonderful Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers....
What is a web page?
June 25, 2002 @ 11:53
I just can't stop thinking about this one thing Owen Briggs remarked in a mail: "We haven't defined what a webpage 'looks' like yet." We...
Some gender related links
June 21, 2002 @ 14:44
Some gender related links I had open for a week in Opera, so they had to go somewhere: Revenge of the Gamer Chick GamerChickPlanet, messageboard...
Only 8 bits, but all the fun
June 20, 2002 @ 18:14
8Bit Joystick.com, a fun little blog/games site. They just published a review of the classic 1986 NES game Deadly Towers....
Bishounen
June 19, 2002 @ 14:33
Bishounen. Interesting. Although I like manga and anime, I'm not a hardcore fan. More like an interested but casual observer and although I'd noticed the...
"One squall stoop man, One leper mannequin"
June 19, 2002 @ 12:22
Here's an older (1999) but hilarious report of how a voice recognition package kept misunderstanding the tester. Turns out the software could not fit the...
Major cool factor
June 18, 2002 @ 10:54
David Silver's RCCS (Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies) got mentioned on Bruce Sterling's weblog. How cool is that?!...
The Words That Took Us There
May 29, 2002 @ 10:26
Yesterday my book got back from the printer. It's finally there. A stack of pages bound in a cover with an ISBN attached. It's odd...
Desperately seeking Ogre
April 24, 2002 @ 17:33
I've been on another somewhat silly search. There's this really cool search tool that will let you search a humongous amount of library data, called...
Blinkety-blink
April 24, 2002 @ 14:20
Just a quick addendum to my post on animated GIFs: I recon the blink-tag is not a HTML standard, which meshes with what I vaguely...
GIF history
April 22, 2002 @ 18:58
In an article I'm writing I make an offhand reference to animated GIFs and the blink tag being all the rage back in 1995 and...
Everquest on PS2
April 9, 2002 @ 17:06
News.com reports that Sony will release a networking kit and a console version of Everquest for the Playstation 2. As usual Slashdot provides some heated...
Weblogs and the news
April 8, 2002 @ 15:23
JD Lasica has a page with a roundup of Weblogs and the News: Where News, Journalism and Weblogs Intersect....
More links
April 6, 2002 @ 16:16
Opera keeps all the open browser windows within the main program window, using 'tabs', so you can quickly switch between them. This keeps your taskbar...
New article
April 5, 2002 @ 14:16
A friend alerted me to a paper by Susan Herring that I hadn't read yet: Gender and Power in Online Communication. And there are some...
Matrix philosophy
March 28, 2002 @ 10:41
I just wrote a long paragraph about cyberpunk and its influences on popular and scientific conceptualizations of cyberspace and then I run into this little...
The future of MMORPGs
March 27, 2002 @ 10:14
Gamespy's reporting from the Game Developer's Conference 2002 has an article titled What's This World Coming To? The Future of Massively Multiplayer Games. By way...
Half-life flashbacks
March 26, 2002 @ 15:39
Staring at my research proposal (which needs closure) I keep getting flashbacks of my recent bout of playing Half-life: involuntary twitches of my trigger finger,...
Love me
March 21, 2002 @ 12:23
Remembering Jill's discussion of the role of gender in the Turing test, I just ran across the following piece of text: The Gestalt psychologists recognized...
Cyberpunk
March 12, 2002 @ 23:55
Good stuff about cyberpunk and William Gibson. "Thus the stage is set as the reader is plunged into the cyberpunk universe which is both bizarre...
Bieslog
March 12, 2002 @ 21:20
A link for the Dutch readers: Bieslog. Bieslog could possibly be classified as a professional blog, in the sense that the author Wim de Bie,...
Cyberpl@y
March 7, 2002 @ 15:11
Cool. I bought Brenda Danet's book Cyberplay: Communicating Online last year at the AoIR 2.0: INTERconnections conference in Minneapolis and now I see that there...
New online papers
March 6, 2002 @ 11:19
Following a link from Lisbeth's blog I found Jonas Heide Smith's site, who recently finished his MA thesis, entitled The Architectures of Trust - Supporting...
Consoles and pricing
March 4, 2002 @ 14:04
All my gaming so far has been on computers. A long time ago I had a MSX-1 homecomputer, then I upgraded to a MSX-2 and...
Packets and metaphor
March 1, 2002 @ 09:57
Fascinating stuff in Hafner & Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late. One of the things that I'm very interested in is how language and metaphor...
Source sorcerer sourcerest!
February 28, 2002 @ 15:05
Ah! Not even a day after I posted the little allegory of the Ring and the PhD on my site or Jill Walker managed to...
Prescripted history
February 28, 2002 @ 11:27
The problem of integrating a storyline with the actual actitivity of playing a game is a very thorny one indeed. There basically are two types...
Dreaming of computerized democracy
February 28, 2002 @ 09:31
I picked up a copy of Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's book Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet [link: Amazon] the...
PhD of the Ring
February 26, 2002 @ 16:58
This little allegory of the Ring reached me by mail today. It was forwarded so many times that it was impossible to trace the original...
The master of tricks
February 26, 2002 @ 12:04
Stephen Tyler writes: The coincidentia oppositorum of putrefaction/congellation symbolizes the antonomasia of feelings as sensation and sense sensibility. Derrida seeks to escape the subjectivity and...
WorldForge
February 3, 2002 @ 23:28
Picked the WorldForge.org link from an interesting discussion on Slashdot....
quote of the day: Conformist
January 31, 2002 @ 22:15
"I am 97% conformist, and seeking to exaggerate the remaining 3% to make for a better paper." -- Hans Reiser, Name Spaces As Tools for...
Virtual world, real economy
January 29, 2002 @ 10:53
This is a pretty amazing article. An economist studied the economy of EverQuest by looking at EverQuest related sales on Ebay and found that the...
Gamespot's History of Videogames
January 20, 2002 @ 18:49
Gamespot features a very interesting History of Videogames. It's basically a somewhat illustrated timeline of videogames. It starts in 1889 with the establishment of a...
Online World Timeline
December 19, 2001 @ 08:48
1973 Talk-O-Matic, a proto-IRC with handles and chat rooms, is on PLATO at this point (it may have existed earlier). "One of the more popular...
RobotStreetGang
December 14, 2001 @ 10:33
A new games and gaming site, RobotStreetGang, subtitled "Game Theory and Lifestyle". Their mission statement reads: "Robot Street Gang is a publication dedicated to video...
Plates in Miller and Slater revisited
December 13, 2001 @ 10:11
I complained the other day about the fact that Miller and Slater in their book The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach refer to plates/illustrations that are...
Digital Beauties
December 11, 2001 @ 12:19
The other day I bought the book Digital Beauties, edited by Julius Wiedeman, about "2D and 3D computer generated digital models, virtual idols and characters"...
Access issues and flat fee
December 11, 2001 @ 10:34
Miller and Slater discuss in their book The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach various issues regarding access and use of the internet by Trinidadians and interestingly...
Plates online in Miller and Slater's 'The Internet'
December 10, 2001 @ 15:11
I've had Miller and Slater's book The Internet. An Ethnographic Approach on my shelf for a long while now, but hadn't gotten around to reading...
New entries
December 3, 2001 @ 23:10
Some new additions to the Online Articles section: Bruckman, Amy S. and Mitchel Resnick (1995) The MediaMOO Project. Constructionism and Professional Community. Available: [html] Ferris,...
Virtual idols
November 29, 2001 @ 11:03
We've seen idoru, Japanese for virtual idols before. Kyoko Date, Date Kyoko for instance was one of the first. Through an article I stumbled on...
Still in Twente
November 29, 2001 @ 10:21
Quick update on the courses: one was pretty good and was taught by a really good teacher and one was (unfortunately still is at the...
Away for courses
November 27, 2001 @ 14:04
Well, I'm away for a weeklong set of courses, mainly methodology (oh joy!), professional skills and philosophy of science. The good thing is that we're...
Final corrections
November 14, 2001 @ 10:07
Yes, nothing much new here for a while... I've been logging stuff to put up here though, but you'll have to wait a little longer...
Some books
November 2, 2001 @ 12:25
Some books I recently bought and that I'm reading now: Ess, Charles & Fay Sudweeks (eds.) (2001) Culture, Technology, Communication. Towards an Intercultural Global Village....
Back from Minneapolis
October 17, 2001 @ 14:53
Back from the AoIR Internet Research 2.0 conference, which also explains my 2 week absence here. It was a great conference, more on that later,...
New links added
October 1, 2001 @ 18:12
Check it out in the Online Articles section of the Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources Sternberg, Janet (1999) It's All in the Timing: Synchronous Versus...
New links added
September 17, 2001 @ 09:38
Oops. For some reason I never included this bunch of papers in the Online Articles section of the Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources. Miller, Hugh...
Books
September 16, 2001 @ 15:44
I received two books I ordered yesterday, Internet Communication and Qualitative Research: A Handbook for Researching Online by Chris Mann and Fiona Stewart and Doing...
Cosign 2001
September 10, 2001 @ 08:09
Well, I'm off to an interesting 3 day conference, Cosign 2001. It's here in Amsterdam, so I'll be sleeping in my own bed, but don't...
New links added
September 5, 2001 @ 20:47
Check it out in the Online Articles section of the Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources LaPin, Gianna (1999) Shapeshifters: Why Women Must Adapt in the...
Conference
September 4, 2001 @ 23:18
An interesting conference announcement just came in through the Computergamestudies mailinglist. It's for a conference called "Playing by the rules: The cultural policy challenges of...
RCCS moved
September 3, 2001 @ 09:14
The RCCS (Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies), the site with the great bookreviews that is in large part David Silver's doing, moved to a new...
Oscillation and resonance
August 24, 2001 @ 12:07
I just re-read Julian Dibbell's speech My dinner with Catherine MacKinnon and I just had to grin, again. With humor and self relativation Dibbell tells...
Some links
August 22, 2001 @ 15:39
Let's make a little list of recent discoveries that turned out worthwhile for me: Game Studies, the international journal of computer game research. Interesting articles...
Videogame thesis
August 17, 2001 @ 16:34
Ah, I just stumbled into an interesting looking MA thesis by Gonzalo Frasca, entitled Videogames of the Oppressed: videogames as a means of critical thinking...