I’ve been keeping you posted about my regular contributions to the Impakt blog, but now you get to take a peek at some of the content I’ve been producing for the festival’s newspaper. The essays are extended versions of this and this blog posts respectively, but one of them has been turned into a nice infographic (the credit goes to the designers who made it). Oh, by the way, everything has been translated to Dutch, so there’s no reading it unless you’re fluent in Nederlands. It looks good though. (more…)

“My nephew has HDADD: Hi-Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.” – Steven Wright

Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach (short haiku-style posts, ultra-light interface, a very “carpe diem” real-time nature) won many users over. But why would such a restrictive, limited social network become so popular? There are so many more things you can do via MySpace or Facebook, where you can easily embed everything possibly embeddable.
Nonetheless, although Mark Zuckerberg‘s well-tested money-making machine is still bigger than Twitter (I’d go as far as to say it’s almost necessary for internet users), the social colossus has been learning a lot from its younger, smarter brother.
The “twitterification” of Facebook has raised some perplexities and the opening of that once closed and well-guarded environment wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for their business. I like the definition of Facebook as a “gated community” (read here): you can easily do everything you need on the internet inside of it and forget about the outside web. This has been part of the network’s strenght in the past, one more reason why it is both scary and addictive.
While Twitter’s openness (making information public and searchable in real-time) has definitely played a major role in the social network’s rise to pop culture phenomenon, replacing Facebook as the next internet thing, I think there is another factor worth analyzing (and no, it’s not journalist A.D.D.).
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It all started by doing what every active internet user does once in a while: egosurfing (or something like that, I wasn’t looking for my own blog – this one here – but for the one I work for).
I googled “yskira.com” and found, at the 8th position on the first result page, a link claiming to be a blog review. The url name read no less than “topblogreview”, so I was intrigued and clicked in hope of a nice comment. It turned out the comment was far more than nice, and even enthusiastic would be a euphemism:

Every post available in the blog is neat, no dirt in terms of inappropriate photos or anything. The articles titles makes you want to read more. I enjoy the widespread reach this site has in terms of its readers from over the world. It’s like the writer has eyes of a hawk not at all missing any point. As soon you read a post you can’t wait to read another one for the tips given. Once you start reading you could not give over.

First of all, such grand terms are so fired up they sound ironic, and second there is no reference whatsoever to what the blog is about. (more…)

This is an article I originally wrote for Ymag.

Ion Bitzan, Map (1978)

It's no surprise Polis has recently opened one of their articles with the same Jorge Luis Borges quote as Jean Baudrillard did in his introduction to "Simulacra and Simulation". The quote comes from a story about an insanely detailed 1:1 scale map of an empire, eventually shredding apart and leaving scattered remains on the very soil it used to discipline.

The reason why Borges' vision is so important today is not only the recent popularization of mapping, especially on the internet, but its evolution into a virtualized and pervasive layer overlapping with both our online and offline experiences. If Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", although focused on architectural design and civil engineering, has also influenced software writers, augmented space and virtuality make the conceptual relationship between city design and network design intersecting rather than isomorphic.

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