The Atlas of Cyberspace, by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, is the first comprehensive book to explore the spatial and visual nature of cyberspace and its infrastructure.
It uses a user-friendly, approachable style to examine why cyberspace is being mapped and what new cartographic and visualisation techniques have been employed.
Richly illustrated with over 300 full colour images, it comprehensively catalogues 30 years worth of maps that reveal the rich and varied landscapes of cyberspace.
The book includes chapters detailing:
- mapping Internet infrastructure and traffic flows
- mapping the Web
- mapping online conversation and community
- imagining cyberspace in art, literature, and film
Update: October 2008 - The full content of the book now available for free download as a pdf.
It was a banner year for social media growth and adoption. We witnessed Facebook overtake Google in most weekly site traffic, while some surveys reported nearly 95% of companies using LinkedIn to help in recruiting efforts. In my outlook for last year, I cited that mobile would become a lifeline to those looking for their social media fixes, and indeed the use of social media through mobile devices increased in the triple digits.
I also outlined how "social media would look less social" or more accurately exclusive, and indeed, we've seen the re-launch of Facebook groups, which focus on niche interactivity, and more recently, the emergence of Path, billed as "the social network for intimate friends" which limits your network to only 50 people. The past year also saw some brands go full throttle on Foursquare's game-like geo-location platform, attempting to reward mayors and creating custom badges for the network's power users.
Some of David Armano's Key Trends are:
It's The Integration Economy, Stupid.
Tablet & Mobile Wars Create Ubiquitous Social Computing.
Facebook Interrupts Location-Based Networking.
read the full post on Harvard Business Review:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/12/six_social_media_trends_for_20_1.html#
I LOVE the Jejune Institute!
Excerpt from the artists' statement:
"Over the past several years, online dating has entered the mainstream, drawing over 50 million visitors per month. En masse, people have condensed their identities into page or paragraph-long descriptions, sometimes complemented by a handful of photographs or peppered with responses to canned questions. These personal profiles are modern messages in a bottle, short statements of self, telling not only who people are, but also what people want. In these advertisements for new human relationships, people package and present their most loveable qualities to help complete their quest to be loved.
Want You To Want Me chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, gathering new data from a variety of online dating sites every few hours. The system searches these sites for certain phrases, which it then collects and stores in a database. These phrases, taken out of context, provide partial glimpses into people’s private lives. Simultaneously, the system forms an evolving zeitgeist of dating, tracking the most popular first dates, turn-ons, desires, self-descriptions and interests...."