I will be straightforward: We participate and actually create the content on Web 2.0 sites. In return, they give us web services. Or rather, they give us the services and we handle the rest. Looks like a bee hive in a bee farm, where the hive is there and you create the honey for people to enjoy, eh?

Two Turkish artists Burak Arikan and Engin Erdogan announced their new project at userlabor.org and their ULML - User Labor Markup Language based on XML, yesterday on May Day.

The idea of User Labor is rooted in immaterial and affective labor concepts, where the labor produces or manipulates affects. Recently, User Labor has become particularly relevant on the Internet since user participation became a marketable product for web 2.0 services. What used to be immaterial is now very close to being material, because the affection can be measured on a per person basis.

Read the rest at userlabor.org. The following links to artist pages themselves might also be of interest:

• User Labor Markup Language - Burak Arikan
• Happy User Labor Day - Engin Erdogan
• Bugun Facebook icin ne yaptin? / What did you do for Facebook today? (In Turkish) - Dugumkume

According to Advocate Gokhan Ahi, who wrote on turk.internet.com, the huge movie database site IMDB has been banned by the Turkish Court. The story is, the former-singer-now-director Mahsun Kirmizigul’s movie has been on the internet for download for a while. The company that releases the DVD of the movie (I guess) Boyut Yayin Grubu recently applied to the court asking for a couple of sites that allow the movie to be downloaded. According to Webrazzi, the sites include torrentturk.com, frmdivx.com, divxcity.org, turkdivx.net and imdb.com.

However, they have made a typo with imdb.com’s address, so they banned imbd.com, which is a parked domain that apparently tries to make money from advertisements when users type imdb.com’s address wrong. The ban, like the old ones on Youtube and Wordpress, is DNS-bansed - which means it is easy to pass the ban by changing the DNS addresses.

The thing is, this court decision shows that neither the court nor the company that applied to get these sites banned know nothing about how things work on the internet. While the typo on the name IMDB is funny enough (I am leaving aside the fact that IMDB has nothing to do with piracy, and the fact that censorship is stupid in general), this also shows that no research, investigation and expert consultation had been done before the decision.

Micro-blogging (or tumble-logging) has become pretty popular thanks to platforms like Tumblr, Jaiku, Cromple and especially Twitter. Google’s acquisition of Jaiku is also a sign that blogging is switching to what’s called micro-blogging, where each post is like a status update of what you are doing or at least shorter posts than you see on traditional blogs. What makes these blogs popular is that you no longer have to worry about the look and spelling, and most importantly content of your posts. They are not to publish content, rather, they function as a way to be updated about what your friends are doing (Tumblr might be an exception to this).

Tumblr is a simplified (idiot-proof?) blogging system, which encourages you to post media along with your posts with an easy interface. Jaiku, Cromple and Twitter, on the other hand, work similar to each other. They allow you to view an ever-changing public timeline (meaning, what all other users are doing, which gets updated any second). Jaiku and Twitter also allow you to update your status with your mobile phones through text messaging.

As for Wordpress;
» Read the rest of the entry..

US Ankara, Turkey Embassy held a teleconference with Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia and Wikia founder on Feburary, 19 2008. Students and instructors related to the subject from various universities in Ankara as well as professional people were invited to take part in the event. I and a couple more friends and instructors from my M.A. program were invited as well.

The conference started with Jimmy Wales’ speaking for about 30 minutes, talking about what Wikipedia is, how it works and the logic behind (mentioning what open-source and open-content are), how it is funded and other general information. One interesting thing he said about Wikipedia was that he called it a system where people can access “the sum of all human knowledge” freely. Personally, I have found this quite exaggerated. Then Wales talked about his ad-supported commercial project Wikia.

» Read the rest of the entry..

I have been making fun of this phenomenon for a while among friends. People, who advertise on various forums for making “Web 2.0 logos” cheered me up even more. For sure there is a new trend in design on the web but it is funny to see how people talk about Web 2.0 reduced to a matter of mere design. I am no designer nor I understand the meaning of colors or typography in designing pieces. However, this Web 2.0 color pallette have been taking my attention for a while. The Flickr Pink, Netvibes Green, Last.fm Red, Twitter Cyan, Digg Blue and many more… Comparing to these, Wordpress administration panel did not really have this Web 2.0 effect. After seeing the latest not-yet-released Wordpress 2.5 administration panel colors, I did a quick Google search to see if I can find anything written on this in general. Web is huge, and I wasn’t really surprised to find tons of several sites talking about these.

The following is from the beta Wordpress 2.5 administration panel. Click the image to see in higher quality version.

» Read the rest of the entry..

It has been a while since Amazon Kindle was released.  For those who don’t know, it’s an ebook reader that can download ebooks from Amazon’s ebook store using GSM.

There were a couple of criticisms to Kindle, like it could not view PDF’s and other ebook formats (unlike Sony’s Reader) - but rumors say that it will soon support various formats for ebooks.  Recent hacking done by Igor Skochinsky shows that Kindle has features more than what is shown to customers. First of all, it can function as a GPS (well, sort of) using GSM, and a picture viewer.

Apparently, Kindle is running linux, and this will probably allow for hacked firmwares to appear - for more functionality. So, check Igor’s blog for more info to see the hidden features in Kindle.

From the official conference web site:

What is Sex 2.0?

Sex 2.0 will focus on the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. How is social media enabling people to learn, grow, and connect sexually? How is sexual expression tied to social activism? Does the concept of transparency online offer new opportunities or present new roadblocks — or both? These questions, and many more, will be addressed within a safe, welcoming, sex-positive space.

Respecting the confidentiality and protecting the identities of participants who wish to maintain a degree of anonymity will be a top priority at Sex 2.0.

When? April 12, 2008
Where? Spring4th Center, 728 Spring St., Atlanta, GA
» Map of nearby hotels
How much? $10

Note: We will be following the unconference model, which means everyone is a participant rather than a passive attendee. This is YOUR event!

I have been looking for an easy and fast way to convert the Ape and FLAC files (aka Monkey’s Audio files) with cue sheets I have to a format that I could use for portable music players. Ok, we all love Ape and FLAC because they boast the best sound quality with lossless or lossy compression, but support for them on portable music players seems hard at this time because of the file size they have and the processing power they need.

The common sense way I have come across on the net is: First, decompress the ape file to wave, any audio convertor should be able to do this. Change the .ape extention to .wav inside the .cue file. Recompress it to MP3, split to individual files (or first split, then compress). But I don’t find this a nice way as the I don’t really want to play with gaps, etc. Ok, Cue Splitter software can remove/add gaps but I prefer to do it naturally.

Or, there are software like Ape Ripper, which can convert your ape files to MP3. But then, it doesn’t allow you to pick a specific encoder, like LAME.

So, what I did was: I first looked for an ape plugin for Nero Burning Rom, and found one here - They have plugins based on the official releases by Monkey’s Audio, FLAC or any other format, so it offers the best quality around. Installed the plugin, and boom! Now, Nero can read and write ape files. Then, I chose Nero’s Image Recorder as the recorder, so I can get a .nrg image file. Just use the Burn Image option and pick the cue file, and it will write it as a .nrg image. Afterwards, I used Daemon Tools (or any other similar software) to mount the .nrg image file so I can rip it with any software I want.

This way, you can use EAC and LAME couple to make your portable music files sound a little better with right settings, or you can directly use the CD rippers of iTunes or SonicStage. Also, your mounted image file will (most probably - all of mine have been found) be found on freedb or Gracenote/CDDB, so you won’t spend extra time with tagging. Depending on the compression settings and your cpu, this should take you a maximum of five minutes to get all these done.

This website called G.ho.st has received the Silver Award at Le Web 3 ‘07 Conference in Paris, and many other awards from other places. I browsed the site out of curiosity and oh my god!

G.ho.st offers a virtual computer accessible from your favorite browser (users say that does not really work good on IE performance-wise), click on the image on the left to see. It uses the familiar (resizable!) window metaphor operating system. It includes a web browser that can either directly connect to your sites or by using G.ho.st’s proxy (looks pretty capable). A mail client that you can use to check all your POP3 mail boxes and handle calender/contact needs.

Additionally, it comes with 3 gigs of storage, which is accessible from FTP (just ftp g.ho.st with your username and password, and that’s it) and allows you to share them on the web. A seperate 3 gigs email quota, which is also accessible from POP3/IMAP. What is good is, you are not forced to login to G.ho.st’s virtual computer to check your mails. You can just go to the webmail service to check them and make the web-based software handle all your POP3 mail needs. It works like any other desktop mail client. In other words, ou can make it check any other POP3 mails and all your mails will be at one place accessible anywhere from the internet. Ah, and a fancy username@g.ho.st email address.

A MP3 player, which can play the files you uploaded to your storage, customizable desktop, instant messaging software. Moreover, you can view and edit your office application files. Youtube, Flickr, feed reader (which is ‘dockable’ on your desktop), a couple of widgets and many more features that I am yet to discover. Ah and, you can use G.ho.st virtual computer in many languages.

Check it out! Highly recommended.

I have been a fan of about:blank as my browser homepage. Recently a friend (thanks Emin) told me about netvibes, which has become my main page. The site has the slogan of (re)mix the web. And it does what it says.

You got a lot of websites that allow syndication/feeding (RSS/Atom, etc) but they are a lot in number and it’s hard to keep track of them? And Google Reader or feed reader software does not have enough usability to provide this?

Netvibes allows you to keep track of your favorite sites and help you with being updated with them. The customizable main page of the site allows you to add tabs under which you can put as many feeds or widgets. You can view local weather, check your emails (webmails or POP, etc), do web/video/etc search inside this window and so on. Just go check it out and you’ll love it!

Netvibes is the ajaxed Web 2.0 cutie!