World Wide Web, World Live Web, World Life Web

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In 1994, in the wake of Tim Berners Lee‘s work, the World Wide Web was officially born. A global web, wide in its dimensions as in its contents. Over the years, these contents have literally exploded, imposing the use of search engines to try and sort out this fertile chaos on the basis of the principle of a classification ‘by relevance’. The domain name (DNS) to identify and classify web sites and to adress documents and the  “http protocol” (hypertext transfer protocol) to retrieve them are the main features of this first documentary age of the web.

Then came the World Live Web, an instantaneous subset of the World Wide Web, a web giving the latest published information in real time. Google News service was one of the pioneers of this second documentary age, but it also enables to refer to what is called micro contents (citizen media), e.g. comments on blogs. Specialised search engines like Technorati are integrated with tools that power the blogosphere and are able to index new content within ten minutes. According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs every day. In april 2008, Technorati is tracking more than 100 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. For instance searching for artgallery.lu in Technorati gives more than 100 results.

We are now entering a third documentary age, the World Life Web, in particular with the extraordinary boom of social networks (Facebook, MySpace) and of virtual worlds  (Second Life). The main issues of this new age are the sociability and the indexable and remixable nature of our digital identity as well as its traces on the network.

Olivier Ertzscheid, enseignant-chercheur (Maître de Conférences) en Sciences de l’information et de la communication au département Infocom de l’IUT de la Roche sur Yon (Université de Nantes) a publié un petit texte à vocation pédagogique sur ce sujet sur son blog personnel affordance.info.

Blogs, Blogrolls, Blogosphere, RSS newsfeeds, Permalinks

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A weblog, or “blog”, is a personal journal on the Web that is updated frequently, most often displaying its material in journal-like chronological dated entries or posts.  Weblogs cover as many different topics, and express as many opinions, as there are people writing them. Weblogs are different from traditional media. Bloggers (someone who writes a blog ) tend to be more opinionated, niche-focused, and partisan than journalists, who strive for editorial objectivity. Many weblogs allow readers to write a reaction (comment) to what was written in the blog entry. A blogroll is a list of blogs and bloggers that any particular blog author finds influential or interesting. The online community of bloggers, their writings and the comments is called Blogosphere.

Weblogs usually offer RSS feeds (a file format that allows anyone with a website to easily “syndicate” their content)  to make part of their content (excerpts and links back to the originating website) available to other sites to use and publish the informations. Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of the content. To provide an easy way to capture specific references to posts or articles in a blog, permalinks (a permanent identifier to a specific weblog post or article) are the preferred solution. Inbound links refer to hyperlinks from other sources citing that weblog. Outbound links refer to hyperlinks from the weblog to outside sources. The leading monitor of the world of weblogs is Technorati, a real-time search engine that is the largest source of fresh information about the global and local conversations going on all across the Web.

1ère édition de LILLE Art Fair

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Artv Fair

Pour sa 1ère édition à Lille Grand Palais, Lille Art Fair accueille pour le plus grand plaisir du public des événements alternatifs hors du commun. Du 24 au 27 avril 2008, Lille Grand Palais  s’apprête à accueillir plus de 20.000 visiteurs, collectionneurs et amateurs d’Art.

Lille Art Fair est le nouveau grand rendez-vous européen des passionnés des Arts avec la venue de 80  galeries prestigieuses et l’exposition des plus grands artistes internationaux du moment.

Murmures

A découvrir pendant 4 jours, des expositions inédites telles que : MURmures » du FRAC Nord Pas de Calais présentée sur les murs de la Foire, des projets artistiques soutenus par RESEAU 50° NORD l’exposition vidéo tout à fait surprenante montée par le FRESNOY et l’espace entièrement dédié à la sculpture monumentale.

Open Directory Project

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The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself. As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

The Open Directory was founded in the spirit of the Open Source movement, and is the only major directory that is 100% free. There is not, nor will there ever be, a cost to submit a site to the directory, and/or to use the directory’s data. The Open Directory data is made available for free to anyone who agrees to comply to the free use license.

Open Science Project : Jmol

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JMOL

The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. The OpenScience project is managed by a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.

Among the six interrelated projects pursued is Jmol, an Open Source Java/Swing based molecular dynamics viewer.

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26th contemporary art fair in Brussels

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Art Bruxelles

The 26th edition of the contemporary art fair artbrussels took place from Thursday 17 to Monday 21 April 2008. 180 galleries from 24 countries and works by more than 2000 artists offered an insight of the current international contemporary art scene. Combined with an exciting VIP OFF programme, panel discussions, guided tours and many links with private and public cultural institutions, artbrussels welcomed more than
30.000 professionals, collectors and art lovers from Belgium and abroad!

Holy Fire : Art in the Digital Age

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Holy Fire

Holy Fire: Art in the Digital Age will present a unique panel of digital artworks created since 2000 by internationaly known media artists. The exhibition will be featured at iMAL new media center in Brussels (www.imal.org/) as part of the “off program” of Art Brussels, the international contemporary art fair ( www.artexis.com/ArtBrussels/, April 18 – 21, 2008).

Holy Fire is probably the first exhibition to show only collectible new media artworks already on the art market, in the form of traditional media (prints, videos, sculptures) or customized new media objects. Holy Fire presents contemporary artworks made with contemporary technologies and designed to be collectible.

Artists: Cory ARCANGEL, Gazira BABELI, BOREDOMRESEARCH, Christophe BRUNO, Grégory CHATONSKY, Miguel CHEVALIER, Vuk COSIC, Shane HOPE, JODI, LAb[au], Joan LEANDRE, Golan LEVIN, Olia LIALINA & Dragan ESPENSCHIED, Eva and Franco MATTES aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Alison MEALEY, Mark NAPIER, Casey REAS, Charles SANDISON, Antoine SCHMITT, Yacine SEBTI, Alexei SHULGIN & Aristarkh CHERNYSHEV, John. F. SIMON, Jr., Paul SLOCUM, Wolfgang STAEHLE, Eddo STERN, UBERMORGEN.COM, Carlo ZANNI.

Dipity : make and share interactive timelines

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A timeline is a graphical representation of a chronological sequence of events, also referred to as a chronology. It can also mean a schedule of activities, such as a timetable. The timelines can be drawn or digital-made.

 
Dipity is the easiest way to make and share interactive timelines about the people and things you care about. Created by the start-up Underlying Inc., founded by three long time Internet professionals in april 2007, the first project name T1ME was changed to Dipity (from Serendipity, the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else) in october 2007. Dipity is a fantastic time-line visualization tool which allow you to manage online media by ordering related content chronologically. By using Dipity you can create a stream that allows you to keep track of text,  pictures, videos and blog posts by adding events manually or by adding RSS feeds to automatically create events. Timelines can be embedded in your own website, the content for RSS feeds is generated in realtime. An API to develop online applications to generate events is available for developers.

An example of an embedded timeline to present the exhibitions of Leslie’s Artgallery in Bridel, Luxembourg is shown hereafter :

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Dipity streams can be visualized in four views :

  • Timeline : the timeline shows everything that was added to the stream based on the time the item was published. There’s a zoom feature that allows you to zoom in and out of your timeline by day, month, or years. The longer the length of time, the smaller the timeline view will become.
  • List View : a very simple list of events in the stream
  • Flipbook : clicking on the blocks at the bottom of the window allow you to ‘flip’ through the stream.
  • Map View : powered by Google, the map view is a great tool for users that have items that are geo-tagged, or tagged with a location. This is best suited for events that are manually added to a stream rather than by rss feeds. An autoplay event show is integrated in the map view.

Dipity is also a social timeline application for Facebook to allows users “to tell their story” using a visual timeline. Dipity started in march 2008 as an alpha version. In may 2008 Dipity added the first mashup application, TimeTube, to create TubeLines. In june 2008 Tickr! ( = Time + Flickr) was launched as the second mashup application.

42ème foire d’Art contemporain de Cologne

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Köln

Art Cologne, la 42ème foire d’Art contemporain de Cologne, a ouvert ses portes du 16 au 20 avril 2008. Daniel Hug, nouveau directeur d’Art Cologne, poursuit une tradition colonnaise de plus de quarante ans de promotion de l’Art contemporain avec 150 galeries représentées sur un site qui l’an passé dépassait les 55’000 mètres carrés. Jeunes artistes et plus anciens seront représentés pour créer un panorama des créations des vingtième et vingt-et-unième siècles.