Mediamatic+Foundation

=[|Mediamatic Foundation]=



Mediamatic.net is an online community building platform. Home to The Mediamatic Foundation, it is also the organizes and showcases of a number of cultural happenings:
 * workshops: lectures on new technology with a cultural approach
 * exhibitions: art, fashion, design and technology
 * salons: functions kind of like TED talks, where smart people are invited to give guest lectures on their research findings
 * library: an online archive that is also a social networking platform; or what they describe as "social networking with books"
 * collaborations: outsourcing artists and designers in developing media-based art projects.

The [|"Mediamatic Exhibition"] page. This page functions sort of like a blog reel, and I find it rewarding to browse thorugh these carefully documented sites of interests!


 * Analysis**

Mediamatic is an all-encompassing project that aims to pool together multiple facets into a giant yet accessible package. And so, I think that Mediamatic fuses the qualities of two things:
 * forum: where likeminded people involved with a particular subject matter (i.e. technology x culture) gather and deliberate on things of interest
 * a delivery system where things are systematically directed to a specific audience.

And thus Mediamatic creates a platform on which there is first a push quality emitting from a central database of information, from this database which is also simultaneously changing and evolving by participation from the public, either through comments, or the "share this" "I like this" flags.

On top of being a social networking system it also has a "dating" function! By challenging and really working around the existing technologies, the Mediamatic platform then is very much like an interactive magazine.

It has some really simple yet interesting/effective interactions, such as this handy fade-in magnifier for photographs on the site. This simple interaction makes browsing through a normal site much more exciting. The load time is kept to a minimum, and allows for a really interesting way to look at hi-res images!



The Mediamatic platform then is an example of the perfect balance between a centralized and de-centralized database!