Time to celebrate! Last Friday I sent off my book manuscript to Routlegde New York, the publisher of Zero Comments. You can understand it was a true relief, a month after coming back in Amsterdam from a ten month stay in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg. As I read on the Routlegde site, Zero Comments is scheduled to hit the bookstores in June 2007. That’s ten months of production time. I am not sure if this process can be accelerated but I will do my best. Let’s hope the readers at least get something back from the Routlegde editors for their patience. Here is the table of content. Most topics will sound familiar to you:

Introduction: Pride and Glory of Web 2.0
Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse
The Cool Obscure: Crisis of New Media Arts
Whereabouts of German Media Theory
Blogging & Building: The Netherlands After Digitization
Indifference of the Networked Presence: On Internet Time
Revisiting Sarai: Five Years of New Media Culture in India
ICT After Development: The Incommunicado Agenda
Updating Tactical Media: Strategies for Media Activism
Axioms of Free Cooperation: Contesting Online Collaboration
Theses on Distributed Aesthetics
Introducing Organized Networks: The Quest for Sustainable Concepts

In the meanwhile I am teaching an intensive MA course at the University of Amsterdam. We’ve got eight students in this one year new media program. As a part of their assignment they are producing a blog entitled Masters of Media (white Dutch, no foreigners or ‘ethnic’ students here, five men, three women). This blog has recently switched from the wordpress.com to a University of Amsterdam server. Also we switched to English in the meanwhile, even though some comments or pages might still be in Dutch.