The Neb Watch
This is a picture of Ben Cerveny at Café De Dokter in Amsterdam, taken with Instagram on Friday 20 April. Matt Cottam, Adam Greenfield and Maria Ångerman were there too.
Ben has been known as Neb for as long as there have been profiles and usernames for services and applications (because the name Ben is so common it has most of the times been taken already). He is the kind of person who imagines new words for emerging phenomena. I believe people call them Nebisms.
Vocabulary starts with Ben.
(Although he would probably call it word space.)
Ben was the first person I ever heard talking about informational weather, back at Picnic in 2009. Meaning a new kind of climate that has been created by a perfect storm of ubiquitous computing and the realtime web. It is something I have also seen written down as network weather by Adam and social weather by Ben H. This meteorological metaphor is something we have taken literally with the development of a social weather map for DRO and the Floriade 2022 in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam.
The latest Nebism appeared after I took this picture at Café De Dokter, an antique Amsterdam bruin café from 1798 with a kind of Rembrandt lighting: “The Neb Watch.” The picture is not meant to show a painting-like beauty (don’t worry Hans Aarsman) - I am sure some people will find it a bit kitsch. I just like it because it shows a happy Ben in his Amsterdam.
Welcome back my friend. Missed you I have.
