Posts

› 2010/09/20

via www.economist.com/

When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff—such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-workers—it touched off a guerrilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006.

Guilty as charged.

You better not force us to smile - or have fun; we're German.

Though the guerrilla war against affairs sounds reasonable to me.

› 2010/09/19

via www.slate.com/

"The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."

› 2010/09/14

via arstechnica.com/

The authors of the study argue that the root of all these tasks involves making a probabilistic inference, where complete information is missing, so people have to make a best guess based on known odds. Video gaming, in their view, increases the efficiency at which people can process the odds and make an accurate decision—gamers simply can do more with less. As a result, any task of this sort sees benefits.

Action Games improve decision making

› 2010/09/14

via startup-russia.com/

The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn’t fail. It still didn’t really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.  Max Levchin (Cofounder, PayPal)

› 2010/09/12

via www.metafilter.com/

If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

Genius

› 2010/09/04

via www.sebastianmarshall.com/

The equal-odds rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist’s average publication. In other words, those scientists who create publications with the most impact, also create publications with the least impact, and when great publications that make a huge impact are created, it is just a result of “trying” enough times. This is an indication that chance plays a larger role in scientific creativity than previously theorized.

› 2010/09/03

via www.schneier.com/

in theory, theory and practice are the same; but in practice, they're very different.

Incredibly good quote.

› 2010/09/02

via blog.stackoverflow.com/

It is clearly not easy for man to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other — like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of “the narcissism of minor differences”, a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.

The Narcissism of minor differences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents

› 2010/09/01

via daringfireball.net/

Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary’, said the switch towards online formats was “prescient”. He said: “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise.”

None

› 2010/08/03

via daringfireball.net/

Unlike some jailbreaking apps, JailbreakMe.com does not require a third-party app. All you have to do is visit the JailbreakMe.com on your iPhone and follow the onscreen instructions. When it’s done, your phone will be jailbroken.

This is a small example of how to not do it

› 2010/07/27

via lesswrong.com/

Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens - not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children. […] "In the end," Simon Funk wrote, "the human species was simply marketed out of existence."

None

› 2010/07/27

via arstechnica.com/

Acquisitions are about enabling growth in a hot new market, and not about sustaining revenue in a mature one.

ars technica on why Apple won't buy AMD

› 2010/07/27

via paulgraham.com/

But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

Paul Graham on Addiction

› 2010/07/06

via www.info.ucl.ac.be/

The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves.

On Literary Criticism

Sounds about right to me.

› 2010/04/05

via scienceblogs.com/

According to a paper by Jennifer Brown, an applied macroeconomist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Mr. Woods is such a dominating golfer that his presence in a tournament can make everyone else play significantly worse. Because his competitors expect him to win, they end up losing; success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

› 2010/03/27

via www.scientificamerican.com/

The first case study appeared in 2002 in the journal Sexual Abuse and documented the story of a low-IQ’ed, antisocial, fifty-four-year-old convict who had a strong sexual interest in horses. In fact, this was why he was in prison for the fourth time on related offenses; in the latest incident, he had cruelly killed a mare out of jealousy because he thought she’d been giving eyes to a certain stallion. (You thought you had issues.)

Words fail me.

› 2010/03/07

via www.nytimes.com/

In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.

Reductio ad absurdum. Should use if ever writes another university text.

› 2010/02/27

via www.cnn.com/

Historically, anything that's new and different can be seen as a threat in terms of the religious beliefs; almost all religious systems are about permanence

Liberalism, Atheism, and IQ

The article states that current research indicates a (statistically significant though not extraordinary) correlation between liberalism / atheism and intelligence.

› 2010/02/18

via dangrover.com/

I know it always takes me a long time to grasp any new programming paradigm. I still don't quite get the idea of monads in Haskell. You see, unlike laymen, programmers are regularly challenged with new ways of abstracting information (be it entire programming paradigms, new frameworks, or just a new way of factoring their own code) and eventually become adept at this meta-skill.

How programming probably affected my ease of learning systems theory

› 2010/01/28

via cruftbox.com/

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” - Steve Jobs

› 2010/01/28

via cruftbox.com/

“Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” - Gertrude Stein

› 2009/12/07

via www.nanu.ms/

Favela – Das sind die Armenviertel in den Randgebieten brasilianischer Großstädte. Du kannst dir das ungefähr so vorstellen, wie bei uns in Kinderhaus oder Coerde, nur insgesamt abgefuckter und größer. Also eher wie Hamm.

:D

› 2009/11/06

via money.cnn.com/

Whatever anyone says about Apple, if it wasn't for Steve Jobs there would be no legitimate music online.

Everybody was lost. The record labels were frozen. When he came up with iTunes, it gave us a [legal] way to get the license ready to go online.

Before iTunes, Napster was out of business for two or three years, and then Kazaa and other file sharing started. There was no legitimate way to buy music. I think his impact on music has been extraordinary.

Much like Apple saved the music industry with the iPod & iTunes combination, I'm quite confident that they're now en route to save the dying newspaper business with the upcoming tablet. Whatever one might think about Apple: For the valuable sake of keeping journalism alive, let's hope they succeed.

› 2009/11/02

via www.textem.de/

Dass Esposito dabei an Luhmanns Ausführungen zum Thema Individualität anknüpft, um die Dialektik von durch Nachahmung erreichter Originalität zu beschreiben, ist nicht weiter verwunderlich und zudem sinnvoll.

› 2009/11/01

via www.wired.com/

In a space that’s crowded with several players, a definitive loss would be the complete failure and disappearance of a company. Zachary and Schobel are both betting Palm will be the first to go. Palm’s WebOS runs on the Palm Pre, and the company currently possesses 0 percent market share, according to Gartner, who predicts WebOS’ market share will only grow 1.4 percent in the next three years.

The company’s smartphone market share continues to shrink, and Zachary said he previously thought Palm would eventually be acquired by a larger company, such as Samsung, to develop mobile operating systems in-house. However, because Google hands out Android as a free, open source OS, this decreases the value of Palm as an acquisition target.

“Who I’m really scared for is Palm,” Schobel said. “They’re dead.”

As mentioned earlier, I fear the same. It's sad, because WebOS is a great Platform – just still in its infancy.

› 2009/10/31

via www.wired.com/

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

› 2009/10/31

via www.wired.com/

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

Die Anonymität des Internets, und die kurzsichtige Gier der Massenmedien, verhindern die Verbreitung von Information / Wahrheit.

› 2009/10/31

via www.wired.com/

And if you need a new factoid to support your belief system, it has never been easier to find one. The Internet offers a treasure trove of undifferentiated information, data, research, speculation, half-truths, anecdotes, and conjecture about health and medicine. It is also a democratizing force that tends to undermine authority, cut out the middleman, and empower individuals. In a world where anyone can attend what McCarthy calls the “University of Google,” boning up on immunology before getting your child vaccinated seems like good, responsible parenting. Thanks to the Internet, everyone can be their own medical investigator.

› 2009/10/31

via www.wired.com/

Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why? For starters, the human brain has a natural tendency to pattern-match — to ignore the old dictum “correlation does not imply causation” and stubbornly persist in associating proximate phenomena. If two things coexist, the brain often tells us, they must be related. Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.” Sounds reasonable, even though, as many scientists have noted, it has long been known that autism and other neurological impairments often become evident at or around the age of 18 to 24 months, which just happens to be the same time children receive multiple vaccinations. Correlation, perhaps. But not causation, as studies have shown.

› 2009/10/29

via www.handelsblatt.com/

Im Firmenblog brachte es einer der zahlreichen Kommentatoren auf den Punkt: "Wir (Generation C64, Generation Upload, Generation was weiß ich, die mit den Computern halt) sind einfach etwas anderes sozialisiert worden. Wir hassen Werbung, alle. Wir hassen PR-Geblubber. Wir hassen diese ganze Scheiße, mit der wir seit unserer Kindheit zugedröhnt wurden." Vodafone hat sich verhalten, wie Tante Emma es nie getan hätte. Verschwurbeltes Kauderwelsch wäre ihr ein Graus gewesen. Niemals hätte sie sich gebrüstet, etwas ganz Besonderes für einen besonderen Kunden zu haben, wenn das nicht stimmt.

Die Zukunft von klassischer PR ist düster

› 2009/10/29

via www.handelsblatt.com/

Auf diese Weise kommen Unternehmen und Verbraucher nicht mehr ins Gespräch. "Werbung funktioniert nur noch, wenn sie nicht als Werbung daherkommt", sagt Amir Kassaei, bewunderter Kreativchef der Agentur DDB. Oder wie der Blogger und Cartoonist Hugh McLeod meint: "Wenn du mit Leuten reden würdest, wie die Werbung mit Leuten redet, würden sie dir eine reinhauen."

Social media erfordert eine neue Form der Werbung

› 2009/10/27

via www.comedycentral.com/

Months after the initial announcement, today, it becomes official: Yahoo has shut down GeoCities — one of the original kings of free web hosting services.

Now, all of those GeoCities websites (excuse me, "Web Sites") are coming down. It's got me more tear-jerkingly nostalgic than Where The Wild Things Are.

No doubt, GeoCities started a revolution, but many of its ways have gone by the wayside. While Yahoo deploys the virtual demolition crews, let's make one last toast to a few of the relics they'll leave in the rubble.

Das Web folgt eigenen Moden, die sich an technischen Möglichkeiten halten. Geocities ist ein Beispiel für diese Mode, ähnlich wie 80er Jahre Kleidung.

› 2009/10/27

via news.slashdot.org/

"Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.

nuff said

› 2009/10/27

via www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/

The diversity of the 18-49 demographic certainly isn't new, and on the surface shouldn't be cited as a notable trend for 2010. But, when you stop to think about how different the media world is for an 18 year-old, relative to a 49 year-old, you might just be ready to step away from a target cohort that doesn't hold up. And every year, the divide between 'internet-raised' and 'television-raised' consumers becomes more profound. Just read 'Media Generations' by Martin Block PhD, Don Schultz PhD, and BIGresearch, and you'll quickly understand that today's 18-49 demographic cohort contains four different media generations.

A more finegrained means of target demographics is necessary.

› 2009/10/27

via www.paulgraham.com/

Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises. It explains why people are surprised how carefully you have to choose cofounders and how hard you have to work to maintain your relationship. You don't have to do that with coworkers. It explains why the ups and downs are surprisingly extreme. In a job there is much more damping. But it also explains why the good times are surprisingly good: most people can't imagine such freedom. As you go down the list, almost all the surprises are surprising in how much a startup differs from a job.

Very nice essay on the differences between operating a startup and a regular job.

› 2009/10/19

via www.fakesteve.net/

Larry's like, Look, the Borg has never been out ahead on anything. The difference is, they used to be able to catch up. They've always been copiers. That's been their business model from the start. Let others go out and create a market, then copy what they've done, sell it for less, and crush them. They got into the OS business by stealing DOS from someone else. They created Windows by stealing Apple's ideas. They got into desktop apps by copying Lotus and WordPerfect and then having the bright idea to bundle all the stuff into one cheapo suite. They pulled the trick off again with Internet Explorer versus Netscape, in the late 90s -- that was the last time they were able to let someone get out ahead of them and then pivot and copy and give it away free and take them over. By the end of the 90s they had broken through 50% market share in browsers, and that was it for Netscape.

wie innovation bei microsoft funktionierte, als der markt es noch erlaubte.

› 2009/10/19

via www.nytimes.com/

“This used to be the company that everyone looked to for innovation and excitement,” says James R. Gregory, the chief executive of CoreBrand, a brand consulting company. “It has lost that edginess in a fairly convincing way.” According to a new CoreBrand study, Microsoft’s reputation and the perception of its management and investment potential have been declining for over a decade, with the drop-off accelerating over the last five years.

das vertrauen in die unternehmensführung / die fähigkeit nützliche produkte herzustellen ist verloren gegangen

› 2009/10/08

via games.slashdot.org/

I made a point in a term paper a few years back that the very nature of GTA, though transgressive, transmits a clear establishment message. You cannot beat the police in GTA. You may escape them, but you cannot stop them. Any attempt to directly oppose the police always inevitably leads to death as there will always be more of them than you. The police in GTA are individually stupid, collectively difficult to evade, and taken as an entire establishment entirely invincible.

Further, there's a recognition (especially in GTA San Andreas) of the fact that the player you embody is fundamentally broken and leads a life devoid of meaning. All of the most likable characters in the games are either killed, betray you or are the "straight men" - the people who point out to your character the failure of their lifestyle.

So although the GTA games allow you to explore your own dark side it seems to guide you to the message that not only is the world better off without your enemies (the people you kill throughout the game) but also without you (the killer).

› 2009/03/21

via www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like John Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.) The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews, or Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology site. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.

das internet bietet mehr informationen als das bei zeitungen möglich war.

› 2009/03/20

via www.newyorker.com/

One important lesson Marx taught is that capitalism tends toward monopoly--an observation that was far from obvious in his day--giving rise to a need for strong regulation.... Likewise endogenous-growth theory models are undoubtedly Marxist in spirit, since their main aim is to demonstrate how technical progress emerges from the competitive process, and not from Heaven, as in the neoclassical model.

Schon auf Marx geht die Idee zurück, dass technologischer Fortschritt durch Konkurrenzkampf definiert wird.

› 2009/03/18

via isocracy.org/

The current reality is that despite all the talk of the establishment of user-created content, the "virtual community" of what is called "Web 2.0", the various 'blogs, facebook-like sites, twitter and so forth, only a small percentage are engaging in this community and arguably this is due to the presence of 'trolls', time-wasting individuals who exist soley for argument, rather than a cooperative search for the truth and mutual understanding [15]. In other words, they breach the first requirement expressed by Habermas as a foundation of a public sphere and formation of public opinion; intentional semantics.

› 2009/03/16

via www.thecommentfactory.com/

Theodore Adorno, his idea of mass culture was formed when he spent time in America – the replacement of high culture by base culture, vulgarization, commercialization and all this kind of stuff

wow

› 2009/02/24

via www.nytimes.com/

Such attention is becoming increasingly common as interactive technologies enable consumers to rapidly convey opinions to marketers.

“You used to wait to go to the water cooler or a cocktail party to talk over something,” said Richard Laermer, chief executive at RLM Public Relations in New York.

“Now, every minute is a cocktail party,” he added. “You write an e-mail and in an hour, you’ve got a fan base agreeing with you.”

That ability to share brickbats or bouquets with other consumers is important because it facilitates the formation of ad hoc groups, more likely to be listened to than individuals.

“There will always be people complaining, and always be people complaining about the complainers,” said Peter Shankman, a public relations executive who specializes in social media. “But this makes it easier to put us together.”

The phenomenon was on display last week when users of Facebook complained about changes to the Web site’s terms of service using methods that included, yes, groups on facebook.com. Facebook yielded to the protests and reverted to its original contract with users.

And in November, many consumers who used Twitter to criticize an ad for Motrin pain reliever received responses within 48 hours from the brand’s maker, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which apologized for the ad and told them it had been withdrawn.

“Twitter is the ultimate focus group,” Mr. Shankman said. “I can post something and in a minute get feedback from 700 people around the world, giving me their real opinions.”

Twitter is the ultimate focus group

› 2009/02/15

via nymag.com/

Now think about that for a second. In the midst of chaos—a plane just crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking, he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums, that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.

› 2009/02/04

via arstechnica.com/

Rosenbaum oversees a Twitter feed, too, a mix of the personal ("the problem with being law students is that at the end of the day defending joel, we still have to go home and read for class tomorrow"), the case-related ("breaking news: First Circuit will hear RIAA's appeal"), and the strategic ("know anyone interested in signing on to an amicus brief re: internet in the courtroom? send us a direct message").

› 2009/02/04

via arstechnica.com/

That is, until Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum got in touch with Nesson in 2008. Nesson took the case, acting as Tenenbaum's attorney, but he outsourced the work of research, strategy, and brief writing to a set of eager Harvard Law students. The students would quickly mount an ambitious defense, not just of Joel Tenenbaum, but of the claim that the RIAA legal campaign was unconstitutionally excessive and improper. Armed with a law library, Twitter, a Web site, and caffeine, the students have already made sure that the upcoming Tenenbaum trial will eclipse the Minnesota Jammie Thomas case for sheer spectacle.

And, if things go their way, the world will get the chance to see it all live on the Web.

twitter wird von studenten der harward-law-school genutzt, bei dem fall gegen die riaa

› 2009/02/01

via www.scripting.com/

Twitter forces you to write concisely, and that makes for crisper, more direct, easier to read copy.

I was reminded of this when reading a piece written by Dan Santow at Edelman PR, who offers a list of phrases that can be replaced by single words without loss of meaning.

das 140character-limit bei twitter forciert die nutzung von konziser sprache.

› 2009/01/26

via www.nytimes.com/

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter,

great link between twitter and social sciences.

› 2008/12/21

via www.telegraph.co.uk/

Researchers found that women who drink even moderately develop a reduced ability to rate attractiveness in male faces, even when they are sober.

› 2008/12/20

via george08.blogspot.com/

"I'll just get straight to the point. You've been affected by the layoffs."

He told me he was reading from a script he was required to follow, and that he needed an address to send some sort of "Agreement" to me in Australia, and needed it sent back by December 19. Before I'd even finished the call, I twittered (to my private account):

"Wow. I just got fired." I was immediately distressed.

I stayed up until about 2:30am that night, chain smoking and talking to friends who saw my tweet and had responded - THANK YOU. I sent a formal request for time to transition The Commons program to whoever is to take it over: "A week should do it," I said. It was denied.

Twitter nimmt persönliche Formen an.

› 2008/12/17

via news.cnet.com/

But now that Obama is poised to take office, the election party's over and it's back to reality. As buzzworthy as it remains, the social-media industry still hasn't proven itself in the business viability department. This was a concern in Silicon Valley even before the financial downturn began to grow truly alarming: Twitter has not yet produced a business model. Facebook and Digg are not yet profitable.

Nun, da soziale Netzwerke ihre sozialen Möglichkeiten unter Beweis gestellt haben, steht die Frage an, wie sie denn profitabel werden können.

Damit hat microblogging ein ähnliches Problem wie die privat-sender in der BRD: Wie können sie Plattform einer möglichen kritischen, politischen, diskursiven Öffentlichkeit sein, wenn sie primär kommerzielle Interessen hegen?

› 2008/12/16

via arstechnica.com/

More than three-quarters of experts and 81 percent of overall respondents agreed that the mobile phone would be the primary Internet connection tool in 2020, largely due to the "bottom" of the world's population relying on mobile communications to get online.

Da in Zukunft der Großteil des Online-Seins immer mobil über mobile Endgeräte sein wird, wird sich die Twitter Nutzung verstärken. Überhaupt ist Twitter nur ein Konzentrationseffekt von Dingen, die es schon mit IRC, AIM o.ä. gab, nämlich das Leute dort primär mitgeteilt haben, was sie gerade machen.

› 2008/12/15

via arstechnica.com/

If you think it's tough to be a blogger because your Google AdWords revenue has been in the toilet lately, the Committee to Protect Journalists wants to remind you that Internet journalist—including bloggers—can and do suffer much more around the world. According to the group's new report, Internet journalists now make up the largest single group of imprisoned journalists.

Of the 125 journalists imprisoned around the world for doing their jobs, 45 percent are "bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors." China continues its ten-year winning streak when it comes to tossing writers into jail, with Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan next in line.

Blogger haben es nicht gut.

› 2008/12/15

via arxiv.org/

We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data. In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors.

Die Popularitätsfunktion des Internet ist ziemlich genau vorhersagbar.

› 2008/12/10

via www.themorningnews.org/

With the usual exceptions, people on Twitter tend to fall into two main camps. There are responders, who use Twitter as a channel to interact heavily with other users, and broadcasters, who use it primarily as a micro-blogging platform.

These groups don’t necessarily get along. Responders will tell you that broadcasters are condescending talking heads who think they’re too good for the community. Broadcasters wish responders would take their nonsensical patter to a chat room, where they could natter on in privacy. Everyone agrees that members of the other group are total jackasses who don’t know how to use Twitter.

analyse

› 2008/12/09

via www.miriammeckel.de/

Ein Viertel mehr Leseunlust in acht Jahren, dass klingt ja nicht so tragisch. Ist es aber. Es ist bildungspolitisch alarmierend, weil Lesen Voraussetzung für viele andere Kompetenzen ist, wie zum Beispiel Mathematik oder Geschichtsverständnis. Wer nicht liest, verliert nicht nur den Zugang zu Zeitung oder Buch, er verliert auch in anderen Dimensionen den Anschluss.

Vor allem aber verzichtet der Nichtleser auf diese Momente, die das Lesen ermöglicht: sich ganz einzulassen auf eine Erzählung, sich mit ihr und durch sie hindurch treiben zu lassen, sich zu öffnen für die Strukturen den Sprache, den Vorgang des Beschreibens und Benennens, für neue Ideen und Sichtweisen und sie im Kopf mit dem eigenen Wissen und Denken zu verbinden.

Miriam Meckel darüber, warum Lesen so wichtig ist.

› 2008/12/06
› 2008/11/30

via www.forbes.com/

It was Twitter's moment. Users tagged posts with information or commentary on the crisis, turning a service that specializes in distributing short, personal updates to tight networks of friends and acquaintances into a way for people around the world to tune into personal, real-time accounts of the attacks.

twitter zeigt sich bei mumbai terror

› 2008/11/28

via www.techcrunch.com/

You can jump up and down and shout all you want that Twitter isn’t a real news source. But all you are doing is viewing the world through a reality lens that’s way outdated. People want information fast and raw from people who are on the scene. If it gets a little messy along the way, that’s ok. We’ll soon see tools that help us distill the really good stuff out of the stream anyway.

What matters isn’t any individual Twitter message and whether it’s right or wrong. It’s the organism as a whole, the aggregate, that lets people stream what they’re witnessing in real time to the world. That aggregate stream gives us more information, faster, than anything before. It’s news, and it’s incredibly valuable.

› 2008/11/28

via hackr.de/

Ein Faktor ist sicher, dass sich die Kommunikation / die Berichterstattung von gerade entdeckt’s in Richtung Twitter oder FriendFeed verschoben hat, und das ist auch völlig ok so.

weblogs werden durch twitter mehr und mehr ersetzt

› 2008/11/28

via www.spiegel.de/

Noch einmal Blogger Tim Malbon: "Für manche schien die Social-Media-Berichterstattung des Ereignisses zur eigentlichen Story zu werden. Das echte Ereignis für eine ganze Reihe von Leuten war vergangene Nacht: Twitter 1, CNN 0 - das ist wirklich traurig. Für viele wurden die alten Medien zum Feind, statt der Terroristen."

› 2008/11/28

via www.vadnu.com/

Why not look at microblogging as the new form of PR in general? Make a consencus that if you can’t tell your incredible breakthrough story in 140 characters or less, perhaps your story just isn’t worthwhile? Now, what that would do to the world of PR. And to the hapless consumers.

Microblogging als From von PR; Interessanter Konsensus.

› 2008/11/28

via edition.cnn.com/

With more than 6 million members worldwide, an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

› 2008/11/28

via www.spiegel.de/

Twitter, Blogs, Flickr: Die Nachrichtenkanäle des sozialen Internets laufen seit Beginn der Terrorwelle in Mumbai auf Hochtouren. Vor-Ort-Berichte erreichen ihre Leser schneller als je zuvor. Doch viele vermeintliche News sind chaotisch oder bloße Kopien - und manche sind schlicht falsch.

Die Geschwindigkeit und Probleme von Twitter / Microblogging.

› 2008/11/28

via www.techcrunch.com/

It was the day social media appeared to come of age and signaled itself as a news-gathering force to be reckoned with.

› 2008/11/28

via www.spiegel.de/

"In den letzten 35 Minuten haben sechs laute Explosionen das Trident-Hotel erschüttert", schrieben am Mittwochvormittag deutscher Zeit gleich mehrere Twitterer - die Nachricht kam damit gewissermaßen in Echtzeit auf der anderen Seite des Globus an, lange bevor auch Nachrichtenagenturen von den Detonationen berichteten. Der Australischen Zeitung "The Age" zufolge tauchten die ersten "Tweets" über die Anschläge schon Stunden vor den ersten TV-Berichten zum Thema auf. Der Microblogging-Dienst hat in derartigen Situationen einen entscheidenden Vorteil - er verlangt nur kürzeste Äußerungen (maximal 140 Zeichen) und lässt sich per Handy bedienen.

Am Beispiel der Indischen Terror-Anschläge, wird einmal mehr die Geschwindigkeit von Twitter dargestellt. Zum anderen zeigt sich aber auch, dass es keine Nachrichten sind. Es ist Stammtischgeplänkel.

› 2008/11/28

via eatsleeppublish.com/

At the end of my post, I asked people whether they thought that “journalism” was possible on Twitter, or if it could only accommodate “news.”

Ist Journalismus bei Twitter möglich? Viel mehr, notwendig? Ist Twitter nicht eher die Rohe masse, aus der sich Journalismus bedient? Nur halt besser, durchsuchbarer, indizierbar..

› 2008/11/25

via adage.com/

He went on to apply a similar standard to the broader world of consumer-generated media. "I think when we call it 'consumer-generated media,' we're being predatory," he said. "Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren't trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody.

Marketer vermutet, dass der SN inhalt nicht media ist. sondern einfach unterhaltung (chat).

er sieht den wert nicht ;)

› 2008/11/25

via mashable.com/

As we reported yesterday, Shaquille O’Neal is on Twitter, and it’s definitely the real Shaq. But two days ago as a few people started discovering The Big Aristotle’s account, not everyone was convinced.

Shaq twitters. Das interessante ist, dass in der Anfangsphase von twitter, kommunikation zwischen stars & non-stars möglich ist. vermutlich nur anfangs und auf dauer unmöglich.

› 2008/11/23

via daringfireball.net/

I have a feeling that print publications turning into online-only publications is going to be a recurring theme during this recession.

Gruber on the changing print landscape

› 2008/11/20

via carta.info/

Dabei könnte die Politik hier in der Tat mal etwas gestalten. Denn das Internet ist keine Freihandelszone. Es ist ein öffentlicher Raum, in dem wir zwar auch einkaufen, vor allem aber kommunizieren wir in ihm, halten Freundschaften, diskutieren miteinander. Und nicht nur das, dort informieren wir uns über Aktuelles, über Politisches, über Alles, was wir wissen wollen. Das Internet ist eine der ersten Anlaufstellen für den fragenden Bundesbürger geworden, es ist eines der wichtigsten Medien zur Verwaltung unseres Wissens.

über das internet

› 2008/11/20

via carta.info/

Man kann nur hoffen, dass international keiner das Programm in die Finger bekommt und auf diese Weise schnallt, wie wenig man in Deutschland in Sachen digitaler Technologie tatsächlich gepeilt hat. Tatsächlich ist die Bundesregierung einem klassischen medialen Problem aufgesessen: Immer sucht man erstmal das alte Medium im Neuen, das wusste schon Marshall McLuhan. Und jetzt denkt man im Wirtschaftsministerium, das Internet wäre ein Auto. Und wenn man sich um die Großkonzerne kümmert, würde man das Internet fördern.

wie wenig die regierung noch immer das internet versteht.

› 2008/11/19

via daringfireball.net/

And how cool is it that Penguin has a Flickr account?) (Via The Book Design Review.

john gruber findet es toll, das penguin flickr / web 2.0 nutzt.

› 2008/11/15

via www.sfgate.com/

Scoble concurred. "The world has taught me, if you have an audience, a business model will show up. Google demonstrated that. It was in business for four years before it found a business model," and now it's a multibillion-dollar company.

The model could be advertising, it could be selling Twitter as a service to companies, and it could find something else entirely.

Welches business-modell könnte sich für twitter entwickeln.

› 2008/11/15

via www.macworld.com/

Here’s the simple truth: Enterprise hates surprises. It’s not what they want. Enterprise wants predictability. They want to know when, what, how much, and that it will be all new and cool, yet change nothing. (Yes that’s contradictory. Have you ever tried to use “Enterprise Software?” Winning usability awards is so not happening there.) And they want to know everything in detail a year ahead of time. Can anyone seriously imagine how long Apple would survive under that model? Right, not long.

enterprises mögen keine neuen ideen. daher wird sich twitter hier nur langsam durchsetzen.

› 2008/11/15

via www.cio.com/

When cofounder Biz Stone saw the application that Jack Dorsey created in 2006 he was reminded of the way birds communicate: "Short bursts of information...Everyone is chirping, having a good time."

Original Definition des Begriffes Twitter

› 2008/11/15

via yro.slashdot.org/

What if Google knew before anyone else that a fast-spreading flu outbreak was putting you at heightened risk of getting sick? And what if it could alert you, your doctor and your local public health officials before the muscle aches and chills kicked in? That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool ... unveiled on Tuesday, right at the start of flu season in the US. Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will tend to turn to the Web for information, typing things like 'flu symptoms; or 'muscle aches' into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states.

Ein Beispiel, wie die Mitteilung von Nebensächlichkeiten aggregiert einen deutlich höheren Wert erreicht. Twitter könnte diesen Effekt vervielfachen, da hier nicht gesucht wird (also nur auf Problemlösungen anwendbar) sondern einfach mitgeteilt wird.

› 2008/11/11

via gotorio.squarespace.com/

Also entschuldigte ich mich bei Gore für die Störung, stellte mich vor und begrüßte ihn bei Twitter. Gores Augen wurden groß: “You already know?”, fragte er entgeistert. “Klar, Sie hatten schon vor Stunden 1500 Leser”, entgegnete ich. Er bedankte sich, sichtlich überrascht, dass er kurz nach seiner Anmeldung bei einem Online-Dienst schon von einem Deutschen beim Abendessen darauf angesprochen wird. Eine halbe Woche später, in diesem Moment, da ich dies schreibe, hat Gore schon 15.000 Leser.

Thomas Knuewer begruesst Al Gore bei Twitter, der sichtlich irritiert ist.

› 2008/11/10

via adverlab.blogspot.com/

To make it work, we take a sample from Twitter every 30 seconds and analyze them in 50-result batches for associations and term matches. They accumulate for 5 minutes and then we flush sample aggregates to the database. So the database has samples from when it started through present in 5-minute granularity. As new terms trend, they begin to populate on the X-axis. The system back end will be implemented using a Java-based stack and PostgreSQL RDBMS. The presentation will be implemented using Flash targeted to Player 9, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS targeted to modern browser versions with significant market share (Safari 2+, Firefox 2+, IE 6+).

Auswertung der Nachrichten bei Twitter, um einen Überblick über die U.S. Wahl zu bekommen.

› 2008/11/10

via adverlab.blogspot.com/

The flaws in online advertising can be described as problems of relevance and trust.

Online-Advertising fehlt Vertrauen. Hat Microblogging Vertrauen?

› 2008/11/09

via broadcast.oreilly.com/

How Techies Can Improve Democracy and Governance

Obama Wahl, Politik, und die Relevanz von Web 2.0 zeugs.

› 2008/11/09

via www.tagesanzeiger.ch/

Das Web ist für die Digital Natives auch ein Platz des Sehens und Gesehenwerdens: Community-Seiten wie Facebook oder MySpace erfüllen Funktionen, die früher Jugendtreffs oder der öffentliche Dorfplatz der Töffligeneration innehatten. Das ist einer der Gründe, warum Digital Natives so verblüffend viele persönliche Details von sich im Web preisgeben. Wer Leute kennen lernen will, muss von sich etwas erzählen, sich ein wenig öffnen. Diese Erfahrung wird ins Web transferiert, verändert hat sich nur das Medium.

dieses zitat zeigt, inwiefern das web (myspace, facebook, etc) die soziale funktion von realwelt-treffpunkten (kaffeehäuser, jugendtreffs, etc) übernimmt.

› 2008/11/06

via www.germancowboys.de/

"Genau wie Kennedy im Jahr 1960 das Fernsehen zu seinem Vorteil einzusetzen wusste um seinen Wahlkampf gegen Nixon zu gewinnen, hat Barack Obama diese Wahlen dank seines Wissens über die Funktionsweise des Internets und anderer neuen Medien gewonnen."

Relevanz der neuen Medien, für Politik

› 2008/11/05

via arstechnica.com/

Current, cofounded by Al Gore, saw success with a "Hack the Debates" experiment in which the company overlaid political posts from Twitter users on top of live coverage of the McCain and Obama debates in real time. For its November 4 election night coverage, Current will fuse traditional and social media even further by incorporating real-time content from Digg, Twitter, and even video commentary from 12seconds.tv users.

Current, ein TV-Sender, hat zur U.S. Wahl TV mit Twitter und Digg vermengt.

› 2008/11/03

via www.nytimes.com/

Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama’s comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.

on how the web 2.0 changed the 2008 presidential campaign.

› 2008/11/03

via www.nytimes.com/

But those who suggest that 2008 is a postnetwork affair should consider that, it was Gov. Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, the anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” and her impersonation by Tina Fey on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” that defined her in the public imagination. When Senator Obama’s campaign sought to make one last push with a 30-minute infomercial, it bought time on three major networks, using money harvested on one platform — the Web — to buy time on another — broadcast television.

on how the web 2.0 changed the 2008 presidential campaign.

› 2008/11/03

via thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/

How else would an airline inaugurate a new terminal these days, except by Twittering it?

JetBlue Airways, which began flying to and from its new home at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York this morning, has been sending out updates about its first day via Twitter.com, and on its own blog.

› 2008/11/03

via www.nytimes.com/

“No one knows the impact of quasi-permanency on the Web yet, but it surely has changed the political world,” said Allan Louden, a professor who teaches a course on digital politics at Wake Forest University. “The role of gatekeepers and archivists have been dispersed to everyone with Internet access.”

on how the web 2.0 changed the 2008 presidential campaign.

› 2008/11/02

via digg.com/

Goldman Sachs takes $12B Bailout, Hands out $14B Bonuses dailymail.co.uk — You aren't going to read about this in the US press, they are too busy lying about everything they report. We have to read about it in a British newspaper.

Befreiung von den klassischen Journalisten, deren Filter

› 2008/11/02

via www.stefan-niggemeier.de/

Der endlose Hunger nach Content führt auch dazu, dass konfektionierte PR-Meldungen begeistert aufgenommen und verbreitet werden. Das ist kein neues Phänomen, aber eines, das durch die Online-Medien noch verschärft wird. Ein paar Prominente als Schlümpfe auftreten zu lassen, um für seine Überraschungseier im redaktionellen Content zu werben, ist dabei fast schon überambitioniert. Jeder Filmtrailer verwandelt sich in einem Online-Angebot von Werbung zu Premium-Content.

› 2008/11/02

via www.stefan-niggemeier.de/

Vor kurzem hat Bild.de sogar entdeckt, dass es im Internet die Möglichkeit gibt, auf andere Texte zu verlinken. Und die Kollegen nutzen das gelegentlich sogar, nicht nur unter die Buchstaben CDU routiniert einen Verweis auf cdu.de zu legen, sondern zum Beispiel auf die konkreten Artikel in britischen Boulevardzeitungen zu verweisen, die ihnen – natürlich variiert durch Missverständnisse und Übersetzungsfehler – als Vorlage für ihre Artikel dienen. Das ist mehr als man von den meisten anderen Medien sagen kann, bei denen immer noch der Glaube zu herrschen scheint, dass jeder Link auf eine Quelle die Gefahr bedeutet, einen Leser zu verlieren, obwohl es längst keine Frage mehr ist, dass das Gegenteil der Fall ist.

› 2008/11/01

via mashable.com/

I believe what makes Twitter so valuable are these moments of connectivity that simply aren’t possible through any other communications tool.

twitter moments. liste von beispielen für dinge, die nur mit twitter möglich sind.

› 2008/10/30

via www.fastcompany.com/

In truth, it was an old--even hoary--marketing concept, dating back to 1955, when the pioneering sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote Personal Influence. They had argued that advertising affected society through a two-step process: Companies broadcast messages, which were then seized upon by "opinion leaders" who proselytized their peers. They weren't talking about celebrities like Oprah or even Paris Hilton, but about the rare everyday people who catalyze trends. Reach those opinion leaders, Katz and Lazarsfeld argued, and you'd quickly convert the masses.

Gladwell reanimated this concept in The Tipping Point. To help illustrate the cultural sway of his hypernetworked protagonists, he tapped the renowned 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. In that experiment, Milgram had given letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to ferry them to a particular stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters along to a colleague socially closer to the target.

Twitter untersuchen, inwiefern z.B. Gruber o.a. als Opinion Leaders gelten können...

› 2008/10/28

via blog.internetnews.com/

We can't make money selling the desktop that's why we focused on a zero licensing cost business model

Mark Shuttleworth puts it spot-on.

› 2008/10/28

via www.connectedmarketing.de/

Der Twitterer mit den Nachrichten aus der Baby-Krabbelgruppe denkt über eine neue Lebensversicherung nach, um die Sie pitchen. Wenn Sie meinen, dass all diese Menschen und all die anderen, die das Web für sich und ihre ganz eigenen Ideen und Projekt entdeckt haben (dazu deren Freunde, Familien, Bekannten), nichts als Loser sind, dann bedeutet das letztlich, dass Sie Ihre Kunden für Loser halten

Die Marketing-Relevanz von Twitter ergibt sich von den Usern als Mediatoren, die die Nachrichten der Nutzer weitertragen.

› 2008/10/28

via www.connectedmarketing.de/

Denn wenn es eine Kompetenz gibt, die man künftig brauchen wird, dann ist das die Kompetenz "Zuhören". Wem? Natürlich – den "Losern". Oder anders gesagt: allen Menschen, die was zum Produkt zu sagen haben. Tausenden von Leuten, deren Meinung mittlerweile einfach mehr zählt als die eine Idee des Werbers. Das hat viel mit Respekt zu tun, mit Interesse, mit Offenheit und Neugier.

› 2008/10/28

via www.connectedmarketing.de/

Das 20. Jahrhundert war in der Werbung das Jahrhundert der Idee. Das 21. Jahrhundert wird das Jahrhundert des Menschen sein.

› 2008/10/26

via www.stefan-niggemeier.de/

Der Blogger und Medienvisionär Jeff Jarvis spricht bei dem, was regionale Zeitungsverlegern im Internet machen bzw. nicht machen, von einem „fast schon kriminellen Mangel an Innovation”.

› 2008/10/26
› 2008/10/25

via www.scripting.com/

When one of the big guys competes with Twitter, they will do everything Twitter does, compatibly, and they will also offer a firehose without restrictions, licenses or approval. Twitter will have to follow suit, but then it will be too late, they will be following in the market they created.

Gefahr für twitter durch big corporations

› 2008/10/22

via news.slashdot.org/

The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate open source projects and the "Web 2.0 free economy," says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including Wikipedia, CNN's iReport, and much of the blogosphere. Instead of users offering their services "for free," he says, we're about to see a "sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor" and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash. Companies that will survive, he says, include Hulu, iTunes, and Mahalo. "The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue," says Keen."

der arme versteht nicht, das manche leute dinge nicht nur des geldes halber machen

› 2008/10/21

via arstechnica.com/

Carr has filed a complaint with the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission over the lack of high-speed broadband available to some rural residents.

Human Rights klage weil kein DSL

› 2008/10/18
› 2008/10/18

via www.theatlantic.com/

A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

super zitat, dass die zeitliche differenz, und damit den wesentlichen unterschied, von journalismus / blogging / (microblogging) verdeutlicht

› 2008/10/18

via www.alleyinsider.com/

Why is Twitter different than the 9,000 other Web 2.0 companies that are intending to figure out a revenue model eventually? Because people are obsessed with it.

› 2008/10/18

via www.theatlantic.com/

the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.

matt drudge on blogs (via andrew sullivan)

› 2008/10/18

via www.theatlantic.com/

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages

andrew sullivan on blogging.

› 2008/10/18

via www.theatlantic.com/

From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation.

sullivan, erklärt den reiz des einfachen publizierens

› 2008/10/18

via www.theatlantic.com/

It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.

andrew sullivan on blogging.

› 2008/10/18

via www.theatlantic.com/

We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge.

temporaler unterschied zwischen blog und print journalismus

› 2008/10/18

via www.theatlantic.com/

But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.

blogging schafft eine direktere verbindung zwischen writer und publics

› 2008/10/16

via idle.slashdot.org/

According to a study to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, you can tell someone's political affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Conservatives tend to be neat and liberals love a mess. Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be colorful and full of books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia. Their conservative contemporaries, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials. Their bedrooms and offices are well lit and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags — especially American ones. Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, says these room cues are "behavioral residue." The findings are just the latest in a series of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. I, for one, support a woman's right to clean.

messy = liberal

› 2008/10/15

via www.germancowboys.de/

Daniel Kraft von Reddot sagt, dass dabei das mittlere Management umgangen werde. Web 2.0 sei allerdings eine Generationen-Frage. Manager über 40 seien häufig Verweigerer, wollten nur ungern von der inzwischen schon guten alten E-Mail als Kommunikationsmittel lassen. Bentele: "Wir haben die Papier-Generation, die E-Mail-Generation, die Instant-Messanger-Generation und die Community-Generation." Letzterer gehöre die Zukunft.

Über die verschiedenen Generationen moderner Kommunikationsformen.

› 2008/10/13

via arstechnica.com/

Seriously. You could entitle the presentation, "How to do business in a world where rich backers are not just shoveling money at you," because that's essentially what it is.

About a presentation given by big VC's to web 2.0 startups.

› 2008/10/09

via bygonebureau.com/

When I arrived in Hamburg, I felt somewhat disappointed in its lack of “Old European” history. I wanted to immerse myself in gothic architecture and struggling artists but found prostitutes instead.

An American moving to Hamburg.

Great reflections on Hamburg and emigration from a expatriates perspective.

› 2008/10/08

via arstechnica.com/

The authors feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon. "These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents' social worlds in school and online," they conclude.

Viele charakteristika von personeller kommunikation sind auch im internet zugegen.

› 2008/10/08

via tech.slashdot.org/

The Guardian has an interesting story on Vint Cerf, the 'father of the internet,' in which he says there's no silver bullet for scammers, spammers and criminals running zombie networks and porn-to-porn file swapping because 'the internet was designed that way.' Cerf adds, 'Like every medium, the internet can be abused. When we think about it, we can commit fraud locally and internationally using the telephone system and postal service.

spam, das Internet war so designed, dass spam möglich ist. es lässt sich nicht einfach so beheben.

› 2008/10/06

via news.slashdot.org/

On Friday someone posted a false rumor that Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack on CNN's unverified citizen journalism site, iReport. Apple's stock price went vertical, losing 9% before Apple stepped in and denied the rumor; the stock then recovered most of its loss. The SEC is investigating. PCWorld looks at the hit taken by citizen journalism as a result of this incident.

die macht, die durch citizen journalism entsteht.

› 2008/10/06

via news.slashdot.org/

This is The Register's world-class investigative piece concerning one aspect of the meltdown on Wall Street ('naked short selling') and how the criminals engaged a journalist to distort Wikipedia to confuse the discourse. The article explicitly and formally accuses a well-known US financial journalist, Gary Weiss, of lying about his efforts to distort a Wikipedia page under assumed names, and accuses the Powers That Be in Wikipedia (right up to and including Jimbo Wales) of complicity in protecting Weiss. This is not another story about a 15-year-old farm kid in Iowa pretending to be a professor. This is like the worst Chomskian view of Elites manipulating mass opinion. But it is all documented

wikipedia, etc, being used for mass opinion manipulation. wikipedia hat viel mehr vertrauen, als z.B. das fernsehen, da es von "gleichgesinnten" geschrieben wurde

› 2008/10/01

via www.spreeblick.com/

Das Fernsehen könnte das theoretisch leisten, hat sich aber entschieden, für politische Themen höchstens eine Stunde am Stück freizuschaufeln. Diese Sendungen werden dann mit acht Gästen bestückt, jeder hat ein paar Minuten, um ein, höchstens zwei Thesen abzusondern, dann wird es ein wenig laut und dann ist auch gut. In Zeitungen wird nur eine Sicht vermittelt, dann werden ein paar Leserbriefe veröffentlicht, bestenfalls wird noch eine Gegenrede herausgegeben. Ein Buch vermittelt auf zweihundert Seiten nur eine Perspektive, dafür aber umso breiter. Blieben noch Fachzeitschriften. Metadiskussion! gibt es dafür Metapopcorn?

digitale medien gegen traditionelle medien bezüglich politik

› 2008/09/30

via arstechnica.com/

Most Americans feel that companies should have a presence on social media sites, and many feel that they should actively interact with customers through those sites. Those are just some of the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, which said that 93 percent of Americans expect to see companies online where the users are—on social networking and other media sites.

IMPORTANT! 93% der amerikaner meinen, dass es wichtig ist, dass unternehmen auch im social web präsent sind

› 2008/09/30

via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_(film)

Patrons were lured to an event billed as cage fighting, held at a Convention Center, by print and Craigslist advertisements, promoting "hot girls", $1 beer and $5 admission. 1500 people attended the event, and were greeted by signs that informed them that they were being filmed. No cell phones, video, or cameras were allowed inside. Instead of hot girls and cage fighting, the acts taking place became homosexual in nature, and people threw chairs and beer at the performers.

New Sascha Cohen Movie.

The new Sascha Cohen aka Borat, Ali G Movie already made me smile. I have great expectations. I hope he won't someday get shot during his endeavours of exposing the ugly sides of society

› 2008/09/25

via arstechnica.com/

Saying that correcting misinformation does little more than reinforce a false believe is a pretty controversial proposal, but the claim is based on a number of studies that examine the effect of political or ideological bias on fact correction.

Wenn falsche Meinungen korrigiert werden, festigt man sie stattdessen.

› 2008/09/24

via arstechnica.com/

The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don't care what the boxes say anymore.

Most users are idiots.

This displays a problem I have long experienced myself. However being rather aquainted with PC's it didn't affect me too much. But someone without the obvious technical knowledige will likely just confirm every possible dialog, which explains the current state of virii, phishing and malware from a users point of view - without any major need of critizing the vendors.

› 2008/09/06

via blogs.computerworld.com/

I just saw Microsoft's much ballyhooed Jerry Seinfeld ad, and can say without equivocation it's one of the worst, most pointless ads in history. If this is Microsoft's response to the "I'm a Mac" ads, it should fold up its tent and tell the world to switch to Apple.

Microsoft

› 2008/09/06

via arstechnica.com/

But people also use Twitter for much more interesting things, and we'd like to be your tour guide through the less-explored portions of the Twittersphere (yep, another "sphere" for you to be aware of). Welcome to Twitter's more interesting, more useful, and more innovative side.

Zusammenfassung der unterschiedlichen Nutzungsweisen die es inzwischen für Twitter gibt.

› 2008/09/03

via arstechnica.com/

While many humans at least aspire to monogamous relationships, pairing among our animal colleagues can range from complete monogamy to an "anything goes" approach to sexual commitment.

niko baitz!

› 2008/09/02

via arstechnica.com/

In the void between blogging and instant messaging, microblogging has emerged to provide users with yet another medium for electronic communication. Microblogging services, such as Twitter and Identi.ca, allow users to post short messages (140 characters or less) for their friends and followers. The technology offers a sort of universal back-channel for real-world events and helps bring Internet acquaintances closer together.

short description of twitter

› 2008/09/02

via arstechnica.com/

Like all new mediums, microblogging is ripe for artistic exploitation. New York Times writer Matt Richtel set out to test Twitter's literary potential by writing a "Twiller", a thriller story in 140-character increments. Richtel valiantly attempts to convey a cliché murder mystery—complete with dead hookers, an amnesia-afflicted killer, and (of course) Barack Obama.

Twitter being used for writig short stories

› 2008/09/01

via ask.slashdot.org/

If you want a Java job, just update your resume to say that you know Java. I have met lots of J2EE experts at work, who would not be able to code a "Hello World" program, if their jobs depended on it. Also learn lots of buzz words.

hehe, I've met those 'experts' too. Big corporations tend to 'collect' them.

› 2008/08/31

via wirres.net/

aber mal im ernst. von tieferer beleuchtung oder sozio-kultur vermag ich in dieser antwort nichts zu erkennen, wohl aber eine unfassbar feinen beobachtungsgabe für gut abgehangene klischees. horx erzählt natürlich quatsch. offensichtlich hat er schon lange nicht mehr mit jemand anders als seiner frau gefrühstückt und war schon lange nicht mehr im kaffeehaus oder der ubahn. beim frühstück kann man sowohl seine informationen mit einem laptop oder handy „upgraden“ und mit diesen geräten das gespräch mit dem partner oder den kindern verhindern, genauso wie kaffeehäuser heutzutage voll mit leuten sind, die das anstarren anderer leute mit hilfe von laptops, handys oder iphones vermeiden.

› 2008/08/31

via rogerebert.suntimes.com/

It is such a relief to hear the music swell up at the end of a Roland Emmerich movie, its restorative power giving us new hope. Billions of people may have died, but at least the major characters have survived. Los Angeles was wiped out by flying saucers in Emmerich's "Independence Day," New York was assaulted in his "Godzilla," and now, in "The Day After Tomorrow," Emmerich outdoes himself: Los Angeles is leveled by multiple tornados, New York is buried under ice and snow, the United Kingdom is flash-frozen, and lots of the Northern Hemisphere is wiped out for good measure. Thank god that Jack, Sam, Laura, Jason and Dr. Lucy Hall survive, along with Dr. Hall's little cancer patient.

das happy end in emmerich filmen hinterfragend

› 2008/08/31

via netzwertig.com/

Die New York Times hat diese Woche einen Artikel publiziert, der eine Lösung für dieses Problem skizziert: YouTube stellt für Medienunternehmen eine Technologie namens Video ID bereit, mit denen Rechte verletzende Videos aufgespürt werden können. Sie können dann das Entfernen der Videos veranlassen, oder sie können es auch dabei belassen und die vom jeweiligen Video erzielten Werbeeinnahmen kassieren. Überraschenderweise nehmen laut Google 90% der 300 Unternehmen, die Video ID verwenden, die letztere Möglichkeit war. Im Durchschnitt verdoppelt sich dabei das Volumen der von ihnen monetarisierbaren Views.

› 2008/08/31

via news.oreilly.com/

Right. The thing is though that you go to a conference and everyone is using a MacBook but you go into any corporate space or pretty much any personal space and very few people are using desktop Macs.

The problem is, that there is no real desktop mac. The Mac Pro is way too expensive and the Mac Mini lacks Graphics Power, a seconds monitor connector and expandability.

› 2008/08/30

via twitter.com/

Das Schöne an Twitter: Man darf ungestraft Wahrheiten zuspitzen und simplifizieren.

Sixtus über die Vorteile von Twitter. Etwas provokant.

› 2008/08/29

via arstechnica.com/

What it does do is sound a ringing endorsement of the basic principle that UGC sites can, in fact, count as "service providers" under the DMCA. While there's still plenty to argue about in every particular case, that general reassurance will be comforting to everyone in the Web 2.0 world.

Veoh.com and thus others can be considered dmca safe harbours.

› 2008/08/27

via www.tuaw.com/

It appears that they are expecting big things from the iPhone market and advertisers, as they will be publishing the quarterly iPhone mag in paper and online versions.

On why the Publishers of Smartphone & Pocket PC stalled the magazine in favour of a new iPhone publication.

› 2008/08/27

via arstechnica.com/

While being able to view Flickr photos shot in your city or to see local microblogging posts on Twitter is fun and all, we haven't seen anyone really aggregate location-based media into one lifestream to provide a birds-eye view of what's going on across news outlets, social networks, and other UGC communities.

fwix kombiniert alle location aware social services in ein konglomerat

› 2008/08/27

via arstechnica.com/

The command interface is conceptually similar to desktop launcher tools like Enso, Quicksilver, and GNOME-Do. Unlike those tools, it places a strong emphasis on web content manipulation and web services. In many ways, it's like an interactive mash-up system. Ubiquity can respond to user instructions in several different ways. It can directly alter the contents of a web page, it can manipulate the browser interface, it can load a page in a new tab, and it can display output in a notification pop-up.

Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension from Mozilla Labs.

First the new Javascript Engine, which surpasses Squirrelfish by large amounts, now this. As much as I love Safari, if Firefox continues to add exciting features at such a strong pace, I seriously have to consider switching back to the beloved fox.

› 2008/08/26

via blogs.adobe.com/

As I remind my teammates, "I swear because I care"--and I care a lot, at high volume. 

john nack on his managing of photoshop

› 2008/08/26

via interviews.slashdot.org/

On August 18 and 19, you submitted questions for NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin about his (non-profit) site's ability to live up to its claim, "Your guide to good journalism." We sent selected questions to Fabrice on August 19. Here are his answers.

Gutes Interview mit den Machern

› 2008/08/26

via www.chrisfinke.com/

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:

Eine Firefox-Erweiterung, die Troll-Kommentare ausblendet

› 2008/08/26

via tech.slashdot.org/

"Remember Knight-Ridder and AT&T's Viewtron from 1983? With a $900 terminal and $12 a month, you could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. After sinking $16 million a year into the project, Knight-Ridder shut it down in 1986. That's just the earliest of the 5 newspaper failures on the Web that Valleywag details in this post, writing: 'each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.'"

Die ersten Gehversuche von Zeitungen im Internet. Allesamt nicht von Erfolg gekrönt. Startete bereits 1980.

› 2008/08/21

via games.slashdot.org/

Ragnar Tornquist is respected as one of the best storytellers in today's game industry. He's done work on Anarchy: Online, Dreamfall, and upcoming MMO The Secret World. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a lengthy three-part interview with Tornquist about how good stories are crafted, how they interact with other aspects of the games, and what his preferences are for building a compelling character.

› 2008/08/21

via twitter.com/

Twitter-Bashing von Bloggern ist das neue Blogger-Bashing von Journalisten.

Interessante Beobachtung zu Twitter.

› 2008/08/21

via www.epd.de/

Ist unter solchen Bedingungen Journalismus noch leistbar?

Altmeppen: Klar ist er noch leistbar. Aber ganz gewiss kein qualifizierter Journalismus mehr. Manche Zeitungen wie die "Frankfurter Rundschau", aber auch Regionalzeitungen spielen mit dem Renommee, das sie sich geschaffen haben, wenn die redaktionellen Ressourcen derart stark beschnitten werden.

Prof. Altmeppen dazu, ob aufgrund von Anzeigenkrise o.A. Qualitätsjournalismus heute noch geleistet werden kann.

› 2008/08/21

via www.tuaw.com/

fear of switching is the foundation of customer loyalty for PCs.

From a Get-a-Mac Add. Tough one.

› 2008/08/21

via ivy.antville.org/

Nach dem Riesenerfolg der Twitterlesung, wo Blogger beschlossen hatten es toll zu finden sich gegenseitig Kurzmitteilungen mit der intellektuellen Fallhöhe von Einkaufszetteln vorzulesen, nun der nächste Hammer-Kulturevent: Landwirte aus Sachsen-Anhalt lesen ihre Lieblings-Wasserstandsmeldungen für die Flusschifffahrt aus drei Jahrhunderten.

Blogger Sven K. kritisiert den geringen Wert der Inhalte twitters. M. e. ungerechtfertigt, da er falsche Maßstäbe ansetzt. Twitter will nicht erstrangig Qualitätsjournalismus abdecken. Twitter deckt alle Kommunikation ab und dadurch nebenher auch Relevantes und Hinweise die dann als Grundlage für qualitativ hochwertige journalistische Produkte dienen können. Twitter ist eher ein digitales Pendant zu einer Freundesrunde / Stammtisch o.a. etwas, wo jeder einem begrenzten Publikum (d.h. im kleinen Rahmen) seine Gedanken mitteilen kann. Aber mit einer Archivierungsfunktion.

› 2008/08/20

via www.wired.com/

Indeed, I'm in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user into the semantics -- and fun -- of gameplay. You regard losing weight as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind. This puts me in mind of the talk that Jane McGonigal -- a brilliant and pioneering alternative-reality game designer -- gave at this year's South by Southwest conference. She argued that game designers ought to put their skills to use in the real world by reshaping dull, everyday activities into fun challenges. Why not a game that gives you points for walking your dog or jogging?

› 2008/08/20

via arstechnica.com/

In 2006, Rice experimented with a wiki for his Introduction to Political Science class. In addition to online articles, the wiki links to books at Project Gutenberg for older texts. This kept the students' reading list to below $40, an important consideration when tuition seems to go up every year. Students could also collaborate, posting class notes and helping to develop the course.

Collborative Wikis as an alternative to commercial academic TextBooks.

› 2008/08/20

via arstechnica.com/

The first is NewsCred, first launched privately in May and opened to the public today. NewsCred acts as a sort of news aggregator like Google News, except with a number of twists. For one, NewsCred allows you to choose among a handful of news and blog sources that you'd like to see news from. More importantly, however, is the fact that NewsCred uses an algorithm to rank stories on the page based on the credibility of the story, the publication, and then author.

Neue Angebote, die stärker auf credibility als Merkmal der Komplexitätsreduktion setzen.

› 2008/08/20

via arstechnica.com/

Most browser implementors are quick to adopt emerging Internet technologies, but Microsoft can't or won't make Internet Explorer a modern web browser.

IE Just Sucks.

› 2008/08/19

via arstechnica.com/

Folks are increasingly getting their news online as the popularity of traditional news outlets like TV, radio, and newspapers continues to decline. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press conducted its biennial survey of news consumption between April 30 and June 1 this year of 3,612 US adults. Pew named four distinct groupings of the news audience, and although all groups still rely on traditional media in some ways, online sources continue to gain traction—and from desirable demographics. That said, Americans still have some issues with the Internet as a news source, however.

Online News Consumption Gros - Despite Credibility Issues

› 2008/08/19

via arstechnica.com/

"One of the things that's happening in cloud computing and Web 2.0 is centralization," he said. "We need to think about what will make this web platform of the future open."

Tim O'Reilly on the future of the web.

› 2008/08/19

via arstechnica.com/

Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), a pioneer in using new media to communicate with constituents, sounded the alarm over the new rules via Twitter.

US Congressman uses Twitter

› 2008/08/19

via twitter.com/

There are really two reasons I'm single: (1) incredibly picky, (2) when I like a girl I tell her she's my goddess instead of ignoring her.

Insightfull comment from Wil Shipley which just about fits me in every single way. Sigh.

› 2008/08/19

via twitter.com/

Langsam hab ich den Eindruck, dass Tweets PR-Agenturen mehr in Panik versetzen als Blog-Einträge...

Thomas Knuewer über die Relevanz von Twitter für PR

› 2008/08/19

via arstechnica.com/

Twitter seems like a really stupid concept... and it is!  There's no reason anyone would want to spend their time reading and writing random, stream of consciousness microblogs.  Really.  I can't stop. 

I don't know what it is, but it's stupidly addictive.

Kurt Mackey on the Twitter addiction

› 2008/08/19

via radar.oreilly.com/

This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results). Journalism professor Jay Rosen noticed this too, and wrote the tweet that sparked this post: @NYTimesComm Could you try to find out for me why Week in Review pieces do not link out even when vital to the story? http://is.gd/1Hzd

Is linking to yourself the future of the web?

› 2008/08/18

via dfbills.com/

I heard this stat last night: “6 of the top 10 sites are social apps” so I decided to check out out.  According to Alexa, this is correct:

Sehr interessant, um die Wichtigkeit sozialer Komponenten zu untermauern.

› 2008/08/18

via interviews.slashdot.org/

NewsTrust is, to quote from the site's header, "Your guide to good journalism." Specifically, NewsTrust links to stories published both by well-known media and by less-known blogs, and asks its users to rank and review those stories on accuracy, balance, context, evidence, fairness, importance, information, sources, style, and trust.

› 2008/08/18

via arstechnica.com/

Social websites like Facebook and MySpace have attracted a great deal of attention as targets of opportunity for phishing scams, but they are scarcely the only two social networking sites. New information suggests that hackers have tuned in to the newfound popularity of microblogging, and are at the very least evaluating Twitter as a potential target.

Spammers target Twitter too.

› 2008/08/18

via yro.slashdot.org/

"You have already heard the news that the SCO Group's US$5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. It was the Web site Groklaw.net that broke the news and posted the complete 102-page ruling; after that, it was picked up by mainstream media and trade press. In fact, it's Groklaw that has covered every aspect of SCO's legal fights with Linux vendors IBM , Novell and Red Hat and Linux users Daimler Chrysler and AutoZone ever since paralegal Pamela Jones started the site as a hobby in 2003. This feature does a great job of chronicling Groklaws' hand in the demise of SCO's case."

tolles beispiel, für die möglichkeiten die partizipation und verbreitungstechnologien erlauben.

› 2008/08/17

via tech.slashdot.org/

we have this joke which says 'Internet Explorer 7 is the best release we ever did,' because they would not have done it, if we would have not built Firefox

› 2008/08/16

via psychcentral.com/

  1. The Paradox of Choice features Barry Schwartz in a provocative TED Talk with a different view on social psychology - too much consumer choice makes us unhappy. Not just when you’re buying salad dressing; Schwartz looks at some wider sociological impacts of increased choice.

the paradox of choice. great video by ted schwartz

› 2008/08/16

via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/

But why should we be the sole beneficiaries of such blegs? Surely our readers, in addition to providing a great reservoir of diverse knowledge, also have bleg requests of their own.

Freakonomics blog nutzen, um meine digg arbeit und quotevault zu vermarkten

› 2008/08/16

via outsidethetext.com/

he Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Galloway and Thacker. This is currently one of my favorite books on network culture. Complex, yet concise Thacker and Galloway take their questioning further than most, past the simple rhetoric of “networks yeah!” that inform many works.

› 2008/08/16

via psychcentral.com/

The fact is that climate change, if it were caused by gay sex, or caused by the practice of eating puppies, millions of Americans would right now be massing on the street insisting that the administration do something about it.

Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness) on the task of social psychology to explain why people don't get as actively outraged over acid rain as other issues.

I'd wager that the main problem here is that there's no easy target to blaim. We ourselves are to blaim in terms of climate change. We can't protest against our own actions. People need easy targets to protest against.

› 2008/08/16

via www.nytimes.com/

His statistical approach has led to what he says is a radically new interpretation of 20th-century art, one he is certain art historians will hate. It is based in part on how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.

“Quantification has been almost totally absent from art history,” he said. “Art historians hate markets.”

I like this idea.

› 2008/08/15

via blog.twitter.com/

The New York Times has been on a Twitter tear lately. They've got a good collection of accounts that make for some nice variety. Some of the accounts are written straight-up by writers, editors, and bloggers at the Times and others deliver just the Section Headlines.

NY Times twitters too.

› 2008/08/15

via idle.slashdot.org/

if you can't help me why are you on google when I type in help with the internet? If you don't want to help people when they need it maybe you shouldn't be on google!"

from emails send to slashdot

› 2008/08/15

via www.youtube.com/

A quick and plain English intro the micro-blogging service Twitter.

Great introduction to Twitter

› 2008/08/15

via blog.twitter.com/

The good news for most people is that we're taking measures to reduce junk in the system—and it's working.

Twitter implementiert Methoden um Spam zu reduzieren, Junk auszufiltern.

› 2008/08/15

via blog.twitter.com/

Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you're actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back.

Wie funktioniert 'Follow Spam' bei Twitter.

› 2008/08/14

via www.bigcontrarian.com/

Managers elsewhere boast about how little time they waste in meetings; Apple is big on them and proud of it. “The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” says Ive, an affable, bearlike Brit. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”

This comparison rings a bell in my head

› 2008/08/14

via www.msnbc.msn.com/

Legend has it that, on his deathbed, Orson Welles exhorted his loved ones to make sure that Ted Turner — who, at the time, was determined to colorize every black-and-white movie in his library — kept his “goddamn crayons” off of “Citizen Kane.”

But who will stop George Lucas from destroying the legacy of George Lucas?

Star Wars - The Clone Wars. Regarding George Lucas destroying the history of Star Wars, ever more with every sequel.

› 2008/08/14

via www.plosone.org/

imilar brain regions are involved when we imagine, observe and execute an action. Is the same true for emotions? Here, the same subjects were scanned while they (a) experience, (b) view someone else experiencing and (c) imagine experiencing gustatory emotions (through script-driven imagery). Capitalizing on the fact that disgust is repeatedly inducible within the scanner environment, we scanned the same participants while they (a) view actors taste the content of a cup and look disgusted (b) tasted unpleasant bitter liquids to induce disgust, and (c) read and imagine scenarios involving disgust and their neutral counterparts

Bücher und Filme haben ähnliche Wirkungen: But now a new neuroscience study reveals that books control people's minds and emotions in exactly the same way television do

› 2008/08/13

via counternotions.com/

Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.

› 2008/08/13

via counternotions.com/

Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises.

› 2008/08/13

via technology.timesonline.co.uk/

A techno-utopian by nature, MIT is his natural home. And it was at MIT in 1968 that he met Seymour Papert. Papert had worked with the great educational theorist Jean Piaget. From Piaget’s work, Papert had developed the learning theory of constructionism. Put simply, this means that children learn most effectively when they are doing things rather than just sitting and listening. Negroponte became an enthusiastic constructionist. It synched with his world-transforming view of technology. Computers were to be the perfect constructionist tool, allowing children to discover and make things on their own. If Negroponte is the father of the XO, Papert is its grandfather.

Lerntheorie, aktivität

› 2008/08/13

via www.techcrunch.com/

If you look at the history of software development, all the interesting things that have been built have been built by two people. It is the nature of software technology.

Google's Eric Schmidt on Software Development.

› 2008/08/13

via counternotions.com/

Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products

Pretenders don’t quite understand that design is born of constraints. Real-life constraints, be they tangible or cognitive: Battery-life impacts every other aspect of the iPhone design — hardware and software alike. Screen resolution affects font, icon and UI design. The thickness of a fingertip limits direct, gestural manipulation of on-screen objects. Lack of a physical keyboard and WIMP controls create an unfamiliar mental map of the device. The iPhone design is a bet that solutions to constraints like these can be seamlessly molded into a unified product that will sell. Not a concept. Not a vision. A product that sells.

› 2008/08/13

via counternotions.com/

why hasn’t Apple, the most innovative and visionary company in computing, produced a single concept product or vision in over a decade? Because, to paraphrase Jobs, real artists ship.

None

› 2008/08/13

via technology.timesonline.co.uk/

But the non-profit decision was important because it provided clarity of purpose – first, a head of state will talk to you because it’s about children and learning and not profit and, secondly, the best people will work for you for zero salary.

Negroponte on why being a non-profit was the right decision.

› 2008/08/12

via www.retro-coding.de/

Das stimmt irgendwie sogar; während Bush und Co die Menschenrechte nur Menschen des eigenen Landes zugestehen, ist es in China quasi genau umgekehrt; alle ANDEREN können machen was sie wollen, aber den eigenen Landsmännern gehören so grundlegende Dinge wie freie Rede natürlich abgesprochen.

Lars zu den unterschiedlichen Ansichten zu Menschenrechten zwischen China und den USA.

› 2008/08/12

via news.slashdot.org/

So they'll just export the pollution to a different city which will manufacture goods for them.

Regarding China's attempt to build a complete green city. Ideology often positively taints the perspective on the uncountable correlations that make up economy AND ecology.

› 2008/08/12

via www.mondaynote.com/

Simple is hard. Easy is harder. Invisible is hardest. So goes one of the many proverbs of our computer lore.

Interesting comment from Jean-Louis Gassée, former CEO of Apple and later creator of the very appealing but ultimately "microsofted" BeOS.

› 2008/08/10

via news.slashdot.org/

Remembering that the Patriot Act was dropped on Congress just 20 days after 9/11 — the Department of Justice had had it sitting in a drawer for years — Lessig asked Clarke if DoJ had a similar proposed law, an "i-Patriot Act," to drop in the event of a "cyber-9/11." Clarke responded, "Of course they do. And Vint Cerf won't like it."

I don't even want to imagine, how an i911 would turn out for the web as we know it.

› 2008/07/28

via www.garagegames.com/

Torque for the iPhone is licensed on a per title basis. For specific pricing and licensing information, please contact garagegames.

Torque game engine for the iPhone. Licensing seems to be designed as a money-making machine. Apart from that, this will like totally flood the iPhone game market with junk.

› 2008/07/26

via royal.pingdom.com/

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can’t stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Fascinating quote by Linus Torvalds.

› 2008/07/22

via www.osnews.com/

Software engineer Satoshi Nakajima, the lead architect of Microsoft's Windows 95, picked up a Mac for the first time two years ago. He was so impressed, he says he'll never again touch a PC again.

Pieces of a puzzle.

› 2008/07/17

via gigaom.com/

A story by Judi Sohn, who edits WebWorkerDaily, one of our growing portfolio of blogs, was featured on the home page of Yahoo last night. The story got voted up via Yahoo’s Buzz, a service akin to Digg, except much more powerful.

might of yahoo buzz

› 2008/07/16

via blog.iphone-dev.org/

Just remember 5 days isn’t a long time in this type of technology area, in the corporate world fat grumpy middle-managers and overpaid PMs would be just about ready to think about scheduling a “kick off meeting” in their outlook calendars, or in some less crufty organizations the first milestone of “open the iPhone box” would have been more or less completed

that's the difference between loving work and having to do work. it's what sets corporations apart (there are corporations that just work in this meme)

› 2008/07/14

via dfbills.com/

Apple has announced that it has racked up 1 million iPhone sales and 10 Million Apps in the very first weekend.  Last time around, it took 74 days to sell that many phones.

Impressive

› 2008/07/11

via it.slashdot.org/

"Hackers are deluging web users with malware-laden spam claiming that World War III has started following a US invasion of Iran. Security experts warned [yesterday] that spam emails with subject lines including 'Third World War has begun,' '20000 US Soldiers in Iran,' and 'US Army crossed Iran's borders' have been intercepted. The emails contain links to a malicious webpage that displays what appears to be a video player showing the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion."

spammer verbreiten falsche nachrichten.. ob man das irgendwo in einer arbeit nutzen kann?

› 2008/07/11

via www.thestandard.com/

What I didn't expect was that Apple would blow away the others on the interface, and I tip my hat to them in this regard.

From all the iPhone naysayers, here's one of the few who actually understood by now why the iPhone was pinned for success.

› 2008/07/11

via www.thestandard.com/

I still don't think it is a great phone, though, and without Apple marketing I doubt it would have done nearly as well. Apple could probably sell refrigerators to Eskimos.

It's amazing, how little Enderle seems to know about business and the cognitive / effective borders of great marketing.

› 2008/07/11

via blog.iphone-dev.org/

UPDATE: MuscleNerd says there are 200 people ahead of him, and about 500 units in stock. He doesn’t want to get physical to get one, we told him to chill, he needs to act more like an Apple fanboy and they generally don’t have muscles.

Those eater-european iPhone hackers are rather wity as it seems.

› 2008/07/11

via weblog.infoworld.com/

The market for Web development technologies appears ripe for consolidation. And yet, the barriers to entry are so low -- many of the tools are free -- that the market forces that might ordinarily eliminate competitors don't seem to apply here.

So true. One of the complexities I face from project to project is wondering which of the gazillion tools might be the right one for this job. And after one finished learning a specific toolkit, another one comes around the corner, that offers far more, better or other things - so the learning process starts again.

› 2008/07/10

via www.360desktop.com/

360desktop transforms your desktop into a panoramic workspace - with more space for everything.

Watch the Video. What a piece of junk. Whoever (angel?) funded this has obviously no idea of current technological advancements and usability.

› 2008/07/09

via linux.slashdot.org/

Geeks love the chaos and security challenges that is posed by Windows.

I love slashdot for it's insightfull comments. This one relates to the 'Linux for Housewives, XP for Geeks' article which states that Asus Eee PC sales record show that Housewives tend to by the Eee PC with Linux, while 'Geeks' (how I hate this word) tend to choose Linux.

› 2008/07/09

via news.yahoo.com/

"This makes me learn better. It's like playing a game," she said.

Education experts say her school, the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Boston, offers a glimpse into the future.

› 2008/07/09

via popfail.com/

So it was submitted into the ‘World News’ category, and some would argue - like I - that it belongs in comedy.

Das Problem ist, dass die Kategorie-Zuordnung nicht unbedingt gut funktioniert, wie man an diesem Beispiel sehen kann.

› 2008/07/09

via popfail.com/

There is no way around it.  You vote for Mugabe or you risk your life.  Period.

This really, truly exemplifies the problem at Digg.  I don’t want this to turn into a rant, but this story or a variation easily hit the front page of Reddit, Propeller, and several other social media sites.  On Digg, it went nowhere.

Dieser politische Artikel zu Mugabe und Zimbabwe hat in anderen social media sites die Frontpage erreicht nicht aber bei Digg. Digg = unpolitisch?

› 2008/07/08

via wilshipley.com/

Avie Tevanian had been working on Mach as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve Jobs recognized he was a star and hired him straight away. (Microsoft countered by hiring Avie's old advisor to work on NT, which is kind of like Microsoft hiring my mom because I'm a good programmer.)

› 2008/07/08

via blog.karppinen.fi/

I tried to log in to Apple Developer Connection this morning to find out that my password had been changed and the email associated with my account was now a yahoo.com address that wasn't mine. Luckily, my "security question" was still the same, so I was able to reset the password and email address back.

Based on the emails that have appeared in my .Mac mailbox, this was accomplished by sending this classy one-liner to Apple:

am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted]@yahoo.com

this is a PR catastrophy for sure. I'd guess this will turn into a fire on the net within 48 hours.

› 2008/07/07

via www.economist.com/

In essence, these are bets on which way the oil price will move. Since the real currency of such contracts is cash, rather than barrels of crude, there is no limit to the number of bets that can be made. And since no oil is ever held back from the market, these bets do not affect the price of oil any more than bets on a football match affect the result.

The going after oil speculators resambles just how inoperative the government really is, regarding high oil prices.

› 2008/07/07

via wine-econ.org/

The story is told of a sales call that Ernest Gallo made to a New York customer in the dark days of the depression. He offered sample glasses of two red wines - one costing five cents per bottle and the other ten cents. The buyer tasted both and pronounced, “I’ll take the ten-cent one.” The wine in the two glasses was exactly the same. Clearly, the customer wanted to buy an identity - the image of someone who wouldn’t drink that five-cent rotgut- even if he couldn’t actually taste the difference.

I love this story. It is in many ways verified but also superseeded by newer psychological findings. However, this quote, in a way explains a lot about the 'why' of people acting. Try to transfer this image of buying an identity onto other social acts, and you'll see, there's (still) much, oh so much, to harness.

› 2008/07/07

via software.silicon.com/

There are suggestions that elements such as mail, photos and video could be available as an option on Windows 7 meaning customers could buy a version which supports what they want to do, without the loads of extra stuff they won't use or need.

Sure. Everybody will jump for an operating system which doesn't even support mp3 & videos. That's clearly old-style marketing think. Vista's problem is not that it does too much, but that it does it in very ineffective ways (usability and performance wise)

› 2008/07/06

via 37signals.blogs.com/

Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.

37Signals regarding their dropping IE6 support

› 2008/07/06

via vertonghen.wordpress.com/

we’re on the brink of a new era. Everybody is used to creating their own computing for now. It won’t be long until we all switch to cheaper computing and leave our own servers to rust. Bad times are coming for sysadmins and people occupied with server- and hosting-infrastructures. Unless of course you have the ambition to go work for one of the utility-providers, the world will primarily be needing appliance-builders. Design will become way more important as well.

Interesting remark regarding the future of computing. Never thought about it that way.

› 2008/07/06

via tech.slashdot.org/

He notes that the second beta is still prone to unexplained crashes, and goes so far as to say that "Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake."

So linux users are just as die-hard reactionary as their windows-using counterparts.

› 2008/07/06
› 2008/07/06

via www.bigcontrarian.com/

In my industry, web design, I’ve quickly realized that the fastest way to an unhappy client is an unhappy team member. Morale is far more important than most managers I know realize.

So True

› 2008/07/06

via blender3dtutor.com/

While this is a step in the right direction, the assumption that one can build a car just because they can drive it is uneducated and reflects an ignorance of the intricacies of mechanics. The same is true for video game art.

True, just true.

› 2008/07/05

via www.defmacro.org/

Programmers are procrastinators. Get in, get some coffee, check the mailbox, read the RSS feeds, read the news, check out latest articles on techie websites, browse through political discussions on the designated sections of the programming forums. Rinse and repeat to make sure nothing is missed. Go to lunch. Come back, stare at the IDE for a few minutes. Check the mailbox. Get some coffee. Before you know it, the day is over

oh so true. actually a rather apt description of how I've worked for years - and still managed to output a lot of valuable software. I wonder what would happen if I were 100% effective.

› 2008/07/05

via www.macworld.com/

If blogs, podcasts, and Twitter haven’t made it clear enough, let me make it so here: The aughts are all about documentation—recording every insignificant moment of your life and the lives of those around you—and, frankly, you, like me, have fallen down on the job.

› 2008/07/02

via www.37signals.com/

Once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out. Whether the feature is good or bad, once you launch it you’ve married it. This changes the economics of feature additions. If you can’t destroy what you build, each addition holds the threat of clutter. Empty pixels and free space where a new feature could be added are the most valuable real estate on your app. Don’t be quick to sell it, because you can never get it back.

Interesting remark regarding the adding of features to mature applications.

› 2008/07/01

via mobile.slashdot.org/

I don't see how it can't change the world ... it has 'Micro' and 'Blog' in the name, and I'll always know where I was when I twittered to tell everyone I was in the john.

Cmdr Taco on Geomicroblogging

› 2008/07/01

via the.taoofmac.com/

I don’t want browser-side storage. That means turning the browser into a fat stateful client, and down that path lies madness – and the negation of what brought the browser into being in the first place.

Tao-of-Mac on browser-side storage.

› 2008/07/01

via tech.slashdot.org/

Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats.

Amazing what competition (i.e. Ajax / Standards Web, see iPhone) can bring

› 2008/07/01

via tech.slashdot.org/

and I have to wonder — with things like AIR starting to be accepted by developers, do we still need the browser at all?

I'd say yes. I'd hardly think that it's feasible to replace the already fragmented world of browsers by a even more fragmented world of 1000s of AIR applications, serving tons of different needs.

› 2008/07/01

via arstechnica.com/

The web is increasingly pummeling its visitors with too much information, and technology like this has the potential to give users a birds-eye view of product reviews, travel recommendations, and even large bodies of factual information.

› 2008/07/01

via arstechnica.com/

The WebKit developers are also innovating beyond the current standards and blazing the way for new ones by experimenting with their own CSS attributes for reflections and RGBA gradients.

› 2008/06/30

via www.tuaw.com/

We're done with a world where radio airplay determines what sells at the record store. These days, consumers are the ones who tell record makers what they want to buy -- it's already in their iTunes playlists.

› 2008/06/30

via www.gamasutra.com/

The second thing is capability. The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it's got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it's location-aware, it's got all of your media on it, it's awake with you, it's always on, and it's always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it's got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.

Neil Young, a former EA Developer about why he left EA to form a new company that concentrates on iPhone (and beyond) game development.

› 2008/06/30

via www.gamasutra.com/

My sense is, in the App Store, you're going to see thousands of applications coming into the marketplace fairly quickly, and it will become very difficult, I think, for developers to differentiate themselves in that landscape. Undoubtedly, some will, and undoubtedly some will create hits.

› 2008/06/30

via www.guardian.co.uk/

Apple is a marvellous company, but it is a boutique. We are a giant conglomerate.

Weird understanding of inhowfar Sony is better than Apple

› 2008/06/29

via www.nytimes.com/

I asked Mr. Tevanian if he thought Microsoft could pull off a similar switch.

“Perhaps, but I don’t know if it has the intestinal fortitude,” he said, “At Apple, we had to. It was a matter of survival.”

Addendum to my last post.

Just found this gem while browsing through my QuoteVault archive.

Mr. Tevanian, the Mac OS X lead System Architect, on whether Microsoft could / should rebuild Windows from the ground up, as Apple did with Mac OS X

› 2008/06/29

via mobile.slashdot.org/

From their board minutes: "Let's make a Linux OS! No, wait, let's buy BeOS and use that! Great, it works, now let's not ship any products that run it! Now let's announce another Linux OS! Now let's announce an UMPC with a different, incompatible Linux OS than the first one - I mean, second one. Now on shipping day, let's cancel the UMPC and "commit" to the first Linux OS! Let's write an emulator that runs on another company's tablet, and give it away for free - but not ship a product of our own that runs it! And in the meantime, to keep our customers entertained, let's keep selling the Palm name to ourselves over and over again!"

Didn't these guys used to run Atari?

Recapitulating the history of the last 6 years of Palm in 5 lines.

› 2008/06/28

via games.slashdot.org/

The sounds you hear are college careers ending before they've even begun.

Distinctive quote regarding the potential impact of Diablo 3. I think I rather know why I'll try not to try this game.

› 2008/06/25

via www.nytimes.com/

“There is only so far you can go with an algorithm,” said Mark Glaser, editor at PBS MediaShift, a site about online media. “In the long run, people want a human touch.”

None

› 2008/06/25

via www.nytimes.com/

Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said that the Internet had made it possible to aggregate news cheaply and, as a result, reduced the ability of news outlets to charge for their content.

None

› 2008/06/23

via www.newsweek.com/

Bob O'Rear (second row left, above Gates), the most experienced of the group (he'd been a NASA engineer, now he's a cattle rancher), concurs—sort of. "My concept of success for us was that someday we'd have 40 people or so."

One of the first Microsoft employees about Microsofts Success