Image by kopp0041 (some rights reserved)
I’ve been looking for a good reason to post this image ever since I stumbled over it a few days ago. Against all odd, I couldn’t find one, except for it being an awesome picture. I love it. The whole Domo Eats The Twitter Bird analogy doesn’t really seem to fly, but there you go.
[permalink]Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard on relaunching Blogpiloten.de, best described as a German blog magazine that has been around since 2006. (Full disclosure: I’m project lead for blogpiloten.de.) Today around noon, the new site went live, and I’m really happy about the way it turned out, for several reasons.
One, I think it looks pretty awesome. Fork did a great job with the design, and our coding team in Hamburg did a great job implementing it. Here’s a screenshot:
Image: Screenshot blogpiloten.de
What doesn’t quite come out in this screenshot is the massive place we reserved for video. Our video on the startpage is some massive 870px wide. Awesome, eh? There’s also some kick-ass video content, namely a series called “Klartext” (translates roughly: “in plain German”), where we ask bloggers and other experts to explain web terminology in a really easy-to-understand manner. (The cool new trailer came from Hobnox, by the way!) Internally, we go by the rule of “no tech arrogance”. (Yes, we really even call it that ;) There’s enough folks out there hiding behind tech speak. We’d rather go out there and help interested newbies get into the game. I hope we’ll be doing a good job.
Two, I found it very interesting and cool to coordinate this relaunch between quite a lot folks who were spread out all over the place. There were two agencies – working from four locations – involved in the design process (Fork for the design, Hobnox for the video trailers). The coding was done at Netzpiloten HQ in Hamburg. Managing editor Steffen Büffel is based in Cologne. I’m in Berlin, most of the time. That’s a lot of folks, and a lot of loose ends to connect. It’s a great team, too, and a good learning experience.
Three, I’ve worked with Blogpiloten for quite a while now, so naturally I’m really curious to see where we can take it. I’m curious about your feedback. If you have an opinion on Blogpiloten.de, please share!
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Charlene Li‘s presentation about the future of social networking, touching on general trends as well as the opening of networks and how to monetize. As always, excellent stuff. (via mashable)
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Augmented Reality – VFX Breakdown from soryn on Vimeo.
A nice (if somewhat slick and artificial) video showcase of how augmented reality could be used in day-to-day educational work. Of course most the stuff shown here is in that odd space where on the one hand the technology is available, but on the others, the available interfaces are too awkward nowadays. Still, a neat little thing. The main point, anyway, is that educational resources could be pimped to a level where you could really transfer a lot of information in a very visual, easy-to-understand way. Much more so than current online learning environment allow. Ah, the futures. Enjoy!
[permalink]This will hopefully be the last post about my server moves. One thing really blew my mind, though, and I’d like to share it: WordPress 2.7 is an absolute game-changer in terms of how smooth a blogging engine can operate, update, run. It’s fast, it’s smart, the interface is completely new – which takes some getting used to, but it makes sense.
So my setup as it is: Hosting by MediaTemple, which offers a very convenient 1-click-installation for several apps including WordPress. And WordPress offers auto-upgrade and live installations of plugins from the admin area. In other words: Within about 5 minutes you can set up and configure a brand new WordPress blog. It really is amazing after years and years of the download-move-upload-active craziness that used to be the installation of a simple plugin. I love it.
Now that you’ve had to suffer through plenty a moving-my-blog posts, I’m looking forward to provide you with some actual content. Thanks for sticking around.
[permalink]…all else is well. (Thanks, Thomas!)
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