somewhat political
US Writer’s Guild still on strike…
… and I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that I care more about the strike of entertainers a few thousand kilometers away than about a strike of the whole train system in this country here. Oh well, so be it.
(It will not come as a surprise that I support the [...]
Facebook Beacon is Serious Breach of Trust
Facebook recently introduced Facebook Beacon, a new technique for businesses and website operators to “enable your customers to share the actions they take on your website with their Facebook friends.”
Beacon can be installed by simply adding a few lines of code:
Simply determine which user actions you would like publish to Facebook (…) Facebook Beacon [...]
Ze Frank on Privacy
The godfather of podcasting Ze Frank is back, this time on blip.tv. Here’s his take on privacy:
Well put. Talking of which, the German Bundestag has passed legislation for massive data retention. Why not join the class-action lawsuit against the data retention law?
Good to have you back, Ze!
Mashup Online Magazine That Writes Itself
That’s an art project I’d love to see one of these days: An online magazine that writes itself, based on a calendar, a pre-written set of tags connected to the calendar, and a bunch of RSS feeds.
Imagine, just for simplicity’s sake, a lifestyle magazine for women. (Of course, every other type of magazine would [...]
Twitter vs Blogs, Revisited
After a week of Barcamp and Web2Expo Berlin, I have to take a look back to what I’ve been writing about the relation between Twitter and blogs. (If you like to read up on the discussion, you can find my posts on Twitter here, the most relevant posts here being probably on inattentive trust, my [...]
Tim O’Reilly tells his parents: What’s Web 2.0?
Link: sevenload.com
At Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, Tim O’Reilly kindly agreed to try solving the one issue all of us are sharing: How to tell our parents what we do? So here’s Tim, explaining to his parents: What’s Web 2.0?
“So Web 2.0: First off, it’s the idea that the Web, rather than the personal computer is [...]
How Do I Tell My Parents?
We interviewed a bunch of bloggers at Barcamp Berlin and asked them to explain any Web 2.0 term in the same way they’d tell their moms and dads. The result is hilarious, I think, and I sure learned something there. (Sorry, the video is mostly German.)
Disclosure: This video is actually sort of a cross post [...]
Open Source Hardware: Buglabs to ship in Q4
Tired of your bricked iPhone? You’re not alone. (Ok, to be fair, iPhones aren’t even being shipped in Germany yet, I think. But anyway.)
There’s at least two new projects that are open sourcing not just their software, but also their hardware: They’re specifically designed for hackability. How awesome is that?
First, there’s OpenMoko, an open source [...]
Opening the Social Graph
Lately the web has been buzzing with talk about the Social Graph (or Social Network Portability, as others prefer to call it).
The basic question? Who owns your social network, and how can you move it back and forth between different services and applications? (You should be the only one with complete control over your [...]
Tara Hunt on Government 2.0
Back in the days when I worked for politik-digital.de, our coverage focused a lot on e-democracy, e-participation and what we hoped would soon become (excuse the lame-o-pun) Government 2.0. And while I haven’t been following this area as closely lately, I was thrilled to see that Citizen Agency’s Tara Hunt has been working on improving [...]