details of a global brain » Contemplation

Zoot Woman as well!

Oliver Wrede — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:52:33 +0000

I am sorry to “spam” my music interest recently. But I am just so glad about what the Berlin team was able to pull up again. As my Last.fm profile discloses I have been listening to the britsh band called Zoot Woman recently. Now I am happy that Hobnox has the concert and an interview:

[See fullscreen and also interview available]

(Reminds me of the fact that I forgot to link the interveiw with Jose Gonzales in my last post).

Jose Gonzalez Live – exclusively on Sly-Fi.com Hobnox is exclusively providing a recording of the live concert...
Hobnox recieved the Grimme Online Award Hobnox recieves the Grimme Online Award. The Grimme Online Award...
Hobnox Evolution launched Finally Hobnox has launched a »warm-up site«: The Hobnox Evolution....

Hobnox recieved the Grimme Online Award

Oliver Wrede — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:24:56 +0000

Hobnox recieves the Grimme Online Award.

The Grimme Online Award is one of the most prestigious awards for online projects in Germany. The jury does mention the quality of the design.

As Head of Concept and Design this makes me happy. But there have been many people working on the design that are not yet mentioned anywhere. And I want to give them credit here – even though some may have been working for Hobnox only a short period of time:

Christoph Bieselt (Motion Design)
Andreas Echterhoff (Information Architecture)
Ingo Feisthamel (Icondesign and Screendesign)
James Fell (Strategy, Design, USA)
Sami Gültekin (Motion Design)
Jan-Philipp Hochstetter (Illustration, Screendesign)
Arron Joseph (Art Direction and Screendesign, USA)
Thomas Junk (Screendesign)
Markus Ort (Information Architecture)
Carlo Palazzari (Screendesign)
Michael Schmitz (Screendesign)
Niklas Schneider (Information Architecture)
Andreas Schwankl (Information Architecture)
Alex Smetana (Motion Design)
Andre Stubbe (UI Design)
Akemi Tazaki (UI Design)
Christian Wiener (Art Direction and Screendesign)
Sascha Wintjes (Screendesign)

I want to thank everyone mentioned here for the effort that contributed to the achievement. Thank you!

Grimme Online Award Nomination for Hobnox Hobnox was nominated for a Grimme Online Award yesterday (category...
Hobnox Evolution launched Finally Hobnox has launched a »warm-up site«: The Hobnox Evolution....
Two Red Dot Design Awards for Hobnox I forgot to post this here: Hobnox won two Red...

Grimme Online Award Nomination for Hobnox

Oliver Wrede — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:00:38 +0000

Hobnox was nominated for a Grimme Online Award yesterday (category “special”). The Grimme Online Awards have always been a sign post for cultural relevance of web projects for me. So this makes me very glad that Hobnox has achieved this nomination.

Side note: As announced on the FMX/08 conference the Audiotool has been updated with a TR-808 rythm composer. The next update (hopefully) will add saving compositions and maybe MIDI support.

Hobnox recieved the Grimme Online Award Hobnox recieves the Grimme Online Award. The Grimme Online Award...
Two Red Dot Design Awards for Hobnox I forgot to post this here: Hobnox won two Red...
Hobnox Audiotool – Kewl! Totally! Next week Hobnox will launch the first Beta version of...

FMX/08

Oliver Wrede — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:55:07 +0000

I am going to speak about web entertainment (and Hobnox) on FMX/08 tomorrow. I will probably see some friends there as well.

I haven’t been to a previous FMX-conference. Judging from their program they do focus a lot on technology and Visual FX. The panel I have the privilege to participate in is subjected “realtime”.

I think this is a very good topic altough the notion is quite dated. But the term gets a slightly new meaning as the networks start to become real multimedia channels that can deliver streaming high quality video and multiplayer games with minimal latency and without wires.

Panel 1 discussion: Meaning in weblogs People are discussing how complexity is managed by weblogging and...
Simplicity in Linz Tobias, Tim and Konstantin visited the Ars Electronica Festival in...
I’m losing patience with my neighbours, Mr. Bush »I’m certain I’ve just as much justification for killing Mr....

Things move on…

Oliver Wrede — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:54:50 +0000

Things have been very busy for me lately. But instead of just apologizing I give you some links to see some stuff that is coming out of that:

99stories.com – sly-fi.com – str33t.org – mi145.com

Most of that is “viewing only” at the moment. This will change radically…

Ten Things We Know About Teaching Online Margaret Driscoll: »As a consultant, I frequently work with business...
News from the evolution The Hobnox evolution contest is half way through and there...
New Amazon Patents on Content Personalization Slashdot: “Defending its decision to concoct recommendations to steer customers...

Tinderbox 3.6.3

Oliver Wrede — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:29:27 +0000

One of the tools I love to use is Tinderbox. The homepage says: “Tinderbox is a personal content assistant that helps you organize, analyze, and share your notes.”

I just downloaded the latest beta version (3.6.3 b17) and found that it has a list of improvements that push it forward again.

If you never heard of Tinderbox try looking at some of the screencasts that are online.

Tinderbox is a tool that has been around for ages now and while the technical progress is slow compared to other tools it remains unmatched for a lot of tasks. The sad part of it is, that it does have some limits and missing features that people expect from a writing tool. But besides of that it’s potential has not yet been fully exploited by its community.

The tricky thing with Tinderbox is, that it does “take off” unless you know how to use the tool wiseley. For a newbie it may feel like just another note-taking tool that misses some core features. But once you discovered some of the core concepts of Tinderbox a whole new set of options.

Findamentally it is a tool that keeps asking you: What do you want to do with your thoughts? How do you create relevance out of randomness? What does order in a chaotic world of fragmented information mean?

Tinderbox somehow forces you to answer these questions and define a concept how you want to process everything you write down. You may start with no such concept and try to develop it while playing around with Tinderbox. But once the level of interdependence of notes, actions, templates and such gets high (which can happen quickly) you need to become smart about how you manage you material.

And the winner is … Tinderbox! I decided to do my new weblog with Tinderbox. But...
Tinderbox to database publishing? Right now I set up this weblog to be rendered...
Tinderbox goes Universal One of the tools I am using for years now...

6 billion Others

Oliver Wrede — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:20:04 +0000

This is a very nice project by Yann-Arthus Bertrand that shows video portraits of 6000 randomly picked people in 65 countires that are talking about personal things.

Return from Hamburg I am in the train back to Cologne. I am...
AOL weblogs? »From a trusted correspondent, talking with a contact who works...
Gapminder Search statistics about human trends through Google and watch it...

Blog lag….

Oliver Wrede — Wed, 02 May 2007 07:24:24 +0000

There has been no post here for over a month now. I really feel bad about that as I can see from different stats, that there are more than 550 subscribers to this blog (slowly growing) – which is not too much compared to some other blogs… but a hell lot of people for me. And with a 20% reach (people that actually click or act on a blog post) I think it is not wise to neglect a blog for so long. But then again I need to thank all subscribers for the confidence I sense from that.

Truth is that I have been way too busy the last month. I stopped working as a professor at the computer science department of the Cologne University of Applied Science (I still do teach Design though) and started to work on an international project related to the music and TV entertainment busniess. I probably will contemplate and write about that sooner or later, because there are really a lot of stories that I’d like to share in future.

So keep me on the radar… I am still alive!

JournURL: More BBS/Blog Fusion »Another entry in the fusion of the BBS and Blog...
Featured blog Yesterday this weblog (»details of a global brain«) was featured...
Performancing Blog Editor for Firefox There is a new Blog Editor called Performancing available as...

Desire (Design and Democracy)

Oliver Wrede — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 11:48:18 +0000

I think the current Privacy/We-blog seminar (see blog) is turning out very well. The students are working on a project that is very “web2.0-ish” and a profound reflection on the business models that drive this market (or new bubble if you will).

One of the questions that constantly return to me is what is the function if design as seen from strategists. There is a discourse about design is being in charge of providing “emotional value” to products – or in other words: to sense desires of consumers.

I have addressed the core strategies of design in several seminars. They were called: Perception, Mind (called “Remembering and Design” back then), Density, Simplicity and Continuity. And it always appered to me that I one day I will have to address the topic of »Desire«.

The problem with “desire” is that it appears to be a mainstream topic – but in fact is not. It is a pandora’s box and it will ultimatley lead to political implications of design. And that is probably why I postponed it several times although I am totally convinced that there is no real way to get around this issue.

One place to start is Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays invented the term “public relations” and spawned research that led to the idea of “life style” and “focus groups”. His influence has been portrayed in this four hour BBC documentary “The Century of the Self” (Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4). If you watch that documentary you’ll see the dilemma.

The documentary ends with the impression that the affirmative politicians in western societies have eroded the notion of democracy by replacing political policy with public relations (thus tuning their speeches and programs towards the short term desires of swing voters). Like Bill Clinton has asked one of his advisors: “What is a mandate if you can’t get elected with it?”

I want to point readers, that managed read this post until here, to a document called “Design and democracy” [PDF, 148 KB / german], a lecture given by Gui Bonsiepe in 2005 at the UTEM, Santiago de Chile (and be assured that the issue of democracy is not only a matter of desinging better election ballots).

Extreme Democracy This concept proposed by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe asks...
Digital Technologies for Deliberative Democracy A project at Columbia’s Center on Organizational Innovation is looking...
Seven Degrees of Design Research Whenever desgin and research touch each other it may be...

Design switch

Oliver Wrede — Wed, 24 May 2006 06:25:00 +0000

This weblog has changed under the hood: the code is cleaner. Everything is CSS based. It doesn’t validate yet, but it will. There have been only a few minor tweaks to the design itself. It pushed most of the templating away from Tinderbox and up to the server.

The next step will be to circumvent the HTML export of Tinderbox completely and publish everything directly from a database (by converting the XML file into RDBMS tables). It will also reduce the number of agents (like the ones that collect the weblog posts for each category).

Update 5/29/2006: Some people asked me about how I did the rounded corners. Actually I am using CSS 3 styles for that which is implemented partially in Webkit (Safari) and Mozilla/Firefox. I don’t use any CSS tricks (even if I could).

Visual Design Elements of Weblogs? Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright:Common Visual Design Elements of...
Desire (Design and Democracy) I think the current Privacy/We-blog seminar (see blog) is turning...
Between life and death: There are just three design principles Students love to ask this question: “Is there any common...

Flickr facelift

Oliver Wrede — Thu, 18 May 2006 10:53:08 +0000

I just noticed that Flickr.com recieved a slight facelift. They added dynamic HTML pulldowns and revamped the structure. The new Organizer is excellent.

Switching this site to a CSS-based layout

Oliver Wrede — Thu, 18 May 2006 03:11:37 +0000

I am not working offline for that and I am also not doing it in one single step. So there will be pages broken and/or looking odd. Sorry.

This change is a preparation for easier future design updates. I also want to make the page more standards compliant.

Progress on site I have been playing around with Tinderbox to manage this...
CS site up I seems I am making a slow move to Plone....
Location based services Until now the topic of »location based services« has been...

Old computers harm office morale

Oliver Wrede — Thu, 11 May 2006 11:26:26 +0000

Ageing and unreliable office computers are making workers unhappy and more likely to claim sick leave, a new survey shows.

No one reads what you write?

Oliver Wrede — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 01:41:04 +0000

Dave Winer in this interview makes some comments about his online writing style. His weblog is less a collection of posts, but rather collection of paragraphs per day with. Sometimes he uses headlines to separate content. But generally it seems to be true that people skim blog pages a lot.

With Tinderbox it is quite easy to shape the style of a homepage. You can add some fields here and include some if/else-statements in the templates there. I wonder if I can find the time to come up with a design that is as easy and “skimmable” as possible.

The first thing I’d do is to not include the full posts on the homepage all the time. Sometimes there will just be an tiny teaser with a link to the full posting at its permanent URL. Of course I need to come up with some design tweaks for this yet. It’s a work in progress….

Spam After getting comment spam for a while I found my...
Blogging strategy reconsidered I really like this weblog of Clark MacLeod from Taiwan...
NetNewsWire 1.0.1 ships »NetNewsWire is an easy-to-use RSS Web news reader for Mac...

BlogLag

Oliver Wrede — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:37:31 +0000

Ok. I am way behind schedule. Posting to this weblog has become a rare activity lately. There are a couple of reaons for that. It is a matter of priorities. I am pretty confident, that I’ll get “back to normal” soon.

Follow up on Social Computing meeting Kevin Shofield posts a follow-up of the social computing conference...
International Conference? Looking at the list of attendees of BloggerCon that supposedly...
Design and organisations I had a phone conversation with a friend who works...

Featured blog

Oliver Wrede — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 03:53:45 +0000

Yesterday this weblog (»details of a global brain«) was featured on »The Main Quad« – a private blog that is “promoting viewpoints and topics that are international, multicultural, multi and interdisciplinary, and all over the political spectrum” (with a focus on academic blogs). I am pleased that I appear to be the first non-native English speaking blogger in their directory and I appreciate the kind words of editor Jennifer Chernick.

EdMedia blog panel Adrian Miles jotted down his experience of the blog panel...
Blog Experiment Here is someone from Scotland looking for english speaking webloggers...
Performancing Blog Editor for Firefox There is a new Blog Editor called Performancing available as...

Mobile photo blogging

Oliver Wrede — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:01:48 +0000

I recently switched to a new mobile phone with SymbianOS. Nothing spectacular. It was cheap as I was extending my contract. It is a Nokia 3230. The user interface really has serious issues (which I think is amazing for a multi-million dollar company like Nokia that does not sell phones only by their external look).

I am not so much into mobile phones and I am not willing to spend lot’s of money to be an early adopter. I am more “early mainstream” in this.

I was looking for a free solution to post pictures online in a second. I was not satisfied with PicoBlogger or LifeBlog and I also did not want to use pricy MMS messages for submitting large images.

Now I found SplashBlog. This service seems to be straight forward and free for a limited amount of images. So from now on you might find some images from me on my SplashBlog site.

Update: I found something better: the fastest way to get photos online with a Symbian phone ist ShoZu. Once you have a Flickr account it’s just a click and it will be uploaded to Flickr in the background. Nice.

Thinking alternatives: From “Mobile” to “Mobility” Shai Agassi is the CEO of The Better Place to...
Plazes goes mobile Plazes has released a mobile version of their locator application....
Blogging lag… I am currently too busy to blog. One of the...

News (in desperate times?)

Oliver Wrede — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 03:18:01 +0000

Mark Bernstein about the ignorance of US mainstream media to world events:

The CNN front page headlines include, among the top 6 stories:
“Jennifer Aniston photographed kissing Vince Vaughn”
I don’t follow the news much. Is there some reason Jennifer Aniston shouldn’t be kissing Mr. Vaughn?

This simply made my day

‘Special Ops’ gets OK to initiate its own missions — The Washington Times Washington Times: “Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced yesterday he...
Upcoming Manila news items enhancements Jake Savin posted a mockup of a possible editing form...
Changed to news items I decided to change this site to a news items...

Need more time for work? Sleep less!

Oliver Wrede — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 04:30:45 +0000

Interestingly there is a whole armada of things keeping us under pressure: you got to be more productive, faster, better organized, and so on. The computer has not only enhanced our productivity: ubiquitous computing also means there will be no excuse to be unproductive (except when you »deserved« a break)?

There are already many people working almost round the hour – from early morning when they wake up to late night when they fall asleep. For those there is now »aid« available:

Glen Rhodes explains how to reduce the daily amount of sleep needed to 4.5 hours:

Typically, I sleep 3 hours a night, and nap for 90 minutes in the evening. That’s a total of 4.5 hours, and I am always alert, always awake and always feel rested and refreshed.

Update: There is a Wikipedia page about »polyphasic sleep«.

Hooray! I’d like to quote Alex Albrecht from diggnation.com: »We live in desperate times, Dude!«.

I work, you work, we all work, with iWork I am doing almost all of my presentations with Keynote...
Near-Time Flow This appears to be exactly what I need for my...
Reality & Real time I can receive MSNCB Europe and CNN Europe on my...

How weird the job of an character animator can be

Oliver Wrede — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 11:07:54 +0000

So, you’d think that the job of an computer graphics animator would involve nothing but sitting in front of a screen and clicking little icons and buttons all day long? Well, looking at these folks I think the curricula may need some tweaking for the required skill sets…

Comments on I finally managed to add a rudimentary comment feature. It...
Mighty Mouse not so mighty Tim Bruysten forgot his »Apple Mighty Mouse« after his presentation...
Personal use of corporate computers is good Found via Lilia Efimova: “Personal web usage in workplace offers...