Notes from Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

  • I finally switched to WordPress

    After a long time of consideration I turned over to WordPress for this weblog and I will not be using Tinderbox to blog here anymore. Tinderbox is a great software for thinking and writing – and I love to have a more graphical/visual note taking approach to weblogging. But it was getting too clumsy to…

  • 3 components of good web design

    Actually the site PSDTUTS has great tutorials for Web Designers. But one of the recent articles about what design roles that constitute a good web design discipline did not convince me.

  • US officials flunk test of American history, economics, civics

    Yahoo News reports: “US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.” You can take the 33-question quiz here. I couriously tried the test and scored a 60.61% as a non-US citizen. Doesn’t this qualify me…

  • Fundamental changes ahead: petaflop barrier broken

    According to this WIRED blog entry IBM and Cray have both cracked the petaflop barrier. Computer scientist Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory claims that this will change the scientific method for the first time since Galileo invented the telescope (in 1509)”. The reason for that is that simulation and approximation can be used…

  • Zeitgeist: Addendum

    Here is a two hour documentary by Peter Joseph from July 2008 explains so much of the backgrounds of a “corporatocracy” today, an unsustainable “monetary-ism” and religious deception that causes social and economic distress. »Zeitgeist: Addendum« is a sequel to the documentary »Zeitgeist« from 2007: Zeitgeist: Addendum, attempts to locate the root causes of this…

  • Information Design and the Monetary System

    I am personally interested in how the lack of information or proper presentation of that information led to the current financial crisis. Obviously the information was available — but not well understood, not correctly aggregated or falsely interpreted by politicians that were responsible for phony policies and flawed legislations.

  • The political implication of YouTube

    YouTube allows people to make visible the failure of politicians. The way they remain clueless and lie about their cluelessness afterwards. This is very important. But unfortunatly a revealing YouTube video may not get the publicity it should.

  • Let’s play Bailout

    It seems US government is denying its responsibility for the financial crash — and even trying to get away with new mistakes by pushing congress to agree on a plan that is hardly removing the source of the problem.

  • Bailing out in the wrong direction

    US Government is suggesting a $700 billion financial package to prevent a chain reaction at Wall Street. The US national debt to over $10 trillion dollars with just a single decision. Interestingly there are many experts that tell their own story about what this all means on the long run. Someone may wonder where this…

  • Two Red Dot Design Awards for Hobnox

    I forgot to post this here: Hobnox won two Red Dot Design Awards for the website and the Hobnox Audiotool. Unfortunatly the Red Dot website does not list the achievement – and there is no statement from the Jury either. The Audiotool also recieved the Flashforward Award 2008 – which is rewarding the best Flash…

  • Zoot Woman as well!

    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:…

  • Jose Gonzalez Live – exclusively on Sly-Fi.com

    Hobnox is exclusively providing a recording of the live concert of José Gonzaléz in Admiralspalast in Berlin. Beautiful concert, excellent camera work, perfect sound. And we are investigating to deliver this in near-HD video quality soon (stay tuned). [See on Sly-Fi-Channel]

  • Hobnox recieved the Grimme Online Award

    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…

  • 89% want to impeach Bush

    MSNBC has a poll online that asks if people would impeach George W. Bush. Out of 678898 people that participated in that poll 89% think he should be. Just yesterday Dennis Kucinich presented a very long lists of articles to Congress. Here is a PDF with the transcript of his presentation.

  • Senate Report: Bush used Iraq intelligence he knew was falseusa,

    Described in this article of the Huffington Post the U.S. Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence has released a series of reports on intelligence related to Iraq before the war. The reports show that the Bush administration actively ignored available intelligence to press ahead with an agenda that will ultimately lead to the installment of permanent…

  • Hobnox – now open for everyone! New contest coming up!

    So Hobnox (the startup I am working for as “Head of Concept & Design”) has reached the end of the private beta phase and is now running as public beta (which means: everyone can register and use it). There are still many things that we have in the pipeline. As of now it appears to…

  • Web 3.0? Maybe user generated applications…

    In few seconds I was able to create a new music browsing application combining puzzle pieces together without any effort: All I needed was Fluid and an example to learn from. Fluid basically is a bare-bones web browser that turns a website into an double-clickable application. It is a website – but it feels like…

  • Grimme Online Award Nomination for Hobnox

    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…

  • FMX/08

    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”.…

  • Yahoo Badges

    Many month ago Yahoo introduced Yahoo Pipes to the public – allowing to mix and process data from sites and RSS feeds from different sources (I have a master RSS feed of a pipe that represents almost all my blog activities) Now Yahoo has expanded this model to include widgets for displaying the resulting: Yahoo…

Got any book recommendations?