Author: Oliver Wrede
-
Fighting DRM
Cory Doctorow responds to digital rights management advocate Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine: DRM isn’t protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition.
-
The End of Usability Culture
Dirk Kneymeyer published an article about the “fruits” of a usability discourse ending up in uninspired designs: The yang to our present yin is a dearth of mainstream creativity, visual differentiation, and sense of active design. For example, the financial services industry spends a tremendous amount of money on Web sites, having moved a large…
-
Extremely annoying
My provider was unable to charge my credit card properly – but even after admitting it his own fault last week my server was locked down yesterday. So I had a downtime of one day. Sorry.
-
Political capital from desasters
The death toll desaster in asian sea begins to exceed any catastrophe the world has ever seen. It is a shame to read this headline: Secretary of State Colin Powell conferred by video hookup with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday on assistance to the victims of the Asian and African tsunamis and then added the…
-
Discourse vs. conversations
I had the chance to re-read Elmine Wijnias text »Understanding weblogs: a communicative perspective« where she applies Habermas’ theory of communicative action to weblogs. I agree with the conclusions of Wijnias’ text at large. But then I stumbled across a dispute of a claim of me that I totally overlooked the first time. Elmine disqualifies…
-
Situated cognition and weblogs
Through Feedster I learned about this interesting post about “situated cognition” and weblogs. I can’t comment to that blog post, because I’d need a Bloggger account for that, so I am commenting here: The link at the end of that post points to the slides of my presentation. I think the actual paper is much…
-
Delicious Library
This application simply rocks: Delicious Library You can hold a book with a barcode in front of your iSight camera and it automatically gets added to a virtual book shelf (with thumbnail, price tag and summary). You can then create and export sub-collections. I would have bought this application for $40 instantly – if only…
-
IIID Expert Forum for Knowledge Presentation
The International Institute for Information Design (IIID) has published a very valuable documentation about the expert meeting on knowledge presentation online.
-
2004 Academic Weblog Awards
The Guardian has published a weblog special. And the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle is just in the final two weeks of the “Best of blogs” award. James Farmer (Incorporated Subversion) suggests to run an academic weblog award. Update: You can now nominate educational weblogs: You can nominate as many blogs as you like for as…
-
Spam
After getting comment spam for a while I found my wiki pages were spammed as well: someone added hundreds of links obiously to tune the page rank algorithm of google. There does not seem to be an easy way to deal with this issue. So I needed to disable open wiki editing (which equals not…
-
Sorry everybody?
At sorryeverybody.com people trying to apologize for re-electing George W. Bush. People can submit images to testify their disappointment to the world. The server seems to be pretty overloaded.
-
Re-surrection
It has been quite silent here the last month. I was very busy and blogging had to be suspended for a while. This will change soon – there have been a lot of things going on. Here’s what is up next: 1. Election in US: a very bad decision to re-elect Bush. But it seems…
-
Digital Difference
Cinematography nowadays almost is unthinkable without computers. I like this story of Kerry Conran trying to render a complex video composition of the upcoming movie Sky Captain in 1994 on a Apple Mac IIsi. After four years (and some hardware upgrades later) he finished six minutes of his feature film. Today it has become not…
-
Comment spamming
I was hoping that with a custom comment system I would be immune to comment spamming. But unfortunalty that doesn’t seem to be the case. It is easy to clean up, but I think I will have to place a burden on that spam bots. Spam is the dirt of the Internet.
-
Checking facts
factcheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Doing “fact checking” seems the be the latest trend and a growing obligation for US voters. Quoting out of context, twisting the words, exaggretating – all these techniques seem to be in the arsenal for Democrats and Republicans as well.
-
Frontier Kernel Open Source Release
Finally Frontier has been released as open source package: This is a fresh start for the Frontier kernel, the technology under Manila and Radio UserLand, and in the future, possibly many more useful system and network applications. We’re releasing the code under the GPL, the rationale for this is explained in the FAQ and in…
-
Userplane A/V blogger
More blogging sidecar tools arrive: Userplane’s Audio & Video Blogger service is an easy-to-use system allowing the creation of audio and video recorded messages for use in blogs, websites and email.The Userplane AV Recorder application will automatically detect your camera and microphone, and allow you to record up to a 10 minute recording. Each recording…
-
Audioscrobbler
Napster was not only hot because of the easy sharing of MP3 files – but also because of finding interesting music in libraries of people with similar taste. Now that Napster is dead the P2P-netowkrs have taken over – but they don’t really offer something that comes close to Napster. So what other ideas people…
-
Flickr export from iPhoto
There is a little iPhoto Plug-In that allows direct export to Flickr. It works as export filter and is used to upload images (but not manage uploaded images). So the best image collection management application meets the best online image sharing application. Bravo!
-
Creativity Techniques
Here is a site that contains descriptions about creativity techniques: Below are listed a number of creativity techniques to help with creative thinking. Like most tools these creativity techniques all have their good and bad points. I like to think of these creativity techniques as tools in a toolbox in much the same way as…