Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Author: Oliver Wrede

  • Yahoo 360 – born to die?

    Shortly after the acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo! the latter company introduced a multi-feature invite-only blog/photo/whatever-sharing platform called “Yahoo 360“. The invitation-only concept worked well for Gmail – elitism marketing. Dave Winer has a spot on analysis of Yahoo 360: Everything about Yahoo 360 is for members only, and in the first few hours of…

  • Theory clusters

    At the University Twente there is a overview about communication-related theories. Extremely useful and a must read – if not must know – for every designer: The theories presented here are related to communication. Students can use these theories as a rich source for a better understanding of the theoretical fieldwork of communication. Choosing a…

  • Eating fossil fuels

    After doing a detailed math about energy resources and consumption Dale Allen Pfeiffer casts a dark image of the future if controlling the earth population will not happen anytime soon: Should we fail to acknowledge this coming crisis and determine to deal with it, we will be faced with a die-off from which civilization may…

  • WebDev is ‘hard stuff’

    Jeremy Zawodny with an interesting post about the return of client side web programming. I did my diploma with heavy use of DHTML in 1997. I wanted to do it cross-platform and I stopped to support anything but Internet Explorer after my doctor told me I should try to back-off from whatever I currently do.…

  • NextD journal

    I just came across the NextD site – an organisation located in New York – with some interesting interviews – the latest with Richard Saul Wurman. NextDesign Leadership Institute was created as an experiment in innovation acceleration. We wondered if it might be possible for a small team of practicing designers to help speed the…

  • Conflict in design education

    I recently had to think about design education again. I sense some divide between approaches of design education. The devide is to some degree a difference between classical and novel ways. I try to identify the differences in these two conceptions: The classical way all theoretical implications are researched in the moment they are required…

  • I heard him say…

  • Fighting wiki spam

    I lost the wiki on this site due to hackers. I didn’t have a recent backup so I am trying to recover as much as possible from Google cache. The wiki wasn’t a wiki anymore anyway: i needed to close it for public editing due to spam bots. The best solution I have seen for…

  • JCU Study Skills

    Through Clark MacLeods blog I found this site about study skills from James Cook University in Australia. It containes some helpful links and it appears to be fine input for the course about “PIM strategies” I was contemplating about some days ago.

  • Blogging strategy reconsidered

    I really like this weblog of Clark MacLeod from Taiwan (he is very much into sound and interaction design). In addition to common blog post keywords. He categorizes his posts in three domains: work, life and play. I think this is a good way to separate social roles and personal motivation in blog posts. I…

  • Removing simplicity in blogging?

    Mark Bernstein writes that Tinderbox is perfectly well suited for structured blogging. It’s basically a concept to add metadata to blog posts. Tinderbox originally was designed with personal content management and hypertext authoring in mind – not blogging. It could be a push for Eastgate if structured blogging is recieving wider attention. Dave Winer also…

  • Podcasting nonsense

    My prediction for podcasting & weblogging: It will remain as a method for distributing files via RSS-style subscription. But I don’t think it will have much impact in the blogging area. Most podcasts created by bloggers are simply too boring. They can’t be indexed. Passages can’t be quoted. Most of all: you have to invest…

  • Downtime – arrrgh!

    My server was hacked and the provider decided to completely eliminate the whole system without confirmation. Lot’s of reconfiguration and updating needed. Most functionality is gone. Comments are lost. The wiki as well. ARRGH! Shouldn’t a provider call to negotiate further actions? This is really weird.

  • Crappy CMS

    I remeber well Brent Simmons’ proposal of a“Law of CMS URLs”: The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs. Today I had the chance to work as editor with the WebDB portal platform from Oracle 10g Application Server. It is pretty modular, but it is a pain in the a** to really get to…

  • 25 dificult questions you could be asked in a job interview

    This is an very interesting collection of questions for job interviews. Very good to be prepared for those in case you plan to have one.

  • Presentation about weblogs in Hagen

    I am going to present about weblogs in higher education at an event at the Univeristy of Hagen next week. I am not quite sure what the audience is expecting and what how this topic is going to fit into the day. I think the (german) presentations will be video taped and published online. In…