details of a global brain
Climate waring as Siberia melts
Scientists warn about a depot of 70 billion tons of methane ready to be released into the atmosphere as the permafrost in Siberia melts due to global warming. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting…
The Appeal Manifesto
The KDE project has issued a short list of things the’re aiming for in a future release of Linux desktop. Interestingly the first item on their list is »breathtaking beauty«: Breathtaking Beauty putting an emphasis on the form and style of software in addition to the function of it creating visually impactful interfaces that support…
Bretton Woods II
German e-Zine Telepolis writes about the Bretton Woods II theory that tries to explain the current world economy. Complex stuff if you’re not into world economics. The theory is around for quite some time now. Read about the Bretton Woods System.
Amazon Maps
We have Google Maps, MSN Virtual Earth – now we get Amazon Maps. The fancy feature of the day at Amazon are Block View Images: you can walk the streets of a number of major US cities…
Wikipedia Animate
Wikipedia Animate aggregates all changes of a wikipedia page and shows an animation of it. It uses Greasemonkey (which allows some kind of client side web application created with JavaScript).
Music video milestones
I am glad to see music video creators running formal experiments and pushing styles forward. Here are some: The video of Agenda Suicide by The Faint the former reminds me a lot of the song Remind Me by Röyksopp also a must see is Let Forever Be by Chemical Brother (directed by Michael Gondry) Facing…
The future of broadcasting
Doug Kaye (host and producer of IT Conversations) suggests that downloading radio programs from the net is superior to the old radio frequency broadcasting: This started for me when I blogged about Doc’s suggestion that we all call our local public radio stations and request they carry the new show. It took me no time…
Audioscrobbler turned Last.fm – redesigned
I wrote about Audioscroblbler before. Now I found they’ve merged it with their Last.fm service and also reworked their design – and it seems they improved usability a lot. Interestingly they offer blogs and tagging (they seem to have learned the lessons). The personal radio now can be used with a separate client (which is…
Geman politicians and weblogs
Here is a short review about some weblogs politicians from Germany are writing. Obviously many have ghost writers and don’t write themselves. They don’t get it. A weblog is not about updated news in a different way – it is an effective way to personally reach thousands of people. If readers feel the blog is…
Podcasting applied to TV
It wasn’t even a question of time when this was going to happen: Subscription TV (see http://participatoryculture.org/). DTV uses the Bittorrent technology to distribute the files. Very clever. So this leaves one question: How to find content? There is this built in channel guide that seems to be similar to the podcast support in iTunes…
Extreme Democracy
This concept proposed by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe asks what is the future of democracy in the information age: “Extreme democracy” is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making…
Podcasts from Tagesschau.de
The popular german TV news program Tagesschau started podcasts MP3 of their prime time broadcast. This supports my hypothesis, that podcasting will be adopted quickly by traditional media. I still think podcasting will remain marginal in the blogsphere.
How to hire a product manager
Here is someone with a lot of experience in hiring product managers talking about how to hire one: So what do I look for in a PM? Most importantly, raw intellectual horsepower. I’ll take a wickedly smart, inexperienced PM over one of average intellect and years of experience any day. Product management is fundamentally about…
Mapping scientific literature
Students often ask for reading recommendations. The question of where to start is a question of what one already knows and what one is up to. There is no single path to take on. So most of the time I first try to give an overview about different types of literature. Now I found this…
60 years Hiroshima
Hiroshima was not only a human desaster of unspeakable extent – it is also the beginning of »politics of deception« that led to Vietnam, Iraq I and Iraq II (and probably more to come). Quote from the LA Times article: Hiroshima’s myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance. The…
OPML Editor
Dave Winer has released his latest project: OPML Editor. I like writing in outlines, but OPML Editor remains a typical Winerish tool: powerful for users that want to dig a scripting tool on steroids – but utterly useless for “normal” users that expect a tool without dead ends and a somewhat standard compliant graphical user…
Gizmo here – Skype gone
On Sunday I decided to switch my DSL provider. After I entered their online form, I recieved their confirmation on Monday. On Wednesday morning I got their package with a brand new DSL/WLAN modem/router and all login data required. Setting it up was a snap. Everything worked out of the box. I also recieved Internet…
Virtual Earth
Microsoft’s answer to Google Maps is Virtual Earth. Obviously Microsoft uses other data for their maps. Alltogether Google Maps appear to be nicer, faster, a little more precise and with better aerial imagery. Microsoft sometimes uses BW images – maybe from the infrared spectrum. Microsofts product also sometimes fails to load all tiles of the…
Updgrade to Tiger
I upgraded my PowerBook to the latest Tiger release. In 20 years of working with computers I never experienced a system upgrade that was so easy. After cloning the complete internal harddisk to an equally sized external one (with Carbon Copy Cloner) I did a clean re-install of MacOS X 10.4 Tiger. Tiger comes with…
Got any book recommendations?