details of a global brain
Bloggers need not apply?
An interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about webloggers that apply for academic positions claiming that most blogs are not benefitial: Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them” — better…
Google Maps
Google Maps really seems to take off after offering their Google Maps API for web developers. People are quickly developing very interessting variations (e.g. this incredible mixing of map and satellite views or someone tracking the hotspots he was using with plazes.com). You’ll find much more at this del.icio.us tag »googlemaps«.
How long does it take for a weblog to become inactive?
Several weeks now without any update here. Why? Well, too many reasons to list here. I was too busy on the one hand – on the other hand I did not want to blog just to remain »active«. I know I ignored one the »post early, post often« rule for running a successful blog. I…
Apple and Intel
This is another major bombshell after the aquisition of Macromedia through Adobe: rumors say Apple is going to announce Intel chips in Apple computers tomorrow. Another interesting articles: Intel, Apple coupling could woo Hollywood Apple to Intel: Some advantage, lots of risk Update: So it’s true. I wasn’t surprised about the fact that Apple had…
Plone book arrived….
I just received a copy of the Plone book by Andy McKay (german translation). Lot’s of new things are in there. Good for studying after some extensive trial & error sessions. I had a discussion with Peter Baumgartner two days ago about Plone – and it seems like they’re going to substitute Userland Manila with…
Are weblogs different to forums?
Peter Baumgartner and Leiff Pullich (after giving a presentation about weblogs in education) had a discussion with others at the Fernuniverstität Hagen about the differences between classical forums and weblogs for discussion: In several occasions we had no convincing argument why discussion via weblogs are different from news groups. The productive atmosphere today (oops: yesterday)…
Location based services (update)
A follow-up to yesterdays post: Tim Bruysten adds some context and links to an interesting project: Loopcity by Dietmar Offenhuber. Markus Neckar pointed me to the MacOS X menubar extra for Plazes by Martin Pittenauer. This makes it very easy to have the system announcing itself to the Plazes service (btw this is one of…
Seminars in winter term 2005
This semester I am feeling like thinking about the next seminars quite early. If plans do not change one of the next seminars will be called »Continuity«. The seminar will research flow theories, the nature of immersion and pre-concious decision making. Sounds strange though, but it’s going to be fun. I am still keeping the…
Location based services
Until now the topic of »location based services« has been more a theoretical discussion about geological references to online data. Now there are obvioulsy a number of developments (and some rumors) that try to create datasets with longitude/latitude metadata. First of all hardware: The problem if tagging information with geological locations could be solved by…
DGTF documentaries
There have been three convents of the German Association of Design Theory and Research (DGTF). These are available online now. There are audio recordings of the latest convent available.
Tinderbox Syndicate
Here is someone re-syndicating a number of weblogs created with Tinderbox. He seems to simply aggregate the news item and republish these.
Twisted 2.0
I was so busy doing other stuff so that I completely missed the release of Twisted 2.0. It was a large transition from a monolithic framework to a modular framework (there is a FAQ about this change). I wish I had the time now to test it.
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…
Got any book recommendations?