details of a global brain
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Topical podcast day
If you are from Germany and you’re considering creating a podcast one day then maybe you should look out for Monday, 29th of August: there will be a podcast day about the german re-election in september. I just learned that some people have founded a Association of German Podcasters…
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BBC Extras
If you liked The Office you might want to see Extras – a new comedy show by/with Ricky Gervais. The main idea: it swaps the roles of stars and extras so that the extras are the stars of the show and the stars are the extras (kind of). But anyway without the stars appearing as…
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Upgraded!
YES! My DSL connection was just upgraded to 6MBit/s downstream. It’s amazing that these speeds are available for consumers for affordable flat rates. I remember a comment made by Derrick De Kerckhove in the final panel of a 4th doors of perception conference about »Speed« in 1996: No body is complaining about the television being…
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DenkWerkzeug 2005
Actually I wanted to join the 2nd DenkWerkzeug meeting in Karlsruhe (organized by Heiko Haller) tomorrow but I can’t make it. I would have been glad to discuss strategies for knowledge tools and possible approaches for a PKM introductory course. Better luck next time…
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Pace, Timing and Rhythm in Information Architecture
Andrew Dillon in December 2004 joined the group of thinkers that question simplistic approaches to effiiciency of communication that ask for speed instead of pace: Is there a temporal aspect to interaction that we should acknowledge? Surely there is a pace that leads to the best fit for each of us between tool and task,…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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).
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Got any book recommendations?