The (still) Expanding Blogosphere

I started my first blog on the 16th of April 2003 at 4:49 in the morning. This blog is third one although I just moved the second one to this new domain. I posted this on my previous blog as well and I have to do it again just to prove that I’ve been in the blogosphere quite a bit. To me it is still amazing to see close friends starting their own weblog and I’m even more amazed when people, who I wouldn’t suspect of being the blogging type, start their site.

Some people now tend to have a blogroll to show which blogs they’re reading, I rather point out some special ones once in a while. In this case I’d like to point to two new players of the game, Jens and Rop. Both just started their own little thing in the web and I’m really curious how it is going to turn out. Rop started right away with pretty sharp remarks on different but mostly political topics. Jens tends to follow more the entertaining way – but it is way to early to have a final impression. Heh, I feel like a sports reporter … Oh I almost forgot, Pavel started writing again as well.

There are a few people left who don’t feel the need of writing their thoughts into the web, like my good friend Karsten. I’m sure he’d have something to say.

For those of you who didn’t know … Karsten, me and a couple of other guys came together with the help of the chaos computer club, a rising star in the early days of the web called kiffer.de and lots of stuff that works well in combination with tabacco. Most of the kiffer.de guys who haven’t had their own blog just started a collaborative one. I didn’t think that it would actually work because some of the guys already tried it on their own once but lost interest shortly after the »hello world« beginning. Now, they’re writing A-LOT. I still hate the generic wordpress theme and the justified text but that’s ok for my newsreader.

So Karsten, it is obviously your turn now!

Again I find it hard to understand what’s going on but at the same time I really like the idea that everyone can publish his or her thoughts worldwide with very low costs. You can actually get things in motion with one entry in your weblog. The whole idea of Joi Itos »Emergent Democracy« seems to work out well, because nowadays it is almost common that mass media refers to blogs and stories that emerged from them. Talking about all this I think I can point you attention once more to Jacob Appelbaums talk(wmv) at the 22C3. It is a pretty good statement about what can be done.

The last thing I have to mention is technorati. It is a blog search engine. First I thought »who needs this?« but currently I think it is one of the most useful websites out there because it really helps you to find interesting articles that deal with certain topics. Best of all: »It is pretty semantic« heh…

No really, check it out, maybe even include technorati tags in your blog to help people to find other articles which deal with certain topics. You can also configure your weblog to ping the technorati servers to notify them whenever you have written something. That way people can find your blog / article on technorati.

I like the web, and I really like weblogs, either if they are funny, entertaining, political, technical, informative or observative.

That I had to say.

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Sorry, this seat is occupied – by Web 3.0

I just did my regular good-morning-rss-reading with a cup of fine black tea in my hand. In the »design« section of my RSS reader I found a great article on the A List Apart website. It is called: Web 3.0.

I think I give you the excerpt as well to tease you even more to read it, it goes like that:

»Web 2.0 is a fresh-faced starlet on the intertwingled longtail to the disruptive experience of tomorrow. Web 3.0 thinks you are so 2005.«

The article is a must-read for everyone interested in the current and upcoming webstandards. It is dealing so well with all this Web 2.0 hysteria by taking it apart and making a »little« fun of it, but in a very decent way.

Have fun reading!

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Textpattern, my favourite CMS

I don’t know for sure if mentioned this before so I am going to write some words about my favourite Content Management System. The reason I like textpattern is its simplicity and its flexibility. You can do tons of stuff by combining small modules that are simple to use and to understand. It is well documented and very light-weighted. Best of all: It is free!

I tried dozens of CMS and most of them either had a lack of features or a GUI which wouldn’t allow you to control all the features easily. I was so glad to find textpattern although I think it isn’t suitable for large corporate websites. Anyway, so far nobody asked me to do a large corporate website and I think I wouldn’t like it either. With texpattern you don’t have to dig yourself through all the glory details to get it running but if you want to dig, play and customise it you can do it, most of the time without even seeing a piece of PHP code.

It works great for blogs or small to medium websites. There are tons of plugins, mods, tutorials, and themes available so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Thank you textpattern for saving time and aggravation!

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Google Earth is soo 1995

I had a lot of fun last night at the CCCB. We talked till early morning about all kinds of stuff. Pavel also showed me the video of art+com’s project called Terravision. It is pretty much like Google Earth except it was done in 1995 and had a way cooler interface. art+com now released the original video from 1995 and i decided to send it out via bittorrent with their permission so everybody can get a picture of that project. They spent millions of dollars for this project, nowadays this kind of application runs on nearly every computer and you can get it for free from google.

Have fun watching, it is really amazing to see!

Download: Terravision Video

Neues aus dem Reprokurs

Gestern fand mal wieder der Reprokurs mit Florian Süßl con Metadesign an der UdK statt. Nachdem wir in den Vormonaten das theoretische Wissen vermittelt bekommen haben ging es gestern mit der Praxis los. Dafür hat uns Florian seine Photoshop Settings für das »Soft-Proofen« / Druckvorstufe gegeben. Ich habe mit seiner Erlaubnis daraus ein .zip File gemacht und selbiges auf smyck.org geladen damit es sich jeder herunterladen kann. Das File gibt es hier: repro-settings.zip

Da Florian auch Mac OS X benutzt sind die Files schon in der Mac OS X typischen Verzeichnisstruktur. Die Windowsuser unter euch müssen leider selbst herausfinden wo die Profile und Settings hinmüssen. Vermutlich einfach irgendwo in einen der Photoshop Unterordner.

Außerdem sei noch angemerkt wofür die Abkürzungen in den Proofsettings stehen:

Fwe – Farbwerte erhalten
PW – Papier Weiß simulierenm

Bei TFT Displays mit hohem Kontrastverhältnis empfiehlt es sich das Papierweiß zu simulieren da deren Weiß weißer ist als Papier. Röhrenmonitore oder TFTs mit Kontrastverhältnissen von 500:1 oder weniger schaffen es grade mal so das Papierweiß abzubilden.

Als letzte Anmerkung noch der Hinweis das diese ganzen Proofingeinstellungen bei Schwarz/Weiß-Bildern nicht wirklich gut funktionieren. Bei derartigen Bildern einfach nur Iso-Coated als Profil auswählen und keine weiteren Simulationsoptionen anklicken.

Falls ihr noch fragen dazu habt – nur zu!