Category: General

In celebration of its first anniversary, BILDblog.de asked its readers to design an advertisement in postcard size:

Macht Reklame für BILDblog [in German]

Mlle. A. received a special mention for her entry.

Auguri from Basel!

at http://krazydad.com/colrpickr/

The FAZ* recently published a page-long article on Howard Rheingold and his predictions.

Es sei eine ganz andere Welt, in der jeder die Möglichkeit habe, auf seiner Website seine Meinung zu verbreiten: “Und es wird immer schwieriger diese Welt von einer zentralen Stellen zu kontrollieren.”

In a nutshell: It’s not so much about what new technologies are evolving, but rather the ways and means social communities are using these to interact and behave…

Other remaindered links pêle-mêle:

Flickr has 775,000 registered users and hosts 19.5 million photos, with growth of about 30 percent per month.

Skype is number one in the North American VOIP business – and spending 0 $ on advertising.

On Blogosophy: Don’t mention the skiing looks back to the blog age: Is there any proven evidence that blogging existed at the start of 21st century?

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*not available online = this publication may lose significance and influence in certain social communities in the near future

[update] re: FAZ-article – it seems i was a little fast in my criticism that the article is not available online. Here it is.
Thanks Mlle. A.

Just wanted to check my email… and ended up upgrading Opera to 8.0, WordPress to 1.5.1.2, and trying out another new theme.

I’m kind of collecting advice on corporate blogging (with no particular goal in mind). A couple of background links I’ve found useful:

• The Corporate Weblog Manifesto by Scobleizer (update March 2018: removed link due to malware warning)
• Ten Tips For A Better Weblog
  
• Onlinejournalismus.de

Ãœber-blogger Scoble also provides advice how to react to negative comments. If you know of any other good links, please leave a comment.

Found this article on writing at kottke.org:

Poynter Online – Writing Tool #50: The Writing Process

The article describes the steps required to produce great writing:

• Sniff around
• Explore ideas
• Collect evidence
• Find a focus
• Select the best stuff
• Recognize an order
• Write a draft
• Revise and clarify

currently listening to Halley’s interview with Meg Hourihan:

download the podcast here

I’d forgotten about the Segway parody at 0sil8.com

[update June 9] quote from her Tuft profile:

Companies like Google advertise for employees with computer science degree, but as Hourihan herself points out, “On paper I don’t qualify for what their requirements are, and yet they bought my company. Looking at different types of experience and different types of backgrounds is important.”

Having founded two pioneering high-tech companies in the past five years, Hourihan’s English degree may seem a bit incongruous. But she doesn’t think so.

“My career path in technology is not at all an aberration,” she explains. “Many women in technology come to technology later and don’t come through traditional academic, undergraduate degrees.”

here’s a blog documenting the different fonts being used on signs and ads in the Zurich area:

TYPE AND THE CITY

What’s it like to live in Africa?

here’s an interesting view from a Ghanaian living in the Netherlands:

My view is that political independence is meaningless until it is linked with economic independence. I think the best place to grow up in this world is in Africa and the worse place too because of the mixture of governance. There is no stage that is so interesting and indeed makes me happier in my life other than those days I vividly remember in my childhood. Independence from colonial rule is relatively good for Ghana for it has already happened and irreversible but I think my life could have been much better if we were still under colonial rule.

Learn Shona via the Shona Podcast

source: BBC

People pay more attention to you when they think you’re up to something.

I was browsing thru the list of bloggers that attended yesterday’s meetup (me included). This entry at Starfrosch.ch had me laughing out loud:

Beta forever (in German)

Heh, I agree beta deserves better. And here’s my link to Nirgendwo.

Remove Forebrain and Serve: Tag Clouds II

There’s a discussion going on at CyberWriter about this Technology Review article … [mostly in German]

Tags & Folksonomies – What are they, and why should you care?

Source: via Swamp Cottage

Drinking coffee, reading blogs, and browsing thru my flickr contacts on a Saturday morning.

A couple of links that caught my eye:

• BBC Backstage – Build what you want with BBC content – via Cyberwriter
• ISO 800, a blog about photography – seen at Stephan Bucher’s blog

Small companies have to work hard to get visibility, especially when the market is crowded with competitors all vying for the same business. In high tech they face the added dilemma that IT departments don’t want to buy from a small unknown vendor, and the vendor can’t become large and reputable unless it has major customers. So, how does a company become better known with limited resources? By becoming an industry thought leader.

Read the full article

source: blog link sent to me by Mlle. A.

I attended the JAX session on using social software in companies. It was refreshing to hear a good description of what blogging is all about, other than the usual negative “Tagebücher” reports. Matthew provided a very balanced and informed presentation on weblogs and wikis and their use in a corporate context (I hope the JAX organisers will be providing access to the slides).

i’ve changed ADSL providers and had to reset my old ADSL router, Cayman Netopia 3341, to the new ISP. Here’s a short description of the steps involved (for my own future reference).

To reset the router:

• Reset the router to the default factory settings. There’s a small round opening next to the power plug. This is the Reset Switch.
• Use the point of a pen to reset to default factory settings.
• Next, open your browser and type the IP number 192.168.1.1.
• Type Admin as the username and 1234 as the password to access the router setup. The Netopia Welcome page displays.
• After a couple of minutes, a screen appears prompting you to enter your username and password. Type your new ISP details.

è voilà .

i’m currently editing several Word 2000 docs, length varying between 20 to 200 pages.

A couple of things are driving me crazy/mad/nuts/insane:

• adding 3 different types of headers and footers (title page, preface, and main)
• empty pages which don’t show online in the Print View, but which suddenly appear in the PDF
• automatic / manual hyphenation

Previously I used to work with FrameMaker. A difficult program to learn, but once you know how… It does it exactly what you want. In Word there are always side effects. When you start changing something at one end… something else falls apart. Unfortunately FrameMaker isn’t an option. And so I need to become a Word expert fast. I have seen some great work done in Word. It is possible…

…meanwhile give me something for the pain.

[update May 01] add to my list of Word woes and wailings above:

• removing a cross reference without replacing it by another