Tag Archive for 'Internet'

Pioneers and such

Published on April 27, 2009 in Other. Closed Tags: Internet, Josh Harris, Movie, Ondi Timoner, Privacy, Social Media, We Live In Public.

The keywords Facebook and Twitter in the short movie abstract caught my attention and made me pick “We Live In Public” as one film I wanted to see out of the great program at the IFF Boston last weekend.

The documentary is a portrait about Josh Harris, a visionary maniac so to say (cf. luvvy) and possibly

the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.

Having made millions of dollars in the dot.com bubble, he created and funded eccentric art projects like Quiet: We Live in Public, a colony with 100 people living under 24-hour surveillance in a bunker in New York City.

People want 15 min of fame, every day.

The master tapes filmed in the bunker must be a paradise for psychologists and sociologists and probably deserve a place in a university library. The bunker is a very brutal, exaggerated and compressed picture of the effects of sacrificing privacy and sharing your life with literally everybody. That part of the documentary raises the question for me why do we want to share our personal information on commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace. What do we get in return? Targeted advertising and hundreds of connections to people you barely know, is that it?

I especially like the quote

Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That we own.

of Josh Harris. A principle of the bunker in 1999, but I guess it still can be easily applied to many Web 2.0 business models nowadays.

“We Live In Public” is a truly fascinating documentary and clearly one of my movie recommendations for 2009. Go watch it!

Jerks

Published on April 14, 2007 in Other. Closed Tags: Blogging, Censorship, Code of Conduct, Freedom, Internet, Media.

If you’re a jerk you might so go ahead and be a jerk. [The Vloggies]

It’s freedom what makes the internet to such an exciting communication media. Any kind of censorship undermines the very nature of the internet. At the end of the day it’s up to every site owner what content is going to be published and what not. I don’t need to sign a Code of Conduct for not allowing harassing or threating comments on my blog, I certainly would delete them, as I do it with spam comments. Still, it would be my own decision if I don’t agree with certain comments and therefore don’t want them to be connected with my online life.

A hard day

Published on March 23, 2007 in Tech. Closed Tags: Addiction, Computer, Dependence, Habits, Internet, Shutdown Day.

I have the strange feeling that it’s going to be a hard day tomorrow. If at least weather would be nicer to spend the day outside.

The problem is that all my home entertainment is organized on my computer. If iPods count as computers too it’ll be a very silent day tomorrow. Even though my neighbors would probably appreciate that.

No rainy Saturday afternoon movie either, because without turning the computer on I can’t watch a DVD. At least the day shows how much I already depend on that device.

But there is still one thing I’m really concerned about: the morning news paper I need after getting out of bed. Either I have to leave the house without having a coffee and buy a real paper news paper somewhere downstairs or I’ll have my morning coffee without reading the news. Morning coffee together with morning news, which I usually read online, is some sort of holy morning habit in my life. This is going to be really though tomorrow in any case.

The geoURI scheme

Published on February 23, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Geoinformation, GeoRSS, Geotag, geoURI, GIS, Google Earth, IETF, Internet, URI.

Alex and I have started working on an Internet draft for a geo Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme. Basically a geoURI should identify locations by specifying latitude, longitude and (optional) elevation like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171. By adding query arguments, like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171?type=cathedral, it’s possible to extend the identifier and provide more information or call applications where to visualize the location (e.g. a GIS application, Google Earth, etc.). Words and text fragments within HTML documents can be labeled as place (geotagged) for instance: St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Nothing will happen when you click on the link…).

Our intention is to keep the URI as simple as possible and to make information about locations for internet users as easy accessible as writing an email after clicking a ‘mailto:’-link.

However, today a first draft was submitted by us to the IETF and it will be presented to the geopriv working group at the next IETF meeting held in Prague March 18-23.

We are still in the middle of ongoing discussions and too many ideas around possible geoURI-applications, -neighbors, -examples and -services need to be structured and sorted out. But if you are interested you can track the geoURI development and share your opinions with us at geouri.org (feed).

Addictive

Published on July 24, 2005 in Other and Tech. Closed Tags: Addiction, Flickr, Internet, iPhoto.

Because I wanted to show/share the pictures from my trip to spain with a few other people I registered to flickr. A pretty good service for publishing pictures online, fits perfect for my needs. It’s easy to use, iPhoto exports smoothly to it and one can personalize photos with notes, comments, etc. Altogether a successful service.
But since a major part in flickr are it’s community features – you publish your pictures to everyone and everyone can interact with them – it wakes up the little voyeuristic monster in you. I could spend hours browsing through “everyone’s photos”, watching some holiday pictures from argentina, cat pix from asia, artistic photographs from england, party pix from sidney… One must be careful with flickr, it’s addictive!