a personal blog about technology, communications and other stuff that interests me
In a move to become more transparent and address accusations that authorites are ”covering up the truth”, the French space agency CNES has put its archive of UFO sightings online.
In the past 30 years there have been 1,600 sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects in France, according to tech news service heise.de. The CNES is a state organization that also observes “extraterrestrial phenomena.” They are working on adding photos and videos related to the sightings.
(via heise.de)
The networked camera has no objective. No lense, no zoom. It’s just a black box with a button and some electronics inside. “Buttons is a camera that actually shoots other’s photos, taking the notion of the networked camera to the extreme.” Sascha Pohflepp, a student of visual communication at the Berlin University of the Arts, has created it:
Photography has become a networked process. It no longer ends with pasting prints into an album. Instead, making them public through services like Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the main ways how we treat our visual memories. The photographic process extends from preserving a moment to an act of telecommunication, with numerous implications on how we perceive reality, how we make our memories and how we create a narrative from it.
If you liked Michael Wesch’s video (“Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”) that has been posted all over the blogosphere recently, you might also enjoy the concept of Between Blinks & Buttons. You can watch a video here.
A team of researchers from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and GWT-TUD GmbH, an affiliated company, is building a library of SMS messages. They are hoping to collect 100,000 messages with several million words by April.
Instead of testing mobile applications and devices in an artificial environment with artificial data, the researchers want to collect, analyze and use real text messages to help make technology more “natural, intuitive and human”.
On its German-language website textforscher.de (German for “text researchers”) the team is looking for people who want to earn 10 Euros for an hour of entering sample text messages. The money can also be donated to charity.
“Post och Inrikes Tidningar” (PoIT), the world’s oldest current newspaper has discontinued its print edition as of January 1, 2007 and is now an Internet-only edition at PoIT.org. Established in 1645 as the official newspaper of Sweden’s national government, it had lost a lot of readers in recent years, according to Der Spiegel (in German).
Near the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish Queen Christina and Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna wanted to use PoIT to explain to its people “what all the money was spent on”. Over the centuries it turned from an outlet for the government’s official view into a full blown newspaper with reports on epidemics, the exchange rate for Swedish currency, weather reports, poetry and novels, and then was mostly focused on being “the country’s official notification body for announcements like bankruptcy declarations or auctions” (from the Wikipedia entry). The last print edition on December 29, 2006, was published with a circulation of only about 1,500.
Rather than viewing it as another proof point for the decline of print media, I’d say in this case the glass is half full. The Internet is a godsend for these types of official notification publications: the official function works just as well online. But it costs less public money.
(Disclaimer: I don’t speak Swedish; my only sources were Spiegel Online and Wikipedia)
On Friday, members of a German grassroots democracy project launched a new website called Abgeordnetenwatch.de (that’s “MPwatch” in English), which allows people to find the members of the German federal parliament for their region, read about their voting records, and get in contact with them.
A similar site was first launched for the federal state of Hamburg in 2004. Now they have expanded it to the federal parliament. They have also received funding from BonVenture and attracted major media partners in German news portals Spiegel.de, Tagesspiegel.de and Welt.de. According to an article in Welt.de, not all MPs are happy about this development. One politician said the site is indirectly pressuring politicans to come up with responses or get a reputation of being “anti-democrats” (I’d agree that there might be unrealistic expectations for the speed of response but, in general, this politician might want to read his job description again. Maybe he skipped the part about communicating with constituents).
A little while ago, I wrote about another German grassroots democracy project, where people can submit questions to the German chancellor and get them answered by the Federal Press Office.
Today I read about great projects in the UK (hat tip to Neville Hobson). Simon Dickson has created a Google Map of all MPs in the United Kingdom, which links to a database of House of Commons Hansard Debates, Written Answers and Statements via an API by TheyWorkforYou.com. TheyWorkforYou.com is an awesome resource for citizens in the UK.
It is fascinating to see citizens – not governments - come up with all these ideas of using new web technology to make government and democracy more transparent and accessible.
Does Europe lead in this type of online grassroots democracy? What about Canada? And other countries? I am asking not as an accusation but because I have no idea about Canada yet and I’d like to find out more about developments. If you know about any projects, please let me know in the comment section or send me an email (see contact page).
Roger Boyes, the London Times correspondent in Berlin, has written a book called “My dear Krauts”. The article about it on Spiegel Online suggests that he is a British man on a mission:
“I see myself as a development aid worker on German humor. Basically the Germans need all the help they can get. And I’ve decided to do my bit. It’s not that they can’t be funny. In fact they like a good laugh. It’s just that they’re a bit slower on the uptake than the rest of the world. And they don’t understand irony.”
That explains it. It’s because of my German heritage that I am slow on the uptake. For example, I never understood why my (Canadian) wife and our wedding caterer found my request for potatoes so terribly funny. Not to mention that they found it even funnier when I got mad about their reaction. All I wanted was to have potatoes added to the wedding menu. My wife still giggles when she talks about my email to the caterer which is now referred to as the ”ode to the potato” in our household. It wasn’t funny! But maybe I would have seen the light with Mr. Boyes’ humour training for Germans:
“[Germans] need to spend 10 minutes in front of the mirror every day and keep saying: ‘I’m funny’. Then they need to grin and laugh out loud for two minutes. It might help. But I’m not optimistic.”
Why so doubtful? I like it! Physiotherapy for my Teutonic funny bone. Where were you when I needed you in my wedding preparations years ago, Mr. Boyes? This book is a must-read for any serious German. It’s on my Christmas wish list…
I don’t know if it is available in English, I could only find the German version on Amazon. But Spiegel Online has posted an English excerpt from the book on its site, where he “recalls a painfully funny ‘reconciliation’ tour of Germany with his father, an RAF bomber pilot in World War II”. Whatever happened to ”don’t mention the War“?
- New York TImes: Entrepreneurs see a Web guided by common sense – welcome to Web 3.0… (via CNET News.com)
- Four second cut-off: 75% of shoppers would not return to a website that took longer than four seconds to load according to research by Akamai (via BBC News). Once again it seems I am part of a minority. But my spirit is with the 75%. Don’t make sites fancy, make them fast and easy to use.
- The BOBs: The results of Deutsche Welle’s 2006 blog awards are in…and the winner is The Sunlight Foundation (via heise.de). The awards highlight many other interesting blogs this year. Wish I would speak Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, too, so I could read them all.
First German Chancellor Angela Merkel started her own video-podcast series. Then a bunch of smart students and university graduates turned the tables on her and launched Direkt zur Kanzlerin! (“Direct to Chancellor!”), a platform where citizens can post questions for Angela Merkel. Anybody can submit a text, audio or video message for her on the site. Then people can vote for their favourite questions by mouse click.
After getting blog buzz and media coverage for their idea, the students got Angela Merkel’s attention. The Federal Press Office has now stepped up and agreed to answer the top three question each week on behalf of the Chancellor.
It is a different kind of Web 2.0 success story - a great little example of the potential that the ongoing spread of new, user-friendly technologies holds. What a great example of a couple people getting together and trying to make a difference through tech-driven grassroots democracy!
Consultant and author Anthony D. Williams recently blogged about the question: “is government ready for the Web 2.0 era?” Looks like the German government is playing catch-up with its people. But the Federal Press Office deserves credit, too. At least they are ready to participate in the project. It’s a start.
Note: The “Direct to Chancellor!” site is only available in German.
(via Welt.de)
The upcoming reform of the German “broadcast tax” system will expand the reach from television and radio to Internet usage. Starting in January 2007, businesses will need to pay fees for all computers and UMTS mobile phones because – through Internet access – they have the potential to receive radio or television programs. According to the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce, this will mean that financial insititutions will have to pay a broadcast tax for the 50,000 bank machines in Germany – because they are all connected through the Internet.
(via FAZ.net)
I fondly remember my student days in Bonn, when a “broadcast tax investigator” came to my door to find out whether or not I had any “illegal” radios or tv sets. Looking straight at the television in my one-room apartment, he asked me: “is this a television?” And I said, “why yes, it is indeed a television.” There are times when you have to embrace bureaucracy. But I still wonder whether he would have just walked away if I had said “no”. Maybe my broadcast tax investigator will now be promoted to head of the bank machine surveillance division.
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martinhofmann.net is the personal blog and web playground of Martin Hofmann. I live in Toronto and work 
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