Great tv series and great restau­rants do have a lot in com­mon: tem­po­rary high­lights are not suf­fi­cient, the pro­duc­ers must man­age to keep the qual­ity level. While many series start with a great first sea­son but fail to live to big expec­ta­tions after­wards, the author­ing team behind Dex­ter kept deliv­er­ing great sto­ries for 4 sea­sons. On Sep­tem­ber 26th, the fifth sea­son pre­miers in the US. Vis­i­tors of Comic Con 2010 were the first to see the offi­cial trailer. Luck­ily, the video is also avail­able on Youtube since July 23rd, and by the time I pub­lish this post­ing, 1.2 mil­lion peo­ple have already seen it. Atten­tion if haven’t watched sea­son 4 yet: the trailer con­tains a seri­ous spoiler!

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While privacy-savy users might think about ways to remove their data from social net­works like Face­book, the aver­age geek is much more wor­ried about los­ing such data against his will. Enter Social­Safe, a handy tool which backs up all your Face­book data on your local com­puter. Eas­ier said than done you might think — but the joint ven­ture beween British online experts iBun­dle and 1minus1 does a nice job for a very low price.

But why would you want to backup your Face­book data at all? There are many good rea­sons, the most impor­tant being that one day your account just might dis­abled. Hap­pens a lot these days, some­times because users vio­late the TOS, some­times because some algo­rithm trig­gers a false alarm. Social­Safe is an Adobe Air based client that stores Face­book data offline and tracks changes between sin­gle “snap­shots”. After the instal­la­tion and the ini­tial authen­ti­ca­tion the pro­gram gen­er­ates a snap­shot of one’s cur­rent con­tacts, wall, photo albums and pro­file infor­ma­tion. Social­Safe ain’t free, but it’s still one of the best things in social media life, and €2,48 for a two-computer license def­i­nitely is a steal. This video explains the basics (actu­ally, this cov­ers pretty much every­thing that can be said about this sim­ple yet help­full app):

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Many Face­book users have wished for a dislike-button. But the biggest social net­work on the planet obvi­ously doesn’t want to start click-fights for pop­u­lar­ity: “If you love some­thing, like it — if you don’t let it go”. I’ll try a dif­fer­ent approach and offer you the full binary options aka the two basic emo­tions: I encour­age all read­ers to use the new “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” sym­bols below every sin­gle com­ment to express their opinion:

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Is it legally and/or eth­i­cally okay, to build a busi­ness based on a GPL licensed soft­ware? To those of you unfa­mil­iar with the not-so-uncomplicated details of open and com­mer­cial licens­ing, this ques­tion may sound like a ques­tion you’d ask a stu­dent of media law. But the­ory turns into vir­tual real­ity when we take a closer look a The­sis, a very pop­u­lar Word­Press theme.

Unlike most themes, The­sis isn’t avail­able for free. Christ Pear­son is sell­ing his tem­plate for $87 per per­sonal site, and so he’s been rack­ing up sales. Why do peo­ple pay for The­sis when there are so many free themes avail­able? This ques­tion is a lot eas­ier to answer: Chris thought about what pro cus­tomers want and started to offer a flex­i­ble, highly con­fig­urable theme which caters almost every need of pro­fes­sional pub­lish­ers and pro-bloggers. But even though his sales fig­ures are sky­rock­et­ing, Matt Mul­len­weg, founder and head of WordPress.com/.org argues that The­sis vio­lates the GPL license — because GPL-software not only is freely avail­able (in source code), but the GPL (Gnu Pub­lic Licenses) also states that all prod­ucts built upon GPL soft­ware must also use the same license. In other words: It’s ille­gal to make money on the hard (and free) work of others.

Today mixergy.com invited Chris and Matt for a Skype dis­cus­sion which cov­ers some very impor­tant aspects of soft­ware licensing:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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On Novem­ber 13th, A1 Telekom Aus­tria and datadirt, the proud and happy author of this hum­ble blog, invite inter­na­tional top blog­gers and Aus­trian social media geeks to join the first pro-blogging con­fer­ence in Vienna. The con­fer­ence focuses on the future of dig­i­tal media. We will dis­cuss the impact of the inter­net on var­i­ous aspects of our life in the next ten years: how will our jobs change? How will our per­sonal life change? What’s the next stage of social media? The offi­cial home­page wbf2010.at will soon be online soon. The event will take place at A1 TA head­quar­ters at Lasallestraße 9 in Vienna — we got a main hall plus var­i­ous smaller con­fer­ence rooms for break-out ses­sions, of course all equipped with sta­ble WLAN.

Aus­trian blog­gers and jour­nal­ists are warmly wel­come. There is no entrance fee; due to the capac­ity of the venue the spots are strictly lim­ited though. In the next weeks, we will invite our inter­na­tional guests and give away all tick­ets via weblogs and media part­ners. Secure your spot now and join us: the first ten spots are avail­able… NOW! Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen

SymbianGuru.com used to be my favorite web­site for all things Nokia-related. But it seems that Sym­bian 3.0 is going fur­ther down a dead-end road, and even the Guru him­self can’t stand Sym­bian any more. And that’s why he decided to shut the site down and switch to Android. Usu­ally, I’m not a big fan of Ol’Google’s Enter­prises, but in this case I totally agree: Nokia used to be the num­ber one mobile mar­ket mover, but recently they’ve done a ter­ri­ble job. And when I read Guru’s final arti­cle, I real­ized that both our expe­ri­ences with Nokia’s smart­phone flag­ship N97 are fright­en­ingly sim­i­lar. Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen

Today, the Word­Press team released the long-awaited ver­sion 3.0 — the third major release of our favorite blog­ging cms comes with a ton of extremely cool new fea­tures: Word­Press and WP-MU haven been com­pletely merged, which means that you can now run an unlim­ited num­ber of blogs from the same instal­la­tion. Also, the infa­mous Kubrick theme finally retires and gets replaced by Twenty Ten. Of course the new stan­dard tem­plate proudly shows off all the new bells and whis­tles, includ­ing a greatly improved han­dling of menus, post types and tax­onomies. The back­end inter­face has become a lot lighter, 218 pro­gram­mers con­tributed 1.217 bug fixes and fea­ture enhance­ments. Check out the video tour posted on the offi­cial Word­Press blog: Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen

Eric Qual­man is the author of “Social­nomics: How Social Media Trans­forms the Way We Live and Do Busi­ness”. More than 2 mil­lion view­ers have seen his “Social Media Rev­o­lu­tion” video clip. In June 2010, Eric gave a keynote pre­sen­ta­tion at Meshed con­fer­ence in Vienna. After his pre­sen­ta­tion I sat down with Eric and we chat­ted about the changes of our media envi­ron­ment. Enjoy the new datadirt video podcast!

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Last weekend’s uncon­fer­ence at Microsoft in Vienna was the biggest Aus­trian Bar­camp so far — the social media scene is grow­ing, inter­est in social media plat­forms, new tech­nolo­gies and the par­a­digm shift in mar­ket­ing has increased immensely over the last cou­ple of months. This is not a big sur­prise: more and more peo­ple under­stand that the web 2.0 is not about a new gen­er­a­tion of buzz­words that pol­lute the same old pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tions, but about a fun­da­men­tal par­a­digm shift in the way com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cate with their customers:

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In the newest issue of my video-podcast MIT Pro­fes­sor Thomas W. Mal­one talks about his reasearch on col­lec­tive intel­li­gence and the chang­ing notion of pri­vacy. Pro­fes­sor Mal­one is the found­ing direc­tor of MIT’s Cen­ter for Col­lec­tive Intel­li­gence. In 2004, he pub­lished The Future of Work, a crit­i­cally acclaimed book about the impact of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion on man­age­ment, orga­ni­za­tions and busi­ness. Before he started teach­ing at MIT, Mr. Mal­one was a research sci­en­tist at the leg­endary Xerox Palo Alto Research Cen­ter. So enjoy the pod­cast which con­tains a short intro­duc­tion, the inter­view plus two exlu­sive bonus tracks

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Back in the 90ies, more than a dozen search engines fought for the user’s atten­tion. A cou­ple of years later (almost) only Google was left. Do we face a sim­i­lar devel­op­ment in the field of social net­work­ing? Tak­ing a look at the lat­est Face­book fig­ures, I’m inclined to answer this ques­tion with yes. Yet their ever-growing social graphs make more and more users ner­vous, and even though Face­book in my opin­ion is doing a good job giv­ing the user con­trol over his con­tent, Reclaimprivacy.org might come in handy. Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen