The Danube Chan­nel is a short, man-made sidearm of the river Danube which runs directly through the cen­ter of the city. About 10 years ago, spray­ing basi­cally was an ille­gal activ­ity any­where in the city, but then some smart folks decided to offi­cially turn the walls along­side the chan­nel into the city-sprayers’ offi­cial can­vas. On a warm, sunny Sun­day plenty of paint­ing action takes place — I shot the fol­low­ing three pics using my EOS D and a lens­baby muse. (Click to enlarge.)

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «Pho­tos: Graf­fiti Sprayer at Danube Channel»

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «Have a great new year!»

If you’re a chef you’ve prob­a­bly won­dered why every­body is talk­ing about these Wik­iL­icks. And if you’re into online mar­ket­ing, you prob­a­bly won­dered why you are still strug­gling with Face­book while the com­pe­ti­tion is already gen­er­at­ing Wik­iLeads like crazy. Calm down — it’s Wik­iLeaks and it prob­a­bly won’t ruin you. Oh, you’re a politi­cian? In that case: be afraid. Be very afraid.

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «How Wik­iLeads can­not get shut down [Cartoon]»

This year, Austria’s first TEDx (an inde­pen­dently orga­nized TED con­fer­ence) took place in Bur­gen­land, the part of Aus­tria closes to Hun­gary. The land­scape here gives a fore­taste of the Puszta low­lands, and all us atten­dants enjoyed a great day filled with many inspir­ing talks. The Dream Acad­e­mia boys have orga­nized the con­fer­ence and now they’ve done a great job with the videos: all the talks are online, video and audio qual­ity are excel­lent: TED^x Pan­nonia: The Talks

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «TEDx Pan­nonia Videos: get inspired!»

The TURF FEINZ of Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia are a leg­endary dance crew that’s famous for tak­ing break­dance to the next level. In this clip, the orig­i­na­tors of the so called turf danc­ing style express deep emo­tions via their moves. There’s a sad back­ground to this incred­i­ble clip: a while ago, Rich D, crew mem­ber and half-brother of one of the dancers, died in a car acci­dent at the cor­ner where this R.I.P. dance took place:

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «Best dance video ever: TURF FEINZ — RIP Rich D»

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!

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «Dex­ter Sea­son 5: Pre­view the trailer»

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):

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «Social­Safe: Back up your Face­book Data»

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:

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «New on datadirt: Rate reader comments»

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.

Diesen Beitrag weit­er­lesen «Word­Press vs. Thesis»

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 «World Blog­ging Forum Vienna 2010 — the next 10 years in dig­i­tal media»

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 «SymbianGuru.com shuts down: No more love for Nokia»