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!
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):
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:

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:
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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!
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:
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
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