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Archive for the ‘digital’ Category

WordPress offers a fascinatingly wide range of options: thanks to the power and the creativity of the open source community, the world’s most popular CMS has developed from a “blog-only” product into a multifaceted platform. Hundreds of plugins are waiting to cater almost every web publisher’s needs. These days, two new plugins take WordPress to the next level by integrated elaborate social network features. BuddyPress is now available at version 1.2 which plays along well with standard WP-installations; the previous version required WP multiuser edition. And then there’s Mingle, a new brilliant extension by Blair Williams, author of the (genius!) PrettyLink plugin.

Even though both plugins offer similar functionalities, they take a completely different approach at turning WordPress into a social network. While BuddyPress aims at running a stand-alone social network site, Mingle extends the community capabilities of nay existing blog. I installed it here on datadirt yesterday. Curious for a test-drive? Just click the new link Profile in the main menu! In the following posting I’ll explain why extending a blog with social network features is generally a smart idea. Read the rest of this entry »

When Public Enemy released their classic hit Shut ‘em down, they were criticizing authorities. Yet recently, Google has given the track’s title a completely new meaning: without any prior warning, the company shut down at least six renowned music blogs hosted on Blogger/Blogspot. Or, as Paidcontent.org puts, it, “wiped them from the internet”: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a big fan of Google in general: there services are not that great, but there’s no alternative. But it regularly frightens me how this machine works. Today, European director Steve Rogers told an Austrian newspaper: “When a company gets bigger, it is seen as intransparent. But we try to be as transparent as possible.” Right after that Mr. Rogers showed what he really means when he answered the next two questions about Google’s situation in China: “I’m not allowed to comment on this.” (Kleine Zeitung, February 9th 2010, page 29). Temper, temper! Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks and shout-outs to all sponsors, visitors, talkers and hosts at Videocamp Vienna 2010! Organizing the event together with Austrian television station ATV and Datenwerk was a great experience – and we’re all very satisfied with the premiere of Austria’s first online video barcamp. Knowledge was transferred, experiences were shared, a lot of visitors had to update their “met in real life” Twitter list – just the way we like it. I’m already looking forward to Videocamp Vienna 2010!

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When Google launched their latest gadget “Wave”, everybody was so keen on getting an invitation – I’ve sent out about 60 invites via my blogs, yet I haven’t been using Wave a lot. Neither in the beginning nor lately: it’s lame (even when used with Chrome, large multimedia Waves are basically unusable on netbooks), it lacks a lot of important features and – most important of all – it’s generally quite unsexy, According to Silicon Alley Insider, I’m not alone with this opinion. Read the rest of this entry »

Vienna’s first VideoCamp ever (a BarCamp specializing in digital video) takes place at Media Quarter St. Marx on the 30th of January 2010. ATV, Austria’s leading private tv station, Datenwerk Innovation Agency and datenschmutz (aka my German-language blog) are extremely proud to invite podcasters, tv professionals, video-freaks and other moving-picture geeks to join an intense day of sessions and discussions.

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WordPress 2.9 is still quite fresh, but today the team released a new version including some minor bug fixes. WordPress 2.9.1 fixes scheduling-errors which occurred on some hosts. The update can either be triggered via the admin or you can upload the files via ftp, no database update necessary this time.

But there’s another plugin-related issue: since the upgrade to 2.9, many WordPress bloggers miss Simple Tags: the tag management plugin just stopped to work, but worry not: it’s just a hard-coded version check, a simple hack makes the plugin work again. Read the rest of this entry »

I got 30 more invites left. Just drop me a note and I’ll send one to the e-mail address you provided. But please don’t ask what to use your newly-won realtime comfort for. Frankly speaking, I have got no idea yet. But I said the same thing about Twitter when I registered my account there, so I’ll keep waiting for the wave frenzy to happen. What’s your opinion? Are you already surfing the wave?

I admit: this equation does indeed have more than one solution – the result could just as well have been formsquare.com. But it wasn’t. And that’s why the maximum mash-up for all geeks trying hard to keep up with the latest hype(s) enters the stage with a noisy, frightening BANG. There are many old sayings perfectly describing this delicate situation: An RSS feed in the aggregator is worth two in a web / A site and its RSS feed are soon parted & Better a big aggregator on a little domain than a little content on many sites. Can you smell where I’m getting at? Indeed: datadirt proudly presents: fourspring.me! Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare.com is getting gold: hype-searching geeks are moving on, and these days their favorite URL is formspring.me: it’s a really simple q-and-a platform – kind of like Twitter, but without the 140 character limit. The service lacks a lot features, it’s still in a pretty early stage, which didn’t keep me from registering though: formspring.me/datadirt.

The setup just takes a minute: like on Twitter, there’s the avatar pic, the homepage URL, a short description and that’s it. When it comes to eye candy, formspring.me offers a couple of templates, but the more brand-aware user can also upload their own background pic – now in 2 minutes, because I’ve compiled a Photoshop-template that speeds up the process of creating a custom formspring template a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Traditional companies often have a hard time dealing with social media marketing – for many reasons. One of them lies in the difficulty of properly “synchronizing” their various online marketing activities. The following anecdote shows that in some cases public relations and marketing heavily disagree when it comes to chosing the right business partners. Read the rest of this entry »