Ergebnisse

Archive for the ‘media.culture’ Category

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! Read the rest of this entry »

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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In Jan­u­ary I vis­ited the exhi­bi­tion Medi­en­wel­ten at Tech­nis­ches Museum Wien. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing trip back to the very begin­nings of infor­ma­tion trans­mis­sion — a must for any­one inter­ested in the early begin­nings of this media society:

The medien.welten exhi­bi­tion presents the his­tory of trans­mis­sion media as well as stor­age media. On 2.500 square meters the evo­lu­tion of the mod­ern media-system becomes alive. In addi­tion to hun­dreds of his­tor­i­cal arte­facts, images and texts, the exhi­bi­tion fea­tures a virtual-information-room that goes beyond the scope of con­ven­tional museum exhibitions.

Last Sun­day I returned to the museum, but this time I brough my cam­era. There’s plenty to explore: from early tele­graph sys­tems which used a piano-keyboard for enter­ing mes­sages to a his­toric cin­ema. These pic­tures only high­light a bit of the exhi­bi­tion — so if you ever come to Vienna, pay a visit to the exhi­bi­tion your­self. 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 »

Jour­nal­ism stu­dents from the Dutsch uni­ver­sity of applied sci­ences in Utrecht are cur­rently con­duct­ing a sur­vey about the pop­u­lar­ity of social media — if you run a pop­u­lar blog, the ques­tion­naire prob­a­bly already arrived in your inbox. All inter­views with social media experts will be pub­lished on the cross­me­di­alab home­page — good ques­tions, I’m really curi­ous about the results of the study and my col­leagues’ answers, just mailed mine to Wolfgang.

How long have you been work­ing with online social media and what was your rea­son to get into this topic?

The ques­tion is: which online ser­vices do qual­ify as “social media”? I’ve started using the inter­net in 1994 – out of mere curios­ity. A cou­ple of years later I started work­ing as a web designer for APA (Aus­tria Press Agency). At the same time, 3 fel­low stu­dents from the depart­ment of sci­ence of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and me launched the plat­form medianexus.net – a com­mu­nity site for pub­lish­ing “grey” stu­dent lit­er­a­ture about media-related top­ics. The project doesn’t exist any­more, the site is archived in the Aus­trian National Library though. The com­ment func­tion was one our most impor­tant fea­tures back than – and even though ser­vices like Face­book and Twit­ter were lurk­ing in the far future, we used e-mail and mail­ing lists for dis­cus­sion and organ­i­sa­tion pur­poses.
To me, there is no clear-cut between “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0” – tech­nolo­gies have evolved, dynamic web appli­ca­tions did replaced sta­tic con­tent. So the new tools fuel the use of social media, but the basic prin­ci­ple of enabling dia­logue and con­nect­ing peo­ple has been one of the main strengths of the inter­net from the begin­ning. Read the rest of this entry »

Bar­rack O. has been pres­i­dent of the United States for almost a year, yet still he didn’t solve all of our large-scale prob­lems: there’s still hunger, ill­nesses, wars and injus­tice — maybe he can’t do it that fast. I guess that grave change will not occur until 2012 (no, not the end of the world, but the next US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions). The team of Wired Italy takes a dif­fer­ent approach in terms of “who” to believe in: the fun­da­men­tal changes dri­ven by the inter­net are far more severe than those trig­gered by a sin­gle per­son, even if usu­ally referred to as the most pow­er­ful man in the world. So Wired Italy pro­poses that the inter­net per se should receive the next Peace Nobel Prize.

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Meshed #1 con­fer­ence takes place for the first time this year. From May 28th to 29th, the ars elec­tron­ica cen­ter Linz will focus on all aspects of Social Media Mar­ket­ing. On my Ger­man blog daten­schmutz I am giv­ing away a free 2-day-conference pass (priced at €680) and there’s more: using the coupon-code meshed_datenschmutz will save you €170 when order­ing a reg­u­lar ticket. To enter the com­pe­ti­tion, you need a twit­ter account as I will be tweet­ing var­i­ous quiz-style ques­tions dur­ing the next three days. The per­sons who answers most ques­tions right wins the ticket. There’s only one down­turn: the whole-give-away is explained in Ger­man and I’m using my Ger­man twit­ter acount @ritchie_tweets, as the con­fer­ence lan­guage will be Ger­man, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Lookin’ for­ward to Bar­camp Kla­gen­furt — it’s been a while since the last un-conference, and I’m expect­ing an inter­na­tional crowd: after all, Slove­nia is very near, and I’m quite sure that some Swiss, Ital­ian and Ger­man web entre­pre­neurs and blog­gers will drop by. If you’ve never vis­ited the city of the “Lind­wurm” (a mytho­log­i­cal dragon, the town’s land­mark), there’s a good rea­son now to travel to Carinthia. Read the rest of this entry »

No more denial, it’s offi­cial by now: no more out­door swim­ming 2k8, win­ter has kicked in Vienna. Yes­ter­day, the lit­tle white thingie called snow was float­ing around in the air, which is nice, if you live near the Alps (ski­ing sea­son!), but which sucks, if you live in Vienna: as soon as the first snow is falling, car-drivers get crazy: no mat­ter if the streets are actu­ally slip­pery or not. Read the rest of this entry »

The last elec­tion par­ties have ended by now, the USA are look­ing for­ward to a new era of fair­ness and social improve­ment. Will the new pres­i­dent be able to live up to his promises in times of an eco­nomic cri­sis? Looks like Bar­rack Obama has got to deal with a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, as the cri­sis is now spread­ing from the finance sec­tor to old econ­omy and car man­u­fac­tur­ers start fac­ing seri­ous trou­bles. Of course adver­tis­ing bud­gets will be cut, which will even­tu­ally lead to more and more online-money being spent for per­for­mance based mar­ket­ing. A rather bleak sce­nario for tra­di­tional adver­tiser, but def­i­nitely not the worst news for affil­i­ates. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week­end #bcv08 took place at HP head­quar­ters in Vienna. The week­end was incred­i­bly intense, spe­cial kudos go out to all the guys from Bratislava who came to join us. We’re think­ing about a bi-city bar­camp, a (really slow) ship might make a great loca­tion. The two cities are so close, it’s time to start connecting!