Are blogs passé?

Are they? What is my personal stance on this? I'm not the average social media user (which should be obvious by looking at my following: I don't have any. And I actually don't care. If I did, I might be more selective in my choice of subjects- or not. I might be publishing more -or not. I might be using SEO and different ways to promote my content. Shout it from the rooftops. But I don't. To be honest, I write merely / mainly for myself. Because I like writing. And I consider writing in English good practice since my professional use for it has dropped off.)

I can say the same about Twitter and Facebook. I almost always use Twitter in a 'professional' context, seldom in a personal one -unless I'm really upset about something, like the Ford Genk closure this week. I rarely post personal stuff on Facebook either. Or rather: I have defined some kind of personal perimeter in which I lift a tip of the veil now and then but I think I'm very discrete in terms of personal info, pictures, information on my family members or friends.

Which is probably not so different from who I am IRL. I don't tend to bore my colleagues every monday with every little thing I did during the weekend. Most of my current colleagues know very little about me. And what they need to know about my professional track record, they can ask - or check on LinkedIn. Which is, by the way, NOT the same as Facebook.

What does this make me? I tend to say, laughingly: I'm not social enough for social media. There's certainly truth in that. But I'm certainly no voyeur: in that case I would use accounts only to look at what others are doing and saying. I think I'm fairly active but guardedly so. People tell me there is a lot of garbage out there, a lot of expendable rubbish the likes of 'I'm going to pee now'. That's possible but my 375 FB friends are not part of that rubbish. Nor are the people I follow on Twitter.

Using these tools daily we tend to forget something that is really amazing: the ability of Twitter or even Facebook to transport us to different places and allow us to see things through another’s eyes, whether it’s a personal event like a wedding or a funeral or a politically-charged situation like the Arab Spring or the closure of Ford Genk. We take it all for granted. We forget how amazing it all is when you stop to think about it.

So is this blog passé? If nobody but myself reads what is written, who cares? At least I think about formulating thoughts before I write them down. That's what I like. It's on the same level as keeping journals. Something private. And a lot of us are doing it. Privately.

The LEGO Stratos Jump

Did you miss Felix Baumgartner's fall from space yesterday? His breathtaking 24.2 mile jump, the heart-stopping seconds while he went out of control into a dangerous spin, included? LEGO created it's own Red Bull Stratos Jump in this hilarious little video. Compliments of Mashable.com.



This was the real Felix, TV-image of the first second of his jump:

In the end it turned out that this wasn't the longest free fall ever, but hey, who cares, right?

It's the end of the world as we know it

Actually, it's the end of the world as they know it: according to a new global survey 1 out of 10 believe that the end of the world WILL occure in 2012, even though we have so far safely survived the first 9 months of it.

A great excuse for GOOD to create an impressive infographic, which shows us that these doomesday people are not all freaky believers in Mayan calendars ... if you are an American or Turkish citizen under 35 you do believe you will see the world end in your lifetime. For this and other stuff: check out the infograph:

Einstein's "appification"

Willing to pay $9,99? Got an iPad? Then you're all set for downloading Einstein's brain -and we are not talking about Admiral Freebee's song here. ("complexity of the human psyche")

Einstein died in 1955. A medical museum in Chicaco scanned and digitized 350 slices of his brain. Einstein wanted no fuss after his death but there was a pathologist who performed an autopsy and removed the brain. Don't expect a 3D model of Einstein's brain or even a detailed mapping of the slices in relation to the anatomic region they belong to ... the app is meant for non-medical users who want to look what a genius's brain actually looks like.

Whether Einstein would have appreciated the pricing, we don't know. He never actually donated his brain to science, it got ... pinched.

The Cassette to iPod Converter

I want one!

No, it's no fluke
Here's who sells them.

Are you a Nostalgia-Craver?

If you are, check-out the retro-channel on BuzzFeed, the viral site. It's called Rewind and it caters to those of us who like a bit of nostalgia now and then. It also cleverly sells the nostalgia angle to advertisers: for example, you'll find a series of great black-and-white pictures of 1900 scientists (a 1900 Geek Hangout), sponsored by ... General Electric. Or have a look at this one:

The only really frustrating thing: BuzzFeed talks about the 80's & 90's like I would about the 60's ... that's tough!

That's what the Internet in Belgium looks like ...

... according to Ruslan Enikeev, who used an association algorithm and a Google maps front end to create an interactive website that allows visitors to indicate which country they want to see the map of.

Fastcompany looks at a logical global picture, with dominance of the big players like Google and Facebook and colour coding for the countries the websites are located in.

The interesting stuff begins when you start to localize and ask for the Internet Map of Belgium. Chinese websites (yellow) seem to be pretty dominant over here. Bing is almost as big as MSN. Chinese portal Baidu is as important as Live.com. Ebay and Paypal are very much alike and can compare to Spanish, Italian or Canadian Googles, ...

In other words: making a global snapshot based on 350.000 websites and 2 mio links from 196 countries, is one thing, a local breakdown something completely different.

B.t.w: Internet maps are so Oldskool. I used to buy them in an era when having an Internet map still made sense :-)

It doesn't always have to be an app.

A young designer from Eindhoven has created these beautiful toys to be used in hospitals to explain procedures to children. His toys contain the 4 most commonly used pieces of medical equipment: X-ray, CT-scan, ECG and an echocardiograph. Each machine has light and sound so the kids get a pretty good idea of what is going to happen to them. Now all he needs is a business angel to finance him. (copyright Hikaru Imamura, Fast Company)

Avinash Kaushik, the usability guru, tweets about WTPh, What the Phonics, street installations in Kopenhagen, that are attached to streetsigns to help people pronounce the streetnames.

I understand why he would find that a great idea: for foreigners all streetnames in most European cities are unpronouncable (or how pronouce Jan Van Rijswijcklaan (Antwerp), Chemin de la voierie des trèfles (Paris), Prilaz Dure Dezelica (Zagreb and I don't have special characters to make it more unreadable) or Haarlemmersdijk (amsterdam)).

So yes, it's a great idea but there's only one drawback: you have to have found the street first before you can learn how to pronounce it's name. Which doesn't solve the problem of having to look for that streetname you can't pronounce in the first place.

WTPh? - What the Phonics from Andrew Spitz on Vimeo.

The Web fought Nature and ...Nature won

Most people find it scary but I find it oddly comforting: Nature ran into the Web twice in two days and won convincingly each time. 


First there was this devastating weather in the US. They didn't call them wild storms for nothing: they left sweltering heat and massive power outages in their wake. Not only were millions of people affected, one of the casualties has been the Internet. Power interruptions at the big data center operated by Amazon.com in Virginia crashed other popular websites that rent out Amazon's computers. No Instagram, no Pinterest, no ..
how many lawyers would be pouring over SLA's and contracts right now? The Cloud being blown away by clouds: there is justice in that.


And then Nature pulled another one.

On July 1st a leap second was added to adjust global world time as close as possible to the solar time or the Coordinated Universal Time. Sensitive computer systems that run on milliseconds don't like leap seconds at all. Google was prepared but others weren't: they're not as technology geek as Google I suppose. LinkedIn, Foursquare, Stumble Upon, Gawker, ... they all went down. Mozilla 'choked on the leap second': not tech-savvy enough? 


Or, to paraphrase Forbes Business: locusts are next :-)

I don't want pizza

When reading about the way Google looks at the world and how it will look in 20 years (as if you could possibly predict that) I get this creepy feeling (again ...). 

Marissa Mayer explains in a recent interview: " It may not be that you search for pizza, but we know you tend to like pizza places, or you tend to like more casual, loungey bars, so we can suggest things." Now why would I be hàppy with that? If I tend to like pizza places and feel like going to a Spanish restaurant for a change, why would I appreciate this meddling in my life and the choices I want to make?


Mayer takes it one step further: "On the social front, can we suggest someone that we think that you should know because you have so much in common that we think you'd like each other?" Nightmare!


I know, I'm being naive: I never liked the 'others who bought this also bought' advice from Amazon. It's not because I like reading J. Eugenides that I absolutely want to read more of the same. I never click on 'most read' or 'most liked' articles on website. If everybody keeps clicking on most read links they remain most read. 


What I do like is to surf the Web. Isn't that what it was designed for? To explore? To be surprised? To learn new stuff? To travel in cyberspace? To be informed, annoyed, shocked, saddened, happy, ... or amused instead of being told what to do, where to go and what to see? 


Former CEO Schmidt once told the Wall Street Journal "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next," and got a lot of flak for that. He also told CNBC in december 2009: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place". 


Wake up, Europe, but don't over-act(a).


(And by the way: they are looking into self-driving cars. I wouldn't want to be in one when it starts driving to a destination I didn't pick :-) )

Lieber Schatz! That's how Albert Einstein wrote to his cousin, the woman he was divorcing his wife for in 1914. ("Es ist für einen ehrlichen Menschen nicht möglich, eine Frau zu lieben und mit einer andern verheiratet zu sein." Collected Papers of Einstein, Princeton University Press, 1998)

To be a student now. Still a bit flabbergasted by the Van Eyck initiative and here's the next one, lovingly offered by the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University (AEA) and the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech (EPP): the Einstein Project. You will not only find all Einstein's writings (scientific ànd other handwritten stuff like diaries, letters and the like) but also photo's, audio etc. We're talking more than 80.000 items from the Albert Einstein Archives being uploaded for consultation on a website. True, they have just started two days ago with 2000 items but the work will continue all through this year. Nothing else to do but check once in a while, right? I wouldn't mind reading a lovenote by Mr. E=mc2 or a shopping list instead of a dissertation I'm not going to understand anyway. Or are we stripping dear Albert from his godlike status if we do? I don't think so.

you can't get closer to Van Eyck than this

Last weekend De Standaard wrote about an incredible, 100 billion pixel, project sponsored by The Getty Foundation. Amazing stuff and nobody, as far as I know, bothered picking it up. Check out http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/#home and be blown off your feet by the rendering of the famous Ghent Altarpiece now available online.

The project itself consisted of 3 elements: urgent renovation,an assessment of the state this masterpiece is in today and an exercise in technical documentation. The result is a truly amazing website, offering the Ghent Altarpiece in all its detail. You get macrophotograpy, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectograpy and x-radiography views. No stuff for simple devices: loading images can take quite some time but boy, is it worth it! The site also contains reports on the restauration work, statistics, information on dendrochronology, analysis, ... But it's the images that are magic. Impressive!

Remembrance day

On February 15, two years ago, we lost a colleague in a train crash. I wrote about it then and I'm remembering Sebastien now, being shocked at how much time has past and how quickly it did. Sebastien is never very far away: his name still pops up regularly in meetings or on work events ...

Tomorrow morning a small ceremony will be held at the location of the accident in Buizingen. I'm not attending but my thoughts are with my colleagues who are and of course with Sebastien's family.

Weird Google Stuff

Interesting article on Huffington yesterday: Google Earth's 'Atlantis' has disappeared after an upgrade. Google has been quality checking their 3D Ocean tool and now claims to have 15% of the ocean floor visible at a resolution of 1 km. Before the upgrade, images existed that were rumored to be images of the long lost city of Atlantis. 


Fake Atlantis isn't the only strange image recorded on Google earth; in the same article Huffington refers to 36 different weird ones. Google Maps finds some pretty weird things too. 


More importantly Google Earth itself is up for an extensive upgrade later this year which is said to result in twice the accuracy it has today.


Still, removing these images: they do have a censorship reflex, don't they?

Photographer is Modern-day Hopper

It's not that Hopper painted poverty and desolate Americana. We all know (and some of us love) his play with light, his choice of subject, his point of view. Personally I also like Sheeler, exponent of what they call the Precisionist Movement: cities, machines.

But look at these incredible pictures, on exhibition (alas) @ the MOMA. In A New American Picture, photographer Doug Rickard takes viewers on a tour of the run-down, the derelict, and the economically depressed using ... Google. Rickard scouted out specific locations on Google Maps that show crippling economic devastation—boarded-up buildings in Camden, N.J., overgrown sidewalks in Detroit, and neglected lots in New Orleans. He snapped digital photographs of the scene playing out on his computer monitor. The effect is impressive and not just for the use of light and colour. The anonymity of the people in these pictures is a harsh metaphor for the anonymity of poverty.

With thanks to www.thedailybeast.com.

#BGGD49 was a long time coming

It's been a while so we welcome back with open arms the next #BGGD49 on Children's Internet Safety, with main speaker Simone van Zuylen (@Norton_be). There's room for a 100 interested parties and when I last checked, the list wasn't full yet. So join the BGG's next week on February 8th in Mechelen. Should be an interesting topic. I for one do not believe in technical solutions for things like safe chat or controled environments; I can only talk for my teenage son who, as a rule, only uses his laptop in the living room and is fairly smart in the way he uses the web. Should be an interesting discussion, next week.

Naive? Zuckerberg's Registration Statement to the SEC

"We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services." You'd wipe away a tear reading that if it weren't Zuckerberg explaining his personal philosophy in the official Registration Statement to the SEC on the eve of the Facebook IPO. His future shareholders are going to looooove that. Going public not to make money but to make the world a better place, help people create relationships, connect to each other and fulfilling a social mission. But I'm probably too cynical: if you want to change the world, you'd best do it from within the establishment. What better place to undermine boundless capitalism than from inside the NYSE? What better place to launch social entrepreneurism? Go, Mark, Go. And if you do end up earning money, do a Bill Gates.

The web finally waking up against SOPA

It has taken (too much) time already but the anti-SOPA movement is finally coming up to speed. We all know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with honoring coppyright and protecting the works of authors but this SOPA initiative clearly is a bridge too far. It kills the mosquito by using a cannon. Yesterday ZDNet's Zack Whittaker announced 'Geeks 1- Congress 0', indicating the SOPA proposal, although not dead yet, was badly wounded. Congress decided to shelve it, in order to reassess and take into consideration voiced concerns over the proposal. Zack closes his blogpost by claiming, and I quote: "Geeks, it should be known, spread far and wide, almost single-handedly helped save the web as we know it." Does it mean SOPA won't be coming back quietly or under a different name? Off course it doesn't. Let's keep our eyes and ears open. Meanwhile, Wikipedia makes a point today, to underline the importance of the SOPA case: