Old Skool media not amused

With thanx to the IHT edition of December 29th,p14, copyright Dennis Valle: fashion bloggers close in on the catwalk. And they get front row seats from the fashion houses. Not really to the likings of the traditional, old skool, privileged fashion watchers.

The result? from left to right the famous Suzy Menkes (IHT), Michael Roberts (VF), bryanboy.com, Sally Singer (American Vogue), thé Anna Wintour, Hamish Bowles (Vogue) and ... jakandjil.com

Two upstarts!

More prominent seating than this is impossible :-)

shocking cynicism

Read in this month's Vanity Fair: a feature on Goldman Sachs. To announce it, editorial writer Carter gives some shocking insite into the cynicism of this top-tier financial insitution (that caused the financial crisis in the first place). Every 13 seconds someone's home is still being foreclosed while banking interests are being benificiaries of 17,5 TRILLION dollar in guarantees, loans and bailouts. This aid means record profits which again means ... record bonusses while the disconnect between America's most rich and America's most downtrodden hasn't been this dramatic since the late 1800s.

On this disconnect one Goldman Sachs advisor says 'we have to tolerate inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all' ... Or how about this one. At Goldman Sachs they do ... 'God's work'. And let's not forget they're into charity. The 2008 tax returns for the charitable foundation of Goldman tells us that the assets have dropped 1/3rd even though they are being managed by Goldman who, by the way, bill the charity almost 4 million dollar for these services.

Warren Buffet has a lot of praise for them , though. They have really turned the financial meltdown of 2008 into one big victory. Huge profits from betting against mortgage-related financial instruments ànd getting bailed out for it. Two main competitors bankrupt. Even getting H1N1 vaccines before hospitals did. And they are topping it of by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying in Washington to prevent banking reform legislation from happening.

Doesn't it give a warm X-massy feeling when you read all that?

Cool maps!

This is a very cool visualisation of the content technology vendor subway map to be found on the site of CMSwatch.com. Even cooler is the Web Map 4 by IA, a very far reminder of those great 'Internet growth' maps from the beginning of the decade. Click on the XXL JPG and zoom in: truly amazing!

Surfing on the Wave

Last week was spent in Boston, for the 6th Annual Gilbane Conference on Content, Collaboration and Customers. Good Conference but very 'American' ... imagine a senior consultant explaining that she'd stumbled upon a company called Atos Origin and that she supposed this never-heard of 'boite' had to be important as they had been involved in facilitating the Olympics ...

However, that's beside the point.

I'd already fallen in love with Boston the first time around, some 20-odd years ago. Now we were completely hooked. I actually would want to live there.

But that's beside the point too.

One of the most interesting (and certainly most fun) sessions of the Gilbane Conference was one with John Blossom on Wave (revolution or hype, complete with a Wave going on while the session ran (and continuing afterwards). I'm using it myself now but haven't had too much time to figure out what it can do (except for the obvious stuff) and I do not want to watch that long demo-video :-)More feedback to follow!

Speaking of video: John Blossom added a great one to his ContentWave

check it out here!

Fold tHe boX (3)

The Jack Klaff session had some weird vibes: laughing one minute, getting completely thrown off the scent the next and ending with a chilling finale. Klaft is a South African born Princeton professor/actor who was also involved in the Starlab initiative (as is Serguei by the way) in Brussels. I'm not sure I know what he talked about in the end ... but he got us sitting on the tip of our chairs.

He was followed by John Engel, production manager in the movie business and author of Uncommon Sound, a history of the guitar since the 1920's with a focus on all those ground-breaking left-handed guitar players like himself. He introduced us to another lefthanded guitar player, Djamel Laroussi, Algerian-French, who produced some trancelike sounds from his guitar (with the strings upside down) and who got the audience joining him in clapping and singing ... sort of, anyway.

I missed the last part, so I didn't get to see Catherine Verfaillie (which is a pitty), nor R.U.Sirius (behind the 10Zenmonkeys blog) nor Noam Perski (who, I read on Twitter made this equation: all datacenters in the world have an energy consumption of 2% which is more than the aviation industry worldwide) , Calligrafitti (who probably designed the awfull TEDx t-shirts) or Paul Collier. And I don't know either whether the missing speakers (Pedro Brugada, the heart surgeon? Caroline Gabriel? ) eventually showed up.

I wouldn't call it Burn the Box, and I do realize that when we think TED, we think TED.com and all those really really great guests they seem to have an endless stock of. It was certainly worth the trip, however. And absolutely to be repeated next year, with more possibilities for interaction (tweets on a screen for example and have speakers react to them if they want to)

I haven't figured out what the incentive was for those like me who paid double the amount of the 50€ fee ... and I haven't found any information yet on the TEDxBrussels website (movies, slideshows, ..) so I'm guessing it will come, eventually.

I hope.

Fold tHe boX (2)

The afternoon sessions had a much more TED.com-feel to them. A fascinating though barely understandable Serguei Krasnikov, straight from Tintin in the USSR on building time-machines (and explaining that you cannot go back to the past to kill your younger self and stuff like that). He was followed by the famous Conrad 'mathematics' Wolfram, rooting for a new way of teaching children maths. (Why does everybody always say they need to know the basics? They need to know how to calculate by hand, from the head? Do we need those basics when working with a pc or driving a car? Do we teach a todler that a cat is a fourlegged feline mammal with an aversion to water or do we let him play with a kitten? Why not teach our children how to use the tools that exist to understand math on a conceptual level?)
And he is , of course, the father of the Wolfram Alpha search engine that could perfectly answer the following question 'what was the weather like when John Brown was born'.

It got even more hilarious with Marc Millis, former head of Nasa's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project ... on stuff like colony ships, travelling for 120.000 years when looking for an habitable planet ('if homosapiens build a ship and left when they originated, they haven't arrived yet'), the need for energy to sustain the trip and other cool ideas. In short: @ one point we will really need to get off this planet so we should be getting on with it.

Fold tHe boX (1)

Yesterday's TEDxBrussels event 'Burn The Box' in the European Parliament left me with mixed feelings. It was fun to listen to hear Michel Bauwens (an old university buddy) starting about his bad Karma day. First a trip from hell from Thailand where he lives followed by his laptop disappearing. It wasn't so much the laptop he was worried about he told me during the break but the reaction of his wife on hearing about it ... We listened to Negroponte rooting for his 'one laptop per Child project' and to Karel De Gucht being interviewed (again) too long about Van Rompoy and too short about what was really important (aid to developing countries).

It got really interesting when Dambissa Moyo talked about Dead Aid and did that splendidly, seated in one of the easy chairs, no need for cues or paper notes. Marc Van Montagu surprised by being as emotional as ever when talking CGO's and about all those great ideas that could fairly simply help developing countries grow their own food.

Really disappointing was Clayton Schaeffer. Not a gifted speaker, reading notes: undoubtedly the subject was very relevant but I don't think anyone understood what it was all about ... something to do with landtitles, microfinancing, registries, rights of the poor, help get rid of charity (the 9 trillion dollar question in the title being the overall worth of all assets of the poor).

David McCandless entertained the crowd with a great exposé on the largescale information overflow and how to manage it. His theory: use our ability to visualize data to help us with that. A very interesting and practical view of the visualization of abstract data, in order to detect trends, and make the data more readily available to anyone.

The notion of “awareness” is based on some key factors: our vision, our taste, our sight, … The combination of these allows us to combine those senses into something we are “aware of“. He illustrated it with some real cool graphs that, indeed, say it all. One of them I distinctly remember having seen somewhere before is posted here. But maps like the Map of the Internet are typical for the stuff he talks about.

But all in all: no Burn The Box stuff, not really inspiring, no wow ... yet.

Let's materialise (2)

Afterthought. This amazing chair is actually called AI. Not the movie, no. Why AI? Because the design (surface, sotfness, comfort, ...) and the functionality (being able to support up to 120 kilos) is human. But it's the computer that finally designed the chair, or, to quote from the website:

Like the biological structure and mechanism of bone, the artificial intelligence software knows where to create sufficient support. The AI stool is an intelligent product that grows in free space with an artificial intelligence 'DNA' code. This code contains all of the information required to ensure that the object will transform perfectly from a virtual design into a 3D object that achieves the optimum strength or intelligent softness whilst maintaining the desired visual aesthetic.

Personally I think this is a little bit .... spooky. But hey, cool stuff, right?

Let's materialise ...

Last night's BGGD19 was impressive; the venue was the offices of Materialise, best known for its activities in the field of rapid industrial and medical prototyping. Materialise has acquired the position of market leader for 3D printing and Digital CAD software in addition to being a major player in medical and dental image processing and surgery simulation. Last night however, focus was on the MGX division for design products. Cool stuff! And unbelievable how it's produced, with one machine creating an object in one long session (depending on the object: from a couple of hours to a couple of days), layer by layer, no assembly or waste or long production lines needed . Very impressive. Check them out or keep track of what they are doing, it's worth it.

Key note speaker Dominique D'heedene enlightened the BGG's with a presentation of DesignArenas, an e-tailer specializing in bringing hotel luxury and lifestyle at home. DesignArenas partners with luxury and design hotels, build collections of interior design articles used in the partner hotels and builds a compelling visual experience through the webshop. The interesting thing is that she has her own collection Arenas as well. And some of us will know her as an IT Architect with IBM. Fascinating combination of jobs!

Why America doesn't understand Europe

This morning I read the Vinocur column in today's International Herald Tribune and frankly couldn't believe what I was reading. Some excerpts:

Why would an American president not come to a celebration marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it, the triumphant end of the Cold War — one of the high points of the United States’ and Europe’s common 20th-century history?

Whatever the exact answer — and it could be that a fatigued Barack Obama didn’t want the physical strain of a trans-Atlantic trip days before a weeklong tour of Asia — his absence from the Nov. 9 ceremonies in Germany has reinforced Europe’s fear that it has become an increasingly insignificant part of the president’s worldview.

That's for starters.

The author goes on analyzing the lack of a warm Atlantic friendship which, he thinks, is largely due to the fact that the foreign policies of Obama are , well, a bit disappointing.

Fair enough. But then:

When Europe picks its first council president and high representative (foreign minister) on Thursday, it will probably pass over internationally meaningful names like Tony Blair, Joschka Fischer or Carl Bildt, in favor of blander, less markedly willful men and women.

This discussion is getting ridiculous. Why would we give the presidency to someone who comes from an anti-European, we-don't-want-the-Euro, leave-us-ruling-the-waves country like the UK and, to top it off, to a Blair who has become a caricature? Internationally meaningfull? Yes, when it comes to charging huge fees.

So Vinocur ends with

If Mr. Obama, quite understandably, were to see them as blanks — quick now, who led Europe at the Nov. 3 E.U.-United States summit meeting in Washington? (Answer: Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden) — then Europe’s concerns about its deepening irrelevance for America seem realistic.

Djeezes!

Let's mashup this flu

... when typing in a zip code Google offers a new feature displaying where flu vaccins are available. Only one major hickup: the efficiency of this tool is totally linked to the availability of the data. Reserves need to be reported. And I imagine reserves need to be monitored as well, almost in real time, to avoid rushes on health centers that are supposed to have vaccins according to Google but ran out some time ago. Still: a cool way of mashing up data. With thanks to the guys from Smartplanet. Oh, and only in the US, I imagine?

Teach ADAMS about user centric design

Lo and Behold! 2 athletes have been a bit careless about their whereabouts and got suspended for a year by the Flemish anti-doping agency. Said athletes defend themselves by saying the app they have to use is too complicated, Internet is not available everywhere and they can't log in when they've forgotten their passwords. Be that as it is, one example of 'too difficult' kept going around in my mind: Xavier Malisse explained that he has to indicate his 'Daily Residence' when he is e.g. trainig for a couple of weeks on the other side of the world. His training venue cannot be his Daily Residence. He then doesn't know what to fill in, leaves it blank, gets an error and a faulty whereabouts.

So I went looking for this application and found a description of Adams on the Web.

Djeezes! If they would have considered getting the advise of a usability expert instead of creating an application that is based on the rules and the data needed, the end-result would have been something an athlete can use. Not something based on rules like:

As mentioned in the Location Descriptors section, athletes have to create location
descriptors for “Mailing Address”, “Daily Residence”, “Training” and “Competition”.
Yet, some might not be applicable.
“Daily Residence”: Every day of the quarter must have a “Daily Residence” entry.
As the “daily residence” appears in orange in the calendar, each day of the
calendar must have one orange entry.
This information can’t be provided by the team manager either

I for one don't know WTF this means ...

The Luxemburg Flu

Isn't this a tad strange? We have this website monitoring the numbers of Belgians infected by the Mexican flu. I personally still don't know too many people actually being sick. A lot of them, myself included, have a cough or a slight cold ... and even those with a flu have the flu (the regular flu or the other one: there is not much difference except when you belong to a risk group. Every GP will tell you that).

But look at this map!

Wouldn't you expect the major cities to be critical in spreading this disease? Where people are packed together in schools, office buildings, on trams and busses, on the subway and on the train?

But no, it is our lovely, green, very lightly populated provice of Luxemburg that carries the crown. Or did they switch the legends and the colours? Are we talking Luxemburg Flu now? Not even enough pigs in Luxemburg to consider a semantic mashup ...

Always nice to be proven right :-)

New study proves what I've been saying for al long time, especially to those who advocate that our kids today are turning into weird, a-social, isolated and creepy kids when you look at the time they spend online.

No, they are not. And there is a new study to prove it.

In fact they are very social creatures, thanx to having a lot of online friendships. I see it in my 13 year old son, who gets to know new friends by meeting them IRL after having met them through other friends online. I see it with myself, meeting up with people I haven't seen or spoken to in ages and hooking up again online. Not necessarily to spend real time with them but just to follow what they are into and, once in a while, actually getting together.

So, yessss, it always feels great to be proven right :-)

I'm so jealous of people who invent stuff like this

You have to agree that it's a great idea, even though just a gimmick and probably a very expensive one: the complete Beatles catalogue digitally remastered on an USB stick looking like that! I'm not particularly interested in spending fortunes on Beatles catalogues (aren't they more or less part of the human genetic imprint by now?) but I would be crazy enough to want to have one of these ... With thanks to Mashable for pointing it out to me :-)

Encounters of the weird kind

Italian artist Franco Brambilla is being featured in Wired this month with his delightful weird images of Old Skool photographs in which little aliens appear. Vintage images turn into settings for encounters of the weird kind. Great stuff!

Weird semantic coincidence

First I write about semantic web and then I get together with an ex-colleague who wrote a doctorate on Topical facets, the semantic patterns between documents and vocabulary. Weird! And here I'm all wired up, writing a memo for my colleagues to check whether we could actually take this up and run with it and see what gives. Fascinating stuff! And the doctorate is public, here's where you can find it. Not that I understand, I get the basics. But for now, that shoud suffice.

Semantic web is getting somewhere with Open Calais

The OpenCalais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you write or load up. Using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes documents and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within texts as well.

Frankly, I hadn't heard from it and I read that less than two years into the project, 18,000 developers have joined the OpenCalais community and are now processing four million documents per day, according to Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. New sites using it are being announced regularly.

How does it work? If I now write about myself, living in Antwerp, working in e-government, driving a secondhand Renault and having taken the train to work in Brussels today, the result would something like this:

They did it! They got the money

Two weeks after launching a mission to raise $250,000 (£152,500) to finance their latest record, hip hop pioneers Public Enemy have hit the $50,000 (£30,500) mark through Amsterdam-based site Sellaband.com.
More than 700 people in 50 countries donated to the cause, making it the site’s fastest fund-raising effort to date, and it puts Chuck D and crew on course to make their full target by the New Year. Which reminds me of this Dutch guy who, a couple of years ago, became famous for about two sec's, asking everyone to donate 1 euro on his website so that he could buy himself a Hummer ...

Rickrolling ... wtf?

I'm probably the last one to read about Rickrolling? Or are we talking about an internet meme that can only be appreciated by those who actually are old enough to actually have listened to the actual Rick Astley crooning his stuff in the eighties? Apparantly, rickrolling is (and now I quote from Wikipedia)a bait and switch: a person provides a web link that they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video of the 'Never gonna give you up' hitsong. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "Rickrolled".

Interesting though: as the practice has spread, two of the various Rickrolling videos available online have been viewed more than 39 million times combined. Rickrolling has extended beyond Web links to playing the video or song disruptively in other situations, including public places; this culminated when Astley and the song made a surprise appearance in the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a televised event with tens of millions of viewers.

Now then: is this an internet meme or a cool marketing trick?

iTunes is a Time-Machine

One is so focussed on using iTunes for new stuff. I have been using it the same way I used to make 4 or 5 cassettes a year with songs taped from the radio ... a running inventory on the hits & stuff of the moment. I do the same with iTunes: by the end of the year I'll have a 2009-list that will be bétter than the 2009 compilations I won't have to buy anymore. Recently I started using iTunes very differently and as the iTunes offering expands it gets even more fun: downloading old stuff. From ages ago, stuff I only have on vinyl. A lot of the times Very Old Stuff has been digitally remastered and sounds even better than it used to do. Right now I'm listening to the digitally remastered Venus & Mars by McCartney & Wings, a record my sister had somewhere mid-70's. Nostalgia! And it still sounds great (and after 30 odd years I still now it by heart)

we will be losing our minds, eventually

... or rather: we will start losing the capacity of using our minds. Why bother remembering songs when you can have them recognized through using intelligent music meta-data tools. Now you can doodle all you like and this cool program will translate your drawings and doodles through image recognition in real images. Great stuff! Pitty the site itself is unavailable. Chinese censorship?

Wanna follow Belgian politics from the inside?

Check out this new tool that aggregates blogpostings from politicians and/or civil servants and basically means to present an overview of ongoing political communication. It's a Web 2.0 tool: it enables you to create your own page and can be personalised by filtering on a person, a party, a theme, a region, language, local community, ... It also allows for some eParticipation: visitors can leave comments or ask questions. Clearly based on some of the more interesting initiatives in e.g. the US of A with the Obama campaign. It's called Agorati and I sincerely hope it will reach enough body to become as interesting as it's potential promises.

next generation poken pops up

Too weird, too unprofessional, too limited capacity ... these are some of the reasons for creating a new Poken line that should solve all these arguments. Now you don't have to pull out some weird plastic zombie (Poken called it 'cute' and 'a creature we like' but apparantly 'we 'didn't follow)to exchange data. I talked about it in an earlier post and I haven't seen any reason to change my mind: the biggest problem is that nobody uses this. What's the point of walking around with one if no-one else does? If the reason why nobody else does is because it looks weird well, .... I'll rest my case in a couple of months when everyone suddenly pokens like crazy and effectively calls it a digital business card (yawn).

Completely forgot to post it

Two days ago I went to the 16th (already) edition of the BrusselsGirlGeekDinners, which interestingly was about books. Famous blogster ImkeDielen has signed a book deal: a collection of 50 of her blogpostings have been published. Food for a philosophical discussion! Why bother, I would think. Even if blogpostings actually treat stuff that's happening, it's like reading old newspapers. Publishing blogs on the other hand, might just be the beginning of something like publishing auto-biographies. Some blogs really are interesting and cool and have some added value that transcends the here and now. In which case I really would be more interested in reading a blog that spans a more consistent period of time. After all: it would be just like publishing letters or diaries. So ... maybe it is the start of someting greater.

Creepy Stuff by Converse

Brrrr .... creepy stuff, these mutated animals wearing Converse ... And why does this dogboypic remind me of a local, Flemish, out-dated Important Local Personality?

Ahoy!

Some things are really amazing. When the first calls were made by phone (approx 1870) someone had to invent a greeting! It had to be a greeting that didn't rely on visual clues, nor on formal introduction of a handshake. There was no way to tell you were connected to someone else. According to history, AG Bell used "ahoy, ahoy" to answer the phone but it would be "hello" ("invented" by the dreaded competitor Edison) that would survive. With thanks to Wired.

A car in one piece

And we can take that literally. The McLaren MP4-12C has been build from a single piece of molded carbon fiber and most of the controls in the interior are integrated in a touch-sensitive screen ... This is a real Top Gear Car: environmentally UNfriendly and way too expensive ($250K) but hey! This car has been designed by the same guy who reinvented the Fiat 500 and the Mini. He's done his share of politically-correct cardesigning, wouldn't you say ? BTW: I prefer this one in red.

Forgetful By Design

With thanx to Clive Thomson. Some Harvard Professor has written a book (due out one of these days) in which he argues that technology has inverted our millenia-old relationship with memory. And I quote: "For most of human history, almost everything people did was forgotten, simply because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But there was a benefit: 'social forgetting' allowed everyone to move on from embarrassing or ill-conceived moments in their lives. Digital tools have eliminated that amnesty."

I must admit I hadn't looked @ it this way. The book is called 'Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age' by V. Mayer-Schönberger.

whatever happened to ... old movies?

57 channels and nothing on. This weekend I was in a nostalgic mood. Remember those days when you had an old movie on the telly every Saturday afternoon? Or those very late Sunday nights when one of the French tv-channels (I'm pretty sure it was TF1) would broadcast an oldie, in original version if the movie wasn't French. My mother used to watch them and when i was old enough to stay up so late (never on a school night :-))we would really make a big thing out of it. Or the returning 'White Christmas' movie every Christmas: in those days we'd say 'oh no, not again' but now it's like all those old movies have simply vanished into thin air. No more Jean Gabin, Simonne Signoret, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, or countless others... no more great films noirs, no more tough PI's, no more femmes fatales. All gone with the wind.

why not use the web for this?

It's a bit like those 'spoorloos' programs on tv where people try to find long lost friends, lovers, familymembers ... Except here it's a gorgeous Danish single mom who got pregnant and is now trying to find the father. Well ... I suppose if it gets posted enough everywhere she might even get lucky. Hope she foresaw some security measures concerning her privacy and her whereabouts but otherwise ... why not indeed? With thanx to Nodesktophero for tweeting about it.

let's goooooooooooogle

Goooooooogle has made its search box loooooooooooonger (with thanx to Mashable for talking about it) it's not the first time the homepage is tweaked. Check out this timeline! I had completely missed out on the fact that Google has patented its minimalistic homepage - didn't even know you could do that.

not so boring after all

Don't you find these classic games boring when they are to be played electronicaly? When I play backgammon with my love, i want to hear the wooden pieces and feel the dice. Or scrabble online! (yawn)But this one looks cute but maybe that's because i haven't played it for a long time and when i did it was a fun Star Wars version. Check out this Monopoly that uses Google maps. Amazing stuff.

AbFab!

- Classic Photography in Lego - The Daily Beast

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Business and Web 2.0

Mc Kinsey's interactive(!) report on the use of Web2.0 in a busines context. Great stuff.

The Zen-like pearls of wisdom from Daniel EK

Co founder of Spotify (who just won Apple's approval for a Spotify I-Phone app) does keep his cool on his twitter

But maybe you really need to be Zen when your Spotify is going straight into battle with .. i-Tunes.

am I good to go?

That's how they named a website designed for soldiers leaving the military. After spending a couple of years in, let's say, Iraq, going back to normal life has to be really scary if this is what is needed. The special website www.areyoug2g.com/has sections for soldiers, for families of soldiers, discharge date counters to post on websites and social networks, a support system to help you create some kind of planning and stick to it, help to find a job, ... It would be easy to be cynical about this but I actually think this is relevant stuff and very well done.

analyst of the year award

Interesting read on the Technobabble blog with regard to the election of the Analyst of the Year in our industry (twice-in-a-row-winner Ray Wang from Forrester). Gartner has been elected best house 2009, mainly due to the fact that in these uncertain times they have not cut down expenditure on research or thehighlevel people working for them.

These analysts' stories always make me uncomfortable. Ages ago, @Tijd, we were one of the first Belgian media clients buying a subscription on Forrester. As a company we really outranked everyone else when it came to pioneering in electronic publishing (as it was called in those pre-commercialweb-days). But we were never once contacted for a survey on what we considered to be 'our' market and 'our' industry, neither by Forrester, neither by the other ones. The Forrester guy confessed that these very expensive surveys usually were based on just a couple of interviews, not on a widescale analysis of the market and it's players. Disappointing even if you do not want to be naive.

This Technobabble post makes an interesting reference to the difference between European and American analysts in a context where up to 70% of respondents in surveys are ... American.

Which makes me conclude not much seems to have changed.

And another thing: all the people on these shortlist are ... male. No smart women out there?

cool tool!

Want to know where a cyberattack is taking place? If 'we' are under attack? Check out this barometer with an interactive map and a widget and follow the Bad Guys around the world.

600.000 or 900.000?

In yesterday's news: local national registrar DNS announces the fact that we have more than 600.000 Belgian websites online. Què? In april they announced to have crossed the 900.000 .be domains mark.

I'm not sure i see the relevance of counting active websites and calling them Belgian. It means we did not count Belgian .com or .eu or .org (etcetera) domains; nor that we see a difference between a 'kieskeurig.nl' and a 'kieskeurig.be' which were, originally, one and the same but Dutch, not Belgian.

It's nice-2-know info but I prefer the 900.000 domain names which might make, who knows, the One Million mark by the end of the year, if we all make an effort :-)

Btw: the Dutch counterpart SIDN claims 3485659 domains and counting.

The top 10 geeky holiday spots -Times Online

The top 10 geeky holiday spots -Times Online

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The 10 best silly events in Britain - Times Online

The 10 best silly events in Britain - Times Online

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new buzzzz-bis

This Layar is a free application. Great stuff, all this 'everything is open, everything is free, please use it and develop it further'. But at some point we'll have what we had with content: a whole new generation of kids who will néver-éver pay for software or applications. So where is the business model in that?

the new buzzzz is augmented reality

Can't be a coincidance. First I read about augmented reality as a means for the Dutch ANWB cardrivers' association to rebuild their old Wap-page into a sophisticated mobile environment using the augmented reality mobile browser Layar. Then some guy on the radio this morning (on the radio!!!) explains some cool marketing trick by GE by which you print out a simple black-and-white design on a page and hold it before your webcam en behold: an animation starts to play on your computer. The ANWB stuff makes much more sense, but then again, marketing could finally become a bit more interesting.

city music @ your service

Cute idea, to start a streaming platform offering music based on ... cities. A location based approach by a club called CitySounds.fm. You choose a city and you get a stream, expecting the music streams to be different in Nashville than streams from New York or Berlin. Or are they? And what is that, 'music from a city': from artists living and working there? Or is 'Amsterdam' basically music 'made in Holland' and 'Berlin' music 'made in Germany'? Or is it music popular in trendsetting clubs in those cities? All tracks offered come from one platform (SoundCloud.com) , guys from Sweden who settled in Berlin and started this dedicated music site. I'm just curious how the selection of cities is going to evolve and how they make musical selections. 'Cause why would I want to know what music is being played in, let's say, Cincinatti? I'd be much more curious about Marseille, Jo'burg or ... Mumbai. And CitySounds.fm is basically nothing more than a mashup of Sound.com tracks and Flick'r images. .. But let's give it a try first. With (again) thanks to Springwise.

Crichton, the media guru

Refresshing read, this article by bestselling author Michael Crichton on the future of the American media ... especially the part about the media being part of society's problems or the big ego's of self-indulged media personalities ... which reminds me somewhat of the attitude problems even our tv journalists seem to develop.

The amazing thing however is that this 'Mediasaurus' essay was written in an issue of Wired in the fall of ... 1993.

Entertaining read from a visionary proclaiming the death of traditional media long before we even had a widescale Internet.

we choose the moon (bis)

The more I look @ this site, the more I'm impressed with the concept behind it. Just think about it. When they actually landed on the moon 40 years ago next week(did they?) there was a certain kind of scepticism about it actually having happened. 'they never landed on the moon! It's all fake! It's all part of o giant conspiracy against the USSR! It was filmed in a studio somewhere in a desert in California! ...'

Now we are watching a so-called realtime recreation of an event that happened 40 years ago. Great concept!

But to me, the logical next step would be watching a real time recreation of something happening now that is not taking place or has never happened.

If you can do this, you basically can do anything, right? So why not have a www.thekingsfuneral.org to watch in realtime with realtime meaning ... euh .. nothing while other stuff is going on? I find that fascinating and not just a little bit scary ...

no comment :-)

we choose the moon

I was 9 and our parents woke us up in the middle of the night to watch it but for those who never did, wechoosethemoon.org is an online recreation of the famous Apollo 11 flight to the moon. They have already been launched, the mission is in stage 6 at the moment, somewhere between earth and moon. The really cool thing is that you can follow the live transmissions of the crew on ... twitter (actually there are 3 tweets: from Houston control, from the crew and from the Eagle). This is really cool stuff!

Life made simple ...

... by using a simple idea. How do you visualize 250 million people on Facebook? OK, that's a lot of people, zillions, 23 times the size of the Belgian population, 1/24th of the world population, ...You can also just make a cute little movie. With thanks to jevedebe.

mexican flu, media flu

There is something weird about this Mexican flu thing. Last weekend, Expert Number One Marc Van Ranst, explained in De Standaard that his apocalyptic view of 7 deaths/day this autumn/winter in a worst case scenario is not out of the ordinary. Every year a 1000 people die during a 3 month flu-peak ... that's ten a day. Every day 3 people get infected with HIV in Belgium. And the same number with TBC. Nobody gives a damn. But now that we have 126 cases of confirmed flu we read about emergency scenario's, local communities preparing, hospitals trying out and the army (!!!) distributing vaccins and masks to 15 distribution points. Did some high up offcial read the 'Outbreak' script perhaps? Djeezes!

I should understand journalists but I don't (2)

Then again, when the other side of the country presents its policy plans it is duly noted. Not a couple of paragraphs, no: a full chapter on the digital divide, Web 2.0, opening up public tenders to small(er) companies, use of open source standards, exchange of free software between government institutions, ... and a number of other ideas and initiatives. Granted: the proof of the pudding is in the eating, whether you announce your policies in paragraphs of in chapters .... but why do we find it so hard to admit that this has more beef than what 'we' did ourselves?

I should understand journalists but I don't

Weird. Professional newsletters like Data News or IT Professional write about the major importance the new Flemish government deal is according to the importance of IT. I read the 112 page document and found 2 paragraphs with -let's be honest- very generic blahblah. The article in IT Professional is longer than what you can read in the document itself. If there is a reason for this lack of constructive criticism, I don't see it yet. Maybe I will later.

what started as a gimmick ...

... is conquering the world: the Eternal Moonwalk.
Launched last Friday by StuBru, it has been the most twittered about subject according to twitturly.com and you must admit that some of the uploaded moonwalkmovies are truly amazing! Check it out! And thank you StuBru (this should have been a Humo initiative, alas)

Gotit!

If it's OK, we say so too. Filled out my tax return yesterday on Tax on Web. Didn't go down once (in what I imagine would have been the most hectic weekend, when all last-minute users like myself decide to go ahead and do it) and was prefilled correctly (having changed jobs last year could have caused some mixup but no). No session time outs, no crashes and no seconds lost when sending it out. Great! No wonder more than 1,5 mio users will have found their way to Tax on Web this year. My guess is, it will be much more than that, after this weekend.

Gotit?

Het incident werd veroorzaakt door een defecte switchpoort in de backbone van het storage area netwerk, op een ISL tussen een edge switch en de centrale directors in één van de SAN switched fabrics. Het signaal was "flapping" met een link die soms wel en soms geen signaal gaf waardoor de disk access tijden op één van de databaseservers (die met één HBA op de betrokken switch geconnecteerd is) op sommige momenten veel langer was dan normaal. Dat had onder meer impact op de trafiek tussen de 2 datacenters

Now thàt is why Tax on Web crashed last week!

Never ending projects

You know that feeling? You build a website, you go through different phazes of stress, crisis, war rooms, ... you finally accomplish something quite OK and then you need to wait weeks before you can go live. Dangerous because in the meantime people want changes, try to alter the scope, suggest new functionalities ... very hard keeping everybody happy and still saying no. There's a pressconference tomorrow .... unless it gets canceled for the 4th time I will finally have a go and we can let this baby go.

iranian twitter bis

Quite a journey of discovery, following the Tehran situation: lots' of interesting links being posted but rumours are getting stronger and stronger and so do calls from others to support claims with evidence (best example: that the army is invading tehran ... causing reactions like 'not confirmed by thrustworthy Iranian twitters' or 'please do not provoke')
Cutest so far are the calls for hackers to bring the government networks down.

Iranian twitter

Following what's happening in Iran on Twitter is scary and fascinating at the same time. As an outsider on the other side of the world you see the tweets barge in at a tremendous speed, giving you the feeling that you are actually in the middle of it. But when you read stuff like

Xtal RT @chrisstrouth change yr Twitter settings to show GMT +03:30 Tehran as yr timezone & change home city to Tehran 2 confuse Iranian censors

or the uncountable tweets helping out with IP addresses, offering tech support, warning for iranian intelligence using the same channels, ... I must admit it gets too close for comfort. What is rumour and what isn't? Recounting in contested area's is announced: true or false? people being arrested: true or false? As always, authentic sources are difficult to define on the Web but one thing is sure: what is happening over there and the way Twitter seems to be the one medium standing in a closed down country is a major shift in the use of what we, spoiled brats, only consider as cool-tools-till-the-next-cool-thing-comes-around. This seems actually to be accomplishing something.

How's that for replacing a daily trip to Brussels

Looks kinda cute ... what would it be like in a typical wet and cold UK winter, do you move your pod to the garage or build a little house for it? With thanx to Springwise

It only takes 4 months ...

... to clean up a life. We've been working on and off in my mum's appartment, packing, dividing, giving away to Kringwinkels, driving to the recycling parks ... last weekend we really finalized, last stuff, cellar, cleaning up, seeing the landlord, handing over the keys ... a very difficult moment and a very saddening one because we were closing that door for the last time . It only takes 4 months to pack up and disperse with someone's life. Even if you keep things, honour them ... there's an awful lot you have to throw out because you have no room/use/ feeling for it. What would she have said, that Wednesday November 26th, if we would have told her that on March 28th her appartment would have been completely emptied out?

Catch a Glimpse and ....

someone very, very, very dear to me - and thàt is an understatement- has finally found the time to start blogging. Not much happening as it is only the first day but check it out on a regular basis, this Catch a Glimpse of ... great stuff, I promise.

Afterthought

Why do people find it so difficult to engage? Why does everybody turn away from politics, from his or her democratic right to do something, to participate, to change things? Could it be because politics themselves have made it very discouraging for those who do act, to achieve something? Leaves active citizens with the sense of having hit his/her head against a brick wall? Of not getting anywhere? Of not understanding the politics speak and the way things are defined and communicated? And will new participatory media actually make a difference?

What's the point of being a benchmark country ...

... when all your efforts, everything you do to earn the 'benchmark' epigraph, sizzle out because ... euh ... no-one's interested?

Take the UK.

Considered something of a forerunner in the area of e-government. Policies defined in a hefty document describing the e-Government strategy. Country of great initiatives like Show-us-a-better-way etcetera. A recent article on PublicTechnology.net dryly notes that just half of the UK population has used Internet in the last year to access information about government or local council services ... or to complete a government form ... or to process online ....

So much for the UK e-Government take-up. Unless you are motivated to participate, unless you feel strongly about something, thén you start moving. Otherwise you couldn't care less.

Now thàt is something no e-Government strategy will ever be able to fix ... talk about a challenge!

Walk the talk (3)

Unbelievable. One of our MP's has gotten 300 something emails in an organised action by Test-Aankoop, our consumer organisation. He clearly has no inkling that writing emails to your MP -even in a coordinated action with standard texts- bears reference to old snail mail stuff like 'writing letters for Amnesty International" in the old days. Imagine the arrogance! Imagine the completely uncalled for 'I don't need this shit' reaction of someone who has been elected ... I'm flabbergasted.

Walk the Talk (2)

Still, some things really amaze me:

- ex cathedra speeches from leading eu. officials, reading stuff instead of (at the very least) having some kind of overview in ppt.

- a eu.official explaining about the importance of the post 2010 Information Society Policies' highlights, announcing a 'public consultation' starting on May 15th this year on policy issues that are important. Everyone of us meanwhile has been passing hours listening to the importance of new social media and the role they can play in empowering the public, resulting in more transparancy and an better democracy... So someone does ask the Obvious Question. "Are You Going To Use A Social Media Means To Organize This Public Consultation?"

The answer is, to my ears at least, rather unexpected: "Of course not! This is a big event! We can't possibly let the result of it depend on what the public is saying." Or words of that meaning.

Now, this really made me feel that the gap between the Thinkers (Social media will help solve the democratic deficit, enable citizens, empower them, ...) and the Reality (the EP, nor the NHS, nor the average Football trainer want peeping toms) is very much a Gap indeed.

Mind the Gap.

Walk the Talk

Spent a full day at the eu.practice workshop on public services 2.0 and how to implement user driven open innovation in public services. Clearly being the odd one out (not being a civil servant nor having a lot of experience in civil servant matters) , the whole thing turned out to be fairly interesting.

There is of course an inspirational side to it: the 'small' projects (small certainly in a European way of measuring things) were endearingly well conceived.

One of my favourites certainly was debategraph.org, based on the mindmap principle, offering some kind of externalized brain. Or rewiredstate.org, a concept I'm going to mail to my boss.

There was a lot of social economy going around in most of these grassroots initiatives, e.g. OnRoadMedia who use ning to create platforms for marginalised groups in society (best example being Savvy Chavvy ... read the article, I can't link to the project itself, it's a closed network).

But still, this is a European event. The (important) fact that all these 'small' projects cost next to nothing is not something we apparantly did want to get into too much.

More shocking was a Romanian project aimed at analyzing and visualizing the voting behavior of the 5-some Romanian European MP's. And if you start doing thàt, you might as well analyze and visualize the voting behavior of all MP's. After all, voting roll calls can be found on the site of the European Parliament. When clicking on the appropriate page you get a ... 170+ pages PDF listing who voted how on what. OK ....

So the Romanians wrote a script scraping the data to be able to show what they wanted to show. When asked how their financing was organized, the reply was 'US money'. Yes, they did apply for a European grant but the EP found the application ... not relevant. And, more importantly, the site ad gone offline for lack of money some time ago.

So yes, this is a European event and the fact that the EP is NOT interested in walking the talk and allow for transparancy ... not really something anyone was really shocked about. But on the other hand I'm not really able to reproduce what these Romanian colleagues did during their presentation ... weird.


And there was also Patientopinion.org collecting patients feedback on national health related experiences (in hospitals, with doctors, ....) where the British NHS basically thinks this is ... euh ... not relevant.

Or the football club Ebbsfield story, shown in the Ivo Gormsly movie Us Now, where the Ebbsfield trainer basically is not really inclined to accept the advice of the 30.000 something supporters having their say in the line up of the Ebbsfield team that needs to qualify to get to Wembley. They do. They get to Wembley. You almost hear the trainer think 'yeah right, streak of luck'

But still ... this is a eu.practice group committed doing things differently. There is hope yet :-)

Proud owner of a bee poken thx to BGGD

Went to the Antwerp edition of the BGGD yesterday evening (a lot of blokes for a gurrrrllll event) and found a cute poken in my goodiebag, courtesy www.ibbt.be ... how long will it take before I run into someone who actually has one I want to high five with? I'm afraid I'll be high-fivin' with someone I don't know, just to be able to :-) But a great gift anyway and one that will probably amaze my very high tech guys @ work. Cool! And thank you, BGGD & IBBT.

fake or real?

When a Facebook monolith announces it's returning to its former terms & conditions due to the strong reaction of the community to the new ones ... is that the strength of the social networking community making a point or just a clever marketing trick? Why am I not as impressed as I should be? Or just being too cynical?

think before you post

Imagine an internet savvy father & son, both on the same social network. The 12 year old hates being told to do what's best for him (meaning: be careful with your postings, about your private data). The 12 year old actually is surprisingly careful: he seems to understand the issue ... him and his many friends all use the same kind of f***k-off attitude with regard to 'strangers' looking at their profiles. Which is a good thing. However, the internet savvy dad isn't convinced. So he sends his son a message saying something like: 'be careful here, my son'. Alas! the internet savvy dad does mention his name and profession on his own profile. I can't wait to point out to him that if anyone breached the son's privacy .... it was him.

what is truth?

Wouldn't you start to wonder? What if this from-gaza-blog is some kind of fake blog, propaganda? Did you reply, state an opinion, ask a question? I did. Unless they get thousands of them .... none worth publishing? Am I becoming too cynical? Maybe I should.

there is hope yet

What a way to start a new year: with a full blown war in a region that doesn't need much to explode into violence and hatred. Maybe that these two bloggers can make a difference ... even though they haven't been online for a couple of days now. Censored? Hurt or worse? No more cyberspace? check out the from gaza blog and read first hand eyewitness accounts.