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.