Category Archives: Web & Technology

Liveblogging from “The BOBS”

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Yesterday, I attended the ceremony of Deutsche Welle to award the Best of Blogs (theBOBS) which, according to the jury, are the best blogs in different national categories, as well as in video and audio in 2009.

Peter aka thewavingcat blogged live with a very fascinating tool called Coveritlive. It has a very smooth editor surface to write, comment and adjust stuff and codes which can be embedded in other websites where your twitterlike short news are flowing in and can be commented. He worked really hard in typing down the many informations from the stage, approving comments AND answering questions from a worldwide crowd. Respect! Also, Stefanie Suren and Andreas Schepers did a good job in guiding the audience through the evening with a plimpse of Hollywood feel: “And the winner is..!”
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What you can do with Arduino

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Arduino“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

Hm, so what does that mean? Basically what you can with the little Arduino board is easily bring lots of input in and turn it into certain outputs. Sounds easy and maybe trivial but really is not. Because Arduino can process many different signals and trigger many different outputs. Kiss a door and it opens. Step close to a mirror and a video starts playing with the mirror talking to you. Turn TV picture into LED-signals. Connect it to the Wii and In general one might say it’s very nerdy and looks a little unready still. But it’s definetly the start into a development of selfbuilt robots and machines.

Below are some video examples. I particularly like the TV to LED part because it’s kind of what a friend and I did for a party once. We put 16 toilet paper rolls covered with translucent paper in fornt a tv and thus reduced the pictures to a 16×16 pixel screen. We taped it to video and had a nice party light installation. The posted below is slightly more elegant but, really, less charming.
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Best of Evolution2

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The Evolution2 is the sequel of the first, very susccesful talent competition Evolution by Hobnox. The contest is coming closer to the final decisions, though it is still time to submit projects to enter the finals.

While the Evo2 is running hot right now, the winners of the first contest are presenting the results of their work since winning the contest at the big Hobnox launch party and evolution festival in february 08. Missy Magazine, a mag about pop, politics and style from a feministic viewpoint is now available as a good old glossy print mag, while Boombaker, a very energetic live drum’n’bass/breakbeat band are on tour right now.

Here, I’d like to present some of the most interesting pieces and explain the rules in a nutshell. Continue reading →

P3000 Blogpost Widget from Sproutbuilder

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Greenhouse.sproutbuilder.com is an absolute blast. It’s a flash based widget builder which works entirely in your browser window and has a lot of editing features. Build sites with text, video, pictures, slideshows, maps, charts or insert RSS. Define size, fonts, colors, background, effects. Here are the most recent updates from the PANORAMA3000 blog in a widget, it took me 20 minutes to make it nice.

Hobnox Updates (how to embed your own files)

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Hobnox audiotool_screenshot1Hobnox has some new, very much awaited features. First, you can now live record your music creation from the audiotool. Thus, Hobnox is one of the first web applications to use Flash10 which now supports wider audio emulation, not at least thanks to the “Adobe, Make some noise!“-campaign, partly driven by Hobnox developers.

Apart from that, the Audiotool has more features compared to the original version, e.g. a command bar which makes it easier to work with many machines plus when inactive for a while, the light fades out and the machines are solitarily left in the dark..

Listen to my little bass monster here:

Saving songs requires several steps, you will need to login, it will then be encoded and you can find it in ‘My files’, on visibility you can adjust copyright settings (also creative commons), here you need to allow embedding, then send the file to your stage, go to your stage, choose the file and on mouseover you’ll see the embed icon (< ..>) to get the embed code.

Moreover, you can save the live shows you can stream with Hobnox now (still, in a quality I haven’t seen on other platforms) to play them later in your profile, also the Evolution2 is still running.

Berlin Webweek begins

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Berlin web weekThe city is always crowded, especially on weekends but this time there will be internetsters from all over the world coming to Berlin to celebrate the “Berlin Web Week”. Just like on Sonar, many events have gathered around the Web 2.0 Expo taking place next week in Berlin.

Wednesday night, the week started with a little drinkunp organized by the Web 2.0 Expo staff, Lifestream.fm and Mister Wong (thank you Janetti and Jodi!). This morning we had a nice Likemind at Oberholz, PANORAMA3000 and The waving cat had invited people to drink coffee and start the last day of the week smoothly.

This weekend is also Barcamp Berlin where people come together spontaneously to interact – everybody should be involved and take part actively, of course one main subject is the internet, but it also hits science, politics, business. Tonight there is a warm up party at Al Hamra, tomorrow and sunday is the camp and numerous parties and get-togethers.

Dive into more events with some links from Berlin Web Week and Berlin Blase.

Gesellschaftliche Gründe für die Flucht in virtuelle Welten

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Gestern hatte ich die Ehre, auf dem Virtual Worlds Camp einen Vortrag über “Gesellschaftliche Gründe für die Flucht in virtuelle Welten” zu halten. Nach einigen Anfangsschwierigkeiten stürzte ich mich voll in die Soziologie der Regeln und Sanktionen, der sozialen Anerkennung und Identifikation und hatte am Ende eine zwar nicht perfekte, aber immerhin so anregende Präsentation beisammen, dass sich eine äußerst lebhafte Diskussion entwickeln konnte. Danke an alle Teilnehmer, hier finden sich die Folien via Slideshare.

Gesellschaftliche Gründe Für die Flucht In Virtuelle Welten

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: games sociology)

Wordle – Beautiful word clouds

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obama_mccain_acceptancespeec_wordle“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like..”

I discovered Wordle in a Twitter-tweet by Steve Rubel where he compared Obama’s and McCain’s acceptance speeches with the help of this text analysis tool. It’s very open to interpretation indeed but somehow pretty and illustrative.

I compared two speeches of Müntefering and Merkel, the one Müntefering held at the Parteitag in Hamburg and one Merkel held to celebrate the Soziale Marktwirtschaft. They were surprisingly similar. A very interesting fact is that both use the word “müssen” a lot. Maybe German politicians should think about putting their messages into sentences with more “können”.

You can see Müntefering’s speech on the left side (obviously, Merkel wouldn’t say “Genossen”) and Merkel’s on the right side.