I just finished Émile Zola’s Nana after i have read Germinal, which my brother gave me right before i went to Chile. While Germinal shows the reality of mineworkers in 19th century France in Nana Zola describes the life of Parisian upper class. Both books feature dramatic and descriptive writing conveying the everyday life below a great inequality where poverty and decadence reside side by side.

What happens if you expect your transatlantic flight to be eight days later than it actually is? You are _very_ happy that you discover this perceptual distortion before the day of departure. My flight to Calgary will be next Tuesday – and not in two weeks – to see the Ente. Hooray! And i have noticed this before Tuesday. Hooray twice!

this is a crosspost coming from the Atomique blog

Yesterday I have handed in the mini-thesis covering my internship project: Decentralized and Distributed Photo Sharing on the Web (PDF) and this is the abstract:

Tagging-based communities allowing users to share, organize, and explore resources such as photos and bookmarks have pioneered the combination of social networking and resource sharing. Formerly rather tiresome activities such as annotating information sources have been transformed to ways of connecting and interacting with other people. Resource sharing in a community environment allows contributors to engage in conversation, play, and challenges. However, most resource-sharing communities have architectural and institutional shortcomings due to their usually centralized, restricted, and profit-driven nature. Users do not have control over the community’s policies, functionality, or appearance. The social aspects created between contributors are locked within a community, while it is usually not possible to interact with users from other communities.

In this report, a decentralized approach towards photo sharing is introduced allowing for community and conversation while fostering access to shared photos and empowerment of users. This concept draws insight from a diverse set of disciplines including information retrieval, databases, distributed computing, interaction design, and psychology. A web-based photo repository is conceptualized employing tagging as a classification scheme. Established standards and protocols of the blogosphere are used to provide for decentralized photo sharing in groups.

A prototype photo repository allowing for decentralized photo sharing was implemented. An overview of this software and its functionality is given, and challenges throughout the implementation phase are presented, including considerations regarding presentation, interaction, uploading, syndication, and photo sharing groups. The document ends with a summary and a discussion of the results including an outlook to potential future work.

or: catching some dolphins in a driftnet

I think the phenomenon of amateurs, musicians, and many other people publishing all kinds of videos on YouTube is hip, zeitgeisty, and overall quite favorable – as readers of this blog probably have noted during the last two or three weeks. However, the centralized architecture of YouTube does distress myself a bit. If a giant media conglomerate can request the deletion of 100′000 videos claiming copyright conflicts, it troubles me somewhat that dear YouTube – remember it’s Google now – is embracing the request wholeheartedly without much checking. Suprisingly it turns out the selection of those videos was not that fine-grained. Some actually did not violate Viacom’s copyrights. Others would actually fall in the category of fair use.

This kind of behaviour of our beloved mass media monsters providing stultifying entertainment instead of contexts for free speech explains a lot about the condition of the societies we live in. The revolution will not be televised nor uploaded to YouTube.

Have you noted that i’m all for decentralizing and democratizing resource sharing communities? Well, actually i am somewhat involved in a prototype allowing decentralized photo sharing. If you ask me, i think we should articulate and stress more the little fact of centralization of most webtwoish providers.

via netzpolitik.org: Wurden Deine Youtube-Videos von Viacom gelöscht?

A well made, condensed video collage showing how hypertext, the Web, XML, open data formats are changing quite a few things, if not everything…

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
by mwesch on YouTube

via des is ja grad des: rethink governance?

Blogstöckchen sind kindisch und oft völlig sinnfrei. Das macht im Prinzip auch ihren Charme aus. Meine ehemalige Tandempartnerin Thalia – saludos a Mexico – hat mir ein Stöckchen zugeworfen, mit folgender Aufgabe:

1. Greif das Buch, welches sich in diesem Moment am nächsten zu dir befindet,
2. schlage Seite 123 auf, gehe mit dem Zeigefinger zum fünften Satz,
3. schreibe die folgenden drei Sätze auf,
4. veröffentliche sie in deinem Blog plus Buchtitel & Autor und
5. leite diese Aufgabe an drei andere Mitmenschen weiter!

Das Buch, das just in der Nähe lag, als ich von der Aufgabe erfuhr, war das Zitatebilderbuch A Question of Freedom von David and Amy Butler, das mir die Ente einmal aus Kanada mitgebracht hat. Es hat 22 pappdicke Seiten mit jeweils tollen Zitaten zu Freiheit mit ebenso schönen Illustrationen. Aus Mangel an 123 Seiten habe ich einfach die fünfte Seite aufgeschlagen und folgendes Zitat abgetippert:

Each person designs his own life,
freedom gives him the power to carry out his own design.
– Eric Berne

So, und weil es sich so gehört, lade ich Ente, Uwe und Marco dazu ein, es mir nach zu machen.