madhatter’s coffee.

Now it got to Germany: Hillary Clinton is NOT named after the mountaineer Edmund Hillary. It was written in the NYT, spread over the hole Internet and now – well, what’s now? Maybe some of those bloggers should have read Urban Legends References.

Because then they would have seen one small piece on information which I would like to quote:

Last updated: 25 June 2004

Urban Legends Reference Pages: (Hillary vs. Hillary)

Which is approximately about two years ago. Two damned years. Then the NYT found it, thought it interesting, took a small call to Mrs Clintons propaganda institution and published it on October 17, 2006. It took another week to cross over the ocean where it got published in one of Germany’s smaller newspapers, named taz.

But why on earth did nobody of those highly intelligent and differentiated writers took the small expense to do an inquiry? And what is the evidence anyways?
No one ever made fuss about the story until today. Today, that is a few weeks to the elections of U.S. Congress and about two years to U.S. presidential elections. Well and Hillary Clinton goes for congress in the beautiful state of, guess what, New York.
Now, why would that be of interest to the biggest newspaper publishing in this very state? Maybe because it would increase the sales pay? Hum.

It would be interesting news, if one could claim that the former first lady had claimed her special connection to the famous alpinist. But she didn’t, in fact, to quote ULR once again,

none of the many Hillary Clinton biographies we checked so much as mentioned the story, not even Living History, her 2003 autobiography. A staggering amount of information has been published about Hillary Rodham Clinton in her lifetime (going all the way back to her days as a Wellesley College graduate in 1969, when she was featured in Life magazine) — isn’t it odd that a basic fact such as how she got her name has been disclosed only once in all that time?

Urban Legends Reference Pages: (Hillary vs. Hillary)

Technorati Tags:
Hillary Clinton, Mount Everest, Edmund Hillary, media, NYT

Prologue: The Webmonday is a specifically German institution. Bloggers, web designers, pod casters, researchers and developers of one region meet to discuss stuff concerning blogging, webpublishing and, of course, what lies beyond web 2.0.
The idea came from Tim Bonnemann and developed first in Cologne about half a year ago. The concept is to have one hour of lectures of about five to ten minutes. And discussion in between. Generally it is a decentralized organization and claims to be free of charge.

Part I. Webmonday in Stuttgart. We’re sitting in the so called ‘S-Bar’ which could be translated with ‘able to see’. Missing the word joke, of course.
Getting each other known, at least those who know each other anyway. Sociologists would have a paradise of research: cliché like small clusters form each other. Real life networking obviously is something most bloggers have to learn. Well, it may be a little bit difficult if anything isn’t a mouse click away anymore

Part II. The Highschool for Media & Print is this time place and organizator of the regularly meeting which started to be gathering point for bloggers in and around the city of Stuttgart.

Parallely the Webmonday takes place on Second Life and is displayed via beamer in real life. The life stream from the real life Webmonday doesn’t seem to work.
Rafael Capurro is the first lecturer. He tries to explain a bunch of people of all ages the meaning of the term hermeneutics. It’s weired to listen to the history of Aristotle in combination with Web 2.0 techniques. Of course we often forget about the continuous flow of ideas stretching from the beginning of times till today.
But the theory that we could only become critical and criticizing beings because mankind invented writing and thus could gain a distance from the things we were actually thinking about needs a little bit acclimatisation. Consequently that would mean that the distance to put things temporarily away we once thought of enabled us to think about them and to get another point of view. Which would in fact be journalism. Or science. Or both.
The next goal would be to combine the knowledge gathered till today via networking. The chance could be to create an new ontology of topics via social networking.
Ten minutes to lay out a great thought. Way too less time, and a too generalized views on the topic. It stays an utopian thought this way, of course.
Jan Theofel tells us about BIGGER webprojects. For example: How to do a cookblog. I will, although I am committed to kitchen work, never understand how anyone could do a blog about cooking. Cooking for world cup. Even if the cook isn’t a cook but a computer scientist. Some ideas are interesting: backward posting, newsletter topping RSS-feeds and a good time management. The rest seems more trivial. In fact it seemed really everyday blogger-life: e.g. searching for content should be done before. Wow. Yeah, I guess that’s so. Wouldn’t make sense afterwards.
Well, the discussion afterwards shows that the audience is more concerned with copyright and data security questions than with composing a bigger webproject.

The last one, Max Völkel, lectures about Wikis. Well, that may not seem stunning new. But his ideas go a step farther: He realizes what Rafael Capurro already thought of in a more global concept. Wikipedia with semantics: the clou is to tag all central notions with terms which categorize them. For example to tag an entry about Stuttgart with ‘city’, so that it would be clear what ‘kind of Stuttgart’ is meant. Searching databases such would become extremely improved because it would enable to do not only a contextualized but a content-related search.

Part III. Afterwards. Afterwards everybody complains about something. In this case it is mainly one thing: when it comes to the point you got to give away your nameplate. When the bunch of bloggers, photographs, webdesigners and freaks strolls out of the lecture auditorium they become nobodies. And soon the old cliques hang together.
Some new faces are there. Newborn flickr-users, newbies like me and others who leave early. The groups stick together.
When I shuffle home they already disintegrate.

Photos taken with many thanks from quox.

Technorati Tags:
Webmonday, Stuttgart, HDM, Web 2.0

I found a new plaything. It’s called Flock and it’s just kool. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s just outfreaking kool. Ok. For those chaps who haven’t already clicked on the link and are irreversibly lost to the charm of Flock now a short description.
You know the term Web 2.0? Well Wikipedia aktually says it was coined by O’Reilly Media describing all the woundeful new services which where invented over the past one or two years. I don’t like it.
Oh of course, I am using flickr, I sort by feeds in Bloglines, I write at two blogs and I periodically use things like YouTube. Lately I arrived at del.icio.us which I rejected twice and now accepted it beeing nice. I even stumbled over last.fm when my sister told me about and yeah, I admit: I use GMail. And GmailChat. And all those other Google-services like GoogleDocs, GoogleAnalytics and GoogleCalendar. Even if I have a slightly nervous prickle creeping upwards my spine each time I log in.
But people using the term Web 2.0 usually do not have the slightest idea of what this is all about. I mean, I am not Alan Turing or Paul Baran. I do not even have the slightest idea about information theories. At least not more, that you can collect from various articles. And some books. Including the Hitchhiker’s Guide.
But many of those writing blogs, doing podcasting, mobloging or any other kind of new media journalism don’t even know about such things.They fight bravely for the freedom of speech and information, they announce flash mobs and organize in lobbies. But what they don’t do is what they should: spread information and think about it. Information that is worth to spread. If one claims to be part of a community struggeling for freedom and truth believing in the ultimate power of news and decentralized media then he should at least know how those things work. One should anticipate the problems of a world-wide network, which cannot only spread information but which also allows to gather it.

Anyways. Flock is the perfect plaything for those who chose blogging as their hobbyhorse. It is in fact a blogging machine. It integrates various webservices, bloggingplatforms, techniques and sources and all in all makes life easier for a blogger. Which is, I confess, the reasion why I am blogging right now.
If you would take all the Web 2.0 applications and combine them in one (not Web 2.0) application you get flocker. It integrates and remembers your Flickr Account and your Blogger, Atom, Movable Type account as well as any other account on a blog hosted on a server using WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal or Drupal. You have an own blogging Window which enables you to save your posts locally on your harddrive. If you’re done you can post in on any of the previously remembered blog accounts.
Additionally, Flock does even more: it combines those services in a relatively simple way. On top of your browsing-window you can open a bar showing a photostream of any User you enter. Or you can search all public photos for tags. Uploading new photos to flickr or photobucket is way easier than with original the frontends of the services. Taging, entering a title or description for each photo, rotating, croping – everything is possible. Combining this with blogging services goes a step further: You may, for example, find a photo on flickr you want to blog, so you just open a barand drag the photo into your new posting, by the way chosing the size of the photo. Just nice.
The search bar is also expanded an shows four hits from google as you type. And you can share your bookmarks with other computers using del.icio.us.

It’s based on the Mozilla Organizations’ Gecko engine, so it is also, first: relatively secure, and second: a good and fast browser. But it is not only based on the Gecko rendering engine it inherits the core browsing engine of the Firefox Browser. It’s themable, works with many converted Firefox-Extensions and thus can be expected to be improved.

All in all: good work, mates. Well. If I could get it portable it would be just perfect. Since I lack my iBook now. But that’s another story.