humming to myself.
"nothing ever lasts forever. it's the same for you i'm sure. all the things we did together, they just hurt me more and more." – new order, "slave".
gee, i just read the first 100 pages of derek powazek's "design for community" and (apart from some minor language flaws, "make no mistake") it is huge. amazing to get to know the people behind fray, metafilter et al. and to share their experiences in making "something useful that others could enjoy" and getting a wonderful crowd of people using it as reward.
i don't like to make such dispensable statements and only do it rarely, but this is a must-read for everyone involved in "the art connecting real people in virtual places" – be it stricly scientific ones or for the sake of entertainment.
antville could benefit from it just as any of the bigco's forums, e.g. fm4 (but honestly, for latter i question the practical transformation).
although the book mainly aims at designers, powazek contributes a lot to general knowledge about how to attract and guide a website's interest group. stunningly, from a designer's point of view powazek even succeeds in overcoming some of his design principles when they interfere with the user experience. a real walk on the tightrope, but he's looking pretty good at it.
what i have learnt so far:
- content comes first
- design matters (so what)
- bury the post button(!)
- there is always a host (and s/he is bloody important)
- barriers are good
today's night trippin': starting 22:00 cet (approximately), michael "say dog" strengberg will play his cool tunes and spin some of his hottest hip-hop plates at vienna's ra-mien in gumpendorfer straße.
i could imagine mr eigenheads will be there, too. say what?
longbets.com: "a computer – or 'machine intelligence' – will pass the turing test by 2029. no: mitchell kapor (mkapor), initiator. yes: ray kurzweil (rkurzweil), responder. stakes: $20,000 ($10,000 each)". via fernsehratgeber.
dave winer: "business is simple, but eisner makes it sound complex. find a way to give the people what they want and you stay in business. try to turn the clock back, and become a memory. they had a good thing going for a long time. the users got snookered into giving him all the money and none to the creative people. that's over. imho, eisner and his ilk were the pirates" (via henso).
remember the independent magazine inflation the years before? suddenly publications like peng, malmoe or nylon popped out of nowhere in almost any of vienna's trendy locations.
i just spoke with klaus hofegger who makes the beautiful peng print design and layout, and he told me that quite many of these magazines are in financial troubles. printing is expensive and distribution a pain in the ass.
i wish the magazine makers would get to know weblogs or simply the way the net works and embrace it for their publishing efforts. i strongly believe that more people would read their texts and they would know more about their readers.
but klaus did not paint a very optimistic picture. obviously they don't understand what the internet could do for them and obviously they don't want to understand, either. fear of contact. what a pity.
great entertainment at the stereolab forum (found via sensomatic): aunty sheila giving the right advice to women confrontated with whiny and clingy men (having tiny schlongs).
"livid purple german helmets", heheh...
i think being amongst the first 10 results when searching google for the terms "netz radio" or "radio netz" and even being amongst the first 500 when searching for the word "netz" only, should be quite encouraging to update such a cool weblog once in a while.
anyway, internet radio is calling for help!
sometimes rabbits mix up a cursor with a carrot (via leuchtturm).
hey, antville is running really fine. what an excellent piece of scripting code.
however, project antville slowly seems to become a pandora's box... so many feature requests and still so little (if any) people scripting their ideas themselves.
what do you mean, it's open source?
wehe, wenn sie losgelassen.