rebol – the official guide, $39,99 includes cd and exclusive, signed, limited-edition designer's tip sheet by carl sassenrath...
does the internet need a government? everywhere, even in europa where the fear of a hegemonic us-controlled net is quite huge, the "internet corporation for assigned names and numbers" (icann) is named the "internet's government". fact is that the organisation is holding some "democratic" elections of 9 of the 18 director's board members now due to public pressure icann was facing lately (more at slashdot.org).
ridiciously, the people entitled to vote (older than 16 years and having a valid e-mail address) are not told who they can vote for, yet... seems like a new attitude towards and quality of democracy have risen since absurd online polls and arbitrary "democratic" manifests flood the net society.
generally, there is a lack of information and communication about icann and those elections in europa as well as in the states. it is said that only a few thousand of us-american citizens registered for voting at the time. an initiative by german news magazine der spiegel in cooperation with broadcast station zdf tries to spread the word, lift conscience and get people to vote at least in germany.
"we are sorry. the database is currently overloaded. please try again when the system is less busy. " – error message trying to reach the icann election application form
i ask myself what kind of theater this "internet government" crap is... can this election ever be called a democratic act? is icann necessary at all? would it help the internet community keeping their niches and ideals or will i, you, we, the users, be among the bleating sheep once again being controlled by some unpredictable reincarnations of esther dyson? what's going on in other european and non-us countries?
q: is this not a global issue? a: this is internet dada.
as mentioned before i read my first harry potter book not knowing how famous that guy already is... warner bros. producing a movie (and i bet british harry-boy will be very, veeeeery american) and in new zealand's elementary schools the book even was banned for a while.
in 20 years harry potter probably will be what the famous five are today.
the finland compilation (pt 2.): before i went to finland i visited jena, home of jenoptik (where is the postal address?), intershop and – most important – netdyslexia.
besides a little workshop i participated in at the faculty of media philosophy (and which lead to an important decision for myself, but more about that another day), i met a bunch of the jenenser webloggers (reimar kosack took a picture of us one night). well, no doubt, this city is the german epicenter of weblogism at the time bringing us netdyslexia (meanwhile in new clothes), n area, publog, clublog, projektlog (don't let the "weimar" in the url confuse you :) and another heap of blogs. unfortunately, with the latter being a university's project there is some holiday-caused radio silence to be expected...
together with arfco3000 i bought some east german sweets. my favorite is "schlagersüsstafel", not only because of the dazzling name.
last thing i remember from finland for now is that claudia nearly was hit by a falling branch of a tree in turku. no kidding.
telepolis: "yps darf nicht sterben". excellent article and in some way making a statement about weblogs, too: "yps has taught a whole generation already in their early years to feel creative when tinkering with cheap, prefabricated plastic caboodle. such experience is as important building an ikea cupboard as it is stealing a dot-com idea. in the strict sense, the whole new economy would be impossible without yps as paragon: sell thousands of kids a sliced plastic waste bag and tell them this be an andventurer's tent. sell your investors a few html pages and explain to them this be a community".
yps is a german comic magazine including a so-called gimmick each issue. few people know that the original idea of this print product was established in france by pif gadget.
last week christian langreiter pointed to the video with mr nofrontiere... besides being convinced that the text was definitely written by a ghostwriter, i noticed two things: first, it is a tragic circumstance that in the year 2000 one of the official leaders in austrian multimedia business is allowed to bore us with details about web publishing systems (templates, shmemplates) and nobody stops him. second – and that's more surprisingly even to myself –, there is an unmercyful truth in the written lines that are read off so professionally by mr szadezcky: it's not the company with the most money or the "precise fulfilling of job descriptions" that leads to success but merely the "subjective backlog that everybody brings into the company and is set free through creativity". not less obvious, however a thesis that most of today's "new economy" enterprises should be more aware of.
the relationship between money and creativity is an anti-proportional and thus a dangerous one. latest news from london reached me that christine lost her job and major project because a big client cancelled the brief with the company she worked for...
nofrontiere is a cd-rom agency based in vienna, austria.
i still have to write some lines about the pickings of the last 2 weeks. there was a lot going on during my absence. not really most notable, merely most sensational (well, literally written) was a certain video linked at hinterding. irritating and a test for my stomach, yes, but however: is life not a marsh of body fluids? (i wonder if ingo likes stileproject.com...)
via rathergood: crab palette – "draw a face or write your name in squashed crabs! can anything be more fun?" – and porn mullets (hairy pixxx).
a video (589 kb) that reminds me of mauro rezoagli saying "kick the kid" everytime he caught sight of an infant in the streets of vienna.
continuing the scrotum series: hans_heinz probably would like this bag.