london news: "heute wurde unsere studenten-website ganz gross gelauncht, mit offiziellem event im ica, institute of contemporary arts, london!" – the new site is a tasty interplay of viennese melange and blue de brasil. but why a splash screen?
exciting as well as frightening (eawaf) – seems to be my motto this monday. just because i read across the interview with hans extreme which contains heaps of eawaffy passages (e.g. the "swastika stunt"). and my weird mind makes it up that i think christoph schlingensief has equivalent reasons and a totally different approach to do eawaf stuff, too. maybe andy kaufman fits in here again... (yawn!) – ok, what about klaus kinski?
i am such a hormoron these days.
what came to my mind today in the morning fits perfectly with tim berners-lee's concerns about the world wide web: i consider it highly likely that the way the web was built in the past will be undermined by the people who "may have less patience in waiting on the rule makers to deal with their concerns and push their own agenda, defining their own rules".
those people, mainly marketmaniacs, ipodelics and governmental authorities, will re-establish their own philosophy with the parameters of the internet (or vice versa, if i am lucky). and they will do it insanely fast, no matter how much they will have been warned. speed is their sacred mean to achieve growth in the end.
they are not the only conservative, egocentric power raising its head: several times i had to cope with some old, lardy and narcistic net-farts who already got their respect for what they might have done in the 80's when electronic publishing meant btx, resp. minitel, or even worse "remote offset printing via satellite". man, they can give you a hard time... (i assume that in 10, 20 years i will be in their shoes. so what. the time is now for me to play a different role).
it's not that there is any struggle lost / won for any side, yet. but i expect the giggling internet sandbox days to be definitely over (well, not for the rest of us...). and something new will surely come – duh! it's there already! the autonomous, autodidactic biodata hacker (i know this sounds cheesy but think of it yourself) is an exciting as well as frightening thought full of new scenarios and visions.
metababy: "sometimes, the best attack is the absence of one".
who is this cute girl with the sad eyes? uh, her name is ariana french. she knows a tale of a woman and has a weblog page about january 17, 2000... probably a special date – what did i do that day?
certainly mrs french has a weblog, i just did not see clearly then. slapatforehead
man on the moon, last and final(?) chapter: i have seen the movie and unbelievably liked jim carey as andy kaufman. the plot was very funny and milos forman did a good job as director. uh, and courtney love has another gorgeous part (remembering “the people vs. larry flint”). ok, my expectations have been pretty high since i was waiting for the movie for ages and certainly would not own up to myself it being a flop. however, it even more increased my interest in this person andy kaufman alias tony clifton (i wonder if helge schneider...). a paperback bio probably will be next...
dplanet is hosted by ogilvy interactive, south africa... in austria oi is producing advertising for and thus is affiliated to box of pandora opener and conservative party in government övp.
get down, get down: "apple drops webobjects license price from $50,000 to $699". jungle boogie! frontier still is $899...
looking at the design apart from the content, the fm4 site definitely is an impressive piece of work. it is hard to find a balanced attitude towards such a project knowing some lovely people behind it on the one hand and the uberadvantages of the orf being a very powerful monopolist on the other. politics everywhere.
but the real sad story is that some bollocks always will complain (i am one of them :)
the lesson to learn: never claim that you are doing it for the users – or they will give you a hard time whining the shit out of you.
weblogs, too? guardian online, orf fm4, weblogs.de?
<rant> my bloody opinion of the day: a commercial weblog is a paradoxon. weblogs are like pirate stations transmitting via http. logma 3000. i rather won't call my own stuff here "weblog" than using the term for yet another outcome of mass media myth or professional portal parasitism. </rant>
other quotes:
weblogs.com: "weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. [...] the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc."
robotwisdom: "weblogs don't replace the function of publishing articles, but they do replace the function of publishing tables of contents, which for commercial zines have to hype their content dishonestly, and can't normally highlight good articles in other sources."
e&p: "[...] as weblogging becomes more widespread among corporations, there's likely to be some resentment from the pioneers who see it as an anti-corporate concept."
salon: "weblogs, typically, are personal web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides."
scribble: "having 10 million hits is not the game plan. having 10 regular readers is a home run."
probably one day the one or the other has to "think of a better name than 'weblog', just start using it and see if it catches on" (jorn barger).
sidenote to boo.crash: about 200 people already lost their jobs, another 100 employments are in danger. those people are the struck ones. it is very likely that most of them will find new jobs pretty soon. but not everyone is a most wanted geek those days – and this is just the beginning, isn't it?