not surprisingly also this year the ars electronica .net award goes to a celebrity: neil stephenson will receive the "golden nica" because "the online art award might not exist if people had not read stephenson's books and been inspired to create digital work" (hey! i am serious, heheh).

or: because of "a lack of originality in this year's .net category entries".

or: because of "just a lust for celebrity, rather than a desire to help nurture the electronic art field, which could certainly use it".

that the net is actually playing a big role in political terms (even in golden nica country) is certainly not worth to mention, let alone some provincial plastic sculpture.

hannes picked up the clue paintrain manifesto topic. right, it's all about the lack of irony regarding the cluetrain reception only. thanks for the reminder. the picture and dave winer's quote make it clear.

paintrain... sounds molestingly comfortable.

"just visualize your very own personal mind distortion": pixelmassaker – a platform for fucked up creative output. massacring pixels seems to be more like a job for "rambos". no teams so far...

loooong outage at weblogs.com and editthispage... (sigh!)

since the cluetrain is taken too seriously by some people who never will get over writing feuilletons and not seriously enough by bluff marketeers (be careful: there is some contradiction hidden in this last sentence!), i added the gluetrain theses for synoptic reasons. thanks for the script goes out to mr langreiter again and again and again.

german weekly newspaper "die zeit" has a discerning article about the cluetrain manifesto. the author generally makes some good points, today it's hard to tell marketing strategies from individual benefit. i also like the polemic sense of humour since all is not to be considered that seriously, anyway.

the german translation is in fact a real mess not far from sociologic darkroom lingo or sectic fanatism. and certainly, the mise en scène by brandeins, "the best magazin layout so far but unfortunately filled with esoteric business buzz only", is a proof of the crude flexibility of marketing: tits and "respect" – very clever (or is it just about the belly?). you have been warned...

however, the article completely ignores the fact that the manifesto initated a huge discussion about this very topic in the states. a discussion that europe would need so much regarding all that boring ipodelic firsttueday, nonsense x-commerce and manic stock-mock skit. why would you wanna let the suits take over this discussion? why isn't there at least the author's e-mail address? or a link to the gluetrain manifesto? it's such a chance and "die zeit" just missed it.

the weblogs monitor is such an incredibly important and extraordinary idea. apart from serving as a wonderful community tool, such helpers become by all means necessary, when the amount of sites exceeds the number one can handle to scan every day.

i implemented a clone of this aggregator on popo.at with all the features like javascript include and customization.

the clone is fully written in rebol and using a linux crontab entry for periodic scheduling. i did not know that automatic scheduling is that easy on linux: no administrator's help was needed, i simply could do that on my own – and so probably anyone could...

i am curious who will add this facility of watching the online resistance evolve to their own page.

via london news: assembler.org. wicked!

partykeller joined the weblogs.community. a very welcome! the dancing stick figure banner is great! partykeller is an euroblog, too.

claudia is writing an article for a chinese newspaper! cool. i wonder if there are any chinese weblogs – asianblogs?

weblogs dancing in the partykeller.

lucky bastards: euroranch has gained recruitment in person of hans_ heinz who is famous here in vienna but in the internet he is quite unknown. sure, this will change now that he is blogging around together with mr makotter. "the lucky bastards" would be a cool name for a country band.

this weblog-like page should be continued (resp. properly launched) with even greater effort and become a "real" blog. i know the guy and it would be fun to read his odd opinions more often. i mean, actually there are no real opinions there, just the usual mindcrap i am used to hear all night long when i meet him in conspirative places. but he can do better. i know it. go for the blog, mr al-khalily!