Just testing a mobile blogging app on android.

Chess players who train with computers are much stronger for it. They test their intuitions and receive rapid feedback as to what works, simply by running their program. People who learn economics through the blogosphere also receive feedback, especially if they sample dialogue across a number of blogs of differing perspectives. The feedback comes from which arguments other people found convincing. Do the points you wanted to hold firm on, or cede, correspond to the evolution of the dialogue? This feedback is not as accurate as Rybka but it’s an ongoing test of your fluid intelligence and your ability to revise your opinion.

Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place

Source: Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

(via the always great somethingchanged)

The Nieman Lab covers the planned expansion of Spot.Us, a really interesting and pioneering project in crowdsourced crowdfunded journalism. At this time, where everybody is discussing potential models for journalism to survive (or be funded), Spot.us takes an innovative approach. By the looks of this interview, it’s going well. Hopefully that’s not only true for the Bay Area…

Spot.Us, the non-profit experiment in journalism funded by readers, plans to expand beyond San Francisco by the end of summer, founder David Cohn tells me in the interview above. Seattle and Los Angeles are the most likely candidates for the site’s next iteration, and in the longer term, Spot.Us is looking to the east coast as well.

Read the rest of the story over at Nieman Lab…

In case you aren’t familiar with Spot.Us, here’s a video briefly explaining the basics:

Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.

Video sources: (1) Nieman Lab, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. (2) David Cohn / Digidave, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

The next Likemind will be off schedule. Instead of the regular third Friday of the month, the November and December installment of Likemind will (globally) be merged into a single event on Friday, 4 Dec. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I think it won’t be too much trouble for anyone, eh?

On the other hand we’ll be working with the good folks of Transmediale for the next two Likeminds (that’s December and January). As I’m sure you know, Transmediale is a very special art festival in Berlin that has been dealing with new media art since that term was really edgy. No, that sounds wrong – what I’m trying to say is: Transmediale has always been on the cutting edge of media art, and has an international reputation that drives people from all over the world to Berlin every time. It’s really that good.

I sat down with Clemens Lerche of Transmediale earlier today and afterwards he gave me a brief interview in which he gives us a glimpse at what to expect at Transmediale 2010. The theme of the festival is Futurity Now, and it’s about nothing less than shaping the future (the video is in German):

Interview: Clemens Lerche / Transmediale 2010 from thewavingcat on Vimeo.

Hope to see you at Likemind!

I have an announcement to make that has me very excited indeed: We just got the go from the good folks over at TED to organize an independent TED event in Berlin. (Not familiar with TED? Check them out, you won’t regret it.) Our event will be called TEDx Kreuzberg and will be held at Betahaus, who are co-organizing the whole thing.

So please save the date:

Date: 10 December 2009
Time: 7pm / 19h
Location: Betahaus, Prinzessinnenstraße 19-20, 10969 Berlin (show map)

For simplicity’s sake, let me quote from the event website that we’ve just begun building:

At 10 Dec (Thursday), Betahaus will open its doors to celebrate a night full of inspiring TED talks: Please join us for TEDx Kreuzberg! We will be providing more information over the next few days on the TEDx Kreuzberg website. Questions? The best way to reach us is via email: mail@tedxkreuzberg.org. More information on TED is available here or on the TED website.

So what’s the difference between TED and TEDx? Here’s the official explanation that explains things very well:

What is TED?
TED is an annual event where some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to share what they are most passionate about. “TED” stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design — three broad subject areas that are, collectively, shaping our future. And in fact, the event is broader still, showcasing ideas that matter in any discipline. Attendees have called it “the ultimate brain spa” and “a four-day journey into the future.” The diverse audience — CEOs, scientists, creatives, philanthropists — is almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Frank Gehry, Paul Simon, Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Bono.

What is TEDx? (x=independently organized event)
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

We’re getting in touch with potential speakers now and are going to be sorting out the details for the event over the next few days. You can follow our progress on the official TEDx Kreuzberg twitter account @tedxkreuzberg.

We’ll start talking to a small number of sponsors. Sponsoring a TEDx is pretty special indeed as it is both a strong brand and a great, inspirational event. If you think you know the right company to be a decent sponsor for this kind of event, please let us know (mail@tedxkreuzberg.info). Thank you so much!

Last but not least: A big THANKS to Christoph and the rest of the Betahaus crew for co-organizing the event. This will be grand, and I can’t wait. Hope to see you there!

In the olden days you used to hear blogs being compared to lovers – blogging was perceived to be an intensely personal, sometimes intimate thing, and the relationships between bloggers was pretty intense. Now, of course that kind of romanticizing was somewhat over the top. There was a small number of bloggers in a vast internet, so they stuck together.

However, there is something to this romantic notion. I’ve been noticing that my relationship to blogs has changed. More and more I’ve been perceiving them as something to deal with in a professional context. That’s not to say I’m not as passionate as blogging as ever, but it changed. Also, with so many more blogs around, attention is spread thinner – and many great blogs don’t get the attention they deserve.

I’ve been neglecting a few blogs that I dearly love, and that whenever I visit them, I find most inspiring. Some of them I would even read not in my feedreader but on their own website, for celebration’s sake, so to speak. So I’d like to introduce a handful of blogs that I’ve always liked, and that I’ve been neglecting. And I’d like to encourage you to do the same: a small selection of hand-picked, author’s recommendation-style blogs.

Digitalien
This is where it all started for me. The German Sofa/Digitalien was a collection of short stories, not called blog then, but very blog like in it’s overall appearance. (It’s abandoned but archived under the domain sofa.digitalien.org, the blog now lives under arrog.antville.org.) and the authors were some of the first in Germany to actually switch to blogging and to discuss the whole affair as it was emerging. Praschl and Knecht experimented with form and content, interpreted both, applied it in often very personal ways. It was always a joy reading, a glimpse into someone else’s life, an inspiration to be part of this whole blogging thing. They would have never called it a movement.

Jan Chipchase / Future Perfect
Jan Chipchase (real name!) is a researcher for Nokia. In his blog Future Perfect he shares some insights on his research on digital lifestyle. Sounds boring? Think again. Chipchase leaves his lab and goes straight to where the real innovation is made this day: the favelas of the world where bootstrapping and improvising and hacking is the default mode. He talks to the folks there who hack their phones to meet the needs of life as an Indian taxi driver or maybe the expectations of a 15-year old in Shinjuku. More companies should be giving budgets to awesome researchers and allow them to blog. Just as I’m typing this the most recent blogpost reads:

Today’s office involves a few hours stopover in Dubai, then a 3am flight to Kabul. The upside of sleeplessness? Watching the dawn over Afghanistan turn from glimmer on earth’s curved surface to the dusty, arid warmth of the mountains below. The next few days an opportunity to map the movement of the city since the last visit, a plethora of interviews and reconnections, Insha’Allah.

This may give you a rough idea of what Jan Chipchase is upt to. It’s always fascinating.

Danah Boyd / apophenia
Danah Boyd blogs under the domain Zephoria.org, her blog is call apophenia. According to Wikipedia, apophenia is “the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”. I’m not sure the blog name is all that convincing – after all, Danah doesn’t really dig around meaningless data but instead blogs about her very concrete scientific findings, mostly around the way youth use social media (in the more narrow sense) or (in the wider sense) how youth construct online identities. (Of course, you surely shouldn’t let the blog name get in your way.)

Like Jan Chipchase (above), Danah Boyd is a scientist who by now is on the payroll of a major corporation to fund her research. She works for Microsoft Research New England and is a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. That shouldn’t deter you, though, as she still shares a lot of research results. Never dry, always compelling and very often thought-stimulating or even mind blowing. Whenever I go to her blog, I can be sure to spend the next hour or so digging around her site, it’s that good. Definitively a keeper.

Bruce Sterling / beyond the beyond
Bruce Sterling has been a hero of mine for a long time. (I most recently sung his praise after reboot11.) If there’s any place he outputs regularly besides the WIRED/beyond the beyond blog, I’m not familiar with it – so this is it. In his very particular, weary-yet-wary way he formulates incredibly deep, complex thoughts in a way that usually takes me a few days to process before understanding what he’s even talking about, but when the thoughts eventually sink in, they usually trigger some profound thought process in me in a way few writers do. The blog itself isn’t always so great, but when it shines, it thoroughly does. And it is, as far as I know, the best place to catch a regular dose of Sterling.

Anthony Volodkin / faßcinated
Anthony is one of the minds behind the wonderful hypemachine music discovery service. On his personal blog faßcinated, Anthony does just what blogs used to be about: he shares personal thoughts and little snippets of stuff he finds online. It’s not overly deep and often banal, but in the best possible sense of the word: Little glimpes into someone’s day-to-day live, written and shared with a lot of love, occasionally with his take on contemporary Russia. (He was born and raised in Russia, now lives in New York City.) I know Anthony only very superficially, but his blog seems to perfectly capture and reflect his very curious, passionate and open-minded personality in a way that’s, well, just fun to read.

Yay!Everyday!
I wasn’t sure if I should include Yay!Everyday! in this list. For one, it’s not technically a blog, but rather a collection of photos. More importantly though, it’s not Yay!Everyday! I wanted to highlight, but Yay!Monday!, which is by now defunct (or so it seems). Yay!Monday! used to be a weekly dose of inspiration a la ffffound, but for Mondays only. (In fact I have to admit I can’t really tell how they’re different, if at all.) So this shouldn’t be part of this list. Then again, this is all about inspiration, so let’s not be too narrow-minded, eh?

What else?
This list feels terribly incomplete. But that’s the nature of neglected blog reading lists, by definition important blogs get forgotten. So I’ll take the liberty of updating this list when I remember another blog that I’ve been neglecting and that should be featured here. Until then, I strongly recommend you check out the blogs above. I promise you won’t regret it. Enjoy!

Updates:

something changed
something changed is not even a real blog. It’s a tumblelog. It’s written by a certain Jessica, who doesn’t give away her family name (not even in interviews), or her exact job (she only says she works in advertising, until recently in Sydney, now in Melbourne). In other words: I know practically nothing about the author of this blog. And yet, it’s full of smart, inspiring quotes, thoughts and ideas. I never leave the site without something new and refreshing on my mind. And what more can you possibly ask for?

Photo by kunel, Some Rights Reserved.

What you’ll see in the videos are two judgments (or rather: worldviews) that couldn’t be more different. Murdoch argues that the audience should be charged for news, and that search engines shouldn’t be allowed to “grab our content and run” (i.e. to index it). Shirky on the other hand says that newspapers probably can’t be saved and moves on to save journalism instead, and putting up a paywall certainly doesn’t enter the equation there.

But watch for yourself, you’ll be entertained (by the first video) and enlightened (by the second).

(via boingboing)

(via netzpolitik.org)

Both events will be completely different, no doubt, but also I’m expecting both to be a lot of fun. At the Becks Camp I’m actually invited as one of 10 creatives (whatever that is) to put together some kind of installation to reflect on the theme of the event customize reality. (Full disclosure: As invited artist I’m getting paid for my participation.) My take is to think about workspaces, and how to create workspaces for laptop workers (think coworking) by working with a given environment and tags to recontextualize as necessary. How exactly this is going to work I’m not sure yet, but the resident artist-in-charge Luis Berríos-Negrón has promised his support and my feeling is that my very rough ideas are in excellent hands there. So we’ll see. I’m curious how it’s going to work out, and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been invited as an artist anywhere, so it should be fun. That’s Thursday, 12 November.

Barcamp Hamburg will be on 13-14 November (FRI/SAT). Last time I was at Barcamp HH I met a lot of very interesting and cool people, and I have all reason to believe this time will be no different. And since links are the currency in which barcamps can pay back their sponsors, here’s a hat tip to the sponsors: Otto, Google, eVenture, Lecturnity, T-Mobile, BCD Travel, kaffeebazar, Pure Tea, Microsoft, Yalook.com, saftblog, T3N.

So let the games begin. I hope to see you at Hamburg!

Update: Becks has put up some photos of the Hamburg event as well as this video:

Beck’s Gold Urban Experiences Workspace Hamburg from Beck's Gold Urban Experiences on Vimeo.

Also, and this really put me in a great mood, Grandmaster Flash (yes, the real one) was at the event as a DJ and Ludwig captured some of his set in a video (thanks!):

A few days ago, the annual fundraiser campaign has kicked off. As you can imagine, like many industries, non-profits like Creative Commons have also been hit hard by the economic crisis as they have to rely on donations both by institutions and individuals.

Before getting into the details, though, a quick intro video for those of you not familiar with Creative Commons. A good place to start is the video “A Shared Culture” by filmmaker Jesse Dylan, known for the “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video:

A few brief examples how Creative Commons is relevant to my work:

• Practically all the images used in this blog are licensed under CC. The blog itself is licensed under CC – with one of the most liberal licenses (CC Attribution). Anybody can use all the content that I created here as long as they point out who it’s from (that’s the “attribution” part), no matter if for non-commercial or commercial uses.
• My photos on Flickr are all licensed under a slightly more restrictive license (CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike), which means anyone can use them as long as they point to me as the creator, but they may only use them in a non-commercial context (because I wouldn’t want a friend of mine ending up in some kind of commercial or anything along those lines), and as long as they share the work based on my photos under similar conditions (thus also contributing to the growing pool of available works).
• In practically every client project I argue for sharing as much as possible on the web, and usually a Creative Commons license is the easiest, most reliable (and most legally sound) way of doing so.

For different kinds of uses and content, Creative Commons offers me the chance to pick just the right license and keep the rights I want to keep while giving up the ones that aren’t important to me. That’s the main difference between the old model you know from old-school copyright aka “all rights reserved”. With Creative Commons, it’s “some rights reserved”.

The official fundraiser kick-off post has the details on the campaign (and a neat CC shirt motif), Joi Ito has some more background.

So what can you do to support a free culture? You can spread the word, share your content (thus enabling others to build on it while also building your reputation), or donate cash, which helps fund the (small) organization behind the scenes:

Here’s more ways and hands-on tipps on how to support Creative Commons and spread the word. Thanks for your contribution.

The election results, frankly, suck. We (Jusos, Panorama3000 and I) put a lot of effort into the campaign and I think we did a good job. But I can understand everyone who’s frustrated with the politics of the last four years, and voters have made it clear that they didn’t want politics to continue the same way for another four years. Both major parties got the worst results in 60 years, the three small parties got record highs: This clearly is a signal of changing times. Where exactly things are going we’ll need to see. I worked with the SPD (the equivalent of the US democrats) in the campaign because I believe that they’re a really important force in our society – and I’m saying that despite my total and utter disagreement with their recent internet politics. So of course I found it somewhat frustrating that the liberal FDP gained so many votes and Germany is going to be governed by a conservative-liberal coalition of CDU and FDP. (And no, I don’t believe it’s good for the economy either.) So now I’m hoping that the SPD will draw the right conclusions and regain both their strength and – in the next elections – also government power.

atoms&bits Festival on the other hand was a total success and I had a great time. We had planned on getting together the communities around coworking, DIY, OpenEverything, participatory politics and art, and it worked out great. We saw a lot of happy faces, inspired (and inspiring) talks, as well as connections being made across these topical boundaries. Also, I had a great time with the Geeks On A Plane, who kindly invited a few of us to join their dinner and in turn joined us at the atoms&bits party at Betahaus.

All that said, some great weeks. But now I’m off for a little while to marry off a friend and go on a little backpacking trip. So if I don’t respond to your calls or emails, you know why. See you in a few weeks!

* Full disclosure: I was an adviser to the online youth election campaign of SPD/Jusos. That was a paid gig. This post expresses my personal views only.