Die Versprechen des mysteriösen, sich aber immer konkreter abzeichnenden Semantic Web sind groß. Nichts anderes als dass Maschinen tatsächlich verstehen sollen, was man gerade sucht und die Informationen und möglichen Entscheidungen entsprechend aufarbeiten will das semantische Web liefern. Ein Web der Daten, mehr als Daten im Web.
European parliament offers a nice widget on their European Parliament MySpace site which breaks down essential political questions in a very simple way. Here is the widget I did:
Too bad it does not show the meaning of the symbols but it goes like this: the cat is for taming financial markets, the sun is for solar energy (althought that’s a little short, I believe we need a mix, which includes nuclear energy BUT with a clear stop in the future), the lock is for open borders, the flash for electric energy for cars, the book is for investments in education (instead of agriculture) and the syringe is for genetic agriculture (and I do not mean Monsanto! I believe public science must undertake a much bigger effort than today to find, also genetically driven, solutions to make agriculture more sustainable and productive.
A friend pointed me to this great film trailer iPhone application which does exactly what you expect: List all available trailers with some context information about the movie, shows the trailers, makes the downloadable to a local archive, select between European countries and thus languages, search for titles or other tags like production company genre and so on. Very recommendable!
And here’s the trailerapp trailer:
Developed by filmtrailer.com (Preview Networks) with xTreo
I had this idea when I realized how many people twitter about what they are watching on tv right now. Taking a look at my German twitter friends on a sunday night, be sure, almost half of them will comment on the ongoing “Tatort”. But in contrast to stuff from the web, tv shows cannot be linked to directly. Of course, there are pages from tv channels, YouTube videos or blogentries, but there is clearly no distinct system to link to tv shows.
This is a gap to be filled, maybe it is THE gap to be filled for the two systems to grow together. We need URLs for tv shows.
How can this be done? Here is just an idea, feel free to discuss it, take it, rework it and implement it.
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For the most time I have been in my current flat, the little store in the ground floor was filled with a computer store. The guys where nice, even had some hints for me from time to time but obviously they did not suceed with their business and closed last year. Some months later people started to build a café there. This was of great delight to us since we have many bars in our neighborhood but no nice cafés to sit and read newspapers.
In september, Café Solvey opened finally and we instantly became friends with Solvey and her family who run the place. It’s warm and cosy, with very old porcelain, self-made cake, soft armchairs, a kids corner with toys and a fake, yet very well done chemin. And when Solvey asked me to help her out with a website I could not say no. Jimdo was the system of choice to build it fast and easy and when I see now that Solvey herself (who is not a big fan of these “computer things”) edits the events on her page and adds products, I know it was the right decision – Jimdo obviously easy to use. And I earned myself a couple of coffees, breakfasts and cakes!
Take a look at Solvey’s website, more importantly, visit the café if you are around and leave a comment in the guestbook!
Yesterday, I attended the ceremony of Deutsche Welle to award the Best of Blogs (theBOBS) which, according to the jury, are the best blogs in different national categories, as well as in video and audio in 2009.
Peter aka thewavingcat blogged live with a very fascinating tool called Coveritlive. It has a very smooth editor surface to write, comment and adjust stuff and codes which can be embedded in other websites where your twitterlike short news are flowing in and can be commented. He worked really hard in typing down the many informations from the stage, approving comments AND answering questions from a worldwide crowd. Respect! Also, Stefanie Suren and Andreas Schepers did a good job in guiding the audience through the evening with a plimpse of Hollywood feel: “And the winner is..!”
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“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”
Hm, so what does that mean? Basically what you can with the little Arduino board is easily bring lots of input in and turn it into certain outputs. Sounds easy and maybe trivial but really is not. Because Arduino can process many different signals and trigger many different outputs. Kiss a door and it opens. Step close to a mirror and a video starts playing with the mirror talking to you. Turn TV picture into LED-signals. Connect it to the Wii and In general one might say it’s very nerdy and looks a little unready still. But it’s definetly the start into a development of selfbuilt robots and machines.
Below are some video examples. I particularly like the TV to LED part because it’s kind of what a friend and I did for a party once. We put 16 toilet paper rolls covered with translucent paper in fornt a tv and thus reduced the pictures to a 16×16 pixel screen. We taped it to video and had a nice party light installation. The posted below is slightly more elegant but, really, less charming.
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Greenhouse.sproutbuilder.com is an absolute blast. It’s a flash based widget builder which works entirely in your browser window and has a lot of editing features. Build sites with text, video, pictures, slideshows, maps, charts or insert RSS. Define size, fonts, colors, background, effects. Here are the most recent updates from the PANORAMA3000 blog in a widget, it took me 20 minutes to make it nice.
“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like..”
I discovered Wordle in a Twitter-tweet by Steve Rubel where he compared Obama’s and McCain’s acceptance speeches with the help of this text analysis tool. It’s very open to interpretation indeed but somehow pretty and illustrative.
I compared two speeches of Müntefering and Merkel, the one Müntefering held at the Parteitag in Hamburg and one Merkel held to celebrate the Soziale Marktwirtschaft. They were surprisingly similar. A very interesting fact is that both use the word “müssen” a lot. Maybe German politicians should think about putting their messages into sentences with more “können”.
You can see Müntefering’s speech on the left side (obviously, Merkel wouldn’t say “Genossen”) and Merkel’s on the right side.
Just a test of the iPhone wordpress app – still iphone word recommendation is really a pain but that’s not the (the=thw- wtf?!) fault of the app..
Took a picture but I guess it means work to adjust it nicely to the design. We’ll see..
Next task: Disable this autocorrect thing.
