If you look at one paper from the CHI2008 conference, look at "Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation". The conference is the place where innovation in computer-human interaction is presented each year.

Video and more documentation available at
http://www.aviz.fr/dimp/

A small video is available here:
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~bonzo/index.html

The idea of this system was developed by four groups in parallel, without being aware of each other (in the beginning) ... the other paper was "DRAGON: A Direct Manipulation Interface for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation"

Abstract:
We present a method for browsing videos by directly dragging their content. This method brings the benefits of direct manipulation to an activity typically mediated by widgets. We show that this method can out-perform the traditional seeker bar in video browsing tasks that focus on visual content rather than time.


I wish they would put the system demo video on youtube. I have both the paper and the video on the proceedings, but its up to the authors to publish this. - just saw the project homepage

Get to know how cool URIs can be, for the Semantic Web.

Everything needs to be identified, being it a person, a web document, an image, or a mythical unicorn. The Semantic Web and RDF are based on the assumption to identify them all using URIs. But these need to be cool, so read "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" which was published on 31.3.2008 as a W3C Working Group Note.

http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

The official statement is:
2008-04-01: The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has published an Interest Group Note Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world people, organizations, topics, things in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important to the Semantic Web, providing both the core of the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for the effective use of URIs in the context of the Semantic Web.

The note was edited by Richard Cyganiak and myself, and it took us from November 2006 (ISWC, where we had the idea to write it) until yesterday, the 31st March 2008 to finally finish it. Max Völkel was also with us at the beginning and helped us to stay motivated. I am happy about this event - we have finished it! Excellent! Horray!

Read some comments from reviewers that also made us happy:

• "... I think this is quite an important note..." Harry Halpin
• "... I thought it was good before, but now it's excellent!..." Susie Stephens
• "I think this is an important document. It contains a large amount of very valuable material, ... " Tim Berners-Lee
• "... a few places which are confusing, and a small number places which are, I believe, actively misleading. There are also one or two places where I disagree about the recommendation it makes. On the whole, though, the document is important and I hope energy is found to incorporate these comments. " Tim Berners-Lee, about an earlier draft. And all these issues have been answered, Horray! :-)

Alltogether, we had a hard work to get it right and there have been some last minute changes on 20th March 2008 incorporating much feedback from the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Many thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who invested much time and helped us understanding the TAG solution by answering chat requests and contributing many emails with clarifications and detailled reviews of this document. Special thanks go to Stuart Williams, Norman Walsh and all the other members from TAG, who reviewed this document and provided essential feedback in June 2007 and September 2007 about many formulations that were (accidentially) contrary to the TAG's view. Also special thanks to the Semantic Web Deployment Group's members Michael Hausenblas, Vit Novacek, and Ed Summers' reviews and their review summary sent in October 2007. We wish to thank everyone else who has reviewed drafts of this document, especially Chris Bizer, Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes, Harry Halpin, Xiaoshu Wang, Henry S. Thompson, Jonathan Rees, and Christoph Päper. Susie Stephens reviewed the document, managed SWEO, and helped us to stay on track. Ivan Herman did much to verify that the W3C requirements are met and submitted the note.

The work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education,
Science, Research and Technology (BMBF), (Grants 01 IW C01, Project EPOS: Evolving Personal to Organizational Memories; and 01 AK 702B, Project InterVal: Internet and Value Chains) and by the European Union IST fund (Grant FP6-027705, Project Nepomuk).

Did you know images have weight and can fall of websites? Yes, they can. Truth is, they are held in position by fixation, you can remove the fixation of images.

go to HTML Gravity to learn how.

Written by me, GPL license.

On thursday I stumbled into the relaunch party of
transformingfreedom.org. The site aims to provide essential information about our age, using the tools of our age.



Andreas Leo Findeisen is one of the founders of the platform and we had a great time chatting, showing off technostuff, and drinking beer. Accidentially, most of monochrom.at were also there and somebody put on a screening of Kubrick's 2001.

A typical content of transforming freedom is this Stallman speech:
http://www.transformingfreedom.org/de/node/97

photos of the events

We opened the last call for comments on "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" before publishing as note.

Published yesterday as W3C news, we have changed and finalised the document. You can read the draft in this version and send comments to public-sweo-ig@w3.org until 28th March, but I would prefer to get feedback before. Together with Richard Cyganiak, I am editor of this article (and we have been working on it now for over 14 months, since ISWC 2006). The document is, in the eyes of the editors and contributors, finished. Therefore comments about typos, stilistic errors, bugs are welcome, whereas comments of the kind "but in general HTTP URIs are bad" are out of scope to be answered now.

2008-03-21: The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world people, organizations, topics, things in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important to the Semantic Web, providing both the core of the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for the effective use of URIs in the context of the Semantic Web. Comments are welcome through 28 March. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

In general, the document will help you to understand basic ideas about URIs on the Semantic Web and how to tweak HTTP servers to serve useful URIs to identify mythical unicorns and other important things such as people or products. Some paragraphs, like the ones in the Section on distinguishing have been editor over and over again, until sounding a little weird at the end. Next week, we got a final, looking forward to having this problem solved and described nicely from now on.

I am from Austria, and have to blog about some particularity in Austrian history, the "Anschluss".

The reason to blog, and also to do it in English, is a fatal quote by some elderly politician. On the 12th March 1938, 50 years ago, German troops marched into Austria and connected both countries to form the nucleus of the Third Reich. This is widely known and documented as "der Anschluss" (German term for "the connect"). This marks a dark day in Austrian history, reminded in many public rituals in the last week.

As part of a longer speech at a ÖVP meeting (the Christian-Democrat "conservative/republican" party in Austria), Otto Habsburg said: "kein Staat war größeres Opfer als Österreich". Which translates to "no country was a greater victim than Austria". This caused outcry in liberal/left parties and media in Austria, and I would guess also international reactions (if anybody noticed).

In the conservative audience, many giggles followed on some parts of the speech - making me speech-less. Here an article with a picture of our smiling ex-chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and Otto Habsburg. You don't fucking smile when you hear this bullshit, you leave the room. To his remedy, the article says that Mr Schüssel intervened and corrected the sayings of Habsburg (so much for inviting the right keynote speaker to your anti-nazi commemoration).

From what I know, shortly after the war Austria positioned itself as "first victim of Hitler", to get rid of the scent of failure attached to losing the 2nd WW. Since then, this question is publicly discussed. The question is: did Hitler occupy Austria and the inhabitants were victims or was he warmly welcome and Austria was well-nazified already. Nobody can surely know, but some facts are historically known. Within a few weeks after the Anschluss, 70.000 people were imprisoned and a systematic, institutional, and coordinated suffering was imposed on Jews, Homosexuals, Left-Wing politicians, Communists, ... . This was well prepared before, you need to have collected these names beforehand, it needs organisation and preparation. Within hours after the Anschluss, vandalism on Jewish property happened. It is hard to believe that Germans did this vandalism nor collected the names of "enemies of the state", it can be assumed that Austrians did this, with the clear goal to steal some of this property their Jewish neighbours had worked hard for.

It marked the beginning of the holocaust and the role of the Austrian population was both victim, as the Jews and Left-Wings were Austrians, and agitators. Many had been forced to collaborate with the regime under the pressure of loss of life, property, and liberty, but surely not everyone had to be forced to collaborate. Austria was not "a little victim" or "the Jews were Austrian victims", many people were attracted by Hitler or did not circumvent what happened. Objectively, it can never be known, but surely calling "Austria" a victim is far than politically uncorrect.

Personally, I hate it because many creative people, inventors, scientists, artists, queers, and freaks, were either killed or driven out of the country in the following years. And I hate the small-mindedness of some people who defend their ancestor's sins as being right until today. (End of historical ramble, go on reading slashdot now folks)

Keine Ahnung von Web 2.0? Was bitte ist Xing und warum soll ich "dort drin" sein? Hier kommt die Antwort.

Meral Akin-Hecke organisiert regelmäßige Veranstaltungen zum Thema Web und Net, die digitalks.at. Der nächste ist folgend:

DIGITALKS 05 / SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS
Datum: 8. April 2008
Location:Museums Quartier Wien, quartier21, Raum D
Beginn:19 Uhr, Einlass ab 18:30

Anmeldung

Im O-Ton:
Beim nächsten Digitalks gehen wir auf online Technologien ein, die uns neue Alternativen bieten, miteinander in Verbindung zu treten und unsere privaten und beruflichen Beziehungen zu pflegen.

Nach einem Einführungsvortrag von Medienberater Ritchie Pettauer werden zwei erfahrene AnwenderInnen mit uns gemeinsam Profile erstellen und dabei ihre Tipps & Tricks für das online social networking verraten.
Ich freue mich auf ein Wiedersehen!

Meral Akin-Hecke
Digitalks Initiatorin

Ich füge hinzu: wer schon flickrt, delicioust und bloggt wird da wohl nichts neues hören, wer aber mehr über Kommunikation im Netz hören will, und vom freien Eintritt profitieren kann, der soll doch kommen.

The masses lost their instincts, and may have more fear from terrorists than cancer.

How much are we animals? Susanna Hertrich has a project on this topic:

This project picks on how much today's people have detached themselves from their original animal inheritance.
...
It is said that no other generation before has been as anxious and risk aware as ours. Other than animals, we aren't equipped for the challenges of contemporary living. We don't have the abilities to identify the real dangers in a surplus of potential threats and horror scenarios offered to us by mass media.

(photo shamelessly linked from Jonathan)

Jonathan Hartley (whom I met two weeks ago in Krakow) blogged about it from a different perspective:
Susanna Hertrich has an art / thesis project to artificially stimulate people’s threat perceptions (by giving them goosebumps, or making hairs stand on end) in response to actual threats, as opposed to perceived ones. It’s a topic that I’m unnaturally preoccupied with, since the most egregious examples of the disparity between the two seem to intrude on my life every day. My opinions about whether any given threat is real or illusiory seem to differ from almost everyone, but I’m going to stubbornly cling to the idea that everyone else is crazy. Take the entry on ‘terrorist attack’ as an example (see diagram.) Public reactions to the topic remind me of nothing so much as a stirred-up ants nest, a psychotic, ineffectual frenzy.

Hey, we were at the "Sportfreunde Stiller" concert on 28.2.2008 in Kaiserslautern, and their frontman dived from about 4-5meter height into the crowd.



What you see here is frontman/singer Peter from Sportfreunde Stiller doing a crazy stagedive from the first floor of the concert hall. Before, he surfed the crowd and climbed up there. ROCK! Sport!

The concert was in Kammgarn in Kaiserslautern, more information in Martin Memmel's blogpost.