As said on reddit, the other was coined "The Great Depression." We start referring to the coming one as "The Bush Depression." It'll be one for the history books.

Listening to the radio news this morning, I heard that the US gov did not find 700billion in their piggybank to give away to scrupulous banks who screwed up their economy. Uhoh. Well, we are all in one boat, and if the US goes down, it will affect global economy. In the radio they mentioned the national banks of Belgium and Germany having to react (something like "have to print more money" but I didn't get it...)

If the bank bubble affects the web2.0 bubble, I may lose my flickr pics and del.icio.us bookmarks, but Knallgrau, the european company hosting this blog is living on company contracts and will probably survice (I hope). Looking forward to the economy next year with mixed feelings - it will probably sort out itself.

If not, look for health packs and ammo on elevated places within the mayhem on the streets.

A quick and fun tool to make nice calligraphically-good-looking tag clouds out of your own tags (works with delicious)

see mine
http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/216762/leobards_delicious



via my pal Barbara Geyer-Hayden's howknow blog, I would guess also reviewed on infosthetics.com

I attended the ESTC2008 conference.



micro-summary:

• I met Ivan Herman and shook his hand (I think for the first time, after working together with him a year on cool uris for the semantic web)
• I met many old friends, made new aquaintances and got intesting chances to continue working on the Semantic Desktop. To point out two, it was again a good location to talk about aperture, smila, aduna, and empolis, who cooperate with DFKI here
• I made some pictures

Heise also reported about the conference.

I am still at KI2008 conference (which is located on the ground floor of the building where I work, so not attending the conference is hard :-) and will go to ESTC2008 tonight.

As blogged before, I will be speaking at ESTC2008, on 25th September 2008 around 16:45 in the Rittersaal room.

The topics of my talk will be circling around Semantic Desktop, personalized Semantic Web, and how this is used or can be used in company settings

• Why is Semantic Web needed on the desktop?
• How does data fusion work on the desktop?
• What is a personal information model?
• How do existing user interfaces and user experience change?
• Which projects are active and what are their results?

A nice interface I stumbled upon: the JabRef editor for smart groups:



an interface for a complex task. To explain the outcome, it generates a description of how the software now behaves. nice!

Wo finden sich Benutzer die mit viel Information zu tun haben, Kunden, Projekten, Themen? In den Printmedien.

In meiner Umgebung ist der Digitaldruck der Wahl bei www.direktprint.de. Die Frage ist, wie in so einem Unternehmen mit Information umgegangen wird. Nun, ich habe den Geschäftsführer kennen gelernt und kann mal in seine Prozesse gucken.

Der Prozess an sich ist faszinierend, Digitaldruck, Großformatdruck, Dissertationen (ah!), Masterarbeiten (oh, meine Studenten), und alles Online. Das interessante ist der sweet spot wo man ein Produkt anbieten kann, also von der Massenware abgehoben. Direktprint sieht zwar im Büro sehr "überlagert" aus (well, es geht um Papier und das stapelt sich hier meterhoch), die Qualität der Ergebnisse sieht aber nett aus.

Gut, nun will ich in den nächsten wochen mal rausfinden, wie hier so die emails und dateien durch die gegend fließen, und ob die Leute hier den Semantic Desktop brauchen.

A truly impressive and visionary speech, summing up why we do web 2.0. Must see Clay Shirky explaining what TV has grabbed for the last 50 years: our cognitive surplus. (of course, you all have already seen it, its from April 2008)

watch:
http://blip.tv/file/855937/

Excellent quotes (some literally, some only overlap in meaning, wasn't quick enough to type everything)
(telling a story he experienced)...
TV Reporter: Where do people find all the time to do wikipedia?
Clay Shirky: No one who works in TV gets to ask that question.
You know where the times comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you have been masking for the last 50 years.


Warcraft: grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.
At least they are doing something.

... the amount spent watching TV worldwide equals to creating 10.000 wikipedia projects each year...
a four year old daughter jumps up while watching a dvd.
She looks behind the TV fumbling through the cables, and we wondered... she said she is "looking for the mouse"
A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.

many thanks to Gunnar Grimnes for sharing