Tobias Escher at the OII

I just downloaded the album of Imogen Heap (which I hereby warmly recommend to you). I rather prefer real CDs and rip them on my computer but I chose the download because it was cheaper and this way I could listen to the music straight away. Or so I thought. The files come in Windows [...]

For the last months a heated debate has taken place in Germany about the right of security agencies to monitor and spy on computers of unsuspecting citizens. In a country that has one of the most restrictive data protection laws the recent proposal of Home Secretary Wolfgang Schäuble to allow agencies to install trojans or [...]

When I was looking at it first I had some trouble to understand what Robert Putnam actually understands by social capital. Sure, there is his much quoted definition: “…features of social life – networks, norms, and trust – that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives… Social capital, in short, refers [...]

Andreas Gehret of Xing (used to be OpenBC) was sharing some insight from the internal development at Xing of an API that would eventually enable other people to write software that interface with the data that Xing holds. Apart from requests from the community, reasons for this development include opportunity for firms to let others [...]

One of the last session the day before yesterday evolved around Mash-up. Panellists included Gregor Hochmuth (who uses APIs to create mash-ups), Bernhard Reiter (who works for the FSF Europe and does a lot about Free Software/Open Source and also geo data) as well as Joachim Glaubrecht from Google. Not too much news from this [...]

I am currently attending the re-publica conference on blogging and digital culture in Berlin (Wednesday till Friday). It brings together presentations, panels and workshops on issues surrounding blogging and the social web. Apart from the brilliant location and interesting programme it is a perfect opportunity to network with people that do research on the Internet [...]

Mainly unnoticed from the rest of the world, a German social networking site called StudiVZ (translates to something like student directory) is now the main pasttime for German University students. It is said to have more than 1 million registered users and judging by my observations of what German students use their computers for in [...]