As of yesterday, I’m the new (and first) web2.0 columnist for Austrian (German-speaking) online weekly CHiLLi.cc. I’ll do my best to bring all the greatness of webbased service glory to the masses. The column is named “Web und Wir”, meaning not much else than “web and us”, with a misspelling thrown in for good measure and individuality.
Check out my first, therefore only text to date, here.
And visit next Tuesday, when I’ll be telling all about the wonderful world of online bookmarking.
So yesterday was Barcamp.
I had to leave early, so no t-shirt for me this time, but that’s ok, I do have two already.
The sessions I saw were quite diverse, one of which was a lively discussion about the fate of people who keep broadcasting their lives onto the interwebs (like me, or everyone else who’s part of any online social network). I myself think that some people can and will be seriously fucked by the amount of personal information they put up, but I personally don’t have that much of a problem with people having a look at my aggregated content. I am, fortunately, past the age where people with cameras can witness me getting or being shitfaced, so it’s really quite unlikely anyone will ever see anything like that on facebook or anywhere else.
Another interesting session was on what the speakers called “social entrepreneurship”. They referred by that label to entrepreneurs who use their money and influence to do good (and talk about it too). Needless to say, there were a whole lot of critical voices during the ensuing discussion, one of which was that evergreen of arguments: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I too am rather skeptical when it comes to the involvement in humanitarian causes by people who have made fortunes, for I’m quite convinced that rarely a fortune is earned by being a saint.
Speaking of saints, during the session they defined a social entrepreneur as a combination of entrepreneur Richard Branson and modern-day saint Mother Teresa. Which reminded me of that book about Mother Teresa I read about in Dawkins’ “God Delusion“. Written by Christopher Hitchens, it supposedly tells a bit of another story about her than the usual hagiographies published after her death, including but not limited to donations by embezzlers and crooks. Sounds a bit like she was a social entrepreneur herself.
Finally, here are some pictures from the event. Well, pictures of the food, which as always was really delicious, especially that homemade olive bread (which is not in the pictures, in case you’re wondering).
And this was the venue WerkzeugH, which due to my not-posting-pictures-of-people policy, isn’t easily recognized as the cozy location it actually is. You’ll have to take my word for it:
Tomorrow at WerkzeugH, the first Barcamp of 2008 in Vienna. Come plenty.
Well, to hell with my separate tech-blog, I need to write about this here:
After releasing a tricked-out new version of GMail only a few weeks ago, the busy GMail team has now introduced a funky new feature called, tellingly, “colored labels”. And well, that’s what it is.
They don’t offer a stunning array of colours, but using just the few, your GMail inbox will never look the same! Well, mine certainly doesn’t. After having looked at it for a few minutes now, I actually think it looks just a tad too fancy. Gone are the days of GMail simplicity. Oh well, I’ll get used to it.
Check out this page to read more about it!
Oh why is it that I’m always afraid of upgrading my Wordpress version? Well, I’ll tell you.
It’s because it always ends in something that’ll take me about three hours to repair and clean up. Don’t ask me why, but it just does. Either because it turns out that the newest version isn’t compatible with the version of the theme I’m using, or vice versa. Which is actually the same, but oh well.
I tried upgrading to Wordpress 2.3 yesterday, but I did it to my other blog, you know, the one you barely read, which is about all that Web 2.0 stuff you really don’t care about. As a matter of fact, not a whole lot of people do, so I thought it to be a good test-bed. And sure as hell, I had to update my theme, and it turned out that there seems to be a CSS-files conflict between my old and the new CSS file now, so I’ve got a strange footer and my sidebar is once again somewhere it doesn’t belong.
I’d love to fix it, but that would mean comparing two CSS-files and checking everything that could be responsible, which, in my eyes, could really be just about everything.
So that’s why I won’t be updating this blog here, because, well, all that editing, uploading, installing, it just gets to me. Almost as much as my new favourite song Suburban Homeboy by the Sparks.
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