I hadn’t been following the news recently, so I was genuinely surprised when I saw “Google Buzz” in my Gmail dashboard today. My first impression is: this could work for me. But not as a replacement of Twitter. I rather see it as something to replace FriendFeed.
I have to admit – I never really got the hang of FriendFeed. While I want a service or an application that helps me to aggregate different forms of information streams, I don’t want[...]
Archive for the ‘Off topic’ Category
I just finished reading Joel Hafvenstein’s “Opium Season“, a book that has absolutely nothing to do with social media but which I’d like to recommend to anyone working in the aid-business.
Opium Season is about Hafvenstein’s time in Afghanistan in 2005, when he was working for a USAID funded cash-for-work project that was supposed to supplement the income of people who were due to lose money because of a poppy-eradication campaign.
The problem with donor driven programmes
What makes this book such a good[...]
I’ve used the New Year’s break to do some minor housekeeping on the blog. Among other things, I updated to Wordpress 2.9 which has some really interesting new features. I also (finally) created a Facebook page for the blog so that you can see updates in your news feed – if that is something you want.
I had been hoping that “Networked Blogs” would help me to get the word out, but so far I’m a bit disappointed. While I get some traffic from[...]
I’ve recently started to “play” Foursquare – and I’m equally fascinated, amazed, confused and slightly worried by the paradox it presents to me.
For those who have never heard of it, Foursquare is a web service that asks you to broadcast where you currently are – via Twitter if you want to – and leave comments about the places you visit. You can also track your friends locations and comments. In addition, you can get badges for certain activities and if you[...]
Google Web History is a service that stores your Google searches and the results you clicked on. This can be helpful if you can’t find a site anymore which you found useful earlier.
What Google Web History is not supposed to do is to continue to log searches from a computer that you haven’t been using in months!
Spying with Google Web History
Here is what happened: About six weeks ago I logged into Web History when I noticed some strange entries. Apparently I[...]
Yesterday, around 3,000 people demonstrated against a WTO in Geneva. While coming back from the super market I saw a really bizarre scene in the middle of the riot police and dissipating clouds of tear gas: I was walking through my neighbourhood Paquis, a part of town where the streets are lined with middle-aged prostitutes and drug dealers.
At a street corner there was a big gaggle of riot police who had set up an improvised command post the and were processing a[...]
Update: Problem solved. See comments if you have similar issues and want to know how I fixed them.
If you are one of the 47 per cent of my visitors that use Firefox then you will see that the text runs over the “Facebook Share”-button on the right. I’m aware of this problem but don’t know how to solve it.
I want the Facebook button to appear underneath the Twittley button (or the other way round), but of course I want the[...]
October 15 is Blog Action Day – an annual event where a bunch of activists are trying to focus the attention of the entire world on one topic.
Their method: Get as many bloggers as possible to write about this topic. No matter what the normal topic of the blog is, no matter whether it is a long or a very short post. Basically they are trying to flood the web with their chosen issue for a day, which would then also[...]
