falklueke.com

A song makes it way around the globe. Ooops! It wasn’t meant to do that?!

Once something is published on the internet, you won’t get it back anymore. That’s the lesson the management of the german belch rock band Rammstein has to learn, which is better known for being a chanty choir for the germanic savage style loving non native german speakers, bawling texts on a level such as Hate is my mate, love is a dove, breath and death, bread and dead. (fake lyrics) but will be understood in parts only by their audience.

Now these bards of banality and their wonderful management are on the way to become the new Metallica: everybody who writes too much about the song, the leaking and so on is facing legal action, according to reports. Lars Ulrich is proud of them, for sure.

Tags: lars ulrich, metallica, rammstein

I don’t have to complain to Chris Anderson. I heard his book ‘free’ mostly on the subway. The audio book was free in it’s german double meaning of ‘umsonst’ (free of charge/without any effects) in any meaning. The time I spent was ‘too small to meter’, just to quote Andersons main thesis.

Tags: chris anderson, for free, free, free of charge

When I entered Facebook, some friends were quickly available. Ok, most of them did not apply to the same friendship scheme as my ‘real life friends‘ — the main qualification was: we both used facebook and met before. Those were the days of early adopters.

Now these days are gone. And in my facebook friends list there is a wild mixture of friends, friends and friends.

Some of the early facebook friends have become real ones, too. And some did not. But I did remove only a few. Long time real friends joined facebook later. Some were astonished about my friends there. They had never met them at my birthday parties (I don’t publish my date of birth on social networks, but that’s a totally different story).

Some of my ‘real’ friends feel a little confused or even distorted by my communication with early facebook friends. Sometimes we sound a little too much techie, I was told. And the early facebook friends are laughing about people who obviously don’t see the difference between the inbox/outgoing and the commentary function on status updates or wall posts.

Don’t know yet what a facebook friend is and how to deal with that. Any ideas? I already do have several lists in which I sorted my friends.

Tags: facebook, friends, friendship

While, and maybe caused by that, the world is troubled by a financial and economical crisis, people start thinking about questions of payment, of money transfer, of currencies on the net/the web.

One of the driving forces is the expected start of Facebooks digital credit system. It seems to become a part of the attention economy based idea of rewarding for action, giving a trading unit for all kinds of interaction. It’s an attempt to make attention pseudo convertible: you are paid for attention and are allowed to try to buy new attention by reinvesting. And if you need even more attention, than you are allowed to buy.

Still missing is a both way convertible currency approach (LindenLabs Second Life currency Linden Dollar was more or less the first attempt used by a larger audience). Many of us do own Credit Cards. Many of us do have a PayPal account. But there is still no way to easily do 1st micropayment 2nd moneytransfer and 3rd receivement of money. All of this is kind of overregulated in my opinion. We do not talk about real money, we talk about some cents or maybe some dollars/euros. Of course, small amounts make a large number. But still, we are lacking a real online micro credit system.

I’m still pretty impressed by the Hawala system and it’s relatives, which are merely based on belief and/or trust. I think something similar could and should be established as a way of bypassing all the problems we do have on the micro level, where technical security might be replaced by trust.

If we are able to share our private life on platforms such as facebook with our friends and the friends of our friend and their friends, we should also be able to establish a mechanism of trustee payments. If I say, I want to give 2 [currency unit] to a guy, who wrote a great blog article and is from Los Angeles. How could we do that? For example, I could ask Janko in Los Angeles to pay it to him, since he’s located within the local system.  Now I owe Janko money - but maybe he also wants to transfer an amount to someone else.

This is still a not very in-depth analysis on what the future might bring. But I think the trust component should be thought carefully. Even though realism says, that a peer-to-peer currency is going to be a little harder to establish than p2p file sharing.

Dear readers/subscribers. Some of you might miss updates, most of you won’t even have noticed yet. I never ran this blog on a regular basis, my time schedule never allowed me to do.

With the beginning of february, I joined the german consumer protection federal organisation (verbraucherzentrale bundesverband), where I work as a policy officer on consumer rights in the digital world. A nice project with very nice people and, what I like the most, a still fast developing environment. I joined due to my very personal wish of working more in-depth on several topics I dealt with over the past years (I don’t have to be that angry about print media management not understanding even the basics of the net after 10 yrs anymore).

Thanks for your patience and your appreciation. A new and just started project sometimes needs more hands-on hours than you might expect before. In the end it hopefully will be successful and bring the best for all of you.

Some weeks ago there was a lively discussion on the reporting and / or journalism quality Twitter allows, influences or stands for. My position was: without referencing, twitter is nothing. Today, a plane went down at the Hudson River in NYC.

Within seconds it was reported by several Twitter users, for example @manolantern, by @trappedinabay, by @jdackerman and by @jkrums.

Janis Krums said to be on a ferry which was getting as close as possible to the watered plane and trying to rescue it’s passengers. He took a picture which will make it around the world during the next hours, sent it via TwitPic into the world. Even though TwitPics servers did not survive the massive amount of requests, the picture was republished by several others [I include it here, too, will change that to a reference link later on when TwitPic is back].

Some of the most interesting pictures I saw yet are to be found at the Flickr stream of user GregoryLam, who started taking pictures obviously within seconds after the plane watered (notice the wave trails behind the plane). They are also interesting to all kind of media, since they are published under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY license, which means: you just have to name the photographer and might use the pictures for whatever purpose you like to.

But what happened on Twitter after the crash? Loads of people reported that others reported that a plane fell into Hudson River. Most of them did not even reference sources or started chatting about it, so their content was mainly meaning- and worthless - twitter search was flooded with plane/hudson posts within 30 minutes, it was hard to find the original posting. There was no journalism on twitter, after the reporting had ended/was replaced by those who do traditional media.

CNN just called me!?!? How did they get my number

To me, this was the most interesting tweet of the day. Oh, and by the way, it’s good to have a good positioning system.

The New York Times sent a News Alert about an hour after the plane went down. It’s content: flight route, no. of passengers and cabin crew, expected reason for the watering. Twitter was not mentioned.

Tags: journalism, news, online journalism, reporting, twitter, user generated media

Over there at my german language blog, I write some more or less lengthy and more or less fictionary stories during christmas time. This is one of them, though I think it loses a lot of it’s very own character due to the translation.

It was a nice winter day in Berlins central district. The birds that did not leave for the winter twittered. Spanish tourists,  mass goods that arrived with the same planes that export the sun hungry germans to their home country, were looking for cafes somewhere between all the American Apparel and three stripes retro shops. It seemed to be a little cold for them.

I was sitting at a café, as I do so many times. I thought about the world, the internet, the media and the people. I was in sorrow, feared the best and expected the worst. The coffee was okay, despite of being too expensive. The service worked, sometimes the internet connection had some hickups, from time to time a window popped up, a text message arrived, someone called, an e-mail stressed, but: nothing happened.

Thats how I lived the day, I missed an appointment, someone missed an appointment with me. And once in a while someone showed up who knew me. We talked, laughed, thought and occasionally checked the stock markets, just to amuse ourselves that we did not lose any money, since we didn’t have so before and our lifestyle was the one of a “tactical consumer elite”. Otherwise, we would have showed everybody how to do good things on the internet.

Then we sat down again and thought for a minute, whether it would be nice or not to change jobs with the man outside sweeping the cigarette stubs of past nights from the sidewalk.  Sometimes we experienced sudden inspirations, one of them or two, three. Some awful play of words fell, stumbled, tumbled out of our party distressed brains. Being a brain worker means to work on your brain with coffee drinks.

So it was a nice december, with the little flaw of being somewhat nicer, if it would have been nice. At the table next to me, a spanish tourist set up her notebook and headset. She said something that sounded like she would enjoy Berlin very much.

Over there at TechCrunch, people discuss whether Twitter is a news source. I think it’s easier than you might think it is.

1. Twitter is a close-to-real time reporting medium.
2. You usually do not follow the guy at the place where “it” happens.
3. You probably do follow a guy that follows a guy that follows a guy… at the place “it” happens.
4. The last guy in the chain will cover “it”. Others will read and spread the word.
5. When Twitterers are not referring to the original source, Twitter is not a news source. It’s just a news channel.
6. If you are interested in making Twitter a crowd source medium, refer to your sources by linking the exact status or at least the original users.

It won’t hurt. I’m sure.

Tags: crowd source journalism, journalism, online journalism, twitter

Joe Trippi, one of the most highly reputated online campaigners on earth, asks whether it’s time to establish an equivalent of my.barackobama.com after he succeeded in the US presidential election: a platform my.whitehouse.gov to get people involved into the needs and deeds of the next president of the United States.

I think this is a very nice idea, but I’d recommend to go one step further: my.whitehouse.gov for US citizens, and your.whitehouse.gov for all those who are affected or interested in the US presidents policy making but not being citizens of the United States of America. Never forget: the president of the USA is not only important to US citizens. He also plays a political role on world level.

Tags: Barack Obama, eParticipation, Joe Trippi

The world is looking on the United States today: the results of todays US presidential election will surely lead to one thing - a new president of one of the most important, maybe politically still the most important country on earth.

So it’s time to think about the man who’s going to leave the White House now. What do the eight years of George Walker Bush being in charge leave behind for the rest of the world?

First of all, the end of the Bush administration with all it’s failed foreign policies is a broadly welcomed day. Being the winning loser of the first election in 2000 against Al Gore, Bush with his legendary hands-on-anti-intellectualism showed the world what happens, if you give someone a knife without telling him that it’s a dual use good. You can slice bread with it or you can slice people. Regarding the use of knives, there was not much bread in Bushs two terms. Instead of making the world a more safe, more human rights respecting, less problematic and a more free place, he managed to weaken security, causing and awaking strong anti-americanism not only in the countries he attacked. Bush did more for dictatorships around the globe than most dictators do. Maybe he did even have the right opinion (democracy is good, dictatorship is bad, the poor and starving deserve a better life and so on), but his deeds are what he has to be measured on.

Second, no one will miss Bush. The firebrand rhetorics of non-intellectual missionary quality, combined with the inability to interact seriously on international level - which would have meant i. e. to accept negotiations on eye level even though the partners might appear weaker in some way.

Third but nonetheless important, Bush failed on one of the most crucial (no, not crusadial)  issues: finding new approaches to promote democracy and equality in the critical regions of Africa and Asia. Bushs doctrine based on the main power the US without doubts can rely on: geostrategic military power. There’s no place on earth a US president could not reach with military power.  But there is more in the toolbox of politics than just brute force. We got to hope his successor will try out some more and maybe even international instruments. Even though it’s clear that the more the US play on international levels the involvement of countries will be enforced which sat in their couches until now. But in fact, it would have been stupid to accompany the misleading adventures of Bush.

Expectations are high - on both, the electorate and the upcoming president - and low, compared to Bushs political performance. Bushs burdens are heavy weighted, but it’s not impossible to smooth his failures out. You just gotta belive. And by the way: thank you for nothing, Mr. Bush.

Tags: Foreign Policy, George W. Bush, US Presidential Election 2008