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In Europe, the presidential campaign is widely noticed. Since most of the population shook it’s head over the Bush ./. Gore fiasco in 2000, was pretty upset and astonished by the re-election of “Cowboy George” (god damn, he lied on iraq, promotes only the interest of the wealthy oil and ammo companies - that’s the way he’s seen in Europe), it became expecting very much from Barack Obama.

He’s smart, he’s black, he’s the most left candidate in the american political spectrum. Europeans were amazed, even though the emptiness of the “Change” rhetorics was critisized as some kind of wildcard-politics.

Now Obama filled some of the empty spaces in his political program. And Europeans are irritated and disgusted by it. There’s no country in Europe having gun laws like the US and there’s no country in Europe having violent crime rates as the US has (within the EU at least). Obama aims at the White House, seems to flip flop towards the so-called election deciding center, the volatile voters. It’s a clear political chess move: John McCain is not able to counter it by aiming at those who favor stricter gun control laws. But it seems to be strange to all those who expected Obama to be a liberal in the european meaning.

Politics all over the world will be widely affected by the outcome of the presidential election. But just a very small group of estimated 50% of the americans have a vote on this issue. The President of the United States of America is the leader of the worlds largest, structural and cultural well-established democracy. But due to that, he’s ruling not only between Hawaii and New Haven.

It’s time to have a direct vote on the general secretary of the UN. Then, the US citizens would be able to have their president again without so much interest from all over the world. And the europeans would not be surprised anymore by finding out that US politicians turn out to be US politicians.

The microblogging service Twitter is felt to be 2/3 of the day “over capacity”, means: not working. Some of it’s features have fully or partly been disabled due to it’s server overload. But: that’s no surprise at all.

Don’t mind about Twitter. It is a perfect proof of concept whether microblogging works or not. Mind about something else: Twitter is a centralized platform. This is cruel in times of decentralization.

Twitter does not have to be fixed. Twitter has to be replaced. Microblogging needs it’s natural implementation as a decentralized communication network.

What does Twitter in fact do? It takes your posting, delivers it to your friends and your public timeline. It offers you direct messaging and RSS. And it also offers you friend networking functions.

A good open source networking-twitter clone would be very helpful these days. Think of it as a web of trust. All it needs is some protocol, maybe based on XMLRPC-Ping and/or XMPP-techniques. I’m not a serious program designer. You are going to add your friends by pinging em (something like XMPP publishing), inform them with a pingback that you reacted to their postings/talk to them.

Sounds like a good project for a plugin for Wordpress, Textpattern, Drupal and all the others. Or am I mistaken? I think it would be a very good point to start from, promoting several nice techniques such as OpenID by making use of it.

Everything seems to be social. We have OpenSocial, CorporateSocialResponsibility, SocialNetworks, Social Democrats (diminishing) and Social Welfare (diminishing, too).

I’ve been to SocialCamp in Berlin this weekend (my now main employer newthinking communications was one of the co-hosts). Two days with the aim to find out which web 2.0 techniques may work for the purposes of nonprofits and non-governmental organisations. And two days full of talks, discussions and politics.

Some people from NGOs turned out to be great and very interested in using the web as their platform, from call-to-action to (in Germany still tough) web based fundraising solutions. Some so called social entrepreneurs were on stage and some of them were more or less deterrently in their concepts, behaviours and interests.

It’s always a bit tricky when it comes to politics. I’m convinced that you got to deal with reality when trying to change the world in the direction you’d like to see it more than with utopian visions. So I was a little bit undiplomatic sometimes, I guess, demanding people first to inform themselves and judging later. I’m sorry if I was rude.

All in all, it was a good weekend with a lot of nice people from different corners of the field of the more or less social anything. Hope to meet some of you guys again, soon. Thanks!

It’s football season in Europe again. Not american football, it’s the real football (some people call it “soccer” and think it’s a sport only played by women such as Mia Hamm). Two days ago the European Championship Euro 2008 in Switzerland and Austria began.

Football is the most political game in Europe. If you think of matches like Netherlands - Germany with the dutch player (and now famous coach) Frank Rijkaard spitting on Rudi Völler, matches between Ireland, Scotland or Wales and England, Italy and France or Croatia and it’s neighbours. And of course there is Germany - Poland. Yesterday, in the evening, Germany shot two goals against a not bad but very defensive playing polish squad. It’s hard to imagine what this match means to germans and polish people, since the polish are the underdogs (in the long history of results, there is no win for the polish team against germany yet) but always capable to beat the germans.

There are many ties between both countries. One of the strongest is the german team: 3 out of 23 german players have polish roots (and I guess it’s about half of the team with some kind of ‘international background’). And it was one of them, Lukas Podolski, netting twice against the neighbours squad last evening.

Before the match some yellow press papers on both sides of the river Oder/Odra were trying to fuel the flames a little bit. But in fact, the stereotypes begin to disappear. Poland and Germany are neither rivals (even though some in Poland would like to see it that way) nor is Poland just a minor partner of the economic strong central european hegemon. Even though there are many cultural differences besides language, i. e. the german way of being liberal-antinationalists without caring much about sovereignity on the surface, which differs a lot to the polish proudness of being a real sovereign state for the first time in many years, it’s interesting to see what happens.

Poland is still transforming quite fast. After decades of being deterred behind the iron curtain, of anti-soviet-communism mainly organised in, by or around the influential catholic church, polish youth is leaving it’s country in masses. Personally, I don’t know any other countries young population to travel around that much, to learn so many languages, to be so straight forward looking to job and business opportunities. Unlinke the saturated german young population, many polish are studying or working abroad, and when/if they return some day, it’s effects on polish society will be much larger than having once again lost against Germany in a football match.

I’m one of those who usually run several chat clients at the same time. Jabber, Skype, IRC are the main protocols I’m using. Now that Facebook added a chat application, I tried to find out how it works for my purposes.

Not to make this entry much longer than needed: It does not. Facebooks chat application does not work for me. Browser based communication doesn’t force me to participate, it’s the same effect with Twitter as soon as the API is on strike again. Facebook could become the ICQ of 1999, when adding a XMPP-API to it’s chat. Right now it’s perfect for asynchronously missing the others messages and just a waste.