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In case you wonder about one of the trending topics on Twitter right now: Blumenkübel means flower bucket.

This german meme was created based on an article by a regional newspaper of Münster (Westphalia), reporting in a dramatic story that a flower bucket on the street in front of an old people’s home was destroyed during the night.

Now this very sad story of the very sad people in Neuenkirchen has become part of the German twittersphere, including a tweet by second national tv program that there might be good arguments for sending a special report on the flower bucket issue tonight right after the evening news. Scientists tweeted, they’d like to conduct surveys on Blumenkübel case related issues, the official account of the very popular savings banks announced that their household insurance would cover destroyed flower buckets and the distance selling giant Otto gave recommendation, that you could buy new flower buckets online there.

During summer holidays, newspapers and tv stations often face serious problems finding important news to report. We call it “Saure Gurken-Zeit” (translates as “sour gherkins term”) or “Sommerloch” (summer hole, both translates best as silly season). There’s a german saying “and in china, a sack of rice fell”, meaning could(n’t) care less. Or, as the original posting on twitter reads: “In Neuenkirchen, a flower bucket fell.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today, I attended the speech of Barack Obama at Street of the 17th of June/Siegessäule. As I did, another estimated 200.000 people came to hear Obama speak. On my way back, on an escalator at central station, I was asked by two nice elderly US citizens why I’ve been there since they could simply not understand what’s on a u.s. presidential candidate so interesting to so many people here.

My answer was just half of the truth, I have to admit. I said that I studied political science and one of my main subjects was political communication. I was interested in the setting, the scenery and the speech of a presidential candidate abroad. But thinking about it later, I have to add some more remarks (even though this post is going to have some lengths). Continue Reading »

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.

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.