falklueke.com

About one year ago I sat in my kitchen, sketching a platform for a convertible attention currency. I had just stopped working on the idea of a Berlin web magazine, because I found that the economic situation is lacking the infrastructure to run something like that in a way I’d like to use it myself. I didn’t want to have subscriptions, paywalls, I didn’t want to have to sell advertisements as content or any other things like that. Therefore I thought about enhancing the infrastructure a little.

The first thoughts were something like this: usually we are paying with our attention on the web. But attention doesn’t make you pay your rent, it doesn’t even make you pay your meals. Even in heavily link recommendation based online environments such as Twitter or Facebook, people are comfortable with getting something ‘for free’ and at the same time, to say they’d pay for some services if there was some kind of easy way to do so.

I worked as a journalist for years. My most difficult story ever had to be published on a blog and I didn’t make a single dime out of it, since the publishers I usually worked for had gotten ‘cold feet’. It was read by 30.000 unique visitors within one week in 2006, just by mouth-to-mouth hints. So there had to be a way to give all those who really do something for their users, their readers, their listeners an easy option to earn some money. And at the same time, to give a little kick to those who still don’t get the net.

To make this already too long story short: I thought of a platform where:
1. you as a user might register with your email address and either your credit card data or a bank account for direct debit (which is very popular, with consumer friendly laws for it in Germany).
2. you as a content producer might register to get your share of the cake.
3. you as a content producer might register to pitch for unclaimed money (explanation follows below).

For the user, the system would be very easy: you see something you like on the web. You decide: this is something I’d like to pay a decent amount for. Maybe 5 cents, maybe a Euro, maybe 10. To prevent fraud there should be no more than 20 Euros per item allowed. In fact this works just like bookmarking with an amount for you.
At the end of the month you receive an email including details on your proposed payments and the possibility to change amounts or to drop your spendings (maybe the blogger you chose turned out to be a millionaire and you might want to spend it in a different way).
So you decide how much you pay, who do you think should get that money and have provided a decent web address for the database.

For the content producer the system has to be much more complex: you are claiming that you own a content by a mechanism similar to the Technorati blog claim mechanism - you register, you get an instant personalized picture and install it at your server in the root directory you are responsible for. Then you click: claim. After that, all content below this directory will be counted as yours and any money which users want to give you will reach you (except someone else claims a subdirectory of it as an ‘owner’).

All money from the users is collected by a foundation. It only has one goal: to get rid of the money again, either by transferring it to the owners of the content which users wanted to pay for or by doing something different with it - a board of trusted people should decide on how to spend the money, maybe by granting fellowships for journalism, for arts or other ways of helping those who want to produce for the nets public. Only the foundations own expenses for administration should be covered by some of the unclaimed money.

Now Flattr is out there and Kachingle, too. I tried to get in touch with Peter Sunde earlier this year, he didn’t reply. Since I think there’s not space for another competitor and I really didn’t have time to get this run, I now decided to abandon it and just publish my thoughts. If you like it, tell others and get them towards the direction I thought it should be done.

Is the internet really a tool for promoting democracy in authoritarian states? Is it just a relay of the existing societies mechanisms? Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org asked me whether I’d like to participate in an interview with Evgeny Morozov for his podcast series. Evgeny, a Belarus born researcher at Georgetown University and contributing editor at Foreign Policy gave us a lot of insights in his very interesting research. Thanks a lot for both, the interview and the opportunity to do it.

The interview is available as MP3 (62 MB) and OGG Vorbis (46 MB).

I’m so sorry. I didn’t keep you up to date. Didn’t post about what I’m doing at work, what I’m feeling, what’s going on in my life.

Oh, well. I never did. But since you didn’t complain, you didn’t miss me. Right? Doesn’t matter. Now this blog is going to come back. Maybe just for a moment, maybe for a longer time. Starting with a question to the few english language readers of my twitter account: do you think I should set up a second, english language account? I guess it would be more serious than my sometimes mixed but mainly german one. I guess it would be the more professional one. But: do you feel uncomfortable with reading messages in a language you hardly understand, talking about topics you luckily don’t have to deal with? As a first step, I promise to write this blog a little more frequent. Which is easy to do.

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.

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.

No real. Just Social Web vacation. See you (your favorite rss reader will notify you, when I’m back).

For the young department of ZEIT online ZEIT Zuender, I took a look on which european nations are using which Social Networks (The text behind the link is German only, but I think you will understand it anyway). While researching, I stumbled across some sites new to me. The result might be read within minutes - but working on it was quite some work (especially, since you won’t believe that some nations seem not to use any social networks).

Not mentioned in the article, since not in the EU: Одноклассники (to be read: Odnoklassniki, in english “classmate”) from Russia, saying it would have 15 Mio registered users. Russian, too: В Контакте (”in contact”), the first Facebook clone looking even more like the original than 2006 started German StudiVZ.

Not available since a few days is Ekipa.hr (in english something like “Team”), which even though I don’t know croatian seemed to be quite interesting, regarding technical issues.

My virtual desk is aching and so do I. It turns out to be a little bit problematic that days are limited to 24 hours. I don’t feel that well, since I feel that some of the things I do are not of the quality I’d like to see them.

In fact, I’m working on 7 different projects at the same time right now, just one of them to be ending during the next week. I think that’s nothing you should try out yourself, it makes your head burst, sleep less than what’s acceptable.

On the other hand, a lot of what I’m doing right now makes me happy. Things are going in a good direction, some projects I had in mind for a while are most probably going to be realized. Need some vacation soon, anyway. Between articles, concepts, ideas and long lists of lovely stuff, my head gets heavier every day.

Facing a very stressful week, I decided not to use Twitter beginning with monday morning.

I integrated Twitter in my daily life during the last months. It became a powerful and easy-to-use-wherever-you-are communication interface to me, i. e. when using pub trans I usually read and wrote tweets on my mobile phone. So I stopped abruptly with this  behaviour on monday having two major goals: saving some time that I need other non-communicative tasks and the other one was of course to find out, how much influence on my life Twitter already gained.

The first thing worked quite well. Twitter is still a dispensable communication tool. It’s easy to use other devices / interfaces to talk to the people you need to talk to.

The second goal I already miserably failed. Twitter is an attention drawing service. First, I switched off the IM functions. Since then, my Jabber client seems to be dead - compared to the weeks before. Then, I tried not to go on m.twitter.com when waiting for a bus or the subway. In lieu thereof, I read newspapers online sites. And I was pretty bored, since not much happened there when I pressed »reload«.

On tuesday, I saw a scene at the tram I thought to be very funny. I could have told the other passengers of the tram that I think it’s funny. I could have screamed it out. I could have made some real noise. I did not do it.

But I would have done on twitter. I would have told people about it. But this time, I didn’t. Sometimes, I miss Twitter. But not twittering seems to save a lot of time.

I did not switch off email notifications. And during this week, some real new followers appeared. In a short period of mental derangement, I once even clicked on “follow this user”. I was so used to this procedure..

I think I will return to Twitter on Monday. Even though it’s a mess and waste of time. And I will write a follow-up, too.

Yep. You can buy me. Well, my content. A new (german language) blog will be starting in may.