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With Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org, one of Germanys leading bloggers, I published a short study on Politics and the Web 2.0 in Germany (PDF, german) today.

Our key findings were: German politicians and parties are yet unable to adapt online campaigning techniques such as established in the US or France for example. Some hope seems to lie in YouTube activities, but neither none of the parties nor the leading politicians has a MySpace profile. Some party groups do exist on StudiVZ, the leading german facebook copycat, and on Facebook itself.

If you are interested, I could translate some more of the findings. Leave a comment and I will try.

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!

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.

The german Chaos Computer Club got some very benevolent media coverage during the last days. The Hackers club with more than quarter of a century of history is going popular while topics like data retention, fingerprints, cctv and other surveillance technics as well as voting computers are earning increasing attentiveness. It’s been a long debate among german hackers whether they should do public lobbying for or against anything.

During the past two years the CCC was appearing in the media, in the constitutional court, in the parliaments committees. The hackers have, while a lot of them still prefers to stay in the dark nevertheless, made a decision to use the system which is using the technology hackers strongly believe to be the better experts in. Well, expertise is nothing bad. But it will be very interesting for how long their public engagement will last.

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.

You can’t imagine how a paragraph like this feels in Germany:

We recently got an alert from the Frank Lautenberg Senate campaign announcing the creation of an “Action Center” on their website, but were disappointed to see that it’s the same web 1.0 approach: tell-a-friend, sign-a-petition, make-a-donation (while we collect your email addresses). (Techpresident.com)

I do not know any german politicians web site having those three elements implemented in a way it works. Even though you won’t believe it. Feeling least developed.

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.

It turned out to be easier than I expected: I did not twitter for one week.

Here’s my protocol of not twittering in max 140chars per day.

Monday: Switched off IM notifications. 2 new followers. Not removing the mail notification.
Tuesday: Missing twitter when using public transport. Passive consumption, 2x.
Wednesday: Following a scene I would have twittered. But I did not do it.
Thursday: Taking a look at other ppl tweets due to may 1st clashes in Hamburg.
Friday: Being contacted by new people on skype. Didn’t happen for weeks.
Saturday: Switching off the laptop. Switched off my mobile, too.
Sunday: Switched on my mobile, again. Returning to twitter in the evening.

Twitter is a nice-to-have and very addictive platform. Since it’s available wherever you are (except some places without mobile connection), you are automatically trying to migrate as much of your communication as possible to this platform. Twitter is some relaxed chatterbox-tool, it’s something inbetween TV (you still remember? yer not young anymore…) with all it’s real life soap operas, and corridor talks with colleagues. Nice to have, but nonethelesse, it’s still dispensable.

Imagine you are a real conservative. You believe in principles such as law and order, you think everyone breaking laws should be arrested and some at least receive death penalty. And you think you found someone who shares the same ideas and values you do. He’s a politician at the GOP, a tough guy known for being a real conservative.

And then he turns out to be one of the founders of one of the most famous cracking group with more than 20 years history. This is the story of Tony Krvaric, as Rawstory reports. Swedish born Krvaric is said to be Strider, one of the founders of the Fairlight software cracking group. For some time, their slogan was: when dreams come true.

Some worlds have collapsed, I’m quite sure.

[via Torsten]