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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.

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.

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.