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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 »

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!

The green is coming to Berlin again: spring is returning, slowly, steadily. Just like many people from all over europe do: if you walk on the streets now, hang around in cafes or bars, you’ll hear a mixture of spanish, italian, french, czech, polish, american and british english as well as “euro english”, swedish, danish, dutch and sometimes you’ll even hear some german.

And in fact, I really like that. Will be a nice spring and summer. I think I need a camera.

Yesterday I attended the web monday in Berlin. For more than two years now, it’s a place where new startups, ideas and projects can be presented to a web crowd, from programmers to journalists to users to investors to…. Well, everyone.

Yesterday, two new software projects and a short introduction to an upcoming conference, the Re:Publica’08 were shown.

The first of the two projects was keiala. It’s a twitter-interacting social calendar tool, making you tell people what your are going to do next based on your entries at you keaiala-calendar. Smart stuff, the presenting guy Alex Lang did a good job. He even provided some “user” interaction: the audience should vote on a new designs main color. Of course there was no way of finding an absolute majority for one out of seven choices given, but pink seems to be out of the race at least.

The second project was vizeo.net. Company representative Jascha Vogel faced some tough questions on a Revver.com based platform which aims to provide new and more functions and especially a focus on the german market. It turned out to be a little bit unfair when the speaker does not have real time access to Twitter while the audience is live deconstructing his business approach.

Well, 40-something people attended and I had a nice evening there. Web monday Berlin obviously is alive.