SemanticMetadata.net

NetBeans 6.1 Beta :: Blogging Contest

With the release of NetBeans 6.1 beta Sun started a blogging contest. Until April 18th, 2008 one can test NetBeans 6.1 beta and blog about it. After blogging you need to submit the URL to netbeans.org and your review will be judged. I’m looking forward to submitting as I definitely want to have a T-Shirt

Related Links:

• NetBeans 6.1 Beta Blogging Contest

My new EEE PC

With some luck I grabbed an Asus EEE PC – a white one, the last in stock – at the Saturn market on Wednesday. As I always wanted to own a subnotebook my expectations were quite high, but I have to say: I’m impressed! The EEE comes with a whole lot of software (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kontact, Konqueror, … even Java JRE 1.5) and can be customized without end. I installed several games, the VLC media player and the Opera browser, which works really fine with the page zoom feature.

On the photo you can see the EEE along with my PSP. This shows how small this thing is. Also the weight is impressive, but best of all: It can decode MPEG-2 (DVB transport streams) and H.264 without dropping a lot of frames. That’s really cool as the CPU runs only at ~ 600 MHz.

While my colleagues are already queuing to do some multimedia tests I’m looking forward to testing the Java capabilities of this device. Full 1.5 mobile java runtime … sounds great to me

Slogan Generator …

Sometimes we just need to be pushed into creativity for marketing. A nice tool is the slogan generator. For the semanticmetadata.net blog it generated

“If You Can’t Beat Semanticmetadata.net, Join Semanticmetadata.net.”

and

“You Too Can Have a Semanticmetadata.net Like Mine.”

However I think I won’t use those slogans

Report from Barcamp Senza Confini

I already blogged about my presentation at the barcamp, but here is a followup report on the first day: The first glance at the registration desk showed that this was organized perfectly. The welcome session started well scheduled and was moderated by Georg Holzer. Right after that Monika Meurer talked about running a blog for a living. She and Achim Meurer had a whole lot of knowledge to share on this topic (see for instance here and here). After Monika’s talk I did my own presentation and went to lunch.

The afternoon started for me with the WikiQuiz presentation of Andreas Augustin. This is a collaborative game supporting user generated as well as semi-automatically generated questions for a Trivial Pursuit style game. After that I talked to a whole lot of people while drinking coffee and missed some sessions. I got back onto track right time for seeing Zemanta, a machine learning based tool for blog post link, image and tag recommendations. The tool is impressive, but also the startup story was fascinating. The Zemanta guys talked about Seedcamps and venture capitalists, things & concepts far away from my current environment

After that some more discussion followed and the last two tracks were the Flex Intro from Trinitec and the Lightning Talk session, where each presenter only had 3 minutes to perform.

Related links:

• Zurück vom Barcamp Senza Confini
• BarCamp Senza Confini Day 1
• Lessons learned at Barcamp Klagenfurt
• BarCamp Senza Confini 2008: 2nd day
• Barcamp Senza Confini Rückblick
• 360° picture of the participants
• Flickr photos from the barcamp
• … and more

My Presentation @ Barcamp Senza Confini

Today the barcamp senza confini started. The organization was a charm, everything went perfect (kudos go to Georg Holzer and the whole team). The first day was great and I heard of a lot of interesting ideas and talked to a lot of interesting people. For myself I chose a short slot and I did the presentation on “Popularity, Power Laws and Interestingness” mentioned in the last post. Although a bit technical I hope I managed to describe some basic concepts as well as my idea. However for later review, here are my slides:

| View | Upload your own

Barcamp Feb. ‘08: Possible Topics

Barcamp in Klagenfurt takes place on Feb. 2nd-3rd 8th 2008. That means to me: Time to think about possible topics. As I had some lively discussions about Wikipedia lately and my last Barcamp talk was about wisdom of the crowds I’ve got several ideas in this direction:

• Who’s right? Case James Surowiecki vs. Scott Adams … While Surowiecki wrote a book about the “Wisdom of the Crowds” Scott Adams said: “You cannot underestimate general stupidity“.
• Wisdom of the Krauts: Is the German Wikipedia better? Some always say the Germans are better at generating truthful content. This would be a shoot-out
• My Internet is always right or “The Citing of the Herds” … Why you should should not rely on the internet as single information source. Unlike the intuitive bet this is not (only) aimed at Wikipedia, but includes also Google Scholar, Springerlink, ACM and Computer.org.

Simpsons Avatars: That’s new!

While many people have already posted their simpsons avatars, Ralf Klamma has blogged a mashup of avatars showing the Community Information Systems Group in at RWTH Aachen.

Ralf: We are waiting for the movie!

Featured Blog: Jliegl.com

Another friend of mine pointed me to his blog: Jliegl.com features posts on music, books and general (un-)culture. Why I’m reading his blog? J. gave me the hint to read Guy Kawasaki!

Featured Blog: Research on Business & Web 2.0

A Friend of mine – Alex Stocker – has asked me to promote his weblog focusing on Web 2.0 in business context. He talks about topics he’s coming across in his ongoing work on his PhD and publishing slides, results, ideas and thoughts. He’d be happy to get some contacs and directions, so give it a try

However note that his blog is german only ;(