In early 2008, I shifted my blogging activity to my German blog : digiom.wordpress.com. But for a while now, I have been writing occasional English language posts on that blog. And from now on, I am going to post teasers of those blog posts on this blog here.

Sigrid Jones, who has invited me to join their internet research group which I am VERY much looking forward to, just wrote a very nice article about Lolcats and their misconception as illiterate creatures: lolcat literacy. ‘nough said: Read for yourself

Lallopallo has tagged me – to maintain our blog friendship, I’ll have to answer his 28 questions (btw, I know that this type of pass-on questions is also referred to as a meme, but is it a meme really? dunno, don’t think so – doesn’t matter).

Here we go (I might choose not to answer if I consider a question to personal):

1. Last movie you saw in a theater?

Gerbert Rappaport’s Čeremuški or Черемушки (a Russian operetta from 1962)

2. What book are you reading?

A reader ‘Old media, new media’ and Weinberger’s Everything is miscellaneous (sporadically)

3. Favorite board game?

Scrabble

4. Favorite magazine?

They all suck.

5. Favorite smells?

The smell of whitewashed walls.

6. Favorite sounds?

Changes. Cute sounds, such as a new message coming in via twhirl

7. Worst feeling in the world?

That people who one loves will be gone forever when they die

8. What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?

I’m not able to think when I wake up

9. Favorite fast food place?

Any good kebab shop

10. Future child’s name?

well, it’s definitely not going to be something like Nova Fee Belle, or what people come up with these days

11. Finish this statement. “If I had lot of money I’d….?

only write

12. Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?

no, but I’d like to blow my nose with stuffed animals

13. Storms – cool or scary?

scary cool, if one is in a safe place

14. Favorite drink?

depends!

15. Finish this statement, “If I had the time I would….”?

write more

16. Do you eat the stems on broccoli?

yes, before it’s cooked

17. If you could dye your hair any color, what would be your choice?

orangey red

18. Name all the different cities/towns you’ve lived in?

Chapeau to lallopallo for being to brave to write them all down – I’m not. It’s likely around 20.

19. Favorite sports to watch?

Football, but only when the European or World Championships are on.

20. One nice thing about the person who sent this to you?

he must be a smart person, because he changed to wordpress eventually (and then his blog kicked off!)

21. What’s under your bed?

don’t dare to have a look

22. Would you like to be born as yourself again?

sure, if I can keep the wisdom I’ve acquired in this life

23. Morning person, or night owl?

night… owl

24. Over easy, or sunny side up?

scrambled!

25. Favorite place to relax?

nothing specific

26. Favorite pie?

anything from a good Viennese coffee house

27. Favorite ice cream flavor?

yogurt

28. Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?

I’ll decline – I kind of have the feeling that all the people I know who haven’t been tagged yet are too busy to respond

It’s in German and set up in support of my PhD thesis. It’s called: digiom (as in Digitale Online Medien). Read it here.

It’s been in the air for a while, but now I confess: This blog has now become a tumblelog - I just don’t have the time to write anything substantial anymore. But I don’t want to let it die either, so I’ll just keep posting bits and pieces of what caught my attention on the web. A place for commented bookmarks really.

Source: Wikipedia

This is great news! In February, I wrote for the first time about the Zemanta browser plug-in which was supposed to allow you to enhance your blog’s content by automatically suggesting links (e.g. to Wikipedia or news pages) and pictures (e.g. on Flickr), based on a semantic analysis of your text. Today Andraz from Zemanta notified me that they went live – and the working version is even cooler than the demo they had on their website in February: In February, you had to enter text and hit a button to ‘zemify’ the text – but the current Zemanta comes as a WordPress plug-in. Every 300 characters as you type the plug-in is going to suggest further links and tags which you can apply all at once or by clicking on them – and that is of course MUCH MUCH more convenient than going to a website, copying the URL, highlighting the word and hitting the link button in WP.

The next cool feature is that a side bar shows related content (articles and pictures) on the web – which you can simply add to your blog post by, again, simply clicking on them. Extremely cool!

But of course there are a number of glitches in this early version (and how wouldn’t there be any, as they need feedback to improve):

• The amount of code that is added to your blog entry is a bit intimidating. Adding links runs smoothly, as those links are added to text you’ve already written – but it would be cool to be given the opportunity to decide whether one wants their ‘rich’ links (with title, relation and class attributes) or just plain ones.
• A little footer, explaining that the text was enhanced with Zemanta, is automatically added. Might sound fair enough – but it would be nicer if that were a voluntary option and didn’t happen automatically. Of course you can still remove that footer – but having to opt out is not the same as voluntarily opting in.
• Adding a picture also automatically adds more code (span tags with e.g. margin attributes) than seems necessary – I’d rather have a plain image link (where I can easily define the size of the image myself by specifying width and alignment) than those six (!) lines of code that are pasted into my editor at the moment. It just takes far too long to scan this huge amount of information to see how it can be altered.
• The quality of link and tag suggestions can still be improved (of course); ‘URL’ or ‘the web’ and actually not even ‘Flickr’ (because everyone knows Flickr, right?) are not a tremendous enhancement in the link department. Maybe they’ll be able to track which suggestions are used and which aren’t, and are thus able to identify the empty ones (in the same way that Google disregards ‘a’ or ‘the’ in searches). What’s going to be more difficult is to automatically identify which PHRASES should be linked – as most people (I think? I do) tend to link phrases, and not just single words. Most links in this post, and all pictures, were automatically added by Zemanta.
• Final suggestion: The image gallery is nearly to small to assess whether the suggested images are suitable or not – but I wouldn’t know how to make them much smaller really. What’s great though is that it automatically shows which pictures you have already used and which you haven’t – so that you can automatically remove the used ones by hitting ‘minus’ in the gallery preview. At the moment, the gallery suggestions only vaguely correspond to my content – it’d probably easier if I wrote about kitten and horseys though.

That much about my feedback. I’ll keep testing Zemanta for while, and am keen to see how it is going to improve over the next weeks!

I have been neglecting my blog greatly – even though there would have been soooo many things to write about and post (e.g. a panel discussion I hosted; the articles that were written about it; the link to the online streaming window; the plans to launch a club for media studies folks doing research in digital media; the joys of Easter).

But: I just didn’t get around to it.

And I still don’t like linking this blog with my real name. That’s the main reason, actually.

Once again no time to blog – find updates here

Yes, I admit: Perez Hilton’s Blog is on my list of RSS feeds – and it has taught me a lot about the importance of always publishing publishable content. Here is the situation: As soon as you hit the ‘Publish’ button on your blogging software, feed readers such as Google Reader and Netvibes will begin to index the post you’ve just published. Quite often, however, the published version is not the one you intend to be the final one; I personally tend to apply quite a few changes after publication – I actually only start to proofread once I have published the post.

The obvious disadvantage of this procedure is that, if you’re unlucky, your changes won’t be reflected in the reader’s view of your blog post, because the first draft has already been cached by feed readers. And in the case of Perez Hilton’s blog post about Disney manager Josh Werkman’s pleading no contest (=die Aussage verweigern) to child molestation charges, we note that not not even deleted post will disappear from the feed reader’s radar. Here are two screenshots:

The top one shows a preview of the deleted post on the welcome page. The second one shows that the post whose title was displayed as a preview on the welcome page is actually no longer available.

The good thing about netvibes is that you can switch between a live and a cache mode, by hitting either ’show website’ or ‘Go back to feed view’. The screen shots above were taken in live mode – after switching to cache mode, I was able to read the post that the Queen himself had already deleted:

Josh Werkman, who manages the star of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, Cole and Dylan Sprouse, has plead no contest to misdemeanor child molestation and misdemeanor sale of alcoholic beverage to a minor.

Who does Disney attract all the pervs????

Werkman has served as co-producer on two of Cole and Dylan’s recent movies, The Kings of Appletown and A Modern Twain Story: The Prince and the Pauper. Aside from managing, he is also the CEO is Merimark Entertainment.

On Friday, Werkman entered his plea in Ventura County Superior Court and will be sentenced on Wednesday, April 2.

They better throw the book at him! And it better weigh a lot!

Steve Cron, Werkman’s lawyer, says “Josh admitted he annoyed an individual who is a minor and provided that person with alcohol on the day in question. He acknowledged that he used bad judgment on that occasion and that is why he pleaded no contest to the two charges.”

He “annoyed” a minor???

WTF?????

Sources say that the alleged victim is a 16-year-old male.

The Sprouse twins are not involved in the case, though they’ll probably be looking for a new very manager soon.

[Image via WENN]

Lesson learned: Think twice before you publish, and use the preview feature to proofread your blog post.

Of course this can also be considered a good strategy to leak information that you know you are not supposed to blog about, for political or economic reasons, for instance.

Yesterday was a busy day on this blog – too bad the Fastest Growing Blogs counter on the dashboard became defunct soon yesterday (and still is now) as it usually means an extra boost of traffic once you get on one of their global charts.

Let’s also say something about Lent, shall we? I’m still not particularly enjoying it (but I guess that’s not the point of Lent, is it?) – on Sunday when we took a walk around Kahlenberg and spent some time on their churchyard, I even fantasized seeing chocolates on the graves. Can craving get any worse? What it factually was were just the remains of some Christmas ornaments, a pine cone iced with fake snow and wrapped in cellophane. And yesterday my boyfriend brought home half a dozen of Fasten yogurt drink bottles which he got for free somewhere. ‘Fasten’ means ‘Fasting’, particularly fasting practiced during Lent – but I am not sure whether the amount of fructose it contains makes it a truly eligible lent candidate… it sounds like something you could actually enjoy:-)