Some Things

Nachdem ich diesen Blog mit Seminarposts vollgestopft habe, sieht man wohl recht deutlich was im Moment den größten Teil meines Lebens füllt. Genau, die Uni. Deshalb war abgesehen von dem ganzen Gepodcaste hier auch nichts los. Ich hoffe es war aber etwas interessantes dabei, mir haben die Podcasts sehr viel Spaß gemacht und ich habe sehr viel dadurch gelernt. Jetzt hat mich aber das Semester gleich so in Beschlag genommen, dass ich den Blog (mal wieder) auf die lange Bank scheiben musste. [persönlicher Kram der eh keinen interessiert; Ende]

Vorgestern ist in meinem RSS Reader ein Post vom Damn Cool Pics Blog aufgeschlagen, der mich daran erinnert hat, warum ich vor ca. zwei Jahren zu viel Geld für Jack Johnson DVDs ausgegeben hab’. Den Jack kennt mittlerweile wohl praktisch jeder, was viele aber nicht wissen, eigentlich war er Profi-Surfer und hat den Job an den Nagel gehängt, weil er ihm zu stressig war. Daraufhin hat er sich ‘ne alte Kamera (mit Film und so) gekauft und mit seinen Surferkumpels (die zufälliger Weise die besten Surfer der Welt sind) einen netten kleinen Trip gemacht. Daraus ist die grandiose DVD “Thicker Than Water” entstanden, die mit den Nachfolgern “September Sessions” und “A Brokedown Melody” den Grundstein für Jacks Karriere legte. Als Hintergrundmusik gibt es nämlich kein 0815-Punk-Geschredder, wie so oft bei “XTREME!!! SPORTZZzzzZZzz,” sondern Musik von Jack und Freunden. Das Ganze sieht dann so aus:

(weiterlesen…)

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series is to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It will lead into a series of podcast episodes. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009.  

This is just a quick teaser for the next, longer post, but I want to share this video right now. I found it a while back, but never got around to watching it, but going through pages I had archived for reading at a later date, I stumbled upon this post on boingboing. Boingboing is blog that functions as “A Directory of Wonderful Things”, where interesting sites, stories, applications and much more from around the Internet are collected. It is a very influential, judging from the number of boingboing posts appearing on social news sites like digg or reddit.

Once and again, boingboing lets guests blog on the site and the video I want to share is in a post, written by a guest blogger. His name is Clay Shirky and he works, among other things, as an adjunct professor at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His post shows, that the Democrats are not the only ones profiting from “netroots” activists. The Dear Mr. Obama video is very effective on an emotional level, as of now has been watched by more people than the famous “Obama Girl” video (13.5 mil <-> 12.9 mil, although Dear Mr. Obama was posted over a year later) and still didn’t get the same attention “Obama Girl” or the will.i.am Yes We Can Music Video. Shirky explains this seemingly strange development, by referring to the homophily of the Republican blogosphere. Conservative blogs usually only link to conservative blogs and so on. As long as the story doesn’t get picked up somewhere else, it might be hugely popular in these circles, but unknown to the public. This is also mentioned in Netroots Rising by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox, who describe the conversation in the conservative blogosphere as merely repeating what Republican politicians and conservative journalists say.

So, without further ado, here is the video:

Image by Bluvalo, it was released under a GNU Free Documentation license.