Web

Since last week there is one less excellent German tech blog to read: Martin Weigert of zweinull.cc is writing for netzwertig.com now and is quitting his own blog. zweinull.cc was one of the very few serious tech blogs in this country which was started only 14 months ago and quickly gained popularity and acceptance among the more tech savvy crowd. It’s probably fair to describe it as a German Read/Write Web, i.e. tech news without copying press releases and a healthy dose of opinion. It was certainly a must read blog and will be missed.

Some people might argue that Martin is writing for another blog - netzwertig.com - now and nothing will change. That’s good, isn’t it? Well, I am not sure. netzwertig.com just launched one month ago. It belongs to Swiss blog network Blogwerk and is run by Andreas Göldi, Marcel Weiß, and Markus Spath. The three guys are well-known in the German speaking blogosphere because of their own blogs. They are certainly three respected voices. Andreas Göldi ran Beobachtungen zur Medienkonvergenz, writing about the convergence of media and (internet) technology. His blog was also part of Blogwerk. Marcel Weiß is still running neunetz.com, a blog similar to zweinull.de but with stronger opinion. While the aforementioned guys are probably fairly unknown to readers abroad, Markus Spath should also be known in the English speaking blogosphere. Besides running his own blogs live.hackr and Museum of Modern Betas, he was also writing for the German edition of Blognation.

Now Martin is joining them and suddenly netzwertig.com is THE tech blog here. While some smaller blogs cover similar topics - Thomas Frütel’s Webmaster Blog comes to mind - there is no real competition to it anymore. Marcel has reduced his posting frequence on neunetz.com already and Markus’ blogs are focused slightly different. Don’t get me wrong (it’s my week of negativity anyway), I like netzwertig.com a lot so far but I am wondering if it’s really healthy for the blogosphere here. It will be more difficult for smaller blogs to gain similar acceptance because netzwertig.com has all the attention and admittedly the competence.

Techmeme. Rivva. Tailrank. Megite. Yeah, memetrackers, that’s right. While all of them provide a great service, there’s always stuff I am not interested in. Also there is the language barrier: Rivva is focusing (mostly) on German blogs while the other three services only include articles written in English. That’s not ideal when reading blogs and news in both languages.

Megite is providing a service called MyMegite where users can send a link to their OPML file and then a personalized version of Megite will be created (took a month or so). That’s pretty cool as I quickly see discussions which are interesting to me. The service is not perfect yet, especially regarding German discussions. Sometimes the articles don’t fit, even dealing with completely different topics. Nevertheless I think it is a great effort. I will have to finetune my OPML file a little bit now, though.

MyMegite is here, by the way.

Almost forgot it: Tailrank has a similar feature. Just linked to the OPML file there as well. Let’s see how that one works.

Attention Data

While surfing the web we leave traces, some unintentionally, some intentionally. Sometimes we are aware of them, sometimes we’re not. Unintentional traces (often they are even unavoidable by the average, non-tech savvy surfer) are cookies which can be read by ad services, IP addresses logged by websites, and much more. Intentional traces are blog posts, Twitter messages, songs we listen to and send to Last.fm, bookmarks, photos and videos shared on the web, events we attend by posting them to Upcoming or Wevent,… That’s our attention data.

APML or How to Use Attention Data

The data is there but what can we do with it? We can publish it. The idea of publishing attention data is not a brand new one, though. Lifestreams are an opportunity to do that. However if you have a closer look at the data it is quite obvious that it is valuable. It is reflecting a lot of what we do and especially what we like. But is there a way to share it and even value it?

Actually APML is doing just that; it means Attention Profiling Markup Language. Recently it has gained some more attention as people have a go at it. Admittedly there are not much use cases yet.

APML could be used for commercial purposes, e.g. I make it available to an online shop so that I am offered products that fit my interests. Of course, there has to be a possibility to block further use of that data if I don’t want to share it anymore. Another use case could be social networks; I will see users who share similar interests. I am confident, though, that APML will gain some more popularity in 2008 as it lets users control their data and complements efforts like DiSo; more products and use cases will follow then.

For further reading: introduction, plugins, applications:

• A great introduction by Marjolein Hoekstra
• Engagd is a service which produces APML files
• A WordPress plugin by Matthias Pfefferle
• TasteBroker is a service which converts data from various sources (Last.fm, Pandora,…) into an APML file
• Ma.gnolia has added support last week
• Cluztr, Particls, Dandelife, and Lifestrea.ms support it as well

People are telling me that faxes have become obsolete, no one needed a fax machine anymore; email and PDF documents had replaced it. Some people even proclaimed email to be old school. Well, in the last few days I have learned that faxes are still relevant.

Last Friday I asked three dealers of beverages for price quotations for a party held in December. All of them have a website and provide a contact email address. I would have guessed that I had replies by Monday. Well, no replies until today, so I have started calling them. Responses have been quite interesting:

1. The son of the owner is ill and the secretary is on holiday.
2. No one has checked email since Friday. You’d better sent a fax.
3. Oh yeah, I remember your email. Didn’t have time to reply yet.

It’s been a rather frustrating morning. The staff member of company number 2 asked me to send the email to her address again. Great! Though then she said that she couldn’t give quotations by email because the system they use didn’t support it. She had to send a fax. Aaargh!

Well, I don’t want to complain too much; all companies are small and medium-sized businesses. I would have guessed, though, that email was more common even there. I didn’t want to sign a contract, just wanted some quotes. However it makes me think if the digital divide is broadening even more. I use Twitter, IM, email, this blog, (mobile) phones, and social networks to communicate and stay in touch with people. Too far ahead or is the majority of people just thinking I was a little crazy?