I’m spontaneously leaving for the What the hack! conference. It’s a big outdoor hacker event in the netherlands. Poorly nobody is coming with me, but look out for some coverage here on my blog.
You can follow me via plazes.

For a complete coverage check out technorati tag ‘whatthehack’.

Update: Molly joined me within an hour, that was even more spontaneous. We are already there tagging plazes and flickr pictures. Hopefully our tent is not drowning tonight.

I hate MySpace anyway. It has a really bad website interface. I’m not speaking of functionality, it’s more that I hate the GUI. And I think it’s also no fun for browsers too. There are self designed ugly pages with background sound, a video player and animated gifs. So click on a friends friend and your browser says goodbye. Also I can’t understand why so many bands have profiles on MySpace. It’s definitely the wrong place. But there has to be a place for all that crap. Stay there and keep other services clean, hehe.

Hopefully there is a better competer coming up soon. Even old friendster has a nicer interface. Orkut is just looking ugly. I think openbc is the best, but its just more business stuff only. I’m wondering what’s happening behind these doors: Wallop

In my opinion Fox is anyway a company, which has no special skills in internet business, so they won’t make it better. Let’s start looking for a new home.

Read BBC on MySpace and Murdoch

Thanks to Molly.

Update: Hehe, see the first reactions here.

On Kfish’s blog I read something about a free media browser they would like to integrate with rhythmbox like iTunes and the Apple Music Store. This will be a great feature. Daniel and I just had a talk with someone from Apple at the MacExpo here in Cologne. But Apple’s policy will not change, the combination of store, iTunes, iPod, DRM (in AAC) will stay proprietary. It will be a great thing to enter this market with completly free and open standards. There are lots of free podcasts available, lots of Theora video and Vorbis audio files. It would be great to have them easily accessible.

There is an Mozilla Firefox extension for Annodex.net which is a technology to build the so called Continuous Media Web, a massively multi-user, distributed hypermedia environment that works in both streaming and disk contexts.

By the way, Cologne’s MacExpo was pretty boring. We just saw some lectures about Logic Audio and Garageband. The guy gave away free downloads for the Apple Music Store and told everybody to buy Sarah Connor songs, so he would get some money from the GEMA (German performance rights organisation). Yeah right, sure! Best thing was that he told us he looks up his lyrics at this rhyme website. The rest were Apple stuff sellers, mostly iPod stuff, and some software and printing companies.

I have an Odeo account. It’s a fresh new web2.0 podcasting plattform. First look seems that it is really nice. But there is no linux client (which is called ’syncr’) - this is pain in the ass, hopefully they are working on it.

At make magazine you can see some screenshots.

Update: According to Kevin from the Odeo support they are working on an linux client.

Podcasting is so 5 minutes ago…

Roadcasting:

It is a system, currently in prototype state, that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among wirelessly capable devices, some in cars, in an ad-hoc wireless network. The system can become aware of individual preferences and is able to choose songs and podcasts that people want to hear, on their own devices and car stereos and in devices and car stereos around them.

found on O’Reillys Developer Blog

It took some time to get it working. Hopefully the diff of Stefan Haischt will be integrated in the geo plugin soon.

What am I talking about? Stefan Haischt added plazes support to the geo plugin for wordpress. So now every new post has information about the plaze I’m posting from. Either the information comes automatically from plazes, just in case I’m logged in to plazes, or manually defined by latitude/longitude.

“Reporters Without Borders” is calling to vote for blogs defending the freedom of expression. Among the nominated blogs are:

Burning Bagdad
A Baghdad women

Just to avoid any misunderstandings. My audioscrobbler profile is not teemow. It’s timod. That never happened before, but another timo was faster. I still can’t believe and his taste in music is no compliment at all.

Have a look at audioscrobbler. I always wanted to have statistics about the music I listen to. But I listen to music at work, home and on my notebook, so the problem is how can I merge all the information. Audioscrobbler is the solution. There are plugins for mostly every player software (iTunes, Rhythmbox, XMMS, Winamp, Windows Media Player and even Music Player Daemon) and these plugins automatically send information to your audioscrobbler profile. This is great, but because it is social software there are even more features. Audioscrobbler calculates which people are similar in musical taste to you and there are suggestions of artists and music you might like similar to the amazon feature “People who like this music also like …”. And there is a audioscrobbler radio station (Last.fm) where you can listen to playlists of other users similar to you or to your own stream with your personal favorite songs.

A plugin for wordpress is also available.

Currently last.fm is down and you can’t register at audioscrobbler cause of essential server maintenance.

I also found upcoming:

“Upcoming.org is a social event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Manage your events, share events with friends and family, and syndicate your calendar to your own site.”

I still didn’t know how to show upcoming concerts on my blog and this is exactly what I wanted to have.

All this social software really helps you with your personal productivity, let other people help you tagging and organizing your stuff. And you can see the results of using tags, if you have a look at technoratis tag search (Cologne) you will find current blog posts, flickr images, furl and delicious links and even google ads

Vienna: vienna became istanbul became vienna became carinthia. and Istanbul: flags, flags everywhere…

Sean Bonner’s Metroblogging looks very interesting. The new “Best of” feature keep you informed of what’s happening in the main blog capitols around the world. So how about a Cologne Metroblog. Quality bloggers (like Felix said) of Cologne apply here and lets join the metroblogging guys.