Brent Simmons comments on the (unfortunately unpopular) use of unique ID in RSS feeds. He is so right.

Not much posting by me recently. While being busy at the University I spend most of the time diving into Wikipedia. After having done the Chaosradio 91 radio show (german) on that topic last week I thought I am going to hop on the next wagon soon but after some time I found myself still digging deeper into the system.

Wikipedia is addictive. I hope I will be able to summarize my experiences here soon.

I am going to leave the country tomorrow for a quick ride to Switzerland. My good friend Sandro Gaycken has been very busy recently organizing The Club Exchange Program which is an ambitious project bringing together the music club culture of Berlin and Zürich over a period of three months. The clubs visit each other exchanging not only DJs and music but the whole club culture as well: the bar, the design, the flair.

This coming weekend, the program starts with the renowned WMF visiting kaleidoskop club in Zürich. DJs Jazzanova, Ame, Slope, Stefan Rogall, Eva Be and Daniel W. Best form the line-up.

So each upcoming weekend, the party goes back to the other city. These are the Berlin clubs and party crews that will come to Zürich: Goldmund & Eschschloraque Rümpschrümp, Maria, the famous Pyonen party crew, Kinzo and Tresor.

If you want to join: the City Night Line offers cheap tickets (EUR 29) to get to Zürich and back with the night train. Cant beat the price.

Gotta put on my fancy suit, boy.

Yes! The Golden Nica– the first price of Prix Ars Electronica – have been awarded to both Wikipedia (in category Digital Communities) and the Creative Commons project (in category Net Visions). Good choice! Congratulations!

The Collaborative User Experience research group of IBM has done some analysis on Wikipedia pages, visualizing change to pages in terms of a History Flow.

history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text‘s evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?

Makes pretty impressive and informative graphics and is an interesting approach to tackle the problem of mass data visualization in a social space. Handling of typical problem domains like Vandalism, the origin of content in terms of registered and unregistered users, growth, evolution and age of content are all becoming much clearer.

Have a look at some of the results of the analysis for a description on color and brightness are used to emphasize certain characteristics . The gallery provides even bigger and much detailed pictures. These graphs tell a lot about the rushed public interest in certain topics like „Islam“ or „Iraq“ and demonstrate the slow, evolutionary growth of mostly undisputed topics like „Love„.

I am going to give a talk on Blinkenlights at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, that‘s about to open it‘s doors today to the public. The talk takes place on Friday at 12:00 h, if you like to join. It‘s going to focus a lot on the Arcade installation done in 2002.

And argh! The web site uses frames. In 2004. Still! Why don‘t these media guys ever learn?

Tonight the english Wikipedia has passed the 250.000 article mark. Growth of the Wikipedia project has been enormous and is continuously rising. This is true for the variants in other languages as well: the german Wikipedia just welcomed it‘s 80.000th article.

Have a look at the growth statistics. At this pace, the project will deliver its high goals probably sooner than expected.

Have you contributed lately? No? So go ahead and tell us about what you know.

Fans are always a special kind of people. You notice it once you discover your are one yourself. And on the net, fandom has found its home in the early days already. Kate Bush – renowned artist and singer – always had a strong following and I admit to have been among the crowd for a long time. I have been touched and inspired by her work since the Eighties and I wasn‘t surprised to see that there were people around the world sharing my affection.

What was surprising was that Kate Bush‘s fans have initiated a mailing list in 1985 (!) that was followed by the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.gaffa soon after. Later, the Gaffaweb adopted the upcoming web technology similarly early (by the way: Gaffa relates to the song Suspended In Gaffa, while Love Hounds – the name of the mailing list – relates to Hounds Of Love respectively. Getting all these international postings on my small computer at home back then was a special brainwash to me as I was still busy explaning my friends the need for things like computers in general.

So what‘s the news? It‘s what made it‘s way into my inbox today: a collection of Kate‘s early works in MP3. Some of them haven‘t been published, some of them are just other recordings of well-known songs from her Albums.

Back in the times of the Cold War, the US Army had it‘s main radar field station on top of Berlin‘s artificial „mountain“ known as Teufelsberg (devil‘s mountain). It has been closed for a while now, but since the follow-up real-estate projects have all failed, the area has been opened to the public two weeks ago.

So the area has been invaded by the hackers and a lot of interesting information on this is coming up. Until then, you might want to enjoy some nice QuickTime VR panorama pictures of the site that Fiedel has put up on his web server. Be warned, access will be slow as the server is behind a private DSL line.

Newseum – The Interactive Museum of News provides the front pages of (currently) 303 international newspapers, updated daily on their Today‘s Front Pages page.

„Today‘s Front Pages“ is an online version of one of the Newseum‘s most popular exhibits. Every morning, more than 250 newspapers from around the world submit their front pages to the Newseum via the Internet.

Interesting to see, that the publisher‘s are actively coopoerating and that the PDFs (!) are not just scanned images but include all the text for cut and paste operation as well.