For quite some time now I am interested in new types of media and try to get a feeling for how people will consume and produce information in the future. One project I am actively following at the moment is EveryBlock which is run by Adrian Holovaty of Django fame.

The basic idea is to offer the people all relevant news for the block which they live in. Current information range from civic information (e.g. restaurant inspections, crimes,...) to news articles. Adrian's team really tries to push the limits when it comes to making information available for anybody in an innovative way. If you got interested make sure to listen to this excellent podcast in which Adrian talks about the project and the future of journalism in general.

For a long time I used Thunderbird as my main feed reader. It's main advantage compared to other tools is that instead of displaying just the the text of a feed item, it renders the whole item using the Firefox engine. Therefore the layout of the site which you subscribe to is not getting lost. However once I joined SAP last year I had to switch to something else because I wanted to check my feeds in the office and at home. Since I heard good things about Google Reader I gave it a go and I am still happy with my decision.

There are lots of things I like about Reader. One thing which stands out for me is how easy it is to send items you like to your friends via email. Another thing which is a neat idea are the so called shared items. It means that while I am skipping through my feeds I can mark anything interesting as shared. All my shared items end up in an extra feed + an extra website. You can check out my feed here and my website here. Why is this cool? It allows you to subscribe to items which were already marked as interesting by people you know and trust. Similar to what the people over at Digg are doing.

I still remember how my father and I investigated the sky through a telescope during those crystal clear summer nights and learned more about the Universe. Yesterday at TED Microsoft presented for the first time their new project WorldWide Telescope which allows anybody to explore the Universe just by using their computer.

From what I can see the execution of the idea is absolutely stunning. I can't wait to show it to my father.

The offical site for the project can be found here.

Have a look at the following video made by Sun to promote their customer facing wikis.sun.com. I especially like the way it shows how collaboration on the web has been evolved in recent years.

They are running their wiki's on Confluence developed by Atlassian. It is a really nice piece of software which I enjoy working with every day.

One of the small little things that I like about Ubuntu it that is much more polite than Windows XP. What more polite? Let me give you an example. If under Windows XP a window, which is not focused, raises a message window or something similar the entry in the taskbar will start to blink furiously. The blinking effect is so strong that it is pretty hard to ignore and it distracts me from the stuff I am currently working on. In my opinion this form of trying to get my attention is rude. I would compare it to banging at the door of an office. In the normal world this type of interrupting people would not be accepted. If software interrupts you all the time nobody cares.

Maybe the Ubuntu folks had a similar experience. However in Ubuntu instead of blinking they slowly fade the color of the application in the taskbar from gray to orange. Much more polite and less distracting (would like to know how it is implemented under Windows Vista).