Next week the crème de la crème of the W3C is meeting in my little hometown, Basel.
The WWW-TAG FTF meeting is hosted by Day, a company I think is getting more and more interesting (again).

While prepairing my final exams and the presentation at the "6th International Conference on New Educational Environments", working out what to write my master thesis at DERI about, I became registered developer (means: CVS write access) to another Free Software project: Moodle.

Moodle is a Learning Management System (LMS) for online courses, grounded in "social constructionist pedagogy", and while it's not actually state-of-the-art as far as technology is concerned, it seems like it's very much what users -say: teachers- want. My little company is currently working on the assessment module and the integration of IMS/QTI 2.0, "virtualization" and an alternative Flash user interface to some parts of it for a leading Swiss e-learning provider.

There's not much news atm, I'm just busy, finishing old projects (such as CWSDL for CB-SeC..), the exams - and acquiring new projects, of course. You can expect more frequent blogging again after 2004/10/10. I have to read quite a lot these days, but I rather want to write, and not only software. I want to change that ratio between input and output soon again.

If you want to read something else from another arrogant geek in the meantime, read the famous Aaron Swartz, he's new at Stanford and delivers a daily wonderful analysis of the kids on campus over there.

Rumor has it that after Harvard and Standford, EPFL and the 17500 blogs offered by the University of Vienna to all students and staff, a similar project is on the at the Université de Fribourg.

The only statement I could get so far is this:

...actuellement il n'y a rien d'officiel, mais micromus au niveau des étudiants va proposer un blog d'ici la rentrée.

The "rentrée" is soon, so let's wait and see.

Bitflux is working on a blog - once again, you might say.
It seems like it doesn't want to be the feature loaden[1] überblog, but it very much looks like it'll have all the features you'd expect from a reasonable blogging software these days. The most important "feature" is not "moblogging" or similar buzzword, but the seamless integration into the Bitflux CMS, as a plugin. Add as many blogs as you like to your website like 1-2-3. Like plug and play. Plug and blog.[2]
Together with their own hosting services // the neat webinstaller which makes setting up the CMS a matter of minutes, this might very well become a valid alternative for bloggers with content. If you have a weakness for Open Source Software, Php5, Popoon and Xsl (Oh! I qualify! ;-)) this does sound tempting indeed.
And as it's my birthday (Gere and Chregu remembered, so nice), I dare to make a wish: Make it compatible with some other blogging tool in respect to (sub-)plugins. I want a book list/Amazon plugin. I wish I wish I wish :)



[1] Although the feature list in the BxCMSWiki is still growing and not substantially less what we have in the tool I'm using now.
[2] You can follow its development in their SVN repository

Saturday I got a letter from the "American Biographical Institute"[1], a company in Raleigh/US, seemingly producing and selling large and expensive encyclopediae.
They wrote I'd been chosen as one of 500 personalities for inclusion in the 2005 edition of their "World Book of Knowledge".
Alright, I'm rather credulous by nature, but heck, who would want the biography of a random 22-year old in an encyclopedia a the cost of $795 USD? This does indeed very much look like the scheme of the publishing house Belbo, Casaubon and Diotallevi, the heroes in Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", work for.. publishing esoteric books at their authors' own expense.
If everybody included in their book buys one (and what's such an important mention worth if you can't show it off), they probably make a pretty good profit.

But then I googled a bit. "american-biographical-institute" yields several thousand hits. If we look closer at some of them we find rather strange entries like that hypnotist or His Excellency Alhagi Dr. Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh(!), but also many less exotic personalities.
And they really print and sell books, "5000 Personalities of the World" for example.
So.. I'm not really sure about this. They say I was recommended by someone, they had my private address[2] and they really seem to publish books, not only collecting personal data or performing rip-offs on innocent authors.
Anyway, looks like their business modell -whatever it is- is profitable enough to send snail-mail out into the wide world. Amazing.
So if you know more about that institute/company, please let me know!

Oh, and let me close this posting with a quote from that letter:

»I admire your accomplishments and dedication to improving the lives of others«.

Gosh! :-)


[1] Right, there's no website.
[2] Ok.. it's public after all

Fabien Girardin blogged some really cool links today.
I want to make things like that!
..oO(basing on FOAF and other semantic web data... perhaps)

But no, I have to learn for my exams.. I won't even make it to OSCOM because of them. Damned.


Edit: I shoudln't have forgotten to link to CRAFT's own visuals.

Jan Zuppinger just posted a nice review of Ars Electronica 2004 on pixelsurgeon.com, while the rest of us is still wondering what a spime is and when the AEC folks finally put the video streams online.

FAS.research (Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft mbH) has some answers to the following key question:

What is the best strategy for an agent to improve his/her position in a given network?

Strategy 1: Adaptive consolidation strategy (network closure strategy)
Strategy 2: Expansive jump strategy (structural holes strategy)
Strategy 3: Alternating strategy (alternating close and jump strategy)
Strategy 4: Random strategy (randomized sequences)
Strategy 5: Passive strategy (no active moves)

1. It´s always better to have a strategy, than not, even if you act randomly!
2. If you want to climb up faster than others, jump!
3. Local heros remain local heros!

etoy is throwing a party for friends and investors this week at MFO-Park Zürich, same locations as pictured below. Most special feature: the etoy.TIME-BACK-GUARANTEE.

etoy.TIME-BACK-GUARANTEE:
should you not be satisfied with the event, an etoy.AGENT will perform in your job on your behalf to compensate your time loss.
etoy.AGENTS qualify for a broad range of tasks including social engineering, derivatives trading, logistics management, sales, and art production.

More over at the etoy.TALK-TANK.
What a pity I have to prepare my final exams :-/