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Fluchtraum der Geschichte
Die Begeisterung für die Frauenkirche ist zwar beeindruckend, doch richtet sie sich ausschließlich auf das Gewesene. Und verstärkt damit bei allem Positiven doch auch etwas Befremdliches: den Hang vieler Deutscher, sich kulturpessimistisch vom Heute abzuwenden und in der schönen Vergangenheit zu verkriechen. Das allgemeine Verlangen nach Replikaten wie der Frauenkirche wächst; in Berlin, Potsdam, Braunschweig, überall sollen zerstörte Schlösser und Kirchen wieder entstehen. Oft aber geht es dieser Liebe für das Alte nicht um das historische Zeugnis, sondern um den Anmutszauber und den Fluchtraum der Geschichte. Anders ist nicht zu erklären, dass vielerorts vorhandene Bauwerke verfallen, klassizistische Herrenhäuser ebenso wie barocke Dorfkirchen, während gleichzeitig mit viel Geld verschwundene Bauten rekonstruiert werden. Fast meint man, die liebsten Bauwerke der Deutschen seien die untergegangenen.
Eben von dieser Vergangenheitslust, die zugleich Gegenwartsscheu ist, zeugt auch die Frauenkirche. Dabei ließe sich gerade an ihrem Beispiel ein neuer Optimismus lernen. Die Zeit um 1700 war, ähnlich wie heute, eine Zeit radikaler Wandlungen. Nur dass man sich damals zutraute, diesem Wandel auch Gestalt zu geben. Hätte August der Starke, Kurfürst von Sachsen und König von Polen, ähnlich zukunftsängstlich geplant wie unsere Gegenwart, keines der erstaunlichen Bauwerke des barocken Dresdens wäre entstanden.
ZEIT.DE: Steine zum Anstoßen →
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Sketchbook: Nocturnes
Sketchbooks are small photo series on topics I might explore more deeply at a later point. Let's start with some black and white nightshots:
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BigTable
Q: What do you get if you put lots of PhDs into a room?
A: BigTable. Big Idea, possibly big implications.
Extended A: Think of it as a massive system to roll out new (Google) services at low costs. Also think of it as something relation database vendors might make feel a bit uneasy. Rumoured GoogleBase (exhibit 1, 2, 3, 4) as a possible BigTable über-app might make a lot of other people feel a bit uneasy, too, and I wonder if it will spark a privacy/competition/a walled garden so big you can't see the wallsTM? discussion. Technically, BigTable seems to be more interesting, though - guess why they are so quiet about it. It also makes all those GoogleBrowser, GoogleOS, JustAnotherService talks appear a bit uninspired, doesn't it?
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Herr Mo holt die Fabrik
Über kurz oder lang wird meine Photo-Seite zweisprachig werden - die aktuelle Bildserie hat schonmal einen zweisprachigen Begleittext.
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Visiting Globalization
Diving deeper into industrial photography also means observing more closely how things get done in other fields of photography: Large plants in their entirety? Landscape photography. Action shots in operational steel mills where you sometimes have to wait for hours just to miss the crucial few seconds? Sports. Workers and their work? Portrait. So all these are fields to dive into in order to get better industrial shots. This also reminds me that "Endangered Machinery" might not be the best choice for my photo site: one might think "nostalgic, ailing, obsolete" first - not exactly what today's plant engineering, today's plant and today's technicians are like.
Speaking of portraits, let me present you:
Four portraits of Chinese workers that helped knocking down an entire German coke plant in order to ship it to China -
Click to view →
The photo site now also sports a Collections Index .
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Tag Triples
When thinking about the general direction my (rather slow moving) Semantic Tagging stuff should head into, it became obvious pretty quickly that moving from facet-value-pairs to RDF-like subject-property-object-triples is the direction of choice. Vapourware needs good-sounding names, so let's call it "RDF without the complexity" - and the good news is: it's already there. Danny Ayers pointed to Phil Dawes' work called Tag Triples:
Tagtriples is an attempt to create a structured metadata format and model with similar properties to RDF (e.g. encoding graphs, trivially mergeable/aggregatable), but made much simpler by allowing any symbol to be an identifier - not just URIs. [...]
The Tag Triples project page links to all the details, the Python sources and also to a nifty demo application called JAM*VAT - The structured data aggregator:
With it you can import information from various structured-data formats including xml, rss, atom, rdf and csv, and then browse and query across the aggregated data.
Finally, some interesting examples of JAM*VAT structured queries →
RELATED ON THIS WEBLOG
2005-10-19 WikiSym 2005
2005-10-02 Semantic MediaWiki
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Slag dumping
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Dumping blast furnace slag from two ladle cars
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Auf den Spuren einer Diktatur
Mehr als 30 Magazinbeiträge [der Fernsehsendung KONTRASTE] aus den Jahren 1987-2001 dokumentieren die Auseinandersetzung mit der DDR-Diktatur und der deutsch-deutschen Geschichte - zeitgeschichtliche Dokumente, die den Prozess der deutschen Einheit begleiteten.
Sechs Stunden Video und umfangreiche Texte über ein geteiltes Land - und gleichzeitig Reverenz an eines der großen Politmagazine: KONTRASTE - Auf den Spuren einer Diktatur →
[via Ostblog]
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WikiSym 2005
My hope is that wiki becomes a totem for a way of interacting with people.
Ward Cunningham in his WikiSym 2005 keynote
WikiSym 2005, the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis, is on. "The Crucible of Creativity" is the title of Ward Cunningham's keynote of which Sebastian Paquet offers notes and Ross Mayfield what he calls a impressionistic transcript.
Blog coverage is rather thin, but the conference wiki, the MeatballWiki, and Max Völkel's
Resource collection for WikiSym visitors offer quite a bit.
Also, Eaton, a universal "Bouncer for WikiSpam and Blog Spam" surfaced as a result of Sunir Shah's WikiSpam workshop at WikiSym. On the workshop's wikipage, MeatballWiki founder Sunir also offers a nice Summary of the State of the Art of WikiSpam.
RELATED ON THIS WEBLOG
2005-10-02 Semantic MediaWiki
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Stabwechsel
Gestern fand die konstituierenden Sitzung des 16. Deutschen Bundestags statt. Damit endet die Amtszeit von Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder und Vizekanzler Joschka Fischer. Beide erhielten nachmittags von Bundespräsident Horst Köhler ihre Entlassungsurkunden. Schröder bleibt bis zur Wahl eines Nachfolgers, die nicht vor Mitte November erwartet wird, geschäftsführender Kanzler. Tina Hildebrandt und Bernd Ulrich fassen in der ZEIT die letzten Monate des Kanzlers zusammen →
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Katastrophe, nicht mediengerecht
Was unterscheidet das stärkste Erdbeben Asiens, eine ganze Generation auslöschend, eigentlich von einem starken Seebeben mit anschließender Flutwelle? Eine ganze Menge offenbar, denn waren nach dem Seebeben die Medien monatelang geradezu verstopft, die Betroffenheitsbekundungen und Benefizveranstaltungen zahlreich und der Hang zum Spenden ausgeprägt, findet Berichterstattung über das Kaschmir-Beben, extreme Dimensionen hin oder her, kaum statt.
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Kashmir Disaster Aid Campaign
Remember Anders Jacobsen's and Eliot Landrum's donation campaign to help the 2004 Tsnuami victims? You posted a list of links to aid organizations on your blog, they both donated one US-Dollar each for your posting, resulting in US$ 656. Now they do it again- so if you want to donate, pick one of these:
Photo Credit: Reuters/Mian Khurshee, courtesy of Alertnet.org
To support the Jacobsen/Landrum campaign, follow these instructions →
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Ruhrort No. 8
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As the last one of formerly eight blast furnaces at this site, Thyssen Ruhrort No. 8 rises high above Duisburg-Ruhrort in this shot taken two month ago. Two days ago, 100 kilograms of high explosives removed it from the skyline - roughly two years after Ruhrort No. 7 faced its end. Closed down 13 years ago, the Ruhrort blast furnaces were replaced by the superlarge ThyssenKrupp Schwelgern No. 2 furnace in neighbouring Duisburg-Schwelgern. That's also where the Ruhrort oxygen steel mill, operated by Mittal Steel, now draw its pig iron from. A newly signed agreement between Mittal and ThyssenKrupp guarantees these deliveries for the next 20 years.
Photo taken: August 2005
Status then: Closed down
Changes since: Demolished October 8, 2005
RELATED
2003-12-20 Ruhrort Plant Overview →
2003-12-20 Ruhrort No. 7 demolition photos →
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Orangoo
While everyone's attention was on Google Reader another web-based aggregator has entered the stage: Orangoo is a rather simple to use solution that seems to be geared towards beginners. So far it lacks OMPL import and exports and does not have a River of News view, but comes with some well-placed AJAX niceties, a bilingual interface, post to del.icio.us links, ATOM support and pre-defined sets of feeds on specific topics. I particulary like the option to one-click subscribe to sets of news, geek and Danish newsfeed when signing up so you don't have to start with an empty page. Still I think that OMPL import is a sine qua non to attract potential users that already use an aggregator to do the switch.
UPDATE
This just in from the author via email: "OPML support is coming - I just need to be sure that the parser works and is fast enough."
Orangoo Feedreader →
Development blog →
Feed Reader Directory →
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Google Reader
Google's latest move: Google Reader, a web-based news aggregator. Free to use with a Gmail account. Differentiates itself from other online aggregators with a custom, fully javascripted user interface that works like a magnifying glass under which you move your list of subscribed feeds (hint: see "lens" in URL). Having played with it for a few minutes after importing my Bloglines OMPL list I can say that this is not an unpleasant way to read newfeeds. Obviously, the interface is very single item centric, so this might not be your cup of tea if you like to see it all on one page ("River of News"/Bloglines style). Thanks to keyboard shortcuts, going from one unread to the next item is rather smooth nonetheless.
This aggregator and many others also in the Feed Reader Directory →
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Staircase
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With my interest shifting from covering entire plants to observing things that are so omnipresent, yet signature to industrial sites, that they virtually become invisble to many spectators - outside staircases, pipeline bridges, laterns, certain facade elements - expect a lot more of stuff like this in the future.
Blast furnaces works Phoenix West ← Hoesch Stahl AG ← Dortmund, Germany
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Wirtschaftswiki.de
Notizen zum vom Handelsblatt-Mitarbeiter Heribert Adamsky gestarteten wirtschaftswiki.de (bearbeitet):
- Grundfrage: bei all den interessanten Möglichkeiten, die ein öffentlich schreibbares zeitungseigenes Wiki bietet, warum ausgerechnet ein enzyklopädisches Wiki erstellen und sich daher genau dort, wo etwas anderes schon fest etabliert ist, positionieren wollen? Was soll Leser motivieren, ausgerechnet an diesem Wiki mitzuarbeiten?
- "Bold Move"-Vorschlag als Ausweg für Wwiki und allgemeiner Denkanstoß: Zeitung/Redaktion/Verlag dadurch als Vorreiter bei der offiziellen Förderung von "Open-Source-Wissen" durch Zeitungen/Redaktionen/Verlage positionieren, daß deren Schreiber/Mitarbeiter an der Wikipedia mitarbeiten und in der jeweiligen Publikation dann auf diese Initiative hingewiesen wird. Ich weiß zu wenig davon, wie z.B. Verlagsleute ticken, um hier Umsetzungschancen beurteilen zu können, aber jemanden Leitendes, der es nicht nur als Risiko ansieht, die z.B. ja in Fachressorts tätigen Schreiber direkt der "kollektiven Wikipedia-Redaktion" auszusetzen, fände sich sicherlich.
Randnotizen:
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One window lit
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The sky above Dortmund-Hörde, 1st of October, 2005
Blast furnaces works Phoenix West ← Hoesch Stahl AG ← Dortmund, Germany
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Semantic MediaWiki
Now it is getting interesting - Heiko Haller, Klaus Lassleben and others present Semantic MediaWiki:
The WikiProject "Semantic MediaWiki" provides a common platform for discussing extensions of the MediaWiki software that allow for simple, machine-based processing of Wiki-content. [...] The overall objective of the project is to develop a single solution for semantic annotation that fits the needs of most Wikimedia projects and still meets the Wiki-specific requirements of usability and performance.
A first version of the Semantic MediaWiki extension and a demo are available, and the well-structured project wiki already offers quite a lot of information.
Semantic MediaWiki →
RELATED
Flexible Fields for MediaWiki →
A proposed wiki-like database for various types of content: Wikidata →
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Three in a Row
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Shaft 2 (left), shaft 1 (center) and boiler house (right) ← Haus Aden colliery ← Bergkamen, Germany
Photo taken: April 2004
Status then: Partially in service
Changes since: Completely wiped out except for the headgear above shaft 2 (which remains open for minegas winning)
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
