Wild Angels with Charlie

This is fake, an absolutely typical method of plagiarism and copy-cat behaviour. One of Europe’s largest tv companies RTL Television plagiarises the well known and absolutely respected tv series and blockbuster movie „Charlies Angels“ into their own germanized format. The show „Wilde Engel“ features a female trio of special-agents: The glamour girl Rebecca, the technic freak Ida and the martial fighter Aiko. Not that the concept is stolen from the legendary tv series, even the modifications done for the Charlies Angels movie have been copied as much as possible. To top this most visible stupidity created by RTL Television, they published a small paragraph on their website:

„The new trio combines a fresh and young mix of action, crime and entertainment on the screen which is only usually known from cinematic movies. With quotes of Hollywood-Blockbusters like e.g. „Matrix“, „Kill Bill“ or „Charlies Angels“.

RTL becomes rather famous for their simple copies of successful tv and movie formats. Already „Monk“ (germanized copy named „Die unlösbaren Fälle des Herrn Sand“) and „Lost“ (germanized into „Verschollen„) have been copied… now „Charlies Angels“ has been media-raped. And why would anyone notice this? Because Katharina and I were loosely zapping the tv channels last evening. I believe the german tv media becomes a fraud itself without the former creativity and ideology…

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Bloglines adé? (Update)

Okay, die Überschrift trügt. Es ist nicht für immer weg, aber anscheinend gibt es einen Bug oder es sind unangekündigte Wartungszeiten. Wie kommt man auf soetwas? Naja, in meinen abonnierten RSS Feeds fiel mir auf, dass heute anscheinend Bloglines nicht mehr so möchte, wie es sollte. Wer hat noch Probleme – nun so ungefähr jeder auf der Welt ist am klagen und jammern… und ich jetzt auch. Zum Abschluss mal ein Screenshot vom Dilemma – herrlich! :(

UPDATE: Bloglines Outage

This morning, one of our user databases suffered a failure that wasn’t detected by our monitoring systems. This resulted in the inability of people to log into their Bloglines accounts. The database has been reset and no data was lost. We apologize for the issue and we’re looking at ways to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

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Bloglines Turmoil

This day turns out to be more than just a simple annoyance. First of all the disturbance in the Force, secondly the robot trouble and now this crap. Besides this, where’s the sense in using a „Lost your password“ tool if my email address is correct even if the server tells me it does not exist, but then actually states the password has been sent?

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Fed up with the Stats…

That’s it! I simply checked the stats of my Blogspirit account and figured that 354MB traffic was way too much. I wondered why, since I know my blog won’t be read by that many users. However, the statistics list revealed yet another sad truth: Robots crawl my site as if a stampede would race over the server. Both Googlebot and Slurp create more than 200MB, and the robots create roughly 78% of the traffic in total! This is way too much, and I’d like to ask for some support here. I already modified the META for robots to „index,nofollow“ and revisit-after to „7 days“, but a robot.txt file to specifically exclude aggressive spider robots or the ability to edit the .htaccess for more usability to ban certain IP Addresses from spamming would really help… Philippe, Thomas? That’s how I made my 300th blog entry, and I’d like to continue still… ;)

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American Idiotism: Blogs for the Media

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The well-known media mogul Rupert Murdoch expressed his new opinion concerning the supposed-to-be rivalry between usually independent blog authors and journalist faction formed by the Mainstream-Media. According to him, the whole battle cannot be fought forever. In order to seek for the end of this struggle, he expects blog authors to contribute and support the journalists to complete the whole coverage of each valuable and expensive day:

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy — chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists. (via Blogbar and Newscorp)

But why are these days valuable and expensive? The answer is rather simple. I believe Murdoch realized the uselessness of the whole concept of pay-per-view content (especially for tv and internet) and probably expects more incoming „monkey-money“ from the younger generation if he changes Multi-National Corporation by adapting a „nicer“ public corporate-culture. To adapt this kind of new strategy seems to be one of the first steps… but even if he’s trying to include independent authors within his corporate dependency… what’s going to happen next?

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Blogs are Weapons of Mass Destruction

Why would I consider blogs as „Weapons of Mass Destruction“? Originally, there’s simply the issue that the author of a blog may influence the life of certain people – especially those who’ve been targetted by the author. Remember the case of Citizen-Media-Ethos in which Eason Jordan was bound to a statement concerning US troops in Iraq infront of a small internal journalist group, but one has been a blogger without affiliance to the Mainstream-Media or any Multinational Corporation. This fact about the hidden and often underestimated power of blog authors made me name this blog Sichelputzer with the subtitle of „Weapons of Mass Destruction“ (seen in the layout image). But blogs as „Weapons of Mass Destruction“ are certainly effecting different topics such as:

Infected Blogs
…which unleash trojans, keyloggers or viruses by utilizing the often provided diskspace to save malicious files and prepare them for an automated download in the HTML of the weblog. Usually the infected blog is being promoted by using the most simple idea: spam mails. On the other hand one should ask why people still grant permission to auto-install software via the internet explorer or visit spam mail related websites… please, stupidity is no excuse.

Censored Blogs
…which is commonly done in China and other countries which fear the truth and non-governmental-controlled media. But even a democratic country like Spain plans to censor the internet and especially blogs. Now the idea to study in a spanish language specialization for my International Management study seems to be oblivious.

(Un)Censored Blogs
…which is explained by a recent voting poll by the US webhosting-company Hostway: 80 percent of a total of 2500 participants in this poll expressed that blog authors should not publish third-party information. Nevertheless, about 52 percent of the participants support the idea of granting private journalists (blog authors) the same rights as traditional and official journalists have – only 27% had no independent opinion on the subject.

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Stärken einer kleinen Wirtschaftsregion?

Mal ein anderer Anfang für den Morgen. Ich erfuhr am Mittwoch von einem Brain Brunch über meine Heimatstadt. Die Region Flensburg ist als nördlichster Wirtschaftsraum von Deutschland mit einer Arbeitslosenquote von 14,1% (PDF) für die Zukunft nicht gut gerüstet, jedoch bietet die Region als Universitätsstandort im Bereich der Managementausbildung und der Tourismusbranche einige Chancen für Unternehmen, sich in diesem Standort zu etablieren. Auch nach dem Abzug der Bundeswehr sind genügend Nichen und damit verbundene Absatzmöglichkeiten vorhanden, um nicht nur auf lokaler Ebene durch Tourismus sondern vielmehr auf internationaler Ebene durch die noch vergleichsweise wenig vorhandene Kooperation nach z.B. Skandinavien zu agieren. Gewiss ist diese Kooperation existent, jedoch im Vergleich zu anderen Grenzregionen nicht ausgebaut. Wer auch aus der Region stammt und Lust auf einen Brunch mit diesen Themen hat, sollte sich vorher anmelden und natürlich auch vorbeikommen. :)

Hier die Termininformation bezüglich der Veranstaltung zur Vision 2005: Im „Brain Brunch“ – ein Frühstück für Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Studierende- werden mögliche Zukunftsperspektiven und Attraktivitätsansprüche des Standorts Flensburg thematisiert. Es referieren u.a. Prof. Dr. Mike Friedrichsen von der Professur für ABWL insb. Medienmanagement an der Universität Flensburg, Dr. Michaela Oesser von der WTSH und Harald Markvorsen, Vorstand BDS.

Brain Brunch: Entrepreneurship und Innovation
03. Mai 205, Beginn: 09:00 Uhr
Veranstaltungsort: Universität Flensburg, Auf dem Campus 1, 24943 Flensburg

Auf der anderen Seite muss ich aber nachfragen, was hier Eure Meinung und Erfahrung von Grenzregionen (speziell Flensburg) ist. Seht ihr Chancen, um diesen schwächeren Wirtschaftsräumen wirtschaftlich zu helfen? Gibt es schon vorhandene Lösungen aus anderen Regionen Deutschlands, die hier ansetzbar sind? Vielleicht ergibt dies auch eine schöne Diskussion in den Kommentaren…

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WLAN and ICQ

I hate this program now: ICQ. While discussing a few issues with Pascal concerning the recently mentioned Soziologie course, my ICQ started to disconnect several times. At first it reconnected again, but now it tells me that I have connected too many times. It’s either a problem of the WLAN here at university or just an annoying glitch provided by ICQ and its Info Number 0124. I will destroy ICQ in a furious rage… once I have the money, I will buy it and use it for my purposes.

Yellow ICQ Flower: If you have a yellow ICQ flower in your system tray, this can indicate a few different problems:
You have tried to login too many times. ICQ will connect to the network automatically once an interval of time has passed.

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Rechteloser Blog-Journalismus

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Was wir alle hier treiben beinhaltet einen positiven oder negativen Effekt. Je nachdem wie man sich in der Öffentlichkeit des Internets äußert, kann der Flügelschlag eines wunderschönen heimischen Schmetterlings den tosenden Orkan in den USA auslösen. Nein, nicht Asien, weil dies hier nichts mit den Tsunamis oder üblichen Stürmen der Region zu tun hat, sondern anders, denn bald könnte es nach dem Willen von vielen Unternehmen und dabei auch die Multi-Nationals wie folgt aussehen:
Man steht förmlich im Walde und kann keine Bäume sehen, den Wald aber schon. So wird sich ein Blogautor fühlen müssen, während das eigene Werk mit vielen anderen Blogs im Internet zu finden ist (= der Wald), aber einzelne herausstechende journalistische Arbeiten dieser Blogs (= die Bäume) nicht finden kann.
Warum sollte man die Arbeit anderer nicht finden? Online-Journalismus in der modernsten Form in Konkurrenz oder Kooperation mit den traditionellen Journalisten sieht man doch täglich im RSS-Dschungel vorbeirauschen.

Drei Blog-Sites, die Informationen über Produkte verbreiteten, die bei der Computerfirma Apple noch in der Entwicklung sind, sollen einem kalifornischen Richter zufolge kein Recht auf Quellenschutz geltend machen dürfen, wie es Journalisten verbrieft ist, um Informanten Anonymität garantieren zu können. Sie sollen ihre Quellen offenlegen.

Apple hat also vorerst einen Sieg für die Multi-Nationals errungen, indem diese drei Blogautoren (vertreten durch die Electronic Frontier Foundation – EFF) in Kalifornien dazu verurteilt wurden, ihre Quellen offen zu legen, werden klare Grenzen innerhalb des Journalismus gezogen. Mehr zur Klage gibt es auch im fscklog. Komme wie es komme, damit ist für mich schon klar, dass ich mir wirklich keinen IPod zulegen werde.

via: FAZ

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Probational as M-E-X Blogger

Since the 7th of April I’ve become a part of the team for the MEX Blog, a well known and well cited blog in the germanspeaking Blogosphere. I consider myself being on a probational term while I maintain my blog and website. To aid in the process of creating a culture for the MEX Blog, I’ll surely add some of my individual culture to the group personality of MEX. So far I contributed two entries concerning the local event in Schleswig-Holstein and the recent idea of Microsoft to publish future editions of their Encarta as Wiki (or as nothing else but a „feedbackpedia“). We’ll see what comes next, and I’m eager to contribute at both sides: There and Back again – a Blogger’s Tale.

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