My girlfriend just complained about my current Windows‘ desktop layout, and she expressed her unhappiness about it quite directly: „Why do you have these symbols (AntiVir and Microsoft’s AntiSpy) here (desktop) and there (taskbar icons)?“ Well… because I choose to! And she just complained that I have Skype in the Quicklaunchbar… well, why not? I like my desktop in the first screenshot, but mine is much more organized than this mess in picture 2! Whoever has such kind of desktop – well, good luck. I dare to say my desktop is quite organized and clean, but… yes, what a mess! Besides this there’s not much to report for today. Just been kept busy, quite busy, very busy. Sometimes I wish I’d have other things to worry about than my studies…

Organized and Clean

What a mess!

Long time ago I registered for the Preople.com service, and I haven’t found much time to use this web gadget alot. But suddenly I noticed my Hotmail account contained a Preople-Mail! I usually refer to my Hotmail address once I register for websites due to security and anti-spam reasons, but this one looked quite funny:

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten just visited your Personal Profile and added a link to your page to their Personal Profile. You can visit that page here if you want to know more about Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten or maybe you want to return the favor and add a link to their page too:
http://www.preople.com/?r=personal&id=1
or visit your own page:
http://www.preople.com/?r=personal&id=2049
The Preople Server

That made me simply return to the Preople Server to look up the „Number-One“ Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, and since he is the CEO of Preople, I thought it’d be a good idea to copy his RSS feed to my own list. Sadly, the feed did not validate for my reader. But upon sending him a message, he promptly reacted and wrote me a kind reply and fixed the error.

Thanks! It looks like my own RSS reader was less strict about the code so I didn’t see any errors. I used Feedvalidator to check all the code now and I found 3 more errors that were easy to fix. So thanks to you our RSS feeds now validate perfectly…

Quite fast and good ;)

Proximity Germany, a customer relationship management agency, recently released a case study on Corporate Blogging in Germany. Under the final stroke, Germany offers a high potential to german companies and their multi-national brothers or subsidiaries, CEO Martin Nit explains (translated):

Even if the expectation is not yet so high at present to own Corporate Blogs, this attitude will definately change strongy on a medium-term base in Germany. This means that enterprises must argue promptly and professionally with the topic of weblogs. Weblogs are useful for the dialogue with the most different target groups such as consumers, customers and also coworkers.

However the question rises on how german companies, especially the german multi-nationals, will apply the benefits and dangers of this direct connection to the consumer. It’s going to become an interesting issue on adapting weblogs within corporate culture (and perhaps their corporate and „ethical“ policy).

[via M-E-X, Corporate Blogging]

Fabian Mohr has recently created his new photo reportage blog „iso 800“ last week. By using a Canon EOS 300D camera he plans to introduce a variety of shots alongside a few hints and tips on how to work with your own camera. The blog already includes some interesting and amazing shots which are usually published on Flickr, too.

[via M-E-X, netzjournalist]

Kat and I were working for more than 4 hours on our term paper for Desarollo Regional 2 with the temporary title „Intercultural Communication in Business“. Unfortunately, it’s meant to be 8-10 pages in total with a maximum of 21000 words – I believe this limitation will restrict the entire issue which is quite important for management. We’ve managed to work out our structure and nearly finished the first part about the definition of culture and the preception of culture leading towards communicative issues. In the end, we plan to roughly compare the approach found in the Cultural Dimensions of Hofstede and Trompenaar with the cross-culture approach by Richard D. Lewis found in his book „When Cultures Collide: Managing Across Cultures„. I plan to publish our German original and our spanish translation of the work once we’re done.

I’ve been quite occupied with university work this week, and I remembered my Todo-List from last monday. If I’m scrolling over it, I definately had a Skype-Chat (and not a Skype-Call) with Philippe and Olivier about the translation, enjoyed a longer discussion with Robert about the potential of the new World of Warcraft blog at gamers-living.com, and I finished the paper for Spanish 2. However, I haven’t kept up with my ideas about „E-Awareness Management“ and only found time to register instead of designing the blog for Rafael. I’m sorry about this, but sometimes there’s too much to do besides the internet mania I’m facing all day long. The rest of my list is still meant to be done.

Good news is that both Kat and I were quite fascinated by a large appartment in Flensburg’s city, and we’ll probably move over there in July. ;)

I don’t know why I post this here, but this TV Spot by Mentos is very crazy. I don’t know what drove the guys in the marketing team, and I can’t decide if it’s good or bad, but the few seconds are worth watching the spot. But in the end, it’s much better than those spots about „Why do you buy XYZ? – Because it is so good. – Why is that so? – Because I am stupid and get 5 bucks for showing my face in this stupid spot!“ Thanks, opting out now.

Das BSI – Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik ist eines meiner mittlerweile gern gelesenen Online-Lektüren in Fragen zur „e-Security“, insbesondere deswegen, weil ich immer wieder unter den angehenden Jungmanagern im Studium ein nicht ausreichendes und manchmal vollkommen fehlendes Grundverständnis für den Umgang mit den digitalen Medien feststelle. Themen wie Sicherheit, Dokumentenschutz, Vertraulichkeit, Umgang mit E-Mail, Blogs und Meinungen – das alles sind meistens Themen des Bereiches Ungehört und Niegesehen (man beachte hierbei die „Wortwechsler“ im Italics).

Just beim gerade fortlaufenden Lesen meiner RSS Feeds fand ich einen Artikel über das jüngste Werk der BSI genannt „Antispam – Strategien“. Laut Heise wird dabei klar gegen Spam gearbeitet, denn „den Schwerpunkt legten die Autoren auf die Erläuterung technischer Maßnahmen„. Ich habe mir für das kommende Wochenende das entsprechende PDF schon einmal parat gelegt und freue mich auf gute 147 Seiten…

While reading my own articles for correction via my RSS reader, I noticed that the extended posts weren’t displayed in the feed and no link hinted at the remaining content. I modified the RSS Syndication and Atom Templates to replace the original content, and I hope it’s not going to unleash an additional load to the servers:

Old:
New:

Richard Edelman, President and CEO of Edelman PR and co-author of their company’s blog Speak Up, wrote an interesting article about the recent movements in the news company OhmyNews in Korea.

The paper receives 200 stories a day from these volunteers. Much of the professional staff time is spent on editing and fact checking these stories before they are posted. In fact 70% of the stories submitted are accepted for publication. The citizen reporters must be verified through government registration numbers, and then sign onto a strict code of ethics including a promise not to write a story for personal financial gain and to tell the truth in each piece.

OhmyNews has embraced the philosophy that every citizen can be a reporter.

I suggest to read the full article as it appears to be a prototype for a new form of media awareness and the use of traditional media. Especially the Mainstream-Media (MSM) would like to learn from this role model which is nothing else but combining forces of professional journalists and their volunteering counterpart. But as these are still professional authors, it reflects nothing else but the current problems of the Blogosphere in which journalists fight bloggers and criticize them at all costs to protect themselves and the MSM. Perhaps the MSM needs to rethink more and more… and revise their processes to include this volunteer work of free authors and blog authors, too.