Adobe’s Takeover of Macromedia

The heading says it all: This deal was worth approximately $3.4 billion, and Adobe basically inhaled Macromedia and all their software packages. The shareholders of Macromedia were given Adobe shares in return, and the Macromedia shareholders will own about 18% of the final Adobe-Macromedia company. Adobe will surely empower its marketshare for enterprise software solutions and mobile communication, especially by combining the web- and graphicdesign departments. How the final spectre of futurous applications for developper tools, the resulting contents and related media equipment might turn out to look like, it’s yet another prospering business.

/von

Blog Burnout Syndrome

Duncan Riley writes about the Blog Burnout and offers a simple solution for professional bloggers as one easy lesson: take the weekend off. The Probloggers usually have a 7 day week if they maintain a blog as major source for their income or add the blogging on weekends on top of their 5 or 6 day workshift. For those who do it privately and free, the idea of taking the weekend off is not a major problem, but for those others it’s a problematic situation:

…when you don’t blog you lose traffic and if your chasing money as well, you potentially lose revenue.

In the end, I believe everyone must find his/her own best-working practise to solve this riddle about keeping blogging, life and work under one banner – being yourself.

/von

Blogroll Modifications

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I believe it’s time to modify my Blogroll in this blog’s navigation bar. To be honest – it disturbs me greatly. Since I’m reading over 150 blogs and newsfeeds each day (once they’re updated by using my RSS OWL aggregator), this handful bunch of links does not conform with the concept of Blogrolls. One idea instead of maintaining the Blogroll here is surely to publish the major categories of my feed list which will directly link to the OPML files, or I might only link the whole OPML file instead of pushing the other blogs into my content.

On the other hand, I wonder if Blogrolls are useful or rather not. In the end, it is just a nice service to push other blogs and increase their pagerank in search engines (unless you no-follow them). Keeping this in my mind, the whole concept of a Blogroll might become redundant since I am definately not using my Sichelputzer blog to jump to others. I do prefer to get content as fast as possible – which is the automated process of reading feeds. That’s why my Blogroll element might disappear sooner or later today.

/von

DCFP – Democratic Chritstian Filipino Party

The first screendesign for our fictional party in the Election Project with the focus on the Philippines has been completed. Here’s a small version of the website’s upcoming layout. I mainly oriented myself at already established political parties from the Philippines, USA, and of course Germany. The significant part of the layout are the style elements found in the Filipino Flag as red and blue are dominating colors, and three stars are combined around a sun in a white triangle form on the flag. You will find these style elements except the sun in the following screenshot if you direct your view to both the head- and subline (the stars) and the navigational bars at the right and left side of the layout (red and blue).

I might start to utilize the functionalities of a blog, and I’m probably going to choose Blogspirit as service provider for the entire project. Nevertheless, I’ve been already investigating other software packages… this is purely the survival of the fittest. ;)

/von

This morning…

…I’ve got some things to do while listening to the Chemical Brothers‚ newest smashing hit:

  • Galvanize something… I’d really like to!
  • Copy the VWL 2 materials from Kat’s script.
  • Create, maintain and publish the fictional DCFP blog/website for the Election Project in Regional Development 2.
  • Get dressed… since both of us sit again on my couch, laptopping the whole world.
  • „Disban the Senate“, or logically our laptops. We’re medial addicts. No newspapers, just digitalized tidbits of society flash on our screens…
  • Drink less coffee. One of these cups of blackness really kicked in now.
  • Consult the optician for Kat’s eye problems.
  • Upload some pictures of Andi’s re-birthday party on Saturday.
Ok, that’s it for now. I’m sure the list is going to become bigger and bigger the longer I’m awake.

/von

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…

/von

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.

/von

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?

/von

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… ;)

/von

Bible-Boys vs. „It’s our Saturday!“

It’s 10:15 am in the morning while Kat and I sit on my comfy booth. We’ve been watching some Jamba-TV, reading virtual news via RSS and exchanging links and gadgets via ICQ. Our relationship can be quite digital here. Nevertheless, just a few minutes ago we were interrupted by the door bell. The door bell on a Saturday morning? It’s my Saturday! I turned the Jamba-TV’s volume off and moved to the door. So much about our digital morning!

Before I’d pick up the intercom, I usually take a look through the doorspy: Two guys stood infront of my door, one to the right side with a bunch of papers, the other a little bit distant. Okay? I shook my head since I wondered how they got into the house already – that’s the idea of the intercom system, or not? I opened the door and was shown a small „The Bible“ flyer and heard the first guy talking about „…we are sorry if we woke you up but…“ – well yes, you should be sorry! I just mumbled in my utmost devilish voice: „Can’t you read? The sign on my mail box says ‚No advertisements!‘,“ and closed the door. Annoying Bible-Boys… and before you plan to judge, it was not one culture of the major churches but a sect.

Have you ever thought about the word „sect“? Well why is it called „sect“? Another most simple answer – sects are like an „insects“, nothing but parasites.

/von