A pleasant surprise
In the last few months I have been witnessing a more visible presence of the German community online and really great stuff has emerged from my sporadic explorations through .de and .at ground. Mind you, they probably were already there for long, and I have definitely missed a lot, but I am now trying to catch up with it, or at least trying to keep up to speed with the latests.
[ amazing how we can easily restrict our searches and connections to an English speaking world... at least this is my perspective. I google in English, I tag in English, 95% of my network and community activities have English as the main communication channel. that's not bad at all, but there's other landsacpes emerging in paralel, and it is great to know that this is happening]
There are two initiatives I would sepcially like to mention today:
“Mixxt is an online kit for creating your own social network. Individuals, organisations or enterprises can start their own community with mixxt and don’t even need a technical background knowledge for that. Your new social network is just a few mouse clicks away. Think of various applications being possible with mixxt (the sky is the limit): Share your know-how and your interests with others, organise your meetings and events, bring your friends, colleagues or business partners together on the Internet and keep in touch with other users.”
By default, mixxt offers the following features for free:
- public or private networks
- member administration
- single sign on for all networks
- discussion forum
- wiki (text administration)
- event module and calender
- photo sharing
- newsletter and group mail, being send directly to the members’ email addresses
- private message center
- adjustable privacy settings
- news import via RSS-feed
- data export via CSV
- video and blog module on request
This definitelly looks good. 
This week I also joined a group called everything web 2.0 in another network I was introduced a couple of months ago: Xing.
And there while in my random explorations I found this reference to a new micro-blogging service: Bleeper.de
What really impressed me in yet this one-more-service was not it’s interface (quite similar to twitter I must say) but the fact that it is a free service running on open source software and automatically licensing all the users posted data under a CC license. What can I say, I found it at least interesting!
And if my bad “Deutsch” is something to trust, looks like that in the future bleeper will be working on more feautures:
- More AJAXand user interface;
- Roadmap;
- Pulling and sending data from others services such as Twitter, Jaiku, etc.;
- Facebook Integration;
- Picture, Video and Audio updates.
It definitelly doesn’t look bad.
It now makes me curious to know what is being doen in other countries and other languages. If you know of some cool, yet less popular initiatives out there, please let us know.
…. I am off to finally subcribe for French classes. Who know…one of these days I will “invading” the web with some lousy French too…and hopefully bumping with other pleasant surprises!
Well I have just discovered Journler (courtesy of Lyn Rees who came to fix my computer last night) It’s a freebie but only available for Mac. The rest of you have probably discovered this already but I was so pleased by it, I thought I’d just share it with anyone who hasn’t seen it. The reason this post is at 1.40 is that I am still playing with it . It comes pretty close to what I’ve been looking for as a big chunk of a PLE…..
This is what Victor Mihailescu says about it
“Journler is a daily notebook. The program provides an elegant, powerful outlet for your thoughts. Not only does Journler give your thoughts a place where you can find and bind them as needed, Journler helps you connect those thoughts with the source of their inspiration. By combining a richness of text and media technology, Journler allows you to add writing to your digital life without losing sight of other media.”
This is a very interesting point – I also speak a number of other languages, including Norwegian, which is my mother tongue, but like you I tend to “surf in English” (except for reading a Norwegian daily, and few blogs in Norwegian… There might be amazing stuff going on in the Italian, Spanish and German blogosphere, but I simply can’t keep up. Or I don’t try hard enough?
Certainly food for thought though!
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