A pleasant surprise

September 26th, 2008 by Cristina Costa

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.org

“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! 🙂

Do you Twit?

May 19th, 2008 by Cristina Costa

It’s been a while since I last posted here. I kinda miss it.

Today seems a good day to post, especially because I have decided to take part of one more challenge: this time is twitter and I was wondering if you were interested in twittering or at least checking what it is going on there. The challenge page can be seen here and basically it all comes down to one thing: Twitter fun!

Let me tell you how I got so into twitter. I always start off being very suspicious and quite reluctant about the new fashionable tools to which you get invited almost on a daily basis. Twitter didn’t appeal that much to me at the beginning – I am never an early adopter
 Embarassed it seem to be quite vague and ineffective… to be honest 
and so after signing up to one more account I didn’t give it much thought. However, during the preparation of the earth day event it became extremely useful as a way to get to know the other members of the project a little bit better. Along the way I started getting more and more involved in it as people were sharing resources, expressing opinions, talking a little bit more about what they were doing at that exact moment (how it is raining again, and Hurray 
 the football team scored again! – those little things that make daily life more bearable and also make you wear a smile on your face as you think to yourself
it’s not only me who has all this paper work to take care of!) Nothing like experiencing in context! Cool

Then with diigo offering the possibility to twitter your bookmarks away and igoogle allowing me to add my twitter friends’ feeds to my home page, twitter has become part of my daily wanders in cyberspace. I got convinced about its potential. Finally!

I have linked to so many useful resources my twitter friends have twittered about, I have followed other interesting people who otherwise I would probably not have come across, and I have benefited loads from what other people bother to share. The twitter-land is indeed a GREAT micro-world.

The learning with computers community has recognized that and is now promoting the Microblogging challenge. I hope you can join us! 😉

More info about twitter can be found here.

Text originally posted here.

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