Samstag, 15. Februar 2003

Peace demonstrations moving: Anti-War demonstrations are underway in many different countries. 500000 people are on their feet in London. Berlin is reporting the same figure. The BBC is showing pictures taken by people and then sent in via email or MMS.

Sausages and Baghdad: Well wadda ya know. From this entry over at dictionary.com it would appear that "War" and the German word for sausage "Wurst" come from the same Indo-European root - *wers- which means to confuse or mix up. There's a moral in there somewhere.

Getting personal: Russell finds out that people read his weblog. Which reminds me of a similar story that happened to me a couple of weeks ago: I was at a possible new client (large European company) talking about this and that. On leaving - one of the guys turned to me and said: "so how is your wife's new phone then"? I was so amazed I wondered how the heck he knew she had a new one. Of course it turned out he reads my weblog - which was kind of cool. At the same time it reminded me about how the lines between personal stuff and work stuff can blur if you write a weblog. There is a certain danger in this as others have found out - on the other hand there is also a certain sense of cameraderie that can come out of it. And obviously lots of room for opportunities.

Weblog comments - no!: One of the things I think really suck about weblogs are the comments bit. Which is why I have them turned off. If you check out most of the comment threads on other people's weblogs - you tend to read things like this. Even on the few weblogs I read, I have already seen too many flame-baits and flame-wars. This gets too much like the usenet threads that end up containing no real information - just nasty bitching at each other. So my advice is: turn those comments off. Use trackbacks and pingbacks if you can. Then at least the person who replies is a weblogger him/herself and can comment in their own space.

BlogTalk: Papa Scott points to the upcoming European Weblogging conference in Vienna. I had plain forgotten about it. Already there a good number of people down for papers etc. and I am wondering whether to do one myself. Unfortunately I already have a possible something down for the 23rd of May so that may be that anyway. In case you are in my part of the world - there are cheap flights with AirBerlin from Dortmund to Vienna - if you're planning on going.

Run - don't walk: To your nearest bookstore and buy a copy of this great book. Just out is "Portale und Webapplikationen mit Apache Frameworks" - and as you can probably gather it is a German book. Carsten and I wrote the chapter on Cocoon which contains a detailed description on the portal and authentication frameworks. The other chapters are good too and contain stuff on Jetspeed, Turbine, Velocity and much much more.