Just some neat picture I acquired through some facebook app:

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 09:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

[Trigami-Review]

Prologue

Travelers always have been an interesting target for web communities – they seek information about places far away – and they want information tailored to their specific needs and they want it reliable. All those are requirements an internet community about travel can give them. People writing about all those places – probably people similar to them be it backpacking or staying in 5* hotels can be found in communities. Also you’ll have the chance to make a picture of those people visiting their profiles or following their posts, and therefore be able to judge about the reliability about information.

But I don’t want to write epic descriptions about travel communities in general – just to set up those three features I would seek for in travel communities:

• get information about places far away
• tailored to my needs
• get community functions to connect with other and to allow me to judge about reliability

Depending on the extend those features are fulfilled I might be interested in sharing my own experiences in such a community

The community

Thanks to Trigami, I was made aware of the chance to have a glimpse at the new travel community dodo.com. Choosing the exotic and extinct dodo-bird (not to confuse with the professor at the University of Bamberg, carrying that first name) as an mascot. Dodo.com provides six main navigation sections.

• The first home sections gives an overview about current community activities like new travel tips, new members, new fotos, new videos and new travelogue entries.
• The second section “travel tips” shows user reviews about something the different sections remind me a bit to qype, where you can write reviews about places, restaurants and sights, too.
• “Travelogues” consists of peoples travel experiences. Each entry there is accompanied by a map, showing the location of area it is about, and information about the member writing the entry.
• Then there are two sections with Photos and videos. Each is offering “new” and “popular” items, and a categorization via country. You are also encouraged to upload your own material – but it hast to be attached to a travelogue.
• The last section probably is the most interesting one – the classic “my”-section being the gateway to most of the individual community settings & connections. You can get an overview about your profile there, change your Profile, see all your travel tips, travelogues, photos, videos, bookmarks and of course your friends and messages.
• Apart from those main features there is also the obligatory (?) making of Blog with information about the making of dodo.com. It’s quite interesting to catch a view pictures of the young team behind dodo.com there.

My thoughts

So far dodo.com offers all features, which are quite essential to publish some travel information on the net. All items on the homepage are well structured and easy to understand. Even a total beginner, or people not to familiar with Internet communities should have no problems in getting around at the homepage. The requirements I stated in my prologue are partially fulfilled. I can retrieve infos, I can judge a little bit, by looking into people’s profiles – but how can I tailor them to my needs? Some more categories e.g. “backpacking” or “luxury travel” or at least a basic folksonomy could greatly improve likelihood to find interesting information.

But it is still beta so the features are yet(?) limited. They provide a well working homepage, but they lack some excellence I would hope for, in such a new piece of social software. Things I would like to see there:

• Possibility to link external media sources – connect the community to your feeds on Flickr, Youtube, Blip.tv, picasa, Gallery2
• Connect your personal profile to other travel related pages e.g. Couchsurfing and hospitalityclub
• Make the content accessible via Folksonomy (aren’t tag clouds always a nice gimmick?)
• More options for your profile. If you’ve seen a few facebook profiles, you know how much time people might actually spend organizing there user profile. A portfolio of widgets and the possibility to post own marked up code should be a minimum

I'm really interested in following the further development of the community.

You're chance to win!

In order to encourage users to register and become active members of the dodo.com community the makers are making a draw at the end of the year, giving away a trip worth 10.000 EUR. The more activity and the more persons you invite into the community, the higher your chance to win! So if you sign in to dodo.com – be kind and use my invitation link.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found, on subject, Travel at 12:25 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Last week I visited the concert of the Bavarian group Bananafishbones in Bamberg. I was not only present there to get some pictures for the homepage of the Live-Club (the place where the band was playing), but also to enjoy myself by listening to the music of their new record. To most of the people the Bananafishbones are only known through one ore two songs, which were really successful in Germany. The first one “Come to sin” was published as song for a Germany wide advertisement for a fashion label. Later the relaxed country song “Easy day” (featuring Franka Potente) achieved country wide attention. But in between those songs and the current record the band was not inactive. They created soundtracks for the movies “Die Wilden Kerle 1-4” and “Open Water 2”. The Bananafishbones are a very versatile band, which can’t be categorized into a specific genre. My friend Daniel, who wrote an review for Feki.de, describes it as “atmospheric rock, punk-country, jazz-rock, avantgardist”. I was really surprised how the band consisting of only three people with three instruments managed to play such versatile and varied songs. I'll do a review of their album, as soon as I get hold of it. Meanwhile have a look at the "Best of" of my concert pictures.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 19:07 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Did I tell you that I like films like Magnolia, Bin ich schön? or Pulp Fiction? Somehow the narrative style with many stories which are related more or less to each other fascinates me. I couldn't find an adequate term to describe this type of film but currently "Love Actually" is running on RTL and - although it is kinda soppy - I like it

I'll write a view words about the story after the movie is over.

Jay's rating (4/5)

Continue reading "Love Actually"

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 18:54 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Several outtakes of this book where already posted on SPON, and within the Spiegel Print Magazine. These articles had convinced me to buy this book as a reading material for my holidays. Flanked by Noam Chomsky’s “Profit over people” I got quite an interesting view on globalization.

The first part of the book (which is not covered by the outtakes) provides necessary background information to fully understand the rest of the book, and already this overview was worth buying the whole book. The first chapters give a decent picture of the historic development of the worlds leading economies. This information is quite helpful for a good understanding of the ongoing changes in our world.

Steingart describes the current situation as very dangerous for Europe and the US. Western Countries have very high social standards, where some Asian countries don’t care at all, but given a free market the goods are distributed all over the globe and compete with each other regardless how they have been manufactured. Countries like China even protect there economies by different actions (like keeping the exchange rates for their currencies artificially down). Because of this situation our high social standards are endangered. The only chance to protect these standard is in Steingart's opinion to establish a free trade region between Europe and the US (which have similar standards) and protect this region against other economies which do not keep up those standards.

In my opinion this book gives a very realistic image of the current globalization process and Steingart's recommendations should not stay unheard.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 01:24 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (2)

I can't resist to make a seperated blog entry for this song. Once again a senior musician had the honor to do a title song for the new James Bond movie. In my opinion this track really represents the whole movie. It is heavy, it has powerful guitar riffs and it swings with a little melancholy. Exactly like the whole James Bond movie. I find it very well adjusted to the whole movie - just like Madonna's rather electronic "Die Another Day" matched for the gadget loaded James Bond in "Die Another Day". I made a list of the last main titles:

• Madonna - Die Another Day
• Garbage - The world is not enough
• Sheryl Crow - Tomorrow never dies
• Tina Turner - Goldeneye
  

Which do you like best? Preferring the new one like me?

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 15:01 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

The new James Bond movie is a very controversial topic. An old problem did divide the public opinion once more – The actor of James Bond has to be exchanged from time to time where each actor has his personal strengths and weaknesses. The second problem seems to be that in Ian Flemmings original novels the character of James Bond himself undergoes some developments. Casino Royal is not the most current book of this series but actually the first! It tells a lot of the story why James Bond is the character he is in the later movies. For this purpose a cut – and the change of the actor was a good idea. I couldn’t imagine Pierce Brosnan acting with the emotional depth.. Of course some will say now – this is not our James Bond – he’d rather be detached and invulnerable. But the James Bond in Casino Royal is just more the man from Ian Flemming’s original novels than the smart, invulnerable hero he was during the last movies. It is a more human Bond.

I visited the movie yesterday accompanied by Grützekraftwerk’s personnel watching the original version in English. There are a few reasons why you should watch the movie:

• Chris Connell’s (Audioslave and former Soundgarden lead singer) theme song - the intro of the movie is really appetizing
• Ludger Pistor’s English is really funny (he plays a swiss banker)
• Adorable Eva Green - I admired her since “Kingdom of Heaven”
• Bond’s Aston Martin DBS

After a lot of doubts whether Daniel Craig would contribute to a great movie I think the public opinion has changed – currently the movie rates 8.1 on Imdb where most of the older Bond movies rate between 6 and 7 points. (Of course the rating will drop a little, since currently mainly Band-enthusiasts visited the movie, but I think it will still be higher than the last movies:

• Die Another Day (2002) 6.2
• The World is not enough (1999) 6.3
• Tomorrow never dies (1997) 6.4
• Goldeneye (1995) 6.9
  

Jay’s rating (5/5)

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 13:41 | Comments (2) | Trackback (1)

Last week I got myself the new album of "Sunrise Avenue", they are a very likeable Finnish pop-rock band and their song "Fairytale Gone Bad" is part of the German Single Charts since a few weeks. Some of you might call there style just "mainstream". I like the mixture of energetic songs like "It ain't the way" or "Fight 'Til Dying" and slower songs like "Heal me" and of course the album contains some plain easy listening ("Destiny").

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 18:15 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)