The news of Adobes online photoshop offering was all over the place. Some less meticulous people were basically parroting the press release and mistakenly claiming it was a free online photoshop replacement.
Of course, anyone who used it for more than five minutes was able to see that it was actually just Flickr on steroids, or an online mix of photobooth, iphoto and flickr. In other words, you weren't really able to do any real photo editing with it.
That was disappointing.
It turns out that there really is a decent online photo editor though. It's called splashup, and has been available for a while. It isn't quite as comprehensive as photoshop or the Gimp, but it does offer quite a few really nice things, like layers, effects, and the usual tools you would associate with a real photo editor.
I played with it for a while, and was able to recreate most of the worksteps I tend to use frequently. It might not be a complete replacement for one of the major editors, but it is certainly enough for a lot of things you might want to do. It even offers direct acces to your picassa or flickr photo galleries, something that is pretty convenient indeed.
is a lovely thing. There'S nothing quite like listening to a bunch of geeks with flow.
Unless they don't have any.
Most of them tend to spend a lot of time talking about things that are near and ddear to their hearts, like Star Wars, Role Playing or ancient computer systems. But there is at least one who you might learn something from.
the SEO Rapper.
Now, I'm not a big fan of the whole Search Engine Optimization thing.
It's always sort of had a bad spam aftertaste.
But in this case, I'm glad I man aged to put aside m predjudices long enough to listen to the track. Because I actually learned a few things.
Muscially, well, let's just say the SEO rapper won't be up for an grammys in the next couple of years. And the song doesn't have any of the humor you might be used to from MC Frontalot or Hawking. But it is chock full of info that might come in handy some day.
Besides, it's one of those things you just have to see.
is about to come crashing down on us. A mad dash for cash has been taking place at the highest levels of industry and media for the last couple of months and soon the pockets will be jingling.
Ever watch the whole circus and think, "damn, I want some of that"?
No? Me neither, but if you did, well, now you can.
'prooms' has been set up to help the little guy grab some of that cash that is supposed to be flowing so freely during the upcoming extravaganza. Anyone with a room, sofa or closet to let can put it up on prooms.
And if you don't have a place to rent, or just don't want any Fußball-fans in your space, you can sit back and chuckle at the ballsiness of people willing to charge 100 Euro a night for a sofa.
I think I just started hating humanity a little bit more ...
Seem to develop in waves. First we just had the standard this is me, these are my friends, aren?t we all cool. Judging by the longer success of places like Orkut and Friendster, that wasn?t really enough to keep people around.
The next wave was of the ?this is me, this is the music I like, these are my friends, this is the music we like, aren?t we all cool variety?. This particular form of social networking had a bit more staying power, since it offered more to do then to simply stare at your profile all day hitting reload and waiting to see what someone said about you.
Now you had a context in which to frame your social network, basic tools for planning some real life social events, and of course, music to listen to. Now you could spend all day listening to music, finding annoying new ways to break, er I mean personalize, your profile, and check out other peoples pictures from the events you will never get invited to while hitting reload and waiting to see what someone else said about you.
The current wave would seem to be location based. Now you can grab the group of friends you may have made and expanded upon with the earlier systems, take them out to concerts by bands you have discovered online, have dinner, and write reviews about the places you were at. Tupalo is one of those.
Put together by Rock Star survivors, it has two other things going for it. A name that still has all it's vowels while not sounding like an obvious copy of anywhere else, and a seriously kick ass little logo. For Austrians it has one other thing. A pretty active local community that has been busy writing reviews of and making comments on local places and businesses. I learned more about my neighborhood in 15 minutes on Tupalo than I did in 5 years of actually living there.
There is going to be a bit of a bash for that community this week as well. So if you want to take your social networking offline it may be something worth checking out.
has a habit of pissing people off. People with a lot of money. Big companies. Big companies with a lot of money and the sort of scruples that wouldn't stop them from hiring private security companies to do a little snooping.
Not that that should be surprising. There have been plenty of interesting stories in the last couple of years about companies doing things like that. And activists have been getting spied upon and infiltrated for as long as the have been getting uppity.
Still, in a time when everyone is giving up there personal info for a few magic beans, governments are redefifing their right to know, and most people think it couldn't happen to them, it's sort of interesting to get a detailed story about the lengths people will go to in order to gain a bit of info.
And thanks to a link provided by Mr. Grenzfurthner, we have one that reads like a bad best seller. Mother Jones has a loverly bit about ex Secret Service agents, big money and activists.
Wien | 19.4.2008 | 11:42 
