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Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

My Thoughts on <head> Conference 2008

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Last weekend, a special event took place: The first edition of <head> Conference. In case you haven't heard of it yet - <head> 2008 was a web conference that took place on the web, or as the organizers kept pointing out, everywhere.

attending head conference online

Paul Boeg "live" at <head> Conference

There were some local venues, so called "hubs", were attendees could gather to follow the talks. Apart from that, people joined the conference online - both attendees and speakers: Instead of making you come to the web conference, let's make the web conference come to you.

The three-day conference covered a broad range of topics, such as community building, information graphics, etc. but the focus was clearly on web design and (frontend) development. (more...)

Posted in Design, Development, The Web | No Comments »

Powerset – Wikipedia meets ELIZA

Monday, May 26th, 2008

The brand new web-app Powerset is a semantic search engine that aggregates information from Wikipedia as well as other sources. As the search engine understands natural English language to a certain extend, it is able to reply to questions – e.g. if you ask Powerset "Who invented the web?", it will answer "The Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989." and point you to a bunch of relevant articles.

Promotional Video by Powerset

On first sight, Powerset might seem like a combination of Wikipedia and the concept of ELIZA ("what is ELIZA?") or todays chatterbots, but it is much more than that. It offers an ass-kicking interface for browsing and searching Wikipedia. The search engine even extends Wikipedia's functionality by generating outlines and linking to further relevant information. It resembles ideas from Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web and is in some ways similar to the knowledge database Freebase (actually, Powerset also aggregates data from Freebase).

Apart from all that, Powerset is a great example of slick interface design and information architecture. Try it yourself: Ready. Powerset. Go.

Posted in Design, Semantics, The Web | No Comments »

Laserpower rocken hart!

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Dieser Tage erschien die erste EP der neuen und heißen mannheimer Band Luis & Laserpower! Das freut mich besonders, da ich daran nicht ganz unbeteiligt war.

Ein Aufkleber von Luis und Laserpower auf einer Betonwand

Photo: Splashed Wall by Kirk Butterfield (cc)

Interesse geweckt? Den Song "Gib mir mehr!" könnt ihr zur Zeit umsonst bei regioactive runterladen. Außerdem touren Laserpower gerade durch Deutschland. Hingehen! Alle!

Posted in Design, The Real World | No Comments »