Yesterday I arrived at Vegas for Microsoft’s Mix conference. And thanks to my lucky charm I got a room with a view at Mandalay Bay Hotel – from my window in the 33rd floor I overlook the complete strip, the famous Las Vegas Boulevard sporting all the grand casinos:

I brought my netbook, so this is just a little preview: watch out for more photos (and HDRs) next week!

On the right side: MGM Grand (8000 beds) is America’s largest hotel.

Vegas at night, taken from the cab on my way from the airport to the hotel.

This Saturday I’m flying to Las Vegas to attend Mix conference. Microsoft Austria invited me (all these years of iResistance are finally paying off!) to visit the world’s capital of gambling – of course I’ll report my trip on this very blog and via Twitter. After my return from the US you and me hopefully know anything there is to know about one-armed bandits, striptease clubs with high moral standards, new Microsoft web publishing techniques and the status quo of the cloud.

Plus I expect to do a couple of video interviews – I’m not sure why Microsoft called this place “The Commons”, but there is definitely a hang-out and socializing place, which I will take full advantage of since some sessions are quite code-related.

Looking forward to the keynotes though – plus the various presentations of Windows 7 Mobile, HTML 5, Silverlight 4 and many more. I’m curious how Redmond images the future of the web. Kudos to the guys who built the session planner – very handy and necessary tool as there are over 100 sessions. So far these are on my personal list:

• 10 Ways to attack a Design Problem and come out winning by Robby Ingebretsen
• Opening Up Opportunity with Twitter by Ryan Sarver
• Microsoft Surface goes Social: Research Project at the University of Linz
• The laws of user experience by Anthony Franco
• Copyright: a cloudy subject by Jonathan Zuck

And I don’t want to miss the Hour with Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s head of research.

I am going to stay at Mandalay Bay Ressort. The event also takes place there. Of course the hotel – it’s more like a small hotel-world, actually – features its own casino:

Las Vegas is full of casinos, but none quite like the one at Mandalay Bay. Our 135,000 square-foot gaming environment was designed to make waves along the Strip. You’ll play in a tropical setting of flowing water, lush foliage, and exotic architecture. And whether you prefer slots or tables, blackjack or poker, you’ll find a full selection of your favorite games.

Gotta see this – even though I assure you that I don’t play my personal “favorite games” at a casino Next week I’ll keep you updated about Mix conference, so stay tuned!

In January I visited the exhibition Medienwelten at Technisches Museum Wien. It’s a fascinating trip back to the very beginnings of information transmission – a must for anyone interested in the early beginnings of this media society:

The medien.welten exhibition presents the history of transmission media as well as storage media. On 2.500 square meters the evolution of the modern media-system becomes alive. In addition to hundreds of historical artefacts, images and texts, the exhibition features a virtual-information-room that goes beyond the scope of conventional museum exhibitions.

Last Sunday I returned to the museum, but this time I brough my camera. There’s plenty to explore: from early telegraph systems which used a piano-keyboard for entering messages to a historic cinema. These pictures only highlight a bit of the exhibition – so if you ever come to Vienna, pay a visit to the exhibition yourself.

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The medien.welten exhibition presents the history of transmission media as well as storage media. On 2.500 square meters the evolution of the modern media-system is described. In addition to hundreds of historical artefacts, images and texts, the exhibition features a virtual-information-room that goes beyond the scope of conventional museum exhibitions.

Funny job descriptions turn up these day – have you ever heard of a “blog relations consultant”? I sure did today, and I can’t say it was an enjoyable encounter. Just know this: unloading your backlink-ridden postings upon a popular blog is not called a “content partnership”. I would call it backlink scraping, but that sounds a lot more unfriendly, doesn’t it?

Could it be there are altruist blog angels, interested in leveraging your popularity rank for utterly unselfish reasons? Unlikely, even though the first paragraph might sound tempting to some:

We’re currently reaching out to bloggers like you to form a content partnership, or a guest blogging partnership, where our Professional writes can contribute guest blog posts on your blog once or twice a month.

Hang on, it’s getting a lot funnier:

Our Writers would not be writing marketing material, but would like to provide Unique content for your blog. Please fill out this form if you are interested so that we can set up an editorial calendar.

Two note-worthy facts:

a) I had no idea that the difference between marketing and “great” content lies solely in the “uniqueness” of the latter.
b) This difference between the two mentioned content categories sounds even weirder considering that the person who sent me this e-mail works for a company which is “marketing” in its name.

So, sadly, I’m not going to start a “content partnership” with you. But I have a free consulting advice for you: set up your homepage before you start pestering innocent bloggers. Somebody might actually take a look at your URL, and read the following sentence:

We will use a unique combination that will allow you to fully utilize the Internet.

And then he might click around the bit and start to wonder, if a completely empty homepage is indeed “he latest trends of marketing that will literally put our customers first”…

WordPress offers a fascinatingly wide range of options: thanks to the power and the creativity of the open source community, the world’s most popular CMS has developed from a “blog-only” product into a multifaceted platform. Hundreds of plugins are waiting to cater almost every web publisher’s needs. These days, two new plugins take WordPress to the next level by integrated elaborate social network features. BuddyPress is now available at version 1.2 which plays along well with standard WP-installations; the previous version required WP multiuser edition. And then there’s Mingle, a new brilliant extension by Blair Williams, author of the (genius!) PrettyLink plugin.

Even though both plugins offer similar functionalities, they take a completely different approach at turning WordPress into a social network. While BuddyPress aims at running a stand-alone social network site, Mingle extends the community capabilities of nay existing blog. I installed it here on datadirt yesterday. Curious for a test-drive? Just click the new link Profile in the main menu! In the following posting I’ll explain why extending a blog with social network features is generally a smart idea.

Why bother with registered users?

This questions indeed comes to mind: on the one hand, standard blog-usage scenarios (i.e. reading plus commenting) don’t require any kind of registration, on the other hand the advantage of an extra user profile might not be obvious immediately. To clarify this, let me begin with a little “social network theory” by answering the question: What are social networks made of? The following elements form the core of any social site:

• User management (including registration, either direct or via 3rd party authentication)
• User profiles (minimal version: avatar picture, info-text, homepage URL)
• Friends/relations management: including friendship requests, notifications etc.
• Status-updates: the main user interaction tool, aggregated on an “activity stream” overview page.
• Privacy settings: users can chose if their profiles/status updates are visible to friends only or the public.

Any extra feature – newsletters, photo galleries, add-on applications, video-uploads and so on – are just the icing on the cake. The main success cause for any social network is not feature-richness but economies of scale: if a sufficient number of people is actively using the network, the tools start making sense.

Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not talking large numbers. Facebook is interesting to people because it has become extremely widespread as a “general interest network”. But there are plenty specialized networks which don’t require huge quantities of users. Any group of people connected by the same project or the same interest will love these tools.

Take a closer look at the list above: doesn’t it remind you of the “good old” bulletin board ear? Indeed: phpBB and other discussion boards are not so different from today’s social networks. Status updates have replaced threads, and realtime has replaced the archive metaphor. (BuddyPress even includes a “traditional” discussion board.)

In his well-knows essay Seth Godin explains micro-communities which he refers to as Tribes:

A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature.
Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger. But more important, they’re enabling countless new tribes to be born—groups of ten or ten thousand or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming

In my opinion, user profiles for registered readers are the perfect tribe-tool for bloggers: the most valuable asset of any blog is the community, the house guests, the regular readers. If you run a niche-blog and have already drawn the attention of various experts to your site, expanding your blog with social network features does make a lot of sense.

datadirt goes social network

This year I added a couple of new social media features to datadirt: users can either register directly of authenticate via their Facebook, Twitter or MySpace Accounts. They can upload their own user pic (instead of the standard Gravatar), but until now, only guest authors had profile pages. Now that Mingle is in full effect, the “socialification” of datadirt is complete.

All current users now automatically have a profile page – if you’ve read this blog as a guest, I invite you to test-drive the new features! You can chose of your profile page is public or only visible to friends, you can add a homepage link and a description plus you might find some like-minded friends. So just give it a try: registering takes less than 30 seconds:

register your datadirt account

Some technical details: BuddyPress or Mingle?

BuddyPress: Social Network in-a-box

BuddyPress is a full-service-solution and it lives up to its claim:

Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress.

First you need to install a “naked” WordPress, then you activate the BuddyPress plugin which includes a social-networking optimized template. More themes will follow soon, and the included one can easily be modified. BuddyPress includes a quite elaborate “activity stream”, group management, private messaging, friend management, user blogging features, profile pages and a discussion board – it’s definitely all-in-one. There are even a few plugins available which add new features.

The developers set up a demo page, plus there are some live communities running BP – just take a look here. The advantages of te plugin are obvious: if you’re planning on starting a private or niche social network, this is the perfect solution. If you’re used to installing WordPress, the setup will take you about 5 minutes, including the ftp upload. But there’s also a catch: if you already run a blog, it can be hard to integrate BuddyPress smoothly into your existing theme.

Mingle – the add-on solution

I decided to go with Mingle here on datadirt, because Blair’s plugin offers less features, but the integration is a breeze. Mingle lacks groups, private messaging and a bulletin board. Basically, it implements nice user profile pages with status updates and comment function, a friendship manager, some widgets and e-mail notifications. Blair set up an example site at wpmingle.com/. And you can always register and account on this blog.

Blair recommends the popular and flexible Thesis-theme. But because of the way Mingle works it plays along nicely with almost any template out there. After the activation the plugin requires 8 news WordPress pages (profile, friendship manager etc). Mingle uses these pages to display the content. It’s probably a good idea to set up a dedicated page template for your community area including a dedicated sidebar!

Mingle also offers additional fields during registration; these are optional and can also be edited later. Obviously, the plugin does not add some parallel structure but it uses the standard WordPress registration and adds some database fields – this is why Mingle works seamlessly with existing plugins. The plugin uses a unique CSS class, so designers can easily change the look via CSS. But even without any modifications, the results looks really nice.

In combination with Gigya’s authentication service, Mingle is a great solution for increasing the “stickiness” of each niche blog. I’m a fan and if you want to do me a big favor, please register and give me some feedback! Thanks

… is rarely seen in nature these day; I was lucky enough to shoot one in Eastern Tyrol:

If you ever get to meet him, run or hide. And hide well – he looked pretty hungry to me.

When Public Enemy released their classic hit Shut ‘em down, they were criticizing authorities. Yet recently, Google has given the track’s title a completely new meaning: without any prior warning, the company shut down at least six renowned music blogs hosted on Blogger/Blogspot. Or, as Paidcontent.org puts, it, “wiped them from the internet”:

“We’d like to inform you that we’ve received another complaint regarding your blog,” begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It’s a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music blogs – sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. “Upon review of your account, we’ve noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger’s Terms of Service … [and] we’ve been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding.”

Among those “silenced” blogs are some of my favorites – passionate, dedicated music bloggers who lost years of their work in a moment. It’s sad and there’s no doubt that this incident shows how incapable major labels are of adjusting their relationships with online publishers. I’ve worked as a music journalist for more than 10 years: major labels cater journalists’ needs well, but they don’t understand that the old media era is over and that bloggers are the best promotion partners they can wish for. But merely writing about music on the net is like “dancing about architecture”: harnessing multimedia capabilities, aka giving visitors the opportunity to listen to the reviewed music makes the overall experience so much richer… it’s a shame.

But this incident does not only highlight a problem of the music industry: anybody who puts effort into producing content and running any online media must be aware of the fact that relying on convenient, even free 3rd party hosting puts them in a very weak position. Self-hosting requires some effort, but in my opinion it’s a vital part of any longterm online-projects – therefor I got one very important advice for you: Take one big step and stop relying on 3rd party hosting services if you’re running a long-term online project. And please do it before the milk is spilt!

I’m not a big fan of Google in general: there services are not that great, but there’s no alternative. But it regularly frightens me how this machine works. Today, European director Steve Rogers told an Austrian newspaper: “When a company gets bigger, it is seen as intransparent. But we try to be as transparent as possible.” Right after that Mr. Rogers showed what he really means when he answered the next two questions about Google’s situation in China: “I’m not allowed to comment on this.” (Kleine Zeitung, February 9th 2010, page 29). Temper, temper!

But still, the Superbowl spot is indeed brilliant:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Thanks and shout-outs to all sponsors, visitors, talkers and hosts at Videocamp Vienna 2010! Organizing the event together with Austrian television station ATV and Datenwerk was a great experience – and we’re all very satisfied with the premiere of Austria’s first online video barcamp. Knowledge was transferred, experiences were shared, a lot of visitors had to update their “met in real life” Twitter list – just the way we like it. I’m already looking forward to Videocamp Vienna 2010!

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All sessions are available on two zaplive channels (big and small hall), but behold: all the presentations were held in German

Videocamp Vienna: Sessions 1
Videocamp Vienna: Sessions 2

I’m going to watch the sessions I missed – I think every single visitor interested in digital video production and distribution learned *a lot* yesterday. Time to start spielberg’ing with my new EOS 7D – for now, I’ve only used it to capture still images.

When Google launched their latest gadget “Wave”, everybody was so keen on getting an invitation – I’ve sent out about 60 invites via my blogs, yet I haven’t been using Wave a lot. Neither in the beginning nor lately: it’s lame (even when used with Chrome, large multimedia Waves are basically unusable on netbooks), it lacks a lot of important features and – most important of all – it’s generally quite unsexy, According to Silicon Alley Insider, I’m not alone with this opinion.

Their Chart of the Day clearly shows a rapidly decreasing number of users, even geeks seem to have abandonned the ship for now. It won’t probably sink any time soon, but it definitely won’t replace e-mail (that’s on of Google’s idea behind the system) in the near future.

This kind of launch scenario is pretty unusual for the big G: usually, when a new service gets launched, an immediate success story follows. Just remember Gmail or Analytics – those products basically took existing services like web statistics or web mail inboxes, improved them in a major way and gave them away for free: Gmail offers nearly unlimited storage, Analytics is a mighty tracking tool (I still prefer Clicky by far though – it’s all about the realtime), but Wave is actually the first genuinely new service which Google has ever offered.

So I wonder if we’re just witnessing a temporary decrease in usage numbers, or if Wave just offers the wrong bells and whistles. Because this might be the first #fail in the company’s history… So what’s your opinion on the future of Google Wave?

I never was a big fan of Will Smith’s music, but I definitely did enjoy some of his movies. Yet I had no idea that Will has such interesting views on life, ethics and success – take ten minutes and listen to the whole interview; it’s worth your time, I promise:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“If you’re not making someone else’s life better, you’re wasting your time. Your life will become better by making someone else’s life better.” I especially agree when will argues that believing you can create whatever you want to create is not a helpful, but an absolutely inevitable “mindset”. So many people get tangled up in weird esoteric ideas these days – get a life and start believing in your own strengths and capabilities. Period. [found this interview via Frank Kern's blog]

I got to know Martin Stoni when I worked for Project Powderstorm, an online snowboard / skate community. When T-Mobile took over our main sponsor max.mobil, the German company cancelled all skate-sponsoring activities and decided to go sports-mainstream. The job was great though: spending nearly every winter weekend in a different ressort, we covered various snowboard events online and we always found time ride the slopes ourselves. Martin Stoni did all the videoclips back then. He stuck to his genre and got even better: these days he published his freeride magnum opus “HiKE” online – enjoy the wonderful pictures but don’t blame me mor any resulting mountain craving!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The riders in the video are Mitch Toelderer, Bibi Pekarek, McFly, Flo Edenberger and Lorraine Huber. Harry Putz operated the camera, Martin directed and editted the movie.

Hint: to see the movie in maximum quality, log in to Vimeo: registered users can download the original HD quicktime file.

More about Martin Stoni’s work: Whatever Films

Vienna’s first VideoCamp ever (a BarCamp specializing in digital video) takes place at Media Quarter St. Marx on the 30th of January 2010. ATV, Austria’s leading private tv station, Datenwerk Innovation Agency and datenschmutz (aka my German-language blog) are extremely proud to invite podcasters, tv professionals, video-freaks and other moving-picture geeks to join an intense day of sessions and discussions.

VideoCamp Vienna will deal with all aspects of digital video: from production to distribution and marketing. We’re interested in new formats, ideas and will definitely take a closer look at topics such as HD video production flow, making movies with SLR cameras and so on. Free entrance, free catering plus a massive load of new ideas and technologies – I’m so looking forward to 30th of January! Most of the sessions will be held in German though, so feel free to join us if you’re able to understand this weird language

Effective immediately: I hereby declare that I’m a Social Media Consultant no longer. When every other script kiddie started to call themselves a SEO Expert, I switched my job description. But nowadays our web 2.0 is full of Social Media Consultants – and some of them send me questions like “How can I publish a trackback?” or “What’s the difference between a Facebook page and a group”? I wonder what kind of “consulting” their customers get… And this is why I switch again: from this day on, I’m a Digital Renaissance Man.

Btw: in German, this title translates to Digital Universalgelehrter. Plus: it’s about time to give DRM a completely new meaning!

If you haven’t seen the 4th season of “Dexter” yet, then don’t watch this video – not even the first few seconds, because they contain a serious spoiler. In case you already know how the cat-and-mouse game between Dex and Trinity ends, you are going to like this sitdown with Michael C. Hall and John Lithgow:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s amazing that even the cast did not know about the ending shortly before the production of the last episodes – and a surprise it was indeed. I really love the series, it’s a milestone in the history of tv crime (actually not my favorite genre): the great storytelling plus the amazing camera and cutting give the series a “cinematic feel” – can’t wait for the 5th season. Will Dexter raise his boy as a single father?

Christian Rap – d’Oh, “motherf*ck your motherf*ckin’ G.O.D, biatch!” is for losers. But the Drumandbass community takes a different approach at celebrating the ultimate break. Old one, yet Goldie, ah, I mean Andy C. Are you ready for the reload?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Btw: of course there’s more on Youtube – instant gospel illumination and MC Skibadee go together just *too* well:

Click here to view the embedded video.

WordPress 2.9 is still quite fresh, but today the team released a new version including some minor bug fixes. WordPress 2.9.1 fixes scheduling-errors which occurred on some hosts. The update can either be triggered via the admin or you can upload the files via ftp, no database update necessary this time.

But there’s another plugin-related issue: since the upgrade to 2.9, many WordPress bloggers miss Simple Tags: the tag management plugin just stopped to work, but worry not: it’s just a hard-coded version check, a simple hack makes the plugin work again.

Amaury Balmer, author of the popular Simple Tags Plugin, has not upgraded his software yet. All you have to do is edit the file simple-tags.php, found in the directory /wp-content/plugins/simple-tags/. Use a text-editor of your choice and look for line 35 which looks exactly like this:

Change this line (it contains the version check) to:

Don’t forget to save and upload the edited file – and you’re good to go: Simple Tags is working again, plus all the other plugins which use some of its functions.

I wish you all a great party tonight – 2009 has been an amazing year for me, and I’m absolutely sure that 2010 will be amazing +1 for all of us. So have a great night, enjoy yourself and never forget: the party is in your head! The right surrounding does help a lot, but ultimately you’re the master of your own device

Have a great start into 2010 – no need to worry, after all it’s just 2009 plus 1. So thanks a lot for your ongoing interest in this dirty little blog of mine, thanks for your feedback, your comments and the encouragement: Can’t wait for the next 12 months of blogging!

“Look up in the sky / it’s a bird, it’s a plane / no, it’s Super Mario / fightin’ Pacman like he’s insane!” Thanks for this wonderful piece of hand-drawn artwork!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I got 30 more invites left. Just drop me a note and I’ll send one to the e-mail address you provided. But please don’t ask what to use your newly-won realtime comfort for. Frankly speaking, I have got no idea yet. But I said the same thing about Twitter when I registered my account there, so I’ll keep waiting for the wave frenzy to happen. What’s your opinion? Are you already surfing the wave?