Some cabinet officials in Germany’s ruling coalition want to levy a fee from those aggregator sites like Drudge Report or Yahoo! News and other services that supposedly profit unduly by leveraging the reporting of other agencies, baiting readers to their own mastheads then trickling off like Plinko bearings to the primary sources. This idea is only as of now a suggestion, but framers have been working on legislation since 2009 and similar plans have already been discussed in the States—with the Drudge tax, and has the support of some German publishing-houses (Verlag) and much hand-wringing and vocal protests on the opposing side. Lawmakers want these asymmetric earners (through front-page ads) to share profits with the makers of their content, the journalists. It seems like a fair proposition, at first, glance but the reasoning, I think, quickly folds. Aggregators don’t intercept potential advertising revenue (although I suppose, for example, if a reader first encountered some tempting resort ad in Pago Pago, the reader probably wouldn’t click on it a second time when mirrored on the newspaper’s web site) but feed and drive visitor traffic, and surely, in turn revenue.
Thursday 30 August 2012
summative or headline roundup
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, ๐️, networking and blogging
prosopagnosia or lost-and-found
Wednesday 29 August 2012
rote
It can be an interesting experience, to lose oneself—akin to trying to reconcile an optical illusion, and I think just as interesting are venues, formats and presentation that somehow always either require rehearsal or become invisible altogether. There’s the traveling mat of one’s commute or household inventories that fade into the background, not looked at any longer (though one might notice their alteration or absence quicker than one would expect), but with the former, there are processes, no matter how dull or stale and imprinted to memory that don’t become obedient reflexes, something done in one’s sleep. Job searching, no matter how automated and centralized it is made, cherry-picking from a database rather than patrolling a beat or rustling the classifieds, seems to be one of those things.
Tuesday 28 August 2012
brica-braca or the long now
Photographer David Johnson, via the astounding Colossal,
the blog of Art and Visual Ingenuity, had a chance to experiment with
new techniques and captured some blooming, long-exposure images of fireworks, during the International Firework Show held in Ottawa in early August.
catagories: graphic design
tv tray or serialization
catagories: ๐ฅฃ, environment, graphic design, networking and blogging
Sunday 26 August 2012
rheingold
Not to disparage the fine cities that sprawl to form a megalopolis from Frankfurt to Wiesbaden to Kรถln and beyond, but we had not experienced anything else in the area. Surely, we are saving a lot to explore for later but did visit some of the defining destinations points that came in quick succession as soon as we left the city-limits.
One attraction that we found was the Niederwald Monument, personifying Germania and built to occasion the unification of imperial Germany after the Franco-Prussian wars, windswept at the summit of the Rheinish terroir, and among a collection of Empire colossal monuments commissioned and built all in a shared spirit, like the gallery of greatness at Walhalla, the Monument to the Battle of the Nations (Das Vรถlkerschlachtdenkmal bei Leipzig), or the Barbarossa Monument (der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Denkmal) in Kyffhรคuser meant to intimate that the then new emperors were the legal successors to the Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans. I suppose that I am taken with this chauvinism precisely because I’ve been raised with my own for a long time now. Since I came to Germany, I have lived in a few places but none outside of Bavaria—or even Franconia.
Not that I regard people in Hessian or anywhere else as more or less German or anything, there is a certain attitude and dialect that one becomes accustomed to and can learn not to see. There are some aspects and trappings of common heritage and identity that can make what’s familiar or excused or unapologetic rather heavy-handed when just a little less familiar when seen in others. I guess I have a little trepidation but I’m sure it’s my imagination magnifying things. In any case, I am glad that we were able to visit the countryside first as tourists.
a mass of incandescent gas
Via the ever excellent Boing Boing, National Geographic reports on the singular roundness of the Sun. It is in fact on average the most perfectly spherical object known to man. The globes of the planets and satellites of course strive to this same figure but due to the tugging of other objects and their own rotation and compositions have settled mostly for a slightly oolong shape.
Friday 24 August 2012
distinguishing signs of vehicles in international traffic
For the old Lady, the T-3 Transporter, we never made good on designs to decorate her with those luggage-label bumper-stickers of places we’ve traveled to with her. And with Silver Lady, the California T-5, we were wavering on the idea.
Touring around Norway and seeing the moose icon on campers and motor-homes (pรฅ norsk, Bobil), we tried to find a small, discrete version for ourselves, but we were unsuccessful. There isn’t so much real-estate along the roof on this one. Instead, we thought we could do something subtle to frame the rear window, maybe, with little symbols, where some families display their children’s names in Germany or advertise the fact that they graduated in 2009 (Abi— for Abitur or Schulabschluss), of the places we’ve been.
In somewhat related news, the German Minister of Transportation announced his support to permit municipalities within a county (Gemeinde unter einer Landkreis) to break from tradition and issue their own license plates (Kraftfahrzeugkennzeichen), not with the prefix of the surrounding county but personalized for their locality with whatever letter combination, not already claimed, they see fit. For instance, the village of Markt Unteroberbergburgmรผhlebach-an-der-Strasse would be no longer under the tyranny of parent East Allgรคu county with its non-specific OAL affix but could try UOB or NBG, etc. Police officials, on the other hand, warned of absolute chaos and if politicians want to appeal to local patriotism, they’d be better off with bumper stickers.
Thursday 23 August 2012
blacklisted or clutter-free: a cautionary tale
I did not notice that the four year anniversary for PfRC came and went without ceremony on my part but it did not pass without acknowledgement and observation. I received a message from the advertising platform notifying me that my account had been suspended over suspect or fraudulent click-activity. This was an unfortunate condemnation and I was more than a bit taken aback. I agree with the characterisation of wanting to maintain integrity all around for the advertising environment, and understand their inability to provide more details, since disclosure about how clicks are policed would give real fraudsters a work-around.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, networking and blogging
Wednesday 22 August 2012
frost giants or manheimr steamroller
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ณ๐ด, ๐, ๐ง , myth and monsters
voracious or conqueror worm
catagories: ๐ฑ, environment
Tuesday 21 August 2012
frรผhstรผcken oder morgen post
I really liked this tableau by Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring, recently featured on the English Wikipedia home-page as a featured image.
Productive from the fin d’siรจcle until the 1930s, Ring’s style and subject matter helped define the Socio-Realism movement, which embraces such iconographic works as Grant Wood’s American Gothic, the anonymous and evocative profiles of the Great Depression in America (like the photograph of Migrant Mother [DE]) and the cavalcades of propaganda art from different confessions and persuasions yet all with common ways of portraying, lensing society. Focusing on the craftsmanship of the furnishings and small details really complete the scene, which is also pregnant with symbolism that slowly emerges. The allegorical is a subtle thing and can tell stories that are inexhaustible, noting the way the way shadows dapple, the copy of the page, the halo of greenery at the woman’s head, the intention of the palette and so on. Taking a moment to appreciate the unfolding reminds one that links do not allegory make.
catagories: antiques, graphic design, Wikipedia
Monday 20 August 2012
energie wende
catagories: ⚛️, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ก, environment
Sunday 19 August 2012
abstract-concrete
Idiosyncratic and family pet-names names for things and concepts or a how about list of the weird jingo and abbreviations of concepts hard to visualize thrown around freely at the office, those words that would be completely foreign sounding and unassailable to a non-native speaker?
Saturday 18 August 2012
verkehrsverhรคltnis
I was not expecting such stop-and-go traffic conditions in Denmark, but these signs that indicate lanes merging that look like an awareness-ribbon along their highways seemed to signal without fail a bottleneck. It is understandable, I suppose considering this country of just five million is being descended upon by travelers coming and going could spur some relative over-cautiousness, which is probably just an extension of being polite and courteous. The display was more acute and regular there, but most Staus pass without explanation or incident with the hesitation and the snowballing reactions of being put in and taken out of formation. Often times, the only delay visible is from people rubbernecking at a scene in the opposite lane. Everyone should be safe and patient, and of course that goes a long way to minimize a true accident, since the occasion for rushing is almost always before one leave home. Sometimes I think the whole mess could be sorted out in no time with a holographic traffic warden directing cars to stay on course and discouraging second-guessing and hesitation. Driving, however, is a taxing and unnatural activity and one ought to acknowledge the compensation and tactics needed to keep traffic flowing may not always be instinctual.
catagories: ๐ง , Europe, transportation
WWII week: nacht und nebel
Why this was allowed to continue and to what extent the civilian population of Germany and the rest of the world were morally complicit is a question, I think, no one is equipped to fully articulate. What will people believe—not only that it is a dutiful thing to deprive another of his rights on such baseless grounds—the everyday struggle we have with our own petty judgments and prejudices are most certainly successors to all the strife and hate of history but the best any of us can do is strive to be better and positively influence others—but also the sanitized reports that enforced the euphemisms?
I wonder what it is that people want to believe or what is easier to reconcile quickly slips into truth and fact. Today, some former concentration camps are hallowed grounds, memorials to unthinkable loss and cruelty that are unflinching testimony. Like the words on the gate of Dachau, Arbeit Macht Frei, the inscription on the gate of Buchenwald is a double-entrende: Jedem Das Seine could mean “to each his own.”
> When the gate closes and the words are facing the inmates of this largest concentration camp near Weimar, that housed all kinds, the meaning could also be “you get what you deserve.” Nacht und Nebel is the moniker for the overarching Nazi war programme to eliminate all elements that threatened state security (“die deutsche Sicherheit gefรคhrden”) through rendition (being disappeared—night and fog, the term is a spell summoning the powers of sword and magic helmet of Wagner’s Ring Cycle), and of course the existence of such detention facilities was an open secret, vexing with the constant disorientation of transporting internees all over occupied territories, separating families and neighbours, so no witnesses could give the same account for what was happening or the missing might be remembered. Let us hope that we begin to see through such cloaks of the lowest charisma and never forget that a share of humanity is necessarily a share of otherness.
Friday 17 August 2012
ragnarok or five minutes til midnight
wordmark
catagories: graphic design, psychology
Thursday 16 August 2012
water closet
Meanwhile, in Kรถln marketers are promoting an item similarly off the grid, called the pocket urinal for gentlemen and ladies. This sort of tetra-pak receptacle was originally developed for construction workers and gliding enthusiastic who cannot easily leave their posts, but has been endorsed by the city for Carnival time and other festivals when too many revelers are less willing to hold it or wait for one of the too few bathrooms. This too is a clever idea but not nearly as ecologically kind nor inexpensive—relatively.
extra-territoriality or diplomatic cul-de-sac
Despite the fact that they risk contravening the Vienna Conventions, and duly arbitrated international treaties always trump the local laws and policies of their signatories, authorities in the UK stand poised to forcibly take Wikileaks founder Julian Assange into custody and won’t allow him to simply leave the Ecuadorian mission, despite the country’s decision to extend him sanctuary and safe passage.
This situation is tense and makes for a complicated Venn diagram of exclaves and enclaves, whose respect is dabbled with at everyone’s peril, and a complex triangulation, wherein all the factors are not known: Assange merited the wrath of the State Department by releasing caches (with the help of others) of dirty-laundry indiscriminately but specifically the gossip committed to paper of the embassy-set, having since disclosed that there would be more damning revelations to come, distributed freely but under the lock and key of his life-lines, insurance policy and the UK has already, I believe, shown its hand and revealed outside pressures by threatening and overstepping what is accorded to Ecuador and the aim is extraordinary rendition to the US. The exposure of Wikileaks purposed to help put an end to such opaque and secret negotiations, and Quito’s stand with transparency ought to be defended and praised.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ธ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy, networking and blogging
WWII week: overlord
baby boom or luck dragon
catagories: ๐
Wednesday 15 August 2012
WWII week: autobahn nagelbett
forever blowing bubbles
Shopping cart here has perhaps an overly simplistic view of the European financial landscape but does pose an interesting choice. I think matters are still relatively ratcheted down for a summer of tourists skimping on the souvenirs and a bit of muted enthusiasm for travel in general. I do think, however, there are some dangerous undercurrents that ripple and bellow in the belated season, like some strange mirage or fata morgana come too late. There are swirling simooms of dissonance that might prove to pull the eurozone asunder with their contradictory forces. Rather than structural weakness in underlying markets or an experiment disproven but rather because on the one hand, investors, seeking shelter, are inflating a bubble of Germany’s relatively robust economy, while simultaneously, supporting the isolation, quarantine of broader institutions by encouraging locally-funded initiatives.
Ripe for chaos, Germany as an anchor of the eurozone’s single currency fronts quite a bit of appeal, industry more sustainable than the husks of manu-facturing or market nervousness elsewhere, but that too could be oversold. Meanwhile, in order to contain potential losses should the euro be splintered into the Mark, franc, lira and peso again, activity is quietly being limited to sources in-country and involvement across borders, save berthing extra money for safe-keeping, which really benefits no one in the long term and damages the good-turn done for regional entrepreneurs and business at the same time. For example, an Italian multi-national corporation is shoring profits in Germany (perhaps buying up debt and real estate) and elsewhere while directing its affiliates in France to only solicit from French partners, as if the denomination was imminent I hope that this familiar tug-of-war does not escalate further.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, economic policy, labour
WWII week: plongeur
Part of the fascination with World War II in the European theatre is the sheer inexhaustibility of the subject, the depth of material for reflection, portrayal and reissue plus the varied aspects of that horrendous and frightening time—replete with tangents, like into the occult, and technical achievements carried forward by the fight.