#NewLife in Berlin working in Google’s Policy Team

About two weeks ago I started my new job and I thought it would be good to share my first impressions, my vision and motivation.

To start with the basics, I now work in Google’s policy team in Berlin, which is basically my manager Annette and myself (plus Ines in Hamburg).

My scope of work is to promote and co-create reasonable policies in Google products, as well as to work in multi-stakeholder groups to deliberate and help develop sound new media policies for Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Thereby my special focus is to liaison and collaborate with colleagues from academics and civil society. In that regard I am really happy that I can build on and extend my engagement for a humanistic conception of the Internet, advocate for Rights and Principles based internet governance regimes, which enable us to enjoy our Human Rights on the internet.

More concretely I am looking forward to (a) work with all stakeholders on internet and society related questions here in Berlin, (b) contribute to the deliberations about and development of policies that are user-centered, maximize individual freedom and balance the sometimes paradoxical overlaps between fundamental rights e.g. freedom of expression and privacy, or access to knowledge and intellectual property, (c) promote transparency and access to information about public institutions (but also of Google as an organization of public interest)

Oh and my managers endorsed that I continue my work with the multi-stakeholder coalition on Internet Rights and Principles as my 20% project! I am really excited about our current endeavors to draft (in collaboration with APC) a Charter of Human Rights and Principles on the Internet (based on APC’s Internet Rights Charter).
However I want to use this opportunity to state that I believe it is time for the IRP coalition to elect a new chair during this years IGF (as stated in our charter). I will be happy to actively participate and continue in the steering committee (if I will be elected).

But back to my new job at Google. In my view Google has brought us some really remarkable services that have not only shaped the way we use the internet, but how we live and work. I have joined them, because I think it is one of the most interesting workplaces, with a true 21st century organizational culture and colleagues who share my passion for the internet. In my experience Googlers have a genuine interest in working with all interested stakeholders to deliberate and collaboratively find ways to (legally and socially) frame the use of its disruptive innovations, which necessitate innovative policies.

Your Data lives forever on the internet

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has been thinking and talking about the inability of the Net to forget for quite a while now (ArsTechnica, 2007, (german) re:publica'08: Keynote: Nützliches Vergessen).
Now his new book came out "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" (Princeton Press)

The balance between privacy and a social online life is not easy to define and implement in practice. Social networking and social media (a.k.a. sharing culture) has become second nature to many of us, while other avoid or even outright reject to "make their private life public".

Allow me to share two aspects, which seem essential to describe and understand (my) social media life:

Networked publics are to be differentiated from the classical terms 'audience' and 'public'. The information I share on internet is interesting and relevant only to a limited group of people, most of which I know personally. One shares information in different groups (publics). And rather than "presenting" to an audience, it is more like a conversation at a (public) party.

The other concept is self-fashioning (wikipedia). A term that was introduced "to describe the process of constructing one's identity and public persona according to a set of socially acceptable standards." Originally applied to how people at the court of Renaissance kings used to design and live their roles like in a theatre play. It remindes me of "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (Erving Goffman).
Putting information online is a concious act upon which most of us reflect regularly. The image, the mirror of our lifes we share online is a "positive" is a persona perspective.

impressive statistics about social media use and impact

A friend pointed me to a really nice youtube arguing for the importance of social media using a lot of interesting statisitics (from the US).



you can read all the stats (and links to their respective sources) on his blog.

openDNS - seems to be a decent way of content filtering

last night i met someone from www.openDns.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS). As the name says, they offer a free/open Doman Name resolver and what i thought was quite interesting: they allow for community based (crowdsourced) filtering by categories.

I just signed up for their service to test it. Here is how it works and some reflections:

You select the network you want to have filtered by either choosing one of the categories or doing a custom category filter:

• High - Protects against all adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters.
• Moderate - Protects against all adult-related sites and illegal activity.
• Low -Protects against pornography and phishing.
• Minimal- Protects against phishing attacks.
• None - Nothing blocked.
• Custom - Choose the categories you want to block.

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in their category list they have some pretty strange themes to filter like "Educational Institutions", "search engines" as well as really broad ones like "news & media"

once you selected the "evil" content you dont want your children, roomates or workers to see all you have to do is active the filter and no-one in your IP/network will be able to access these pages. In fact you can define custom messages/pages to be displayed for the different blocked categories.

I am not 100% sure how the system works though. I played around with it and e.g. didn't see a reason why weeklygripe.co.uk or even more strange http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ was tagged (to be decided for blocking) as hate & discrimination. In fact i didn't think any of the sites in that category were reasonably tagged.

In their defense it has to be said that from the 5,399,836 sites submitted only 1,034,372 are aproved for blocking right now.

here are some relevant answers from their FAQs

• What Do I Do If A Domain Is Tagged Incorrectly?

If an undecided domain is tagged incorrectly, vote No.

If a decided domain is tagged incorrectly, go to the domain detail page and click the "Flag for review" link.

Community moderators will review all reports.

• Who are the moderators?

Moderators are a mix of OpenDNS employees and trusted community members. Moderators are identified throughout the community by a badge .

**And they invite applications to become a moderator from the community.


--------------

so here are my 2 cents worth of thoughts about this approach

A) I think the way the decisions about blocking are made should be described clearer (who has the final say?) and a wikipedia like discussion page would also be helpful

B) having that said, i think it is a rather transparent, community driven and therefore commendable approach

C) it would add substantial value if there was a "suggested warning" category -- so say nazi propaganda gets flagged and a warning page is displayed when a user tries to enter, but if s/he descides s/he wants to see the page there is a link to enter

-------------------

Interestingly Prof. David Casacuberta and myself had envisioned a relatively similar service in our 2007 article "Do we need new rights in Cyberspace? Privacy and the Need for an Internet Bill of Rights ", presented at the GigaNet Symposium 2007 and published in Enrahonar 40/41

Allow me to quote:

"Lets imagine the institution managing the cyber address assignment includes meta-information regarding the content of the information and service provided. This would enable, for example, the classification of content to be only appropriate for mature users as well as the insertion of a informative page advising the user of the quality of the content. This upstream page would also allow for public discourse and collective assessment of content provided at the site. This way there is no enforcement of particular axiological dispositions in the form of restraining the freedom of expression but vulgar and extremist content would be classified and debated."

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Lastly i looked and it seems quite easy/possible to "hack" (=circumvent) the openDNS system. You can go to the sites IP directly, or you can use a proxy server.

Also it seems that openDNS finds pretty interesting (value added) services to complement their core functionality. For example you/the admin can define shortcuts to point to urls; so you can define that the word "mail" points to your webmail etc.

I would be interested what you think about their system. For me it is clear that openDNS is operating in a space that is very relevant to internet governance so i would like to invite them to join our efforts and discussions; and if possible come to the IGF so we can work with them "in real life".

Fotos:: Climbing the Chief:: Squamish - BC Canada

just came back from a really nice climbing trip in canada. Here are some impressions:

Schooling is the best way to fight terror & under development

What i stated in the title is no news, but it is always encouraging to see someone really making a difference and putting theory to practice: Enter Greg Mortenson

Greg is a mountaineer who "climbed Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain in the Karakoram range.

While recovering from the climb in a village called Korphe, Mortenson met a group of children sitting in the dirt writing with sticks in the sand, and made a promise to help them build a school.

From that rash promise, grew a remarkable humanitarian campaign, in which Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

As of 2009, Mortenson has established over 90 schools in rural and often volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which provide education to over 34,000 children, including 24,000 girls, where few education opportunities existed before."

Chapeau - it is a reminder that we can all really make a difference if we choose to do so!

Greg has written a book about his venture - read about it @ www.threecupsoftea.com

Values in (technology) Design

I had a very productive meeting with Eddan Katz from the Electronic Fountier Foundation last Thursday. At the end of our conversation we found out that we both have a passion philosophy (of technology) and he recommended me the work on values in (technology) design done at the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Santa Clara University and e.g. by Helen Nissenbaum (Professor @ New York University) as well as Batya Friedman (Professor @ University of Washington).

On my travels up to Vancouver/Squamish i had some time to review their work and i really really like it. It is a super interesting approach to getting Human Rights included into technology planing and policy development.

Please if you know of similar approaches or other peoples work in this area please comment or contact me directly. I am especially interested in cultural differences in technology use & design.
Thanks in advance!

Emotions ~> Values ~> Rights - An Inspiring TED talk

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web:







also the two projects sites are interesting

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.
http://universe.daylife.com/ -- background: http://universe.daylife.com/statement.html


this made me think of Neil Postman's "grand narratives" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Education)

In the second part of the book, Postman proposes 5 narratives as possible alternatives to the current ones:

• "Spaceship Earth" (the notion of humans as stewards of the planet)
• "The Fallen Angel" (a view of history and the advancement of knowledge as a series of errors and corrections)
• "The American Experiment" (the story of America as a great experiment and as a center of continuous argument)
• "The Laws of Diversity" (the view that difference contributes to increased vitality and excellence, and, ultimately, to a sense of unity)
• "The Word Weavers/The World Makers" (the understanding that the world is created through language — through definitions, questions, and metaphors)

---------------------

basically i would suggest to frame our "human rights online" story as a complementary (sub)narrative of this kind. something like "one free and fair global (online) community" what do you think?

Google's Data Libertation Front

I just learned that there is a Google code team working to enable users to extract their data (email, contacts, blog-posts, etc.) and move it between different services. That would put the users in the driving seat regarding data ownership and increase competition on data security and privacy.

Here are the Goals of the Data Liberation Front as stated:

• Liberate data across web services.
• Make that data portable across cooperating web services.
• Allow users to own their own data which is submitted to the Cloud.
• Do anything else to allow users to have fine-grained, easy access, and control of their data.

This is pretty much along the lines of what Eric Schmitt was saying back in 2006:

We build a very good targeting engine and a lot of business success has come from that. We run the company around the users–so as long as we are respecting the rights of end users and make sure we don’t do anything against their interest, we are fine,” Schmidt said. He noted that history has shown that the downfall of companies can be doing things for their own self interest. “We would never trap user data,” (ZDnet interview, bold added)

Really looking forward to learn more about this initiative!

You can follow them on twitter: http://twitter.com/dataliberation

Slack-Lining [watch out HIGHLY ADDICTIVE]

it seemed 1000% impossible, but then i tried and it was instant fun; and then it became my new obsession: Slack-lining is a thoroughly fascinating, meditative sport of balancing on a super-easy-to-setup sort-of tight rope ;-)

I guess it's most easily explained by a little video we shot next to my current home in palo alto. I am still very very beginner but who cares it was fun from the very first second i tried ;-)




So believe it or not I have already summoned basically everybody who met me over the last couple of weeks onto the slack-line and so far (a) they all had fun and (b) everybody was able to balance for at least a couple of seconds after about a 30 min session. IT'S REALLY RELATIVELY EASY. I am not saying it's easy, but the learning curve is just amazing. The first time feels impossible, but then with every second you spend on the line your body learns.
And that is a very interesting feature, it's not cognitive or intellectual learning it is only your body that learns to balance.
It is one of the most pure feelings of Flow (see wikipedia entry for psychological state of flow) i have ever experienced in my life. It is really just amazing and certainly more exciting than participating in a beard competition ;-)

It is pretty amazing what people do on these slack-lines. Watch e.g. this guy doing a back-loop landed on the freakin line:



But the real professionals are without a doubt the circus artists:





Here is another pretty crazy video Aye just send me: Dean Potter BaseLining (basejumping of a high-line that your balance on)

Best Firefox Plugins

i have quite a number of firefox plug-ins installed, but really the ones that adds most value are

Googlepedia This very simple plugin adds a wikipedia search to all your google searches and displays the wikipedia page to the right of your google results.

Search Cloudlet - which adds a tag-cloud displaying the most used words on top of your google searches. The clue is that you can either increase the importance of the terms in cloud or exclude them from the search.

And last but definitely not least i installed AdBlock Plus, which actually really eliminates a big percentage of the banners and ad-words on websites all over the net (e.g. spiegel.de and google)
http://adblockplus.org/en/

What are your most useful plugins?

Best of Amsterdam [Travel Recommendations]

Last weekend I had the pleasure of meeting with Howard in Amsterdam and I would like to recommend you the places I really liked:

www.canvasopde7e.nl/ - has a really nice roof terrace overlooking Amsterdam, really good food and it turns into a club at night

P96.nl is one of the very few houseboat cafes

Trouw Club - really good music - mixed and bouncing crowd - i liked shakin' that boody again ;-)

Jordino.nl - has the best choclate/pralines i have had in my life - period

Saunadeco.nl - is a supernice art deco spa - i did not have the time to go but Howard went and really likes it

and last but not least we took a pretty nice boat ride on our private little party barge. Marcel runs the business and he can be reached under bootvaren@gmail.com or 0642302209 (he also has a really nice little houseboat for rent)

OK hope this works for you next time you are in amsterdam!

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

This is probably the most entertaining, enlightening and pragmatically useful analysis/explanation for how/why there are such fundamentally different moral mindsets.

I am off to read his 2007 Science article http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/

Steinbeis-Transfer-Institut Information Ethics ( STI-IE )

Over Christmas I met one of my academic-philosophic role models, Rafael Capurro. It was a gray german winter day, and as always when i meet an established elder I admire, I was full of excitement and a bit nervous. I am always especially nervous, when i meet intellectual specialists (Prof. Capurro has created the philosophy of angeletics and is one of the top authorities in information ethics). I know my scholarship is genuine and holistic, but because it is highly transdisciplinary it must be eclectic, hence it many times lacks in-depth genealogy of the respective field in question, which makes me a bit un-easy because many academics tend to judge their conversation partners based on what they know about their field.

Anyways, the meeting was a true intellectual and friendly encounter. We talked and philosophized for six hours straight, and I believe both of us had the understanding that we'd meet many times, collaborate and deliberate about the themes that matter to us (ethics and values in cyberspace, info-ethics, philosophy of technology, etc.).

On my next visit, some weeks later, we helt a short interview for the Internet Rights and Principles coalition (listen to mp3) and we agreed to setup a explorative survey about 'values on the internet' (please contribute!) meant to produce qualitative data, which we plan to use as basis for more research.

During that visit I also learned that Prof. Capurro and Dr. Michael Nagenborn had just setup the Steinbeis-Transfer-Institut Information Ethics (STI-IE), and I felt really honored when they asked me to join their international advisory board.

About two weeks ago we had the first board-meeting (adjunct to a symposium on Prof. Capurro's angeletics) and as expected i was impressed by the high academic competence, as well as cultural and geographical diversity of my peers in this community.

"The STI-IE envisions an international as well as intercultural cooperation focusing on the ethical impacts of information technology on human practices and thinking, particularly on social, economic, political, scientific and cultural interaction.
The STI-IE is devoted to academic research as well as to practical projects."

So if you plan to work on a project within that scope or if you are looking for a partner to address relevant aspects in a project you work on, please feel free to contact either me or Prof. Capurro.

What educators (and other media/) can learn (or Scott McCloud rocks)

when you understand experience as the basis for learning, and when you realized that new social multimedia networks are replacing old text-book / frontal teaching knowledge container transfer methods; then Scott McCloud's TED talk about how human storytelling evolved to the high art of comic books, should be inspiring regarding how we can/should/must design knowledge ecologies that take advantage of the this amazing n-dimensional interactive canvas that is cyberspace.

Towards a Humanistic Conception of Cyberspace. A Twofold Challenge for Netizens Mobilizing for a Democratic Internet Governance

I am happy to point you to the article i co-authored with Elena Pavan and Konstantinos Komaitis for the GIGANET Symposium 2008. It has just been published @ Fascicle I. Economics and Applied Informatics (The Annals of Dunărea de Jos University)

UDATE: Here is the full paper we presented @ the giganet symposium as Script or as pdf download

please reference as: Pavan, E., Senges, M., & Komaitis, K. (2009). Towards a Humanistic Conception of Cyberspace. A Twofold Challenge for Netizens Mobilizing for a Democratic Internet Governance. The Annals of “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati. Economics and Applied Informatics, 1.



and here is the abstract and bibliography from the journal:

Towards a Humanistic Conception of Cyberspace. A Twofold Challenge for Netizens Mobilizing for a Democratic Internet Governance

http://www.ann.ugal.ro/eco/Doc2009/ElenaPavan_MaxSenges_KonstantinosKomaitis.pdf

Modular Human Readable Privacy Policies Initiative

a multistakeholder group of privacy, internet & new media experts (including me:) are working on developing an approach to have modular human-readable privacy policies. The idea pretty much is to do what creative commons has done to copy-right -- make it possible to really easily see what is happening with your data when you sign up for a service and thereby making it a relevant business point for marketing / quality-branding / differentiator.

Please review our wiki-site, spread the word and join the team @ the privacy OS wiki!

I tried to visualize the situation:

SOOOoooooo.........ooooOOOOOoo
the long term vision is to start and work with privacy - and then move to other rights like Freedom of Expression

Ideas For MicroEntrepreneurs

Don't you also keep wondering how many peddlers are selling this super-cheap toys, candy and roses? So quite some time ago i had the idea to start a collection of business ideas (products and services) for mirco-entrepreneurs. I started to take pictures of things & services that can (more or less) be easily build (bricolaged) by oneself.

Unfortunately i never really catalouged these pictures (so most are on some backup somewhere ;-( BUT i just recently took a couple which i now uploaded to start this collection.

For now you will find some examples of (1) inspiring and not-standard masks, (2) artsy objects like colored stones, a mobile; (3) furniture and some other things i thought might transpose well into other micro-entrepreneurial contexts.

You are more than welcome to send me your ideas and pictures. I plan to develop a more comprehensive web-knowledge-base on the subject of micro-entrepreneurship over the next years.

Some years ago i visited the DrapArt festival in Barcelona and they had a whole product range of things that could be build with some simple tools and materials that were thrown away. Check out their website @ www.drapart.org/en/

Edit: i dont know what's up with this picasa embed, but i edited twice and it doesnt show up nicely in my browser - so if it doesnt work for you please go to http://picasaweb.google.com/maxsenges/MicroEntrepreneurship?feat=directlink

US Idealism Pragmatism vs. French post-modern meme archiology

Still one of the best YouTube videos i have ever found, this Noam Chomsky | Michel Foucault debate from 1971 is an intellectual delicatess (and the awesome hippie atmosphere adds even visual appeal).

Sidenote: Isn't it cool how these two über-intellectuals claim to talk to each other, while speaking on completely different subjects ;-) Chomsky first elaborates on conditions/components for an ideal social order - then Foucault counters by saying he doesnt even understand the current system and speaks about power - to what Chomsky replies he needs the ideal to inform his actions. Or might there be a connection after all??

Entrepreneurial Learning Article co-authored with JSB and Howard Rheingold

Last year, while working and living in the Bay Area, i had the pleasure to get to know John Seely Brown and Howard Rheingold and the three of us stuck our heads together and co-authored an article entitled "Entrepreneurial learning in the networked age: How new learning environments foster entrepreneurship and innovation" which has been published in the Paradigms Journal of the Catalan Ministry of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise

this is soo microsoft.... and the real world has a sense for humor

The german mag "der spiegel" just made me aware of a super funny story: Microsoft has released a pretty interesting new software called SongSmith. It records your singing and adds more or less "harmonic" rythems and instrumental sounds around it. The result is a more or less song-like piece of music. Quite frankly i like the idea and the resulting product does produce bearable songs that seem to be fun and creative to produce (see below). But before i show you what the web community used it for - awesomly funny re-makes of blockbuster classic songs in exemplary creative commons re-mix style - you have to check out this incredibly stupid, dull, old-school advertisment Microsoft dared to publish:



and here a pretty cool Queen re-make:

virtual xmas present & max' life's venture

It has become a tradition for me to share a mash-up of my "Best Brainfood of the Year" as my virtual present with my friends and peers. This year i selected books, videos, sites, and services waiting to be cognitively unwrapped right below the few paragraphs about what happened in my life in 2008:

My year was dominated by my experiences in the bay area (San Francisco):

Stanford's d.School
dddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

During my post-doc in Stanford i learned in & about the d.school, which is the best educational institution i have ever seen. Why is it so great? Because it is an environment where creative thinkers coach transdisciplinary teams of learners to design adequate innovative solutions (to any kind of problem) - they teach design thinking - hence d.school is a mindset and a set of solution development practices - @ d.school knowledge is created and enacted rather than consumed and memorized.

Startup Experience @ Supecool School
ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssupercool
During my time in California i also met Steli Efti, the founder of SupercoolSchool. Steli became my best friend in the area and SupercoolSchool.com became "my first start-up". The idea is really really supercool: it's a webplatform that offers a marketplace for learning (it allows you to say i want to learn X and team up with others with the same interest). I am "only" an adviser to the company, but it really feels like my baby and it provided the opportunity to live the life of a silicon valley entrepreneur (meetings with venture capitalist, pitching, bootstrapping, networking, organization building...). If you are interested to learn more, I co-authored an article with John Seely Brown, and Howard Rheingold "Entrepreneurial learning in the networked age: How new learning environments foster entrepreneurship and innovation" where we discuss Supercool School. I also wrote several substantial pieces on our educational philosophy. It will be amazing to see our baby grow up! Please come and join our educational revolution!

Research @ Google
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After a great summer Europe VW-bus road-trip to a friends wedding in Greece I returned to California to do a research project investigating learning & leadership development practices @ Google. During the two months there i interviewed more than 20 Googlers and Nooglers (new googlers) and deliberated with veteran managers on Google as a Complex Adaptive System - I'd say my initiation into Google culture and practices has been versatile & profound and i am now ready to roll up my sleeves and apply the insights gained. In short, my experience there was supercool and I am looking forward to work with my Google peers in 2009.

Yosemite
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Oh and i climbed of course. Man, do they have great rock in Yosemite (some pics)! I spend almost every second weekend there and after adapting to the craziness of traditional climbing i slowly but surely did longer and longer climbs (up to about 1000m = 16 rope lengths = 16 hours) including my first big wall - where we slept on a little ledge at about 300m.

Internet Governance & Human Rights on the Internet & India
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In 2008 i accepted to coordinate the Dynamic Coalition on an Internet Bill of Rights. It is a true challenge: super complex discourse space, globally dispersed volunteer participants, etc. etc. nevertheless for me it's the perfect cause. To contribute actively to the humanization of Internet Governance and thereby help shape how we participate in Cyberspace & network societies is for me the most rational citizen/netizen engagement. And it is highly rewarding; I learn and become competent in pragmatic leadership, political alliance building, (online) collaboration and community building, plus it is great for networking and social capital building. Lastly it is a fascinating field for academic reflection (I co-authored two papers and participated for the first time in GigaNet's conference planning committee).

The yearly gathering - the UN lead Internet Governance Forum (IGF) - happened to be in India. The timing was tight, but i squeezed in one week of travels before the conference. The quest was clear: full immersion in indian culture, "instant expert" in indian philosophy and of course inner peace and happiness in an ashram crash-course ... impossible to convey what happened in this mail, but we can surely have a good conversation next time we meet. In short i fell in love with the country, i feel humble (with regards to the insights of modern western philosophy) and a deep respect for the human centeredness and idealistic foundation of indian philosophy/spirituality.

Social Media & Virtual Communities @ UOC
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUOC

In december Howard Rheingold and myself started to work with a team from UOC.edu to develop a Social Media & Virtual Communities Strategy and conduct 4 pilot projects to foment virtual community building and collaboration. So far the kick-off workshops went really good and i am looking forward to co-lead this knowledge entrepreneurship initiative meant to appropriate internet based innovations into a university (= my phd theme).

And here are my brainfood recommendation:

BOOKS
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Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis - a man who lives his life to the fullest, a man who acts, a man with a examplary life philosophy; a great book about the flow, the energy, the unplanability of life; a book of down to earth pragmatic philosophy of the heart not the lofty intellectual philosophy of the post-modern refelctive citizen. [This book is considered THE modern greek classic]

Goodbye Tristesse by Camille de Toledo - the first intellectual social-critique of substance i read who is my age (30). The book is fun to read, because he uses our language, because he sees the world through the eyes of someone who came of age between the 9th of November 1989 (when the Berlin wall came down) and 11th of September 2001. Sarcastic post-modern french intellectual.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera superb Kundera style tales of life; Kundera has a unique skill to mash psycho-analysis with rich and engaging stories that hit the essence of what's "really going on" when people accept, revoke or shape their destiny.

When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom entertaining (fictional) contest and dialogue between Nietzsche's radical life-philosophy and (Breuer/Freud's) psycho-analysis; wrapped in a well designed storyboard situated in Freud's Vienna.


FABULOUS FLICKS (Movies)
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The City Of Lost Children (1995) if you liked Amelie and Delicatessen this one is right down your ally. Rather sur-realistic somehow darkish fairytale.

Into the Wild - i guess it comes as no suprise that this movie about a guy who leaves civilization to live in the wilderness of alska speaks to me, and i believe most of you will like it (at least as a thought experiment)

Tropa de Elite (2007) same atmosphere and intensity as City of God. Hard core, hyper-real impressions from Brazil's social dillema.

Serenity (2005) - really nice Star War's style science fiction

Maria Full Of Grace (2004) - this one is heart breaking. Story of a young columbian girl who becomes a coke smuggler. I don't know why exactly, but this movie was really really intense. I guess it was because the main actress does an outstanding job and the director manged to produce a super credible setting.

No Country For Old Men - Coen brothers at their best; modern city-cowboy adrenalin with strangeness mix

Charlie Wilson's War (2007) - tells the story of a politician who runs the US foreign affairs committee on afganistan in the 70/80ies and describes how he created a war there. I am not sure how much of the movie is based on historic facts, but the movie claims to be based on a true story.

I.Heart.Huckabbes (2004) - surrealistic funny - something for the whole (post-modern) family



SERVICES & Tools
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- drop.io is a place where you can drop up to 100MB files (or you can fax, email, call to the "drop-box"), no registration, but password protected if you want, and the best is it's sooooo simple everyone can use it instantaneously

- Ubiquity - the modular mash-up web we will take for granted in a couple of years - http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

***The apple side of life (Best Free Mac Tools):***

- Copy & Paste Pro - is a tiny tool that remembers the last 30 things (text snippets, pix, files) you copied and gives you a shortcut (double paste) so you can select which one you want to paste - i experiment with many services over the year, Copy & Paste Pro is by far the most useful new tool i have adopted this year. I use it about 100 times everyday.

- Quicksilver - makes starting all programs much faster - ctrl + space and the first letters of the program name replaces looking and clicking around before you found the right launch icon.


WEB SELECTION
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Best documantary about kids' internet use: FRONTLINE: growing up online: watch the full program | PBS

Supercool videos explaining social media, wikis etc. so your grandma will understand: The Common Craft Show | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

A real utopia! 1800 people who live together in india Where is Auroville and how to get there?

Does the internet change the way we perceive the world? Is Google Making Us Stupid? (New York Times article)

TED videos are cult: Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration | Video on TED.com

My good friend and mentor: Howard Rheingold on collaboration | Video on TED.com

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I hope you find something meaningful amongst the recommendations above!

and i am of course looking forward to hear from you and hopefully spend some time with you in 2009

happy holidays
Max