I liked the following video created by the “Elektrischer Reporter” so much that I decided to post it on my blog, ignoring the fact I didn’t attend this event. But also the facts and figures mentioned in it are quite overwhelming and interesting and amazing.

VIDEO WAS DESTROYING EVERYHTING-WILL COME!

I summarized some of them for those who are lost with the German language!BarCamp | FooCamp (friends of Oreilly: Tim O’Reilly is the inventor) “foo” also is considered as a wild-card/placeholder within different programming languages.The informal and unforced get together characteristic of BarCamps make people just loving these type of un-conferences.Meeting very nice people who have the same intention to share KNOWLEDGE on a wide variety of political, social and technical internet aspects. There isn’t any stupid questions who can be asked. I talk on my own experience when I first started visiting the so called grassroot-events of the web 2.0 movement. Further, it amazes me how much you can learn from each other by having a nice weekend while listen to panels and discussions. Just dive into new internet issues get a hint what people do in their spare time, what people are amazed or just thinking about, get to meet new people become friends enjoy learning and just keep asking. It reminds me on the Seasam Street and its theme song. “wer, wie, was, – wieso, weshalb, warum – wer nicht fragt bleibt dumm!” (a bad translation: Who, how, why, wherefore and where – if you don’t ask you stay dumb!”) Here you get a taste of Seasam Street and how “people”help each other!

HERE COMES AN OTHER VIDEO;-)

Ok let’s focus on the topic of this article again. People just get crazy about barcamps, that 8 hour after publishing the announcement of registration start already 150 people were registered. If you go to this events to are supposed to take part in an active way. Present or talk about a product, help with the organization, help with blogging about the event or recording panels in audio or video format. It is free of costs for you as a participant. Companies like Thoughtworks, QSC, O’Reilly and a lot of others are supporting the barcampings while are sponsoring the venue facilities, W-lan and other amenities like food & drinks. Thanks! So far, the concept and the intention of barcamps seem really to work out. One of the reasons those barcamps came up was the intention to find an alternative way of participation at conferences and and events. “Professional” conferences like T20, SES Chicago 07 or the Web2.0 EXPO in Berlin are not affordable for students and non-millionaire normal working people. Since barcamps came up they got an alternative and they don’t have to spend tremendously high registration or entry fees and additionally they get sponsored by the same companies like the “professionals” do. Well, I think with this achievement we can say: we fully hit the bull’s eye!9 month ago, the first barcamp in Germany was held. Nobody knew about that un-conferencing thing and the concept of it. The same progress happened with other networking and knowledge sharing events like webmontag, mobilemonday, plogbar, minibar, OpenCoffeeClub and all the meet-ups I don’t know about. They number of barcamps, which were already held exploded, now they take place all around the globe. I think the tipping point is reached – a very interesting book by Malcolm Gladwell by the way.

You really feel the need of people to network, the power of learning and sharing knowledge beside having a good informative time and a few beer together. Shit I missed the beer at barcampcologne2. So far – THE END for today!

Regarding the last blog entry and the drawn distinction between Copyright, Creative Commons and the Public domain, I would like to introduce and arise awareness on a German bunch of people who work hard under the name of „zeitgeisty“ on spreading the message about Creative Commons Licenses and explaining their intention not only to the web affine nerdy kind of people also to „off-liner“ – creative people express creativity in paintings, sculptures or photographs.

“zeitgeisty” is used as an adjective in the English language and stands for „the spirit of the age“. Zeitgeisty as defined in the German Wiktionary describes the idea of an entire generation or era – the attitude of majority of a society.

Well, it is obvious that the pure restrict copyright isn’t appropriate to the digital age anymore – where copying and changing e.g. pictures and articles is made to quickly and easily. See above the zeitgeisty logo and what I did within 20 seconds to make it clear what i am talking about. The Creative Commons Licenses (CCL) loosen the restrictive boundaries of the copyright by making it directly visibly for the users (just those who already know about CC) what he is allowed to do with the certain ‚creative‘ work and what not. It must not necessarily be a art or creative work also applies to diploma theses, blogs and books. The new division od the CC-Organization is called ccLearn.

The „zeitgeisty“ crew is planning an event similar to the open music contest (unfortunately a German website). The open music contest was held in Marburg organized by a student organization, only for band which publish their songs under a CCL. Zeitgeisty focuses on activities, events and exhibitions where people are interacting in creativity. For example one person takes a photo which will be developed and another person develops it further while using a spay can. Not only photos also paintings and etc. lots of ideas are already popping up in their minds. One thing is important, because they try to reach the off-liner all activities we be detached from computer.

They are still seeking for exhibition premises and also people who share their philosophy of free content and open source lifestyle. It is again the matter of PARTICIPATION.

How the single copyright C can be converted into the more or less open CC license can be found here or here in German.

I already started using CCL for this blog, for my diploma thesis – I decided to go for a By- Noncommercial-Share Alike attribution. And wait, I also publish my flickr picture under a CCL.

… I just got a ‚for:tohuwabohu‘ hint on deli.cio.us where to find free audio books which are recorded by volunteers. The platform is called LibriVox. The goal of the LibriVox community is to make all books which are available under the public domain available as free audio books. (So no lord of the rings or Harry potter) Therefore volunteers read and record chapters of books and upload them afterwards. The audio book recorded by LibriVox volunteers are also directly going into the public domain. They provide RSS feeds to stay tuned on New Releases and Latest News a inconvenient usability.

Their motto is: „We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.“ Regarding this statement the blog is under a creative commons license.

To give a short introduction I try to explain briefly copyright, public domain and creative commons. The copyright are a couple of „exclusive rights“ held by people for their own creative „work“ which can be a form of intellectual or artistic „work“, e. g. text, poems, theses, movies, paintings, music, lyrics, etc. … . Mostly it is limited for a certain period of time which depends on the different laws in the particular country. When the copyright expires after the certain time frame (can be between 70-95 years after the creators death) the „creative Works“ moves into the public domain“. The symbol for copyright is „©“ – i think well known. The copyright is supposed to protect the creator and its „intellectuell property“. So only the copyright holder has the right to copy, reproduce, built derivatives, import, export, display, perform and transmit the work. Also the opportunity to sell or assign the rights itself to other people or institutions is included into the set of exclusive rights.

If a creative work goes into a public domain that means it is free. Who ever wants to can do everything mentioned in the last paragraph above like copy, … . Public domain comprises the „creative works“ in relation to that NO person or other legal entity can establish or maintain proprietary interests. Information and creative works are considered to be part of a common cultural and intellectual heritage, which, in general, anyone may use or exploit, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Creative commons are something in between.  First they try to make people aware of the copyright and the restricted opportunities with creative works. Second they try to build a balance between the restrict copyright and the border less public domain.

I don’t know yet about the quality but according to a statement of a BBC person: „The list of titles is not as long as I would like, but it is growing all the time and the quality of the recordings is generally very good.“

Well, who is a great reader with a nice voice? Go ahead and participate, you might become famous voice. I’ll go and check out which books are available.

Interesting how an outage of the “little” internet service Skype, affects the entire world. Also interesting how I found out about it via another mobile internet push service. When I recognized that Skype isn’t working in Bangalore my first thoughts were that happens here once and a while in consequences of power cuts or internet cuts which are a part of everyday life. After two month India you are used to those circumstances and tough I was fine without Skype because getting angry isn’t worth it and fortunately I am not depended on it in a business manner. After a few minutes the first twitter messages about Skype and its non-connectivity in Germany reached my Indian cell phone. Wahuu, I am surprised in a positive way it isn’t Indians ‘underprivileged’ or better still in-developing-status infrastructures fault. And a few hours’ later also emails from the US with the message that Skype isn’t working – reached me. The internet and its impact in businesses on the entire world is sooooo amazing and fascinating at the same time. A blog posts on TechCrunch shows that other services like the gizmo project and Grand Central gain benefit out of the Skype outage. The Grand  Central Project was just acquired by Google at the beginning of July 07.

Since the results of my thesis got a panel on Barcamp Bangalore #4, I thought I should translate & upload the abstract in English as well. Furthermore FAROO is already mentioned in the top 100 list of alternative search engines in july. And at least FAROO is obviously just worth an entry in the English version of Wikipedia.

”Analysis of the growth of a decentralized Peer-to-Peer search engine index“

Nowadays, the internet serves as a source of information for a variety of researches. 90 percent of all internet user use search engines with their comprehensive and complex data gathering and crawling technique, data storing and search algorithms as the tool to accomplish the required information. All established search engines are based on the same technology which is called the client server principal.

Within this thesis a search engine with a different technology of data gathering and Data storing will be introduced and described. It focuses an analysis of the growth of a Peer-to-Peer search engine index against the amount of users and the time line.

The aptitude of the different novel and user centered crawling method to generate a decent search engine index will be examined. The innovation in that method is, that the generation of the index will be realized by the users themselves only while surfing and viewing website within a browser.

To prove the aptitude three hypotheses were formulated which can be proved and discussed by data out of a practical experiment as well as based on theoretical work in the first chapters. The conclusion out of the theory and empery will give an idea and insight to the required timeline, amount of user and the approximately reachable index size. This thesis doesn’t give exact numbers but enables the possibility to make assumptions for the target group as well as marketing measurements to build up a proper search engine community.

Tags: internet, search engine, peer-to-peer, p2p, index, index size, crawling technology, user centered, search behavior

The FAROO website provides you with some more information about its technique and functionalities. If there are any questions, please just put them in the forum, they will be definitely answered. Or you might find your answers within an interview of FAROO’s CEO by clicking on here.

If somebody is interested in details about the results just leave a comment and I will translate that part as well.

Barcamp Bangalore #4 (BcB4) was held at the IIM – Indian Institut of Management – great spot.
The first day was kind of confusing but I have not been in a good shape additionally I prefer just barcamping without collectiving. Although it is nice to involve people by providing biking and a photo collective. My favorite was the ‚unband collective‘. their panels gave us some relaxing time in between the panels.

these days are busy and I don’t find time to report on every session I saw. Nevertheless you should get the opportunity to see some pictures. Here you find some remarks at least for the 2nd day of barcamp.

Just created a Technorati account and they want me to claim this:
claimed