“Goodbye privacy” is the motto of this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. The festival is held by the Ars Electronica Center which is the most famous technology institute in Austria with many young programmers and artists who collaborate with programmers and artists from all around the world. The main goal seems to be to explore new ways of how to use modern technologies and often artistic usage.
This year the size of the festival is incredible. There is a street where all the empty buildings are occupied with special exhibitions. The main theme seems to be second life as you can see many connections to the virtual world. For me “Goodbye privacy” affects me somehow twice as hard as other visitors as the whole Pfarrplatz (the big place in front of our flat) is rebuilt within Second Life and re-connected to the real life. If you have a conversation in second life you can hear it from speakers within the real world. On the other hand you can watch the virtual world on several screens around the Pfarrplatz beach area.
Today I’ve quickly walked through “Marienstraße” and I will be back tomorrow to see all the cool exhibitions. It really is worth seeing. The festival will end on Sept. 11th. So there is still some time left. I’ve also been to both Pfarrplätze (in the virtual and the real world) and here are the images. Maybe we’ll meet in the next days…

Last weeks flashback: this year started quite busy. In the near past I was and am still working on top secret customer web projects. A project I am allowed to announce is the ThinkFinger project at sourceforge.net. As my notebook has the fingerprint reader for which the developers of the project are developing a linux driver I felt that I should give them something back. So why not doing some webdesign?
Linux consumed a big portion of my time too as I was playing around with beryl as window manager under kde. And today I spent some time on updating several wordpress blogs. Some time ago version 2.1 was released (named ELLA) with some nice new features.
Yesterday I applied as a developmember at the amazoop project at sourceforge.net and we’ll see if I can be of any use to the developers. Oh… and I almost forgot about my new platform which allows you to share your books/dvds/etc. in communities. One active community is setup at honya.desu.at (which is japanese and means something like “this is a book store”) which is focused on items related to Japan. Guests visiting the site can only see the items and descriptions but cannot access the community features: see to whom the book belongs and see to whom the owner lended the book.
And last but not least I was testing lots of google features (analytics, adsense, etc.).

Now it is time for something completely different. Let me introduce you to something which I think was, is, and will be very important in the future: inter humanity. Do not be afraid. It is not some spiritual plan to save the world or anything. It is just some codex/charta/guidelines I want to write down and improve with the help of others. Before it is too confusing let me point you to my inter humanity pages where you can read on. Have a nice day.