Internet lectures now also on itunes

This semester, all recordings of my lecture 'Rechnernetze und Internettechnologie' (Computer Networks and Internet Technology, the lecture is given in German) at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, are available via yovisto.com and also via itunes (for download). Here you will find the first lecture of the series at yovisto.com and here ist the itunes link to the lecture series.

Due to some deficiencies of the former real media recordings, we decided to encode all recordings via flash (in a much more fashionable style...see for yourself) now. The itunes version is of course mp4 with h.264 encoding.

WWW in Chinese ....

Hej, on Tuesday I received the very first copy of the Chinese translation of our book "WWW - Kommunikation, Internetworking, Web Technologien". Contrarywise to the German original it's a Chinese paperback and therefore also less expensive. Wow.....it's amazing to know that there are potentially more than 1 billion readers ;-)
Finally, I know how to spell my name in Chinese (although I can't read a word of the book...):

（德）萨克（Sack，H.）

Anyway, if you believe it or not, translating the book took more time than writing. I remember that it took me about 15 months to write these 1200 pages. But, the translation itself took more than 2 years. One of the major difficulties was that, although we gave the LaTeX source code to the translator, text being embedded in images and figures was hard to deal with (maybe because I wrote the entire book on a Linux system with xfig for drawing graphics and figures....).

All in all, the translators did a great job and I would like to thank everybody being responsible for the work being done, especially Long Wang from HPI Potsdam for the tedious work of endless proof reading and of course Christoph Meinel for establishing ties to the Chinese publisher Science Press.

Here (at dandang.com) you may find a Chinese advertisement for the book (being already) on discount for only 51.60 Yuan (instead of 69 Yuan...).

bibcamp 2008 in Potsdam / Berlin ahead......

After the succesful educamp 2008 in Ilmenau, I would like to draw your attention to the upcoming bibcamp in Potsdam and Berlin, on May 16-17, 2008. Like educamp 2008, bibcamp is being organized as a barcamp. Up to now, we have 45 participants, and more to come...

If you don't know what a barcamp is all about, here are the rules (....thinking about fight club):
1st Rule: You do talk about Bar Camp.
2nd Rule: You do blog about Bar Camp.
3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
4th Rule: Only three word intros.
5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

If you want to know more about barcamps, you might have a look at the following video being produced by the Hochschule für Medien in Stuttgart:

Link: sevenload.com

educamp 2008 in Ilmenau

NEW: The video recording from the first day podium discussion of educamp 2008 is now available via yovisto.com.

Today, we are visiting educamp 2008 in Ilmenau (April 18-20, 2008) on behalf of FSU Jena and yovisto.com. Educam 2008 is organized as barcamp, i.e. it is almost unorganized. But, with more than 150 visitors the e-learning focus of the 'unconference' obviously has attracted a lot of people.
The day started with a short introduction of everybody with 'name + 3 tags', which really is not so simple. Just try to focus your interests in 3 tags, where at least one tag is reserved for your affiliation, one for your profession, and the last tag for your interests. Oh, but wait. The day did not really start because of a lack of coffee (which is essential for any kind of scientific working...).

For yovisto, we have managed to organize a session in the afternoon (1.30pm, 'Geistesblitz'). Therefore, we have some time for visiting other sessions, connecting to people, and public relations for yovisto... ;-).

ok. 1.30 pm. Our session is streamed live into the internet. You may find the live-stream at mogulus. From my point of view our presentation went very well. We had a lot of interesting questions including comments and advice how to improve the services of yovisto.

Unfortunately, we are a little bit too late for the upcoming session 'slidestar'. Concerning content and targets, slidestar for sure is one of our competitors. They offer an entire framework for authoring, recording, and searching lecture presentations....but only in a proprietary manner. One of the problems of slidestar seems to be the accessibility of slidestar-presentations for search-engines. slidestar is a flash-based application and therefore, linking and indexing the content is not possible for search engines like google. Anyway, they have won the 'Deutscher Bildungspreis 2008'...

Now, we are following a session on 'Exzellenz & Kompetenz' for universities and lecturers given by two speakers from meinprof.de. One of the questions being discussed is the motivation for students, which university to choose. Based on the experience of the participants, regional factors seem to be rather important, i.e. students are chosing a university near their hometown or where their friends are. Thus, is 'excellency' really the main criterion for choosing where to study...?

All in all, I really like those barcamp conferences. The athmosphere is much more liberal compared to 'hardcore' scientific conferences, because there is no strict line between gurus, experts, nobel price winners, and new commers. There's discussion everywhere and a lot of new ideas do come up. It's all about networking....and I guess also the 'hardcode' scientific conferences can learn from barcamp.
At least, there have been no conference fees. Everything (lunch, dinner, refreshments, etc.) was for free, thanks to the sponsors. I'm looking forward to my next barcamp, which will be bibcamp in Potsdam/Berlin on May, 17-18, 2008. Hope to see you there!

German IPv6 Summit in Potsdam

The German IPv6 summit will take place at Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam (Germany) on May, 7-8, 2008. On behalf of the German IPv6 Council I am pleased to take the opportunity to invite you all to visit this important event.

The German IPv6 Summit provides two days of International, European, and German experts to address IPv6 technology at work. The first day includes talks about IPv6 strategy and deployment status worldwide, with a focus on Europe, China, Japan, USA, India, and Korea. The second day of the event will complement the program by addressing IPv6 deployment from the perspective of operators and ISPs as well as deployment in the public sector including education, administration, and defence.

As keynote speakers, there will be Vivane Reding, commissioner for information society and media at the European Commission, and Vinton Cerf, vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google (and one of the "fathers" of "the internet" as far as TCP/P is concerned).

For further information including registration, conference venue and accomodation, please visit www.ipv6council.de.

Hope to see you all at Potsdam in May!

Alive and Kicking... Google 2084

Yep...after several months of abstinence, I'm back, finally.
During the last few months, a lot has happened, in science, in business, and also in private. Thus, there is a lot to talk about and a lot of forthcoming posts. Probably the most complex thing during the last months was to handle two large EU-FP7 proposals as being one of the proposal's core partners, with writing, discussing, conferencing, travelling, conferencing, discussing, and writing again, etc....
Also in my genuine research areas a lot has happened. You might be looking forward to several blog posts on information retrieval, semantic web, semantic search, multimedia retrieval, web of trust, e-Learning, and many more.

Today I just wanted to show you a funny 'screenshot' of what might Google look like in 2084.

Ok. The image is not really new. Actually it was published by Randy Siegel back in 2005. You might also find it in the New York Times. The question is not, if Google would be capable to offer these services, but rather when. Anyway, I guess theese services could be offered much earlier......and (at least) also with a much better user interface.