Martin Hofmann

a personal blog about technology, communications and other stuff that interests me

Martin

A library of SMS messages

by ·

A team of researchers from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and GWT-TUD GmbH, an affiliated company, is building a library of SMS messages. They are hoping to collect 100,000 messages with several million words by April.

Instead of testing mobile applications and devices in an artificial environment with artificial data, the researchers want to collect, analyze and use real text messages to help make technology more “natural, intuitive and human”.

On its German-language website textforscher.de (German for “text researchers”) the team is looking for people who want to earn 10 Euros for an hour of entering sample text messages. The money can also be donated to charity.

High Road’s new look

by ·

(cross-posted from the new High Road blog on the new highroad.com)

————— 

We’ve updated our website and refreshed our brand. We used our tenth anniversary to not only celebrate but also make changes to our corporate look and feel.

We loved our old logo with the road-that-leads-to-the-mountain. It’s been with us ever since High Road was founded back in the days when a website launch still created excitement and media started to think they might want to look into this thing they called “Cyberland” (“Extra! Readers talk back!”).

A lot has changed since then. High Road has grown from two to more than 70 people. We’re still doing technology and digital lifestyle PR but now we are doing it in six divisions and four offices.

We’ve been to the mountain and back many times. But we still love the hike, and we always strive to find new and better ways to get up there. And that’s what we wanted to focus on with our “refreshed” brand.

We searched for people who could help us with that, and found the team of Evoke Solutions (branding and design) – or as I like to call them: Knights of the White Space – and The Working Group (website planning and development).

Together, we came up with a new logo, a new corporate identity, and a new website. We hope you like the result.

image
————-

(I will keep blogging here, too. But I can now also be found on the High Road Communications corporate blog.)

Jon Arnold and Marc Robins team up

by ·

Jon Arnold (blog), Canada’s independent voice on IP communications, has entered into a partnership with Marc Robins (blog) that “includes the two firms joining forces to provide an array of marketing, communications, strategy consulting and market research services to their growing roster of IP communications technology vendors and service providers.”  They are also planning to launch a new joint electronic newsletter. This will be good. More in the press release.

World’s oldest current newspaper now only available online

by ·

“Post och Inrikes Tidningar” (PoIT), the world’s oldest current newspaper has discontinued its print edition as of January 1, 2007 and is now an Internet-only edition at PoIT.org. Established in 1645 as the official newspaper of Sweden’s national government, it had lost a lot of readers in recent years, according to Der Spiegel (in German).

Near the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish Queen Christina and Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna wanted to use PoIT to explain to its people “what all the money was spent on”. Over the centuries it turned from an outlet for the government’s official view into a full blown newspaper with reports on epidemics, the exchange rate for Swedish currency, weather reports, poetry and novels, and then was mostly focused on being “the country’s official notification body for announcements like bankruptcy declarations or auctions” (from the Wikipedia entry). The last print edition on December 29, 2006, was published with a circulation of only about 1,500.

Rather than viewing it as another proof point for the decline of print media, I’d say in this case the glass is half full. The Internet is a godsend for these types of official notification publications: the official function works just as well online. But it costs less public money.

(Disclaimer: I don’t speak Swedish; my only sources were Spiegel Online and Wikipedia)

New RSS reader feature in Canuck PR Toolbar

by ·

Users of the Canuck PR toolbar may have wondered about the new button called “RSS – All Feeds” that has popped up out of nowhere. In addition to the existing directory of Canadian PR, marketing and media bloggers and the news ticker, I’ve now also included an RSS reader with all the feeds from the listed Canadian PR and marketing bloggers.

People who subscribe to all these blogs in their own RSS readers, either as part of their browser or in readers like Bloglines or Live.com, may not be interested in this new feature. If you don’t like it, it is easy to turn the RSS reader off by clicking on Toolbar Options (in the Canuck PR menu on the left of the toolbar), selecting “predefined components” and de-selecting “RSS All Feeds”.

The PR and marketing blogger list keeps growing. The following blogs are currently included in the RSS reader (click image to enlarge):

I will update the directory, newsticker and RSS reader with more Canadian PR and marketing blogs as soon as I come across new ones or get a heads up from other people in the comment section.

In other toolbar news: The resources directory has been updated with a link to David Jones’ excellent Social Media Toolbox for PR People in Squidoo.

BTW – if anybody is looking for a list of PR blog feeds that isn’t limited to Canada, I recommend the Public Relations Feedburner Network.

And finally, a quick note on RSS feeds: special kudos to Marc Snyder for having the biggest RSS icon this side of the 49th parallel. It doesn’t have to be that big but it helps to have the RSS icon in an easy to find location, preferably near the top of the page. When I went through all the blogs in the directory to find the RSS feeds, it was interesting to see where some bloggers had placed the links. In two cases, I couldn’t find a link to an RSS feed at all. So one blog isn’t included in the RSS reader and with the other I was lucky to guess the feed URL.

P.S.: If you don’t have the Canuck PR Toolbar installed yet, you can download it here.

Red Herring comes to Canada

by ·

Looks like May and June will be busy months for tech people. After ICT Toronto recently declared the last week in May to be “Toronto Technology Week” (featuring mesh, BarCamp and the Canadian New Media Awards), Red Herring today announcend the launch of Red Herring Canada and its own tech conference in Montreal from June 13 to 15.

“With Red Herring Canada, we will help shine a light on a whole new crop of Canadian technology innovators who deserve more recognition.”

Joel Dreyfuss, Editor in Chief, Red Herring

I haven’t seen any details beyond the standard press release yet. But that’s good to hear. There are already a number of great events and awards for technology innovators in Canada, for example CIPA. But we can definitely use more help. Welcome to Canada, Red Herring!

Does Europe lead in using web technology for grassroots democracy?

by ·

On Friday, members of a German grassroots democracy project launched a new website called Abgeordnetenwatch.de (that’s “MPwatch” in English), which allows people to find the members of the German federal parliament for their region, read about their voting records, and get in contact with them.

A similar site was first launched for the federal state of Hamburg in 2004. Now they have expanded it to the federal parliament. They have also received funding from BonVenture and attracted major media partners in German news portals Spiegel.de, Tagesspiegel.de and Welt.de. According to an article in Welt.de, not all MPs are happy about this development. One politician said the site is indirectly pressuring politicans to come up with responses or get a reputation of being “anti-democrats” (I’d agree that there might be unrealistic expectations for the speed of response but, in general, this politician might want to read his job description again. Maybe he skipped the part about communicating with constituents).

A little while ago, I wrote about another German grassroots democracy project, where people can submit questions to the German chancellor and get them answered by the Federal Press Office.

Today I read about great projects in the UK (hat tip to Neville Hobson). Simon Dickson has created a Google Map of all MPs in the United Kingdom, which links to a database of House of Commons Hansard Debates, Written Answers and Statements via an API by TheyWorkforYou.com. TheyWorkforYou.com is an awesome resource for citizens in the UK.

It is fascinating to see citizens – not governments – come up with all these ideas of using new web technology to make government and democracy more transparent and accessible.

Does Europe lead in this type of online grassroots democracy? What about Canada? And other countries? I am asking not as an accusation but because I have no idea about Canada yet and I’d like to find out more about developments. If you know about any projects, please let me know in the comment section or send me an email (see contact page).