What a letdown. I wanted to report on near completion of The Website Resurrection Project – but I had a mind-altering experience. On the upside, I am not afraid of identity theft or surveillance anymore. My dentist had to cancel an appointment the day before. I showed up some minutes before the appointed time. The…
Tag: Netizen
Blog Cleanup – Raking the Virtual Zen Garden Again
I am proud owner of a full season of Monk on DVD, and as a child nobody ever had to tell me to tidy up my room. I indulged not only in cleaning my Lego(*) world with a fine paint brush but I rather re-organized all my belongings in Feng-Shui-meets-OCD-style quite often. (*) Lego is…
The Web As I Want to Remember It
This title might be due to unknowingly plagiarizing dejavu.org – The web as we remember it. I haven’t visited dejavu.org in years, but I did now as I felt I need to wax nostalgic. This might be due to my recent tinkering with my websites‘ layouts. As a child I crafted 200-faced paper polyhedra whose…
Using Social Media in Bursts. Is. Just. Normal.
I have seen lots of turkey pictures last week and this has reminded me of an anniversary: When I saw those last time I have just started using Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. @elkement Little bird has left its egg! #newbie #twitter — Elke Stangl (@elkement) November 22, 2012 So a review is overdue, and I…
What Is Normal? (My Way of Announcing Blogging Time-Out)
I remember the best Out-of-Office note I have ever received – musing on not being able to get back to me as quick as normally, and culminating in the philosophical question: But – what is normal? Probably this is one of the hidden, leading questions that have driven this blog ever since I started it…
On Social Media and Networking (Should Have Been a Serious Post, Turned out Otherwise)
It has been nearly a month since my satirical post on LinkedIn and bot-like HR professionals has stirred interesting discussions and unexpected reblogs. I have promised to come up with related posts regularly. To all my new followers who were probably attracted by the Liebster-award-related nonsense: Compared to those posts this one is unfortunately a…
Liebster Blog Award: This Time I Try to Respond in a More Normal Way
It happened again – I have been bestowed a blog award despite the way I handled my last nomination. This time I will respond in a different way. I – the Subversive El(k)ement – will adhere to the rules! Geeks, please bear with me though! I still think that blog awards are just ridiculous chain…
Professional Online Persona or: What Are Your Skills?
My previous post has triggered intriguing discussions – about writing, identity and what I called an ‘online persona’. As far as I remember I borrowed this term from David Weinberger’s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined – sublime reflections on the way the web has impacted culture and communication. I have asked myself sometimes: How should…
On Writing or: What Do I Need to Smoke to Understand Your Websites?
This is a verbatim quote. (“This” refers to the second part of the title. The first one is a lame reference to Stephen King, of course). It is a question asked by a former colleague some years ago who had been exposed to my proto-blog websites for the first time. These websites are subject to…
Website Resurrection: Status Report
It’s nearly EOY (end of calendar year) in corporate lingo, and thus it is time to prepare the last reports and try to meet some deadlines set by top management for political reasons. Corporate thinking is in my bones so I need to apply this approach to my personal Website Resurrection Project. I registered three personal…
Crowdsourcing of Art: Poetry from Search Terms
Since I had access to the log files of my first hosted web server (in the past millennium) I had been addicted to analyzing my log files – browsing text files with a simple text editor. In particular, search terms submitted to search engines had intrigued me. I know I am not the only one. People (……
F as in Finally
Finally I did it. I. Am. On. Facebook. A week ago I reactivated my dormant Facebook account, created years ago, that has never been associated with any friends. Fortunately I have some friends now. If I die tomorrow, I will not die alone. And I am on Twitter. @ elkement Little bird has left its egg #twitter #newbie So…
How to Avoid Exponential Inflation or How to Respond Appropriately to an Award Nomination
I have been nominated for an award by a true philosopher despite the cartoon I have posted recently. More precisely, I have been nominated by Daniel who runs The Unemployed Philosopher’s Blog! The award comes with some really tough conditions, I try to rise to the challenge: (Italics: Questions designed by the unknown originator) 1)…
Discovering Your Life Being Cliché
You are browsing the internet in order to test – by anecdotal evidence – if your original ideas are that original or your most creative writing that creative. Within milliseconds you detect that everything has already been told, shared, pictured, thought, sketched. For every clever business idea I had, I found zillions of companies that already had implemented version 3.0 of this idea….
Burn the Org Chart – if Not the Organization – Down to the Ground
Don’t panic. This is just a quote. It is a quote from one of my favorite favorite favorite books: The Cluetrain Manifesto, first published in 1999 and now available for free. The website – and the book is a call to the people of earth and puts forward 95 theses, the first of them being Markets are…
Reconcile All This (Goals of This Blog)
I have now blogged since more than half a year and I have pseudo-blogged since about 10 years, but I have never stated any goals explicitly. Fueled by my Website Resurrection Project I will do so now, running the risk to be able to hold myself accountable for achieving these goals. Despite the title of…
The Website Resurrection Project
I own a bunch of domains. I have once been asked if I had some issues with my provider so that he compensated for that by giving all those domains to me. This question was followed by: What do I need to smoke in order to understand your websites? So yes, there is content on…
Shallow Waters and Deep Reading
I have re-read The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and this is not a balanced book review. I am an occasional reader of popular psychology books and I am guilty of selecting these books according to my pre-established bias. The following experience puzzled me before I read the book: I spent a two-week…
My Blog Name Corresponds to a Mistyped Term
I am aware of this. Therefore, it will never be indexed correctly. Google will consider me one of those typo URL hijackers – or whatever the technical term is for people who own domains like micorsoft dot com where they host these web sites that only contain a bunch of other URLs. Elkement is a…
Clandestine Blogging
Currently, I have not linked my blog anywhere, and I avoid creating too much outgoing links. The blog is public and nobody is aware of it. I had even planned to blog at a hidden – fully private – blog for a while, although my postings are not that confidential. Reasons being: I am using…
From Early Adopter to Lazy Laggard
Applying the Technology Adoption Life-cycle model to my internet usage pattern, I categorize myself as a Laggard or a member of the Late Majority. The beginning was more promising: I used e-mail since the early 1990s, and I set up my first web site in 1997. At the dawn of the new millennium, I owned…
elkemental Force 