I recently installed the Wordpress Plugin called “wpTouch“. This plugin adds a mobile version of the wordpress site for iphone user agents.

The result looks like this:

Note: By the way, the newer Wordpress Versions come with a built-in plugin installation routine, that makes it really easy to install plugin. As administrator you only have to search for the plugins name, and then after finding it, click on install and type in your ftp data. That is all. The update process is the same.

From June 4th to June 11th some friends and I have been canooing in Arvika, Sweden.

The week after we visited norway. The following lines describe our tour:

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Day 1: We took out flight from Graz to Vienna, and Vienna to Oslo, then the train from Oslo to Arvika in Sweden.

Day 2- 7: Glaskogen Canoeing Tour.

Day 8: Train from Arvika back to Oslo and then again traveld by air from Oslo to Stavanger in Norway.

Day 9: Sightseeing & Oil museum in Stavanger.

Day 10: We took the ferry from Stavanger to Tau, with the Bus to the starting point for a hike to the famous Prekeistolen.

Day 11: With rented car to Kjerag to see the famous boulder called “Kjerag Bolten”.

Day 12: By car from Stavanger to Bergen and finally moved on to Voss – where the extreme sport’s festival takes place annually.

Day 13: Starting with the bus to go to the starting point for a boat trip through the Nærøyfjord, an arm of the Sognefjord – Norway’s longest and deepest fjord – to Gudvangen, back from Flam to Myrdal with the Flåm Valley and back again to Voss by train and bus.

Day 14: Driving with the rented car from Voss to Lillehammer – thereby drove through europe’s longest tunnel (25km) – to see the famous ski jumping ramp.

Day 15: Back from Oslo to Vienna and then the rainy Graz!

If you would like to see more pictures please talk to me personally, we have also a protected  picasa album that is online too.

I tried out comparisons like “night,day” and “apple,microsoft”. A funny one was the comparison between “bush,obama”. Look at the screenshot below or jsut try out the tool for yourself : TwitterSpectrum

The tool was created by J.Clark who also published articles on data mining, statistical analysis and visualization and created other visualization tools. For further information you may scan his weblog.

it has been a week since we came home from our probably last skitour for this season.

Therefore I would like to share some impression from South Tyrol:

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Google now offers a Public Data Explorer. This is another progressing Google Labs Project that looks quite usable yet. The datasets include, among others, minimum wage in europe, world development indicators etc.

Such public data visualizations are good examples of what can be achieved by information visualization. Such as, this small and easy created visual comparision of Agricultural land between the World and Austria lets users quickly examine that Austria’s agriculture is decreasing while the world’s one is still rising.

But have a look for yourself and create your own visualizations.

While readig through the latest entries of my subscribed rss-news-feeds I stumbled upon an interesting collection of three websites that are presenting data visualization of all kinds. Here is a list:

1. SWIVEL – See, Understand and Share Data
2. Tableau – Visualize and Share Your Data
3. Verifiable – Share Your Data. Learn from Others.
4. Visualcomplexity – Resource Space for Visualization of complex networks
5. and last but not least of course the already mentioned: Many Eyes – for shared visualization and discovery

Smashing Magazine recently presented 50 free UI-and-web-design wireframing kits.

Here I present an excerpt, namely parts of the collection of iPhone & iPad templates and resource links that are really useful to create nice (low-fid) prototypes, advertisement pictures, fake-screenshots or whatever you would like:

• iPad GUI PSD
• iPhone GUI PSD
• iPhone Stencil PDFs
• iPhone PSD Vector Kit
• iPhone APP Sketch Templates
• iPhone GUI Elements
• iPhone Wireframe Sketches

User Experience & Interaction Design are two of the most important issues when facing the current use of our World Wide Web. Though, most scientists and developers forget, that the Semantic Web and therefore also the Internet-Data’s Understanding is strongly connected with UE.

Within my future thoughts and projects I will be approaching the Semantic Web from more of a Interaction-Design or respectively user-focussed perspective. So obviously there are many interesting viewpoints to be taken into account when dealin with this wide-ranging issue.

The first question I stated was what are the different ways to look at this topic; here is a short answer to it:

Notes:

To begin with, I would like to use this post to note down a very incomplete listof professionals, conferences, symposia and institutes (which I may update from time to time), that are besides the obwvious ones, dealing with this topic somehow:

• iSchools iConference
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) – Sympoisum on Creative Intelligent Systems
• UC Berkeley School of Information
• Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI)
• InfoVis C. – A data code compute resource
• A Timeline Visualization of Information History
• Information Aesthetics – Where form follows data – Blog
• DataVisualization.ch – Blog
• many many more

Catchphrases, Quotes & other thoughts:

concept of … highly adaptable … up-scaling views …

“Students shall choose projects with high societal payoffs, researchers have to employ the updated science 2.0 strategies, developers have to focus on genuine user needs”

Eventually, one of our best hopes for the future is that a large and connected group of people can change the world!”

Concept: Let us think of what should be achieved by 2020 and do something about it!

This weekend we have been to the Small Bösenstein (2395m) within the Niedere Tauern. Though there is not much snow these days in Styria, is was a nice skitouring day. Let me share some impressions with you:

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