George Carlin, the disputed libertine comedian, died last Sunday in the age of 71. Man, we will miss your awesome humor.

Lars Juhl Jensen, another member of the Bork group, started his new blog Buried Treasure some days ago. As said in his first posting the main intension is to make some of his scientific loose ends public:

My primary goal with this blog is to make my never-to-be-published observations openly available. As I don’t plan on continuing these projects, anyone is welcome to pick up a project and continue where I left off.

I wish a happy treasure hunting.

I guess you didn’t miss the big hype about Googles OpenSocial (link doesn’t work so far), which is a set of open API standards for social networks. I like Google for using open standards and working with and not against the community. But regarding this opening of social networks (same for FOAF/XFN) I have strong concerns as we lose too much control about the data and our privacy. Ralf Bendrath and others precisely describe the problems.

The Internet is challenging our current understanding of privacy/identity/society. Maybe we just have to accept this change and must adept our attitudes. For me personally it is not a problem that a potential employer can find out that I have fun in my spare time (as long as the information is correct … which I cannot control) for other it might be different. But the potential abuse of this easy-to-harvest data by governmental agencies makes me refuse to stop questioning the legitimation of these technologies.

EN: What would happen if we run out of oil today? World Without Oil, an alternate reality game, simulated this scenario. Different online media like blogs, podcast and videos are used to create this made-up reality and draw a picture of the peak oil situation. Hopefully it stimulates thoughts about the topic and real action, too.

[vie O'Reilly Radar]

EN: Paul Watzlawick, mostly famous for his communication theories (e.g. one cannot not communicate), died at the 31st of March, 2007. I enjoyed reading some of his books (The Pursuit of Unhappiness is highly recommended) as he had a wonderful, humorous way of communicating his thoughts.