Well, I’ve been away for almost a week, stuck on an unexpected contract. I must say that non-disclosure agreements are not as fun as they sound, especially for a blogger who’s just dying to share something this interesting. On signing the contract and the agreement I was subjugated to an IQ test, and while I have much less confidence in them than I used to years ago, I was happy to score 138. So was the client.

Let’s see. In that same week I managed to almost get sued by Beyonce Knowles’ lawyers, I lost a fair bit of my online portfolio due to sheer stupidity (for the first time ever I tried to play it safe - bad idea), I came down with an overdue illness, I got ideas for 200+ domains and some 10 sites, and wrote a research paper on why technology serves as empirical proof to the concept of Post-Modernism. At the same time I’ve ignored e-mail and my blog almost completely.

Today I got my invite to try out minggl.com. First, a brief description from their own site: “MiNGGL is a free, simple, and easy-to-use browser plugin that helps you connect with friends and manage your profile, whether you’re a member of one or multiple social networking sites. With the MiNGGL Social Palette, your friends and favorite social spots will be connected into a larger network that you control.”
Sounds good, right? Aggregators are becoming popular nowadays, which is the natural step in the world of post-myspace and post-facebook startups that hope to claim a piece of the socnetverse.^[1] Minggl’s potential uniqueness in this paradigm is that it does not simply aggregate data using rss, opml or api on their own site - instead they provide a browser toolbar / plugin that allows their own Minggl notes to be added directly to the site in question (so far myspace and facebook). A little note shows up in the white-space surrounding the facebook / myspace profile that sums up your relationship to the person, and if the person also happens to be a minggl user, more of these floating boxes will appear throughout the profile, nicely embedded wherever the user decided to add one of these notes.
But instead of talking, let me show you what I mean. The setup process is a breeze - in my case I used FireFox 2.0. The toolbar installed just like a standard plugin would (although at 600 kb+ it is rather large for FireFox). After the installation, this is the page you see:

Taking a small break from the world of technology… I have not written any reviews for a long time and while this isn’t really an attempt at one, I just felt like sharing this with you.

The Edukators (original title: Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei) is a slightly unusual movie. Form-wise, there is nothing to it. Yes, the camerawork can be a bit jarring, as the camera is almost constantly moving, the shots are sometimes a bit too rushed, almost impatient. But the main impetus lies with the actual body of work.

In a way, it’s both a coming-of-age story (mostly for the characters vis-a-vis their interpersonal issues) and a in-search-of-idealism-lost story (that is the least the implied message provided for the audience). What I particularly like about this seemingly plain plot is how those two main themes interplay in terms of accessibility - sometimes the issue is private to them, other times it becomes public - it affects the audience. Then another theme emerges and tries to take the centre, with a number of secondary themes always present in the background. It really is quite fluid.