Kasi-Blog

A good blogger-friend of mine – Der Rüdnitzer – is currently involved in an online/PR/battle for an alley of wonderful trees in the north of Berlin. Good Luck for this hopefully succesful campaign!

There are quite a few networks available for staying in contact with your friends, such as OpenBC (bald Xing), StudiVZ.de, Unister.de, MySpace.Com, Facebook.com, Orkut.com, Friendster.com, LinkedIn.com, Reunion.Com and TakingItGlobal.org and many more.

Here are my reasons why StudiVZ and TakingITGlobal.org are the best solutions for staying in contact with people.

- Almost everybody is inside: at StudiVZ.de and TakingItGlobal.org everybody can sign up and a lot of students and alumni from Germany are already there.

- Contacting is easier: At LinkedIn.com you have to know another person’s emailaddress if you want to contact them. However with many people having three or four email-addresses, such guesswork becomes very laborous. With TakingItGlobal, you just need their names and you can add them to your friends-network, at StudiVz (as well as Facebook, OpenBC you need their confirmation first.

- A great ressource: TakingItGlobal is not only an contact network, but also offers a wide variety of information about funding, NGOs, campaigns and activities – and StudiVZ is increasingly becoming a ressource for discussing and researching.

- It is easy to generate new groups. Just recently I started a group on Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsiblity at StudiVZ and it has received enormous attention. It now serves not only as a meeting point for people interested in the topic, but also as an exchange base for announcing meeting and conferences. At OpenBC groups have to be applied for and recently an application for a group of former Alumni of the Bavarian Representation in Brussels was rejected.

- Not (yet) commercialised. To make use of the full service of OpenBC, you have to pay. Unister.de and MySpace.Com are covered with commercial stuff. Both TIG and StudiVZ are relatively free from advertising. Hopefully it stays like that.

- Truly international. Okay StudiVZ concentrates on Germany, Orkut on Asia and South America, MySpace on NorthAmerica. But TakingITGlobal.org is truly international because members are from all parts of the globe.

- Featuring new artists.Both platforms have created opportunites for young writers, singers and painters to express themselves.

- Better with the users.. While Unister has the reputations of attacking users or advertising for their site with questionable methods, the people behind StudiVZ and TIG are real people who answer nice and polite.

I decided to change my homepage into a blog. I am kinda excited, we’ll see how it goes.

Because a lot of my friends ask me this, I will post some stuff on my personal development on this blog in addition to the other more content-oriented stuff
After coming back from the USA with a lot of ideas, I first had to get settled somewhere. I chose Berlin for quite a lot of reasons, family, friends and a fine lady that maybe does not want to be mentioned here in public.

I signed up as math student at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. I am now taking some classes in Analysis and Algebra – which are really quite interesting. And then I try to organize my life and my next steps – more will follow on this issue soon.

Konstantin writes about a company that replaced journalists with robots – maybe an interesting idea for replacing bloggers with robots? Simply copy links from another blog, write a standard phrase in front of it like “Mr. Smith wrote this interesting article about this and that” and suddenly the page rank goes crazy.