Kasi-Blog

It’s going to be expensive for the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as the host of the G8 summit. But are they going to lose the summit? As German media (see Berliner Umschau, MVRegio, SVZ (I), SVZ (II), NDR, Lübecker Nachrichten) discussed the last two days, the regional government threatened to cancel the summit if the federal government would not give additional funding to the state in the North of Germany. Read on, my friend »

I think that Don Alphonso is going too far. In his recent post, he describes various groups in StudiVZ which cover issues such as group sex and sex without condoms. This has nothing to do with the most problematic issue: the pseudo-elitism that marks the business-modell of StudiVZ. Read on, my friend »

I think after the recent allegations against the founders of StudiVZ – and especially the acussation against Ehssan Dariani – it would be best for a clean cut. Maybe it’s best if the whole founding team resigns. Read on, my friend »

Don Alphonso claims that StudiVZ and Facebook are organizing a swap of ownership shares. The StudiVZ founders get a certain share of Facebook and Facebook gets a certain share of StudiVZ, to free the path to shared user data. The business model is also exposed: combining user data for advertisement purposes.

But what is this? A little bit below it says that this is by far not the end of the story. Read on, my friend »

The Berlin initiative idemokratie has started a website for donating money to budget of Berlin: 1 Euro für Berlin.

• Hauptstadtblog
• Soulhouse
• Muedchen
• MediaOcean
• Stefan Schridde
• Fontblog
• Sassen
• Modersohn

Just one month ago, the Chinese facebook clone Xiaoei was bought by Facebook. Now StudiVZ looks like it’s being bought by facebook. Soon Facebook will be bought by Yahoo for their network Yahoo 360? And Yahoo? Bought by Google’s Orkut?

This is the 21st century method of a pyramid scheme: copy another person’s idea then sell it to them. The others are probably not poor either, since they have also copied their idea and are just waiting to sell it to somebody else. In the end somebody owns all social networks in the world. I wonder who?.

Of course, this also works in the real world: Der Rüdnitzer describes the case of his fight for the trees on an alley near his house. Apparently a pro-tree group has started collecting signatures, a contra-tree group has also started collecting signatures – but with very little information regarding the case. Apparently they only asked: “Do you want a new street?” – they did not ask “Do you want a new street and have the trees cut down?”

After the huge amount of critique that existed in the blog-o-sphere has been partially refuted and commented by the StudiVZ founders (see their comment on their finances, see Ehssan Dariani’s apology for his personal mistakes), and after I have written how fast the StudiVZ founders have learned from the blog-o-sphere, it is time now to ask: what have the bloggers have to learn from StudiVZ.

An interesting article at Sammelsurium argues that the accusation by the blog-o-sphere was effective, but resembles a modern method of a public witch trial. The article also claims that the image of the StudiVZ founders is ruined for years and maybe soon legal procedures need to be found to erase false accusations by the blog-o-sphere.

In my own comment, I have tried to refute some of these arguments. Read on, my friend »

Now, many bloggers are saying that the StudiVZ-bomb has exploded: Nazi-Invitation and Facebook-Deal. What else can still top that. But I have no doubt that more is still to come. Read on, my friend »

The following article combines a list of proposal for immediate reactions to the problems found at StudiVZ discussed at a meeting with the founders of StudiVZ.

1. No more private PR by Ehssan, Michael or Dennis

StudiVZ used to be an innocent student project, it is now a large company with a lot of money and it is certainly not innocent. Read on, my friend »

Last Monday at noon, the StudiVZ staff invited me to their office in Berlin to discuss some of the critique floating around in German media and German blog-o-sphere. I made sure that my role as an independent journalists is clear. I only wanted to get a second opinion on the accusations made by bloggers. I told the StudiVZ founders that I want to write an article about this meeting.
Present was Ehssan Dariani, Michael Brehm, Dennis Bemman and Dario Suter. The contact was initiated through Tobias Walter – all are staff members of StudiVZ. (Registration needed to see the profiles).

We did talk about all kinds of issues, from technical problems to PR problems to Ehssan’s personal PR problems to legal issues. I have included their anwers in my updated Summary of StudiVZ.

In general, I had the feeling that the founders of StudiVZ are extremely overwhelmed by the public reaction to their posts and that they are extremely ill-advised on their PR. They have been supported with money and maybe technical advice, but other than that have been left alone. Read on, my friend »

In the last couple of days, comments in the press (see SVZ, N24) suggested that the G8 summit is not-well financed. The G8 conference site Heiligendamm is situated in the German state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern , which has to finance the preparations surrounding the summit. Read on, my friend »

Today Tobias Walter from StudiVZ commented on one of my StudiVZ articles. He invited me to visit their office to discuss the roaming critique with them.

I was first a little bit surprised, since so far StudiVZ is only indirectly answering the critique (see Dariani’s reply to the recent discussions of his Youtube-Videos at the StudiVZ blog). But in fact I am very happy and would like to thank Tobias for taking the first step and contacting me.

I will try to visit their office in the next couple of days and hopefully it is possible to discuss some of the heavy items on the PR-To-Do list of StudiVZ. Of course I will report about the meeting here at my blog.

I am personally quite undecided. On the one hand, I think that StudiVZ is an interesting project, it is okay if some mistakes happen. On the other hand they should now seriously get started and thinking about their company policy and with a lot of money in the background, they should start this soon.

The Mainzer Media Dispute, a conference of journalists to discuss current trends in the German media, offered an interesting discussion between Philipp Schindler, Head of Google in Northern Europe and Thomas Schnedler, who has recently published an interesting study of Journalism in the Web 2.0 (Thomas Schnedler – “Die Content Falle – Journalismus in der digitalen Medienwelt”? – The Content Trap – Journalism in the digital media world)

Schindler said that “Google is not a media company, it only provides information through various channels to the users”. He emphasized the democratic sense of Google: all it does it sorting information by relevance. Read on, my friend »

I found today an interesting story about the experiences of foreigners at the G8 protests in St. Petersburg.

On the French weblog of StudiQG, the usual search for new staff can be found, but with an interesting picture: the famous Uncle Sam Wants You Picture.

What does that mean? Are they expanding into the USA? Have they not researched the meaning of the picture? Or have they simply copied the picture from the internet – just like they did with Facebook?

Questions…

The German website StudiVZ and its French clone StudiGQ are incompatible. It is impossible (according to the weblog at StudiGQ) to add German StudiVZ users in the French version and vice versa.

But the goal to create one website of all StudiVZ clone is reaffirmed in the blog – but apparently the Student’s Project StudiVZ is apparently not capable of integrating the databases – despite all the corporate money that has flown into StudiVZ.

StudiVZ has crossed the one-million-user threshold – a great day of joy for Jamba, Samwer, Holtzbrinck.

A friend of mine said today that this is how breaking up with a person has changed over the years:

• Ten Years Ago: Delete his/her name from your black phone book
• Five Years Ago: Delete his/her name from your cell phone
• Today: Cancel your StudiVZ friendship and create a face-book trash group for your ex

P.S. I got an invitation from a charming person to Lokalisten.de – a social network based on home bases. My nickname is KasiW.

A youth organisation named YOIS – Youth for Intergenerational Justice and Sustainability is organizing a conference called “Werbung für Übermorgen” . The idea is to connect young people working in youth NGOs for causes like environmental protection with advertisment and PR specialist to give the young activists some tools for their work.

Me and my father will hold a workshop on “Lobbyism and decentral communication in the Web 2.0″. The conference takes place between 8th and 10th of december in Berlin.

Another great example on how decentral communication by bloggers can put an issue on the political agenda is the case of the trees in between Rüdnitz and Danewitz (see Der Rüdnitzer). It seems that when money is involved, common sense gets out of the the door and runs away.

Recently a number of bloggers have commented and linked to my article on StudiVZ (see Chaos@Paderborn, Schnitzler, Blogdoch David Warlick, Customer of Hell, Robert Basic, Don Alphonso.Jörg-Olaf Schäfers, MyMediaMirror, Fimpern, Gastronomie Blog, Visual Blog). Thanks for all the positive and constructive comments! I have revised updated my article and clarified some of the wording.

StudiVZ really needs to disclose its finances. Otherwise they will have a hard time finding new staff and new customers. I talked to a lot of students and it seems that the bad news from the blog-o-sphere is already trickling down into main-stream media and main-stream student thinking. I also mentioned the case of StudiVZ at the Mainzer Media Disput – a conference the effects of the digital revolution on journalism.

And anybody sufficiently capable of writing some PHP-code will also be able to enter “StudiVZ” into GoogleBlogSearch or Technorati. And who wants to work in a company with such a bad image? Well, some people work also for FoxNews.

My own efforts to gain more insight information into StudiVZ were doomed. I tried to contact the StudiVZ people last week and asked them if it is possible to visit them and confront them with the accusations. So far no response.

I think the demand for a StudiVZ-Watchblog, as Andi suggested, is growing. I did contact a few bloggers who have been prominently discussing StudiVZ. The general reaction was a positive one – although quite a few said that StudiVZ is likely going to change its name and its appearance soon and until then a decentral watch blog is better. I agree.