Kasi-Blog

At this late hour, I want to share some thoughts on family – because these thoughts have been turning around in my head for the whole evening because of some unexpected things happening in my family. I won’t go into details here, there’s no need and it would probably cause a lot of trouble anyways.

I am lucky to have a big family. The parents of my father have several sisters and brothers. Their descendants are sometimes hard to keep track off. My father has three brothers, my mother has three sisters and if I have counted right, there are ten cousins alltogether.

In my own family, the counting is a little bit more difficult, but I have to confess that there is quite a large group of people that I would consider to belong my direct family: my mother, my father, my grand-parents, my sister, her brother, their mother, their grandparents, my relatives, my host-family from the States, the family of my supervisor, even to some extent close friends and the families of close friends.

When I think about them, they make me think of a “family”-feeling which is hard to describe. What is that feeling? Is it knowing each other for a long-time? Is it the feeling that these relationships have moved to another level of close-ness? I don’t know really. It’s maybe knowing that they are part of me and me being part of them – even though that sounds very weird writing it down like that.

We have a lot of family reunions in the family. Birthdays, holidays, sometimes marriages. The good things about reunions is that you know what to expect: your relatives get older, you get updates what has been happening, if it’s a birthday or a marriage the focus is on them for a day, but there’s nothing unclear about family reunions. When I visited my aunt in Hungary, there was an immediate link to my last visit five years ago. When I visited my relatives in Canada, there was an immediate link to their visit two years ago. Sometimes there are small surprises, for instance when all of us sang evergreens at my grandmother’s birthday this year. But this “link” was there and “immediate link” does not need constant rebuilding, but is just there, it is what constitutes “family”.

Family is something that you can not escape for real. Maybe ignore, but never really escape. When I look in the mirror, I see my parents. When I see my sister, I see her brother, her parents, her grandparents. And with some friends I see their parents in a similiar way – I know where they come from and what has influenced them – this feeling of knowing who they are also constitutes “family”.

Pride and sometimes anxiety – that also constitutes “family”. My mother has some big adventures ahead of her, which make me really worried but I feel immensely proud that she is undertaking this big step, but I can’t wait to see her back. My father is doing small steps every day and thus is working gradually towards the big goal. He made the big step into unkown wilderness already, and that’s in my eyes very impressive. My sister has made so many big steps already which has put her so far ahead of me, even though she is much younger. Since I can see her blush already, I’ll keep my praise when I see her at the weekend.

Last weekend, when talking with very close friends, I noticed something that I had somehow thought before but never realized it like that: how difficult it is for parents to teach children to have trust in other people, to be curious about the a world filled with dangers on every corner. If a child can just lean back into the world, and feel the support from somebody, sometimes a lot and sometimes just a little, this makes “family”, I think.

The German Friends of Nature, a youth organisation for young ecologists, has developed a website called Europasprech which serves as a dictionary between the EU terms and normal language. Great idea!

Marina Natanova discusses the latest surge in the Russian blogosphere: a Rexona campaign that treated Russian women disrespectfully by alleging that they need more deodorant than British, German or Polish women.

Via Airport, Spiekerblog, Codecandies.

Heard about Jon Ronson, ordered his book called “Them” where gets to meet Al-Qaeda-Klu-Klux-Klan-Bilderberg-people, read it in 24 hours and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone!

wHave you ever returned more exhausted from a journey than when you started it? Filled with new impressions and memories and tired from two weeks of sitting in busses and trains, hauling around the backpack and changing accommodation, it is time now to reflect on some of the lessons learned during the trip.

Read on, my friend »

I’ll be gone for two weeks, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Hungary. Without internet and mobile phone. Enjoy!

At the G8 Press Conference, a young man stood up and started spreading leaflets. Putin replied to him in German. The first interesting thing is that this incident never made it to German media. The second interesting thing is that the whole incident became popular across the internet because of the bulging-eyes-man sitting behind the young man. Find photoshopped images as well as the movie of the press conference here.

The Subprime crisis is in the German Media after the German government together with the large German banks and a federation of smaller private banks have saved the German Bank IKB.

Why are the markets so nervous? Why does every little hint of vulnerability of a Financial Actor cause stock markets to plunge down into unkown depths? What is the real deal behind the Subprime crisis? Read on, my friend »

Mein Artikel Artikel über Regionalbüros in Brüssel wurde nun bei poli-c.de veröffentlicht, bin über Kommentare und Feedback gespannt. Danke an dieser Stelle nochmal an Florian Busch-Janser für die freundliche Veröffentlichung. Ein Policy Paper zu Regional Offices habe ich auch schon erstellt, mit ein paar interessanten Strategien zu effektiver Regionalarbeit in Brüssel.

I just came back from an interesting journey through Germany, meeting with three rising school-student networks (btw, I also met with René who will soon release a very nifty university tool – more about this in a later post).

SchülerVZ is producing news with porno-images and nazi-groups on their network – but their growth in profile counts profile allows them to enter cooperations with search engines such as yahoo. Is there no room anymore for other social networks?

The journey convinced me that there’s more to German social networks than the Facebook-clones StudiVZ and SchülerVZ. Last week I met with Sebastian from Schueler.cc in Friedberg, a small town north of Frankfurt. I also met with Jasco, Klaudia and Florian from Fellowweb.de in Vallendar, a university town in the Rhine-Valley. Last but not least I met with Manuel and Bernd from Spickmich.de in their hometown Cologne. Read on, my friend »

Wer mit der Berliner U-Bahn fährt, wird entdeckt haben, dass die Fahrgäste permanent an die Decke starren. Woran liegt das? An dem sogenannten Berliner Fenster, dem Fernsehprogramm der BVG, das auf kleinen Bildschirmen übertragen wird.

Die Sendung ist recht kurz und besteht aus einer Folge von Powerpoint oder Flash-Animationen, die Nachrichten, Werbung und andere Inhalte präsentieren.

Leider hat man aber oft das Gefühl, dass das Medium nicht ausreichend genutzt wird. Ist es zu einfallslos, zu oberflächlich und zu wenig informativ?

Für Journalisten ist es sicherlich eine große Herausforderung, die Nachrichten der Welt auf 200 Zeichen zu reduzieren. Wer aber bei einer halbstündigen U-Bahnfahrt die Schlagzeilen schon auswendig rezitieren kann, wird sich sicherlich wie ich auch schon mal gedacht haben, dass der Unterhaltungswert des Berliner Fensters größer sein könnte.

Der 15 Minuten Zyklus wird vom Berliner Fenster dadurch begründet, dass die durchschnittliche Verweildauer eines U-Bahn-Passagiers so kurz ist. Vergessen wird aber, dass man oft mehrmals am Tag mit der U-Bahn fährt und so die Länge des Programms nicht ausreicht, um die Aufmerksamkeit der Fahrgäste zu fesseln.

Das Medium „U-Bahn-Fernsehen“ ist aber gerade deswegen sehr interessant, weil man zum einen durch das Format (zwei Bildschirme nebeneinander) interessante visuelle Effekte erzielen kann, zum anderen weil durch die hohe Reichweite (siehe auch Reichweitenstudie) fast jeder in Berlin erreicht werden kann. Wenn man noch die S-Bahn- und U-Bahnhöfe mit dem Berliner Fenster ausrüsten könnte, würde dies die Reichweite noch erhöhen.

Wie könnte aber das Programm verbessert werden? Um mehr Menschen zu erreichen, muss das Programm den Zuschauern mehr bieten als jetzt. Ich habe daher sechs Ideen zusammengetragen, die das Programm voller und interessanter machen würde. Read on, my friend »

Blogtrainer features each three months a thorough examination of top german websites using the Alexa Statistics. In a recent article he suggests that among the Top 1000 German websites with the most readers only four big bloggers in Germany can be found.

His methodology is this: he looks at the Top 100 most popular websites in Germany and their respective global Alexa-Ranking. The median of the global ranking of these 100 websites is about 1250. Since he knows the global ranking of some popular German bloggers, he now extrapolates their global ranking onto the German scale.

Whether this is statistically sound is not the question. He could also have used a weighted average, but I guess that this would not necessarily have changed the big picture. An interesting deduction following his line of thought: in the 2500 top sites worldwide there seem to be only 100 German sites exist. What about the rest? What countries are represented in the Top 2500 websites at Alexa? And what other bloggers are on top inside this Top 2500?