A fresh start – again!

Okay I have to admit that I have been pretty lazy over the last 2 month when it comes to this blog. Although I have been pretty busy in my job, I should have taken more time to write something here.

Why so lazy?

Well, thats the question, isn’t it? What I know is, that a few things have changed over the last weeks, the most important being that I think I finally found an area of expertise I want to focus on. This was clearly not the case when I left university over 2 years ago with a diploma in information management. I started out doing some marketing & pr stuff, some IT, but nothing really focused on one area.

The funny thing is, that I think I have found my home in Information Architecture and User Experience. So basically I have ended up pretty close to where I started in the first place, but now with a lot more pratical background.

So what now?

Being more of a generalist, I have focused on web related stuff in general on this blog. I am about to change that to more IA/UX focused articles in the future, since I would like to share some experiences I have made during my work. My current project should allow this kind of focus and we will see what the future holds in this regard.

Furthermore I will try to write this blog in English from now on. Firstly because I don’t want to focus on Germany only (I just know IA/UX guys from other countries but none from Germany…thats weird, isn’t it?). Secondly this offers me the chance to practice my written english skills, and that’s always a good thing.

Looking good!

If you have visited my blog before, you will realize that I have changed the design (again). Yes, I know, I should stick to one design, and hopefuly I will stick to this one. I’m just easily faszinated and there are so many great designs and styles out there to get inspiration from - as a designer I am sure you know what I’m talking about.

As I said I will stick to this new, minimalistic layout but will try to improve it a bit over the next few days. There are still a lot of bugs with this one and I appologize for that! I know I should set up a test environment but I just don’t have the time to do that right now, so the live machine has to do. At this point, there aren’t many who are reading this anyway :)

So, that’s it. I hope I can produce some interesting content for you in the future and I’m looking forward to getting more involved in the IA/UX community form now on.

Cheers,

Sebastian

Webdevelopment for Beginners – XHTML and CSS

Recently I decided to start learning more about webdevelopment, since fronend coders are hard to find at the moment. I started looking for some good tutorials that should help me to get an overview over this topic. Start off with XHTML/CSS, followed by JavaScript and finally RubyOnRails - sounded like a good plan. Well, it turned out to be much harder to find some good tutorials that would help a novice with his first steps, especially since I wanted to learn to write W3C compatible code right from the start. Anyway…here are some of the resources I used for my first steps (and I’m still a novice in this area).

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Privacy – How a lack of media competence is threatening our future

The right of the individual to be protected against intrusion into his personal life or affairs, or those of his family, by direct physical means or by publication of information.
- Report of the Committee on Privacy and Related Matters, Chairman David Calcutt QC, 1990, Cmnd.
1102, London: HMSO, at 7.

Privacy is a human right. The need for a personal space, protected and hidden from those we don‘t trust has been part of our life even since birth of humanity. In  the modern life protected by law, we still see privacy as something holy, a basic human right. Since the triumphal march of modern communication and the internet, privacy of information and communication has moved into focus of our society. Therefore it is no surprise that topics about this basic right lead to excitement. But how can we protect our own personal space in times where information about everything is freely available and easy to access? Where can the line be drawn between what is private and what we want to share with others? And how does our changing live has an impact on our definition of privacy itself?

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