Timo Heuers Weblog

In June, I added a tip to Dopplr database, which I want to publish here as well. Have fun and don’t hesitate to send me a message if you are planning to visit Hamburg - I can introduce you to some dudes over there.

If you don’t want to spend all your money for just one night, this is the a good tip: Stay at Hotel Wagner. It’s beautiful located in Hamburg-Rotherbaum close to the ICE railway station Hamburg-Dammtor and the University of Hamburg and with bus connections to Hamburg central station and other tourist destinations in a few minutes.

I stayed there for one week while I was doing an internship in Hamburg near by. The staff is really helpful and it has free wifi, too! That’s one of the points a good hotel need in my opinion so that you can do stuff and finish work from hotel, too.

The style is also amusing: Hotel Wagner tries to catch old Hamburg style and combines it with new elements, really cool!

The building where it is located is called Dammtorpalais which houses five hotels. Although in a very busy, but also safe, district of Hamburg, the Hotel Wagner is still very noiseless (if you don’t get one of the rooms at the beginning of the floor wich everybody is passing to go to their own rooms).

Yesterday I watched a TED Talk by Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in which she talks about Great Apes — particularly about bonobos — and shows what these apes are able to do in an amazing way (it’s both, speech and video where you see her and her team working with the bonobos).

Sue also talks about why it’s her mission to provide Great Apes. (Unfortunately I am not allowed to embed this video, so here is the link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=YRjaqlqzeeA)

The reason why I love Seesmic are they conversations. I had some about different subjects the last days and recorded lots of videos even at a birhday party. But the most interesting discussion was with “an English English teacher living in Spain”, how he calls himself. Cool guy. He’s “cataspanglish” on Seesmic if you want to follow him or watch last videos. My Seesmic name is “timo“.

Cannot remember when the discussion started, but it was in the thread “can you help me to learn english”, which a Chinese girl opened. I recorded a video for it when Chris was asking me for tips for learning and improving English skills.

First of all, English in school is mostly crap. It’s too much theory and too less speaking and writing. The teacher is talking German instead of English and if he is talking English, he has to explain the order twice, English and German after it, because not even half of the class understood what do to.

Of course reading English blogs and tweets is important. Listenings to podcasts also fills the important hole of pronouncing and listening comprehension. One of my favorite English podcasts, called Speaking English Podcast, is run by a German who studies American studies and English studied in Hamburg. He podcasts about grammatical problems and words that sound the same but are used in different ways and spelled different.

But what is passive listening and reading without asking questions and interact? In my opinion the most important thing is to interact with native speakers, it doesn’t matter where they are from (India, UK, US, ..). That’s how you can learn sayings and expressions used to describe things. Don’t hesitate to ask them for a correction of your textes. I did that for the “about” page, but don’t do this anymore for normal blog postings - making mistakes and err is human.

That’s all for now. Do you have any further tips?

I published a comment at planet sab - a friend’s blog - about why I don’t use Friendfeed and social life aggregators. Also read his thoughts about Friendfeed.
I tried to explain my opinion as well as possible. That’s what I wrote (with some corrected mistakes):

I don’t use it, by the way. I remember me registering but can’t find any emails from them. But even if, I wouldn’t use it. I think it’s just more needless information. I don’t want to know, if someone listened to something on Last.fm. People who are alway listen to music when they are on PC generate too much entries about their music taste. Don’t want to know that! I don’t want to know, what they blogged about — I subsribed to enough RSS feeds which show me.

I know, Web 2.0 is about losing privacy, but a place where every of my online activities is aggregated is not the right place for me, sorry. Maybe the Lidl bosses should just add the Friendfeeds of their employees (if they had one, of course). Would be cheaper than spying.

I tried to fill Jaiku with Twitter messages, Last.fm songs and blog posts. And of course I got and still get clicks on new posts. But I don’t want my online life on a single place — especially when it’s public for everyone (don’t know if you can hide it, but than there is again no need for me to register).

Note: I even know people with a stalker!

Any comments?

I am now a subscriber of taz for some days and I more and more like this left-winged alternative paper. Their style of writing is funny but also serious enough.

To teach you something about what’s going on in Germany today (I promoise, today will be the only day I’m doing this…), I have to start with the Transrapid, a German promosing high-technology in the railway sector. The Bundesland “State of Bavaria” ordered one of this Transrapids (trains) for a new railway line between Munich airport and central station. But the contract was cancelled today because the costs went into ad infinitum (from 1.6 billion to 3.1 billion) and Bavaria cancelled the contract.

The second red hot topic in Germany is the Lidl treatment of staff. You will find some more inforation here:

In March 2008 the German news magazine Der Stern came up with a cover story reporting systematic surveillance of Lidl workers, including most intimate details of their private affairs.

I am watching more and more movies on iTunes with my US account. I think renting movies, watching and giving them back has never been easier for me. I tried to rent movies in a “classic” video library, but they are more expensive and it’s more difficult for me to bring them back. And there is no good video library nearly.

I pay approx. 2,60 euros per movie and 2 euros for a TV episode.

The main argument for me to rent movies in English is to improve my language skills. You may have noticed that I have some problems with sentence constructions and deeper knowledge in English. I want to improve and I think this is a good way to do so.

I love NCIS and I learned a lot from them. I bought eight episodes on iTunes and some more on DVD and want to get even more. And I rented “Ratatouille” as my first movie and just finished “Evan Almighty” yesterday. Both of them were nice, I can really recommend it!

To finish this article I promise to watch more movies in English. The iTunes rentals as well as some of my DVDs — I have a big collection of movies at home.

When I was attending BarCampBerlin2 yesterday, I went to an English session called “OpenID for beginners”. Lukas Rosenstock, member of the OpenID Foundation Europe, talked about how OpenID was created and how to use it.

Here are a few statements, notices and thoughts:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dckgqp4z_13cz39fw

I bought my first Mac some days ago and I totally love it. Ok, not totally, but I love it.

I ordered Leopard yesterday and hope Apple will send it soon

I already blogged about the current Web 3.0 discussion ransomed by Mahalo (which seems to be a great project by the way) founder Jason Calacanis.

But I think one of the best definitions is made by Niva Spivak from Radar Networks, who writes:

Web 3.0, in my opinion is best defined as the third-decade of the Web (2010 - 2020), during which time several key technologies will become widely used. Chief among them will be RDF and the technologies of the emerging Semantic Web. While Web 3.0 is not synonymous with the Semantic Web (there will be several other important technology shifts in that period), it will be largely characterized by semantics in general.

Nova created a very interesting graphic, which shows us, that Web 3.0 starts 2010 in his opinion.

What’s in my mind is, how people will notice, when Web 3.0 is all over the internet. I don’t know how to differ between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 in practise. Of course, we can speculate about what Web 3.0 will be, but who will identify it, if Web 3.0 is here?

I have a friend, Lutz Thielmann, who visited one of the Lunch 2.0’s I organized, and he worked a long time in Semantic Web sector. I asked him for a book suggestion for beginners. Would be cool to read a good book about that. But, hum, I am totally overload with books. Here are some books to review, some classical books which I want to read (for example Kafka, a great author) and I’m currently reading Robert Scoble’s “Naked Conversations” and have a lot of critism most for the German translators.

In an interview with David Wilkinson, who is running the Techzi Network, I got asked about what I think what Web 3.0 will be. It was in January. I answered, that Jajah and Jaxtr will be big players in Web 3.0 and Open Source will be a big part of Web 3.0, but as I think today, I failed.

Today, 10 month after the mentioned interview, I think Web 3.0 is all about portable Social Networks, Semantic Web, WebOS and maybe Micro Blogging (I’m not really sure about that). But I think, Web 3.0 will flood the Web earlier than we can imagine.

I joined Explode today, one of first MyBlogLog competitors. I love the design. Also Marshall Kirkpatrick from Techcrunch wrote about this. And I’m happy, ’cause I can register my first name as my user name :-). That’s the widget by the way. I will not integrate it into my English blog at the moment.

I’d be glad to see your profile names in a comment. Thanks :-).