sagesex

… and support sagesex.com in a new and easy way! The nerds among you know already: The Swedish heroes from the Piratebay have had another stroke of genius: Flattr! It’s like Digg with money: Now you can’t just tell everybody what you think is cool on the Web, but also reward and support (flattr!) your favorite projects in a way that is brilliantly simple, secure, and adapted to your personal finance and generosity budgets: fantastic Open Source software, free texts, music, images, video and, of course,  masterful mixed media contributions like sagesex!

It’s very simple: Go to Flattr, register, pre-pay an arbitrary amount via Paypal or credit card, and adjust how much of this money you want to give for the good in the world every month. From then on and everywhere in the Web, you can simply press one of these cute little buttons that you can now see below all our posts, and your monthly contribution will be fairly distributed among all the projects that you have flattrd in this month. Plus, from this moment on you also have the opportunity to have your own contributions to the world’s information culture rewarded by the world. And, as with Digg, you can always see how popular something is by how much it gets flattrd.

You can see, I find this idea beyond brilliant and of course I have begun to flattr my favourites myself (by the way, it would be great to have a wordpress plugin that shows you my favorite things). Flattr is a concrete and well-made utopia that might even make redundant the often talked-about “culture flat rate”. There are still some concessions to grey reality, like the 10% that Flattr keeps (though they are supposed to have promised decreasing this percentage in the future – plus, I like to support the pirates in their lawsuits), the idiotic fees that Paypal/Moneybookers take, or the minimum contribution of 2€/month (which is OK for me, but it could keep a few Indians from taking part in this new world economy). Still I’m hoping and believing that Flattr will be outrageously successful, that it will blur even more the boundaries between producers and consumers, and that it helps bringing free culture to free people without making the producers starve. In this spirit we naturally rejoice deeply if you flattr us.

Popularity: 7% [?]

... and support sagesex.com in a new and easy way! Die Nerds unter Euch wissen es schon: Die schwedischen Helden von Piratebay haben einen neuen Geniestreich gelandet: Flattr! Es ist wie Digg mit Geld: Jetzt kannst Du nicht nur anderen sagen, was Du im Web cool findest, sondern auch Deine Lieblingsprojekte genial einfach, sicher ...

… and copyright. I just saw this and thought you should see it, too. It’s a topic that’s close to my heart and that I have thought about a lot in my PhD thesis. But don’t worry, the people who made “Good Copy Bad Copy” have made this topic very accessible and fascinating as hell. Sorry, English only. But maybe you want to “remix” this into German? Enjoy!

Popularity: 7% [?]

... and copyright. I just saw this and thought you should see it, too. It's a topic that's close to my heart and that I have thought about a lot in my PhD thesis. But don't worry, the people who made "Good Copy Bad Copy" have made this topic very accessible and fascinating ...

It’s finally official. After more than six years of searching I can call myself a “Dr.rer.nat”, which is the German equivalent of a PhD in the sciences. In my thesis I have basically asked why we don’t have an anonymous Napster yet and what it would take to build such a network. If you’re interested in privacy, networks, anonymity, copyright, file sharing, or the future of libraries, I invite you to take a look at my dissertation World Libraries – Towards Sharing Large Data Volumes in Open Untrusted Environments while Preserving Privacy”.

Popularity: 10% [?]

It's finally official. After more than six years of searching I can call myself a "Dr.rer.nat", which is the German equivalent of a PhD in the sciences. In my thesis I have basically asked why we don't have an anonymous Napster yet and what it would take to build such a network. If you're ...