The New Media Diva

Wired Mag has an article online about an estimated US$30 million effort at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology to literally piece together the work of East Germany’s Stasi. Researchers at the Institute are using digital methods to tape together the 5 percent of surveillance files ripped up by the Stasi during the fall of communism.

From the article:

“That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There’s a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany’s communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally “paper-wolves” and “rip-wolves,” German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

There’s no way to know what bombshells those files hide. For a country still trying to come to terms with its role in World War II and its life under a totalitarian regime, that half-destroyed paperwork is a tantalizing secret.”

According to the article, Frauenhofer is using a system of scanners to “digitally tape together the torn fragments” from 400 bags. Each bag has about 40,000 fragments. The massiveness of the project equals the size of the Stasi’s surveillance program.

“As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic’s Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler’s Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.”

Via Instapundit. Image: jgaray/Wikipedia

I’m trying not to use the word “hate” because it’s just not a nice word.

Last year, my editor-in-chief and I started using Google Calendar as a collaboration tool to schedule stories. She’s in Sarajevo. I’m in Zurich. The Calendar seemed to be the best way to schedule stories in real time with both of us online. I created the calendar.

A few months ago, she had a problem where the calendar that contained the schedule for all of our news stories either wouldn’t load for her or just wouldn’t show the stories (which we’d put in as events). This happened all of a sudden. Then, all of a sudden, the problem disappeared. Everything went back to normal.

Well, it’s my turn now. Since Christmas, I haven’t been able to see what stories have been scheduled…and we’ve scheduled some weeks in advance. I posted the problem on the Google Calendar help group, but no one seems to know a solution. My e-i-c is going to have to send all of the scheduled stories in an e-mail, which is certainly not a time saving move. I created a new calendar thinking that that would solve the problem. Nope, I can’t see any scheduled stories even on the new calendar.

I even tried embedding the calendar in a web page. I still couldn’t see the events.

I’m at my wits end with this. I can see my other calendars, just not this one…which is the most important one.

This has taught me a lesson: Never depend on one service for something as important as story scheduling. Always have some type of back up (even paper based). It will save you a lot of trouble down the road.

I’m now trying to find a better scheduling solution because it looks as if Google Calendar isn’t it. Any suggestions?

• The Next Social Network: WordPress - GigaOM
  Late to the party with this one, but here’s a great argument for WP to get into the social networking business.
  (tags: wordpress socialnetworks blogging)

…please do so. Now. You have been warned.

I’ve had a Twitter account for who-knows-how-long, but I’ve never used it. I’m waiting on the system to send me my user name and password again, for I’ve forgotten it. It has been about 10 minutes.