We lately attended Openair St.Gallen, which I’ve been visiting every year for 6 years now. Once again it was one of the best times of the year. The traditional rain and the following mud at the beginning of the festival weren’t missing either, but the rest of the time it was take-your-shirt-off-weather.
Besides hanging out with friends and lots of random people, the concerts were of course the highlights. Here’s my short summary:
Best concerts
- The National - I’ve been waiting to see them live for years, and they didn’t disappoint me! Matt Berninger (front man) tested the length of the microphone’s cable by pushing himself about 40 metres through the crowd.
- Linkin’ Park - Teenie memories! I still love their old songs, and the facts that they mostly played their hits from back in the days pleased me. Their new stuff isn’t really my cup of tea.
- Boys Noize - A German electro artist. They played around 3 at night and no one joined me. Still I was pretty sweaty after the show was over, awesome!
Biggest disappointment:
- Queens of the Stone Age - They have those 3 songs that rock like hell, but all the rest pretty much sounds the same and I felt like they played a single, 1 hour song.
Best new discovery:
- Beirut - Luckily a friend of mine was a big fan of the band and she suggested them to me, so I joined for the concert and was surprised! Their folk music just sounded great with all the trumpets and tubas, and was perfect for a sunny sunday afternoon.
OMG, this blog is still alive? Yep. Well, it’s “only” been 2 months. I turned out not to be too happy with what my Blog has become. All the Tumblr reblogs were kinda, well, random. I’m trying to find a new concept for my posting. I might make a seperate account to share all those meme-comics and other weird products of the interwebs.
I’m not tired of blogging, at all, I just don’t want to start posting again before I’ve figured out the best way to do it. Until then, here’s some photos that I’ve been wanting to post for quite a while. They’re from a roadtrip I did with Liz. We went down to the southern, Italian speaking part of Switzerland called “Ticino”. We quite enjoyed the awesome sceneries. Check out the Flickr Album for the full load of nature-goodness (friend me to see photos of me and Liz)!
Flickr-Album
A few days ago Google announced their new +1-Button. It looks like as if they want to compete with Facebook’s Like-Button. Logged in with your Google Profile you’re able to 1-up search results, which will then be ranked higher if friends of yours search for the same thing.
I for my part, don’t like this concept at all. In my prediction, this will fail just as Google Buzz and Wave did, even though those two had potential. I think this because of the following reasons:
- User-base: For a feature like this to be successful, you need a decent and active user-base. Now, Google is used by everyone and a lot of people are using Gmail, but barely anyone is in any way socially active on Googles platform(s).
- Irrelevance: The concept of “you like what your friends like” doesn’t appeal to me. Of course I might click a youtube video in my Facebook News Feed from time to time, but I have the possibility of ignoring it.
Besides that, people who are capable of using Google in a really efficient way (with not only words but clear definitions, hyphens and quotation marks) will be robbed of that skill.
Let’s say you search for “ATi-Radeon HD-6990 Review” and a “friend” of yours just liked one of those price-comparing sites, it might well show up as the first result.
- Lazyness: For now, to like a search result, you’ll have to be on the Google results-site. How do you know a source/result is any good before you’ve read it? Not at all that is. And what I doubt is people going back in their browser after reading, just to +1 the search result. This might change when the button gets integrated into websites and blogs, but for now, it’s useless.
I admire Google’s attitude of trial and error. They invent, they try, they fail sometimes. That’s how innovation works. I wish for them not to stop trying, but this is one of the times where they will most probably fail.
