About this site


This is the personal blog of Gerd Kamp.  everything i write (especially my blog posts concerning  the german media landscape (typically written in german) is my own personal opinion.

(Disclosure: My employer the german press agency dpa, is owned by the german media, publishers as well as radio and TV stations (commercial as well as “öffentlich-rechtliche”).

Why relations.ka2.de?

This blog serves a multitude of purposes:

  • Firstly, it is a personal experiment in order to understand the phenomenons of the blogossphere, folksonomies, social networks not only by consuming them passively but also by actively using them.
  • Secondly, it is an exercise in writing english texts.
  • Thirdly, there is the illusion that somebody might find my random rants and ramblings about media and technology and especially about the interfaces and intersections between these two topics interesting.

Relations? Why relations?

relation1609005.jpgWhy the heck did i choose relations as the name of the domain as well as the title of this blog?

This excerpt from britannica.com may shed some light on it:

Main Entry: re·la·tion
Pronunciation: ri-‘lA-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English relacioun, from Middle French relation, from Latin relation-, relatio, from referre (past participle relatus) to carry back

  1. the act of telling or recounting
  2. an aspect or quality (as resemblance) that connects two or more things or parts as being or belonging or working together or as being of the same kind ; specifically : a property (as one expressed by is equal to, is less than, or is the brother of) that holds between an ordered pair of objects

Hence relation is a word having relations to both media and technology, perfectly describing the intent of this blog.

In addition to that, the worlds first newspaper that appeared 1605 in Straßbourg beared the name “Relation”, namely „Relation aller fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien“ and “Relation” was used as a synonym for “Zeitung”, a german word that was at that time used generally for “news” but today is the german word for “newspaper”.