Silberbauer Says:

Og lige en update med denne artikel fra Berlingske om projektet og DRs strategi for unge.

Så er vi kommet i luften med DR Partisan projektet. DR Partisan er et stort crowdsourcing projekt som hovedsageligt benytter www.facebook.com/drpartisan som udgangspunkt for at give DR ren besked om, hvad 18-25-årige vil ha’ for medielicensen.

Først skal vi have fundet en rebelsk community manager, der kan være på www.facebook.com/drpartisan og skabe events i hele Danmark for at gøre opmærksom på projektet. Du kan søge jobbet frem til d. 22. november 2010 på www.facebook.com/DRpartisan eller læs hele jobopslaget her. Efter en runde med jobsamtaler findes de bedste kandidater og fra d. 1. december stemmer partisanerne selv om, hvem der skal have jobbet.

Herefter følger en stor ide-konkurrence, hvor der er 100 dage til at komme med nye ideer til DR – men man kan sagtens gå i gang allerede nu, så du er klar til første runde. Det behøver ikke at være så avanceret – du kan bare tale til dit webcam, lave et slideshow eller andet, men du må gøre lige så meget ud af det, som du vil. Forhåbentlig er du mere kreativ end os. Vis os det.

Partisanerne stemmer selv de 5 bedste ideer til tops i løbet af de 100 dage konkurrencen er åben. Til hver af de 5 vindere er præmien: Ekspert-hjælp til en værdi af 30.000 kr til at lave en pilot, dummy eller lignende af deres idé og så direkte adgang til at pitche ideen for DRs topledelse.

Håber du har lyst til at deltage!!
Ses på www.facebook.com/drpartisan

Lars Silberbauer

The four best presentations I experienced on w2e this year.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Ben Huh, “Becoming One with Internet Culture”
Great talk on the ‘new pop culture’ and subversives vs. hackers.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Tim O’Reilly, “State of the Internet Operating System”
The man himself speaks about the clash between the ‘new’ open Microsoft, Amazon’s cloud and the closed business model of Apple.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: June Cohen, “Ideas Worth Spreading: TED’s Transition…”
June shows the new TED translation feature that is truly impressive. And she’s just a great presenter.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation. …”
A bit hyped presentation, but still with a lot of good stuff on lean startup tactics.

Note to self: Don’t go down this road… use overlays and popups with extreme caution.

…er min frues nye blog på Politiken. Very good food, blot på dansk og med en lidt anden vinkel. Web 2.0-baghjul til Silberbauer.

June 11 the City of Copenhagen will launch World Climate Community. This project needs all the publicity in the world.

World Climate Community will collect ideas and voices on climate from all over the world to let the politicians know that we’re for real and that this planet is too good to waste. The world’s leaders will gather in Copenhagen for COP15 in December and World Climate Community will help set the agenda.

Right now you can join the Facebook page and invite your friend to join too. And of course, after June 11 you should join the community and participate with your opinion, ideas and projects.

The community will launch at www.worldclimatecommunity.com

Baekdal is absolutely right. Audi fucked up: Why only publish their (probably pretty costly) documentary on Les Mans 24 on iTunes only, and thus only in the US? A European brand makes a movie about a European event, and then only makes it available to recession-struck Americans. Dummkopfen.

The movie is paid for – why not just push it on Youtube and every other available channel? Get it out there!

Here’s the trailer, but you can’t see the real thing, unless you’re American. For some reason, Audi doesn’t want you to.

Viacom vs. Google. I guess you’ve heard about that case: Viacom, in all its stupidity, wants to sift through all of Youtube’s log files to find out who have watched what. And the US courts approved that. So don’t be surprised if one day a slick lawyer turns up on your doorstep asking you to pay $2.000 for having watched excerpts of Friends on Youtube back in 2004.

It’s sick, and Viacom is making a stupid move. You can’t win the media wars by sewing and harassing your own target users. You simply must provide a better product than your competitors. It’s really that simple. But just like most of the record labels, Viacom doesn’t get it and, thus, will fail.

This destructive and pathetic struggle of a dying giant made me think of why the web is so more intriguing than the old telly, and why we choose to watch the pixelated, lagged streams on Youtube instead of buying yet another satellite HD decoder box.

It’s not just because the web is free (it isn’t, you know. Broadband connections do cost money). It’s definately not because the quality is better (HD on cable looks stunning – Youtube videos pretty much look like shit.) It’s because it’s fun! And it’s there when you need it. You don’t have to order a satellite package seven days before the race or the fight that you want to watch. And most of all: You can share the experience with hundreds or thousands of other viewers. Real time. Right when the action is happening. It connects you to the reality. That’s why it rocks: It’s all in the interaction with other individuals of the Homo Sapiens.

A few weeks ago 24 hours of Le mans was on. And Danish driver Tom Kristensen was behind the wheel of no. 2: The Audi diesel R10. Something not to be missed. But none of the two national networks in Denmark chose to transmit the whole 24 hours of Le Mans – or more correctly: None of them could afford to buy the rights.

Being at my weekend cottage (no cable) I had no way of seeing the race on Eurosport. Luckily I have a 2 MBit internet connection, though.

I found a page made by a guy called Crizzzie (yes, three z’s) who has put a tuner card in his pc and somehow manages to make this signal into a Flash Video stream with only 30-something seconds of delay. Normally Crizzzie streams rugby, but this day Le Mans was on for all 24 hours of it. My hero.

Furthermore, and this is where it gets really clever, he had embedded a IRC style chat chat next to the stream. Here, Le Mans aficionados chatted away about the drivers, the cars, the tires, the pitstops – in sync with the stream. And most of the guys on the chat seemed to know more about racing than do the lame commentators on Danish tv. One of the chatters actually has participated in Le mans himself with an American GT1 team).

Now, Crizzzies stream was without commentaries (I guess he somehow has access to the “raw” stream from Le Mans) and I knew that the official Radio Le Mans (broadcast on the track) is supposed to be quite entertaining. So I found the official audio stream of the Radio Le Mans in another browser tab. Real time lap times and the overall standings came from a third site. And voilà: The perfect Le Mans cocktail in three browser tabs: IRC, a video stream, audio from Radio Le Mans and real time updated lap times, pit status and so on. No television network can compete with this no matter how hi def the signal is.

This was the funniest and most intense tv experience I have had in a long time. It was like sitting in the couch with some good (and very race-savvy) friends. People argued about tire choices, Peugeot’s strategy – and we all tried to help poor Dave when his laptop started running out of juice. (Poor Dave didn’t make it, though. He disappeared from the chat 5 minutes before the checkered flag).

A short video grab from a great Le Mans “tv” experience

As long as the web gives you this much added value and as long as pay-per-view networks insist on charging a fortune for a single race, people will stream from the web and thus embedding the content in their own social context. Simply because it’s more fun and more meaningful an experience.

Viacom and other distributors must face that the value of content in itself is falling rapidly – even that of the good stuff. But the number of people that will attend a single event online, like the Le Mans, is on the rise as more and more have access to broadband and as services like Youtube and Google Video matures. The good parts of a race like Le Mans 2008 will circulate the web for years and be watched by millions.

Come on, Viacom and all you other boneheaded media dinosaurs. There must be a clever way to capitalize on these dynamics by acknowledging that it’s not the content in itself that carries the value, but the context in which it is watched. Think advertising, product placement, targeting, measuring, viral, instead of thinking trials and lawyers.

As I told you earlier, my wife blogs about gourmet food. She’s been blogging for a little more than a year now, and her blog has turned into one of the leading Danish gourmet blogs with a huge network of friends and blogs abroad.

Last week the Danish paper Politiken called for an interview and did an article about food bloggers in general (see an English version translated by Google here). The conclusion was that food blogging is a serious competitor to the more established food critics. And they should be. The best of the bloggers know as much (or more) about food than does the critics. The article also lead to a podcasted interview on K-Cast, a pod cast on communications (in Danish).

In the Politiken article, several chefs were asked about the food bloggers. Most of them seem to have understood that bloggers are here to stay, and that a good blogger can be your best friend as they know how to work the net and how to get the message through, in a way that your own website never will be able to. And so it is. One dedicated blogger can advertise your business or products more efficiently than you can yourself. And a network of bloggers will easily outperform your PR agency. Why? Because consumers trust fellow consumers and friends over slick PR guys.

To make a successful business you need ambassadors. Someone unbiased that will recommend your product to other people within his network, and who’s words carry some weight. Several food bloggers are just that: Authorities on gourmet dining that people turn to when they want to go out without the risk of being disappointed. And this goes for all other business areas as well.

Consumers has always talked about products and businesses. The only difference from 20 years ago till now is that today the conversation is taking place on the web for everyone to see. And that’s what terrifies some business owners. But they should be thrilled instead, now they can in fact hear what their customers are saying.

You can’t keep the bloggers away – because they are your customers. But you can win their hearts with great service and great products (as two-star Michelin restaurant Noma and it’s Chef, René Redzepi, has won Trine’s) and then you have made yourself a very influential friend and ambassador.

My best estimate based on traffic on the Very Good Food blog and considering the network effect of blogs, is that Trine’s blog in average may produce up to five new customers for Noma a week – directly or indirectly. She and her blogger friends have put Noma on the virtual land map, and as more and more consumers are relying solely on the web for decision making the impact is quite substantial.

Other businesses must learn from the approach that Noma has to the bloggers. Instead of shooing them away and telling them not to photograph the food, they are made friends of the restaurant. In that way Noma has managed to turn the conventional customer/business relationship into a ambassador/business relationship, and that’s good for business.

Do not as a business owner underestimate the networked power of a well written blog. You can choose to fight your ambassadors or to embrace them. But don’t go over board and bribe them, that will spoil everything. Treat them well with a hint of V.I.P., and show them that you care about their opinions.

There’s a flipside to this: It’s very important for bloggers to realize their own power. With the ability to make or break a brand or a business, bloggers should be careful only to write about things that they truly understand (note to self: Stop the raves…). Blogs have a very real impact on real life – for better or for worse.

A real life moment: Trine and blogger friends Laurent and Guillaume were introduced to Heston Blumenthal (Chef and owner, The Fat Duck ***) who happened to be dining at Noma that evening. It’s Mr. Blumenthal in the middle – René Redzepi, Chef of Noma, is the second from the right. Both Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Redzepi are incredibly nice and dedicated people with a overwhelming passion for quality and food.

Where I am? Well, someone had to operate the camera

Finally, after months of preparation, we have launched the digital signage system in DR’s new headquarter in Copenhagen… and it went well

From a workplace to a place to create.
That was the headline of the project from day one. DR Byen has been built by four different architects who has made four very different buildings.
Pictures from one of the four buildings in DR Byen

Our project was meant to deliver an integrated communication platform and to ‘bring the media’ inside these buildings.
As you can see on this images the last part in the project (the Concert Hall) is still more or less a construction sites (see the official site here). About three quarters of the building is finished and the digital signage project has been launch in three of the four parts of the building.

Number one: To connect the architecture with our corporate identity:
First of all, we needed to make a tighter connection between the architecture and the corporate identity.
Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) is, as the name implies, a media corporation. And although it’s an amazing piece of architecture made by 4 different companies, it is not immediately obvious that it was the home of the largest Danish media corporation, that we are delivering high quality public service content, and that we are the de facto keepers of the Danish cultural media heritage.

Number two
Second, we are experiencing an increasing competition in the media business, and the most important competitive advantage is creativity. Therefore I believe that it is absolutely vital to create a pleasant and inspiring environment for creativity to happen. Of course we can’t do an ROI calculation on how much creativity this project will generate, but I believe that we are creating the ground upon which creativity may grow more easily than usual. And that’s why we have been focusing on the integration of different kinds of visual art in the project and creating an experience instead of just an information screen.

Number 3
Finally, our customers have ever changing needs, and therefore we must able to communicate very fast inside the organization and also be able to change our communication procedures very quickly, if needed. A fully automated digital platform, as the one we have created, is a big asset in this race. In the web-2.0-user-has-the-power communication world of today it’s very important to have non-intrusive way of pushing important communication to your stakeholders, employees and customers.

First of all, the Entrance.
When you step into DR at groundlevel, this is what you see. Three large video projections (one is hidden in this image) on the white and grey concrete walls.

We’ve been working closely together with the architects to create a coherent experience of the room. The content is very abstract and meant to supplement the room with depth, dynamic and a creative atmosphere.

I think it’s important, to be very courageous and to use an abstract and symbolic content that will activate the viewer instead of communicating in the usual corp-speak discourse. We should stimulate experiences with the use of symbols and montage-effects and not with the use the very powerful media to promote corporate taglines. See for instance how Jason Eppink is transforming standard commercials to street art.

The entrance from another angle:

The foyer from one of the side entrances. Four 19″ monitors placed on a white concrete wall.

The ‘Main Street’ on the 2nd floor:
The connection between the four buildings in the ‘DR City’ is a giant glass-covered street (12*18 meters) with a bridge crossing the water channel going through the area called ‘Ørestaden’.

In this part of the building we have placed 6 46″ screens. The content consists of news from our own news-channel and news from the department of corporate communicate. Besides that, there are breakers made by young visual artists. They we’re given access to our media archives and used some of the old material to make new artistic expressions.

The ‘Main Street’ viewed from the bridge on the fourth floor.
Every screen has it’s own unique flow of information configured to the specific physical context and user behaviour.

The Meeting Center:
In our Meeting Center we’ve made an integration to MS Exchange Server. In this way our meeting booking system is automatically updated on the screens next to each meeting room. The interface is based on Flash using xml-data from Exchange generated by AgendaX.

What’s next??

Well, this is just phase one of the project. In the next 1-3 month we will be creating a lot more content to the system, for instance the weather forecast, trailers, traffic information and of course more visuals. In february we’re having the first art exhibition with the project ‘Runner’ in collaboration with Illumenart and EPI. Hopefully, we be able to extend the system to the other parts of DR in Jutland and on Bornholm and most importantly we’re learning a lot about what it takes to maintain and use this kind of communication platform.

Besides this, we’re of course looking forward to completion of the concert hall and to the exciting task of creating the digital projections in and outside the concert hall See the pictures. That’s gonna be amazing!!

I will hopefully be able to upload some video soon. It gives a better sense of the look and feel of the displays.
Please comment if you have any good ideas or experiences with digital signage solutions.

/Lars Silberbauer

Using the basic material from his book “Free Culture”, Lawrence Lessig is presenting his view on how to solve the conflict between end user-recreation and copyright issues.

I highly recommend the book and his TED-talk
Lawmakers! Please listen to this talk…. and read the book!!!

Really good slideshow about the economics of micromedia, connected consumption and the snowball effect.
Nice to see a web 2.0 slide show that’s not focused on technology but on the development of the New Media Economics.
Although 107 slides is a lot, I liked the intelligent analysis of broadcast/blockbuster media and micromedia. Enjoy

At e-consultancy‘s What’s New In Online Marketing, London June 27, Flemming Madsen presented Onalytica. It’s a tool for measuring your brand’s online impact. Like Google, Onalytica counts links, but unlike the big G, Onalytica weighs each link according to the credibility of the source. Also, Onalytica (partly) understands the context of the link and thus it can judge (with a precision about 93 %) wether the brand (or product, or subject) is referred to in a negative or positive manner.

This opens for pretty nice analysis of brand impact and for targeting those sources that are especially influential. Of course your brand have to be large enough to be discussed substantially online – in reviews, in blogosphere etc.

More from WNIOM to come…

I attended this seminar in London yesterday and it rocked. The term Web 2.0 wasn’t used at all but the whole thing was about how to link your website into the web itself and how to think outside your own site. I’ll be back with a more thorough description as soon as possible.

Hello WordPress! Why? Because it’s niftier. The admin-interface is so Web 2.0 that we almost wet ourselves. Forgive us the default template.

And oh yeah: The Blogger RSS Import plugin by Ady Romantika really rules.

Göran Karlsson On Search And Web 2.0

moblogging from Børsen: Göran Karlsson from Fast is so right: Search and web the 2.0-paradigm is closely connected. Specialized search technologies are the backbone that creates value from the user generated content.

Web 2.0 Seminar At FDIH

moblogging from Børsen: Thomas Madsen-Mygdal talks about the real values behind the web 2.0 hype. It’s about real change, not technology.

For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination
We learned to talk

Pink Floyd: Keep Talking (The Division Bell)

Speaking about social networking and e-commerce at the Danish E-business Prize 2007 someone in the audience expressed his feelings about social networks and communities as nothing more than a hype. ‘Who’, he noted, ‘will spend time discussing and reviewing products on the web – I know for sure I wouldn’t’.

I guess people who haven’t participated in the buzz themselves don’t understand why someone feels the urge to talk online.

Neither did I until a couple of years ago. Being a true child of the generation of one way communication this social networking thing seemed foolish to me. Of course, as a web professional I quickly learned to appreciate community features and social navigation as nice tools for enriching the user experience. Later on my brother and I launched this blog to be a part of it all and felt the blog-urge.

But maybe I didn’t really grasp the emotional power of web 2.0 for real until very recently when my wife started blogging about what she loves the second-most: Gourmet food.

Left: Trine in our weekend cottage – outside the April sun is shining bright, but… must blog… must blog…

She’s not watching TV anymore, she’s not reading magazines – she’s always in front of her laptop working on the next post. That is, when she’s not out photographing restaurants and chefs for the blog or busy reviewing cafés or gourmet restaurants on the (excellent) community site www.mitkbh.dk

It has been quite an experience for me to see her suddenly realize to the full extent what web 2.0 is all about. It made me realize how simple it is: It’s not about AJAX, round corners or bubble design. It’s not really about the web or the internet at all. It’s just about communicating. It’s about telling other people what you like or don’t like and about experiencing the sheer thrill of meeting new friends that share your likes and dislikes. I spend more than a day creating the template of this blog and, from vanity reasons, getting Blogger.com to ftp the pages to my own domain. Not giving a rat’s ass about the technology Trine spent exactly 10 minutes picking a WordPress template and she was on her way.

Neither TV, newspapers, nor web 1.0-sites will give you that nice feeling of contributing and being a part of it all as do blogs or community sites. That’s why old school corporate websites or web-shops that don’t hook into the buzz in any way soon will be things of the past.

For designers (and our clients) it’s important to understand that the true web 2.0 aficionados out there do not care about the fancy tech-stuff of it, or the term web 2.0 for that matter. Screw the hype and the bleeding edge technology – keep it simple. They just want to keep talking.

As the last person in the western hemisphere: I’m now able to photomoblog.

Well… I guess it is easy if you’re either living in the US, having AT&T as your carrier or being the proud owner of a blogger-ready Nokia N-series or a fancy Sony-Ericsson. But living in Denmark (not supported by Blogger’s mobile service “Blogger Go”), having Sofonon as carrier and having a Nokia 6230i (which is a lousy phone for anything else than talking) – photomoblogging is up hill.

I’ve spent a lot of time testing different approaches:

• Blogger GO (not supported in Denmark)
• Shozu (Great Java app that connects to a web based distribution service that will push your images here and there. Doesn’t work well with my Nokia and Sonofon, though, and can’t connect to the new Blogger service which I’m using)
• The Flicker->Blogger interface (works great, but I can’t MMS from my phone directly to Flickr)
• Sending images directly to Blogger’s e-mail-interface (it doesn’t accept attachments)
• Using Gmail for mobile phones (to circumvent the Nokia 6230i e-mail- and MMS-features (but alas: Gmail Mobile doesn’t do attachments at all upstream)

I finally came up with this detour that in fact makes me photomoblog by MMS’ing an image to an e-mail-adress:

How to photomoblog directly to your Blogger blog (new version):

1) Set up an Gmail-address, if you don’t have one already (Gmail accepts MMS)
2) Set up a Flickr account, if you don’t have one already (To use as a gateway between Gmail and Blogger)
3) Let Flickr make you a special “mail-to-blog”-email-address
4) Grant Flickr access to your Blogger account
5) Set up a filter on your Gmail account forwarding all mail sent to a special pseudo address (e.g. yourname+foo@gmail.com) to your Flickr e-mail-to-blog e-mail-address

Now: Put your special Gmail blog-entry in your phone’s contact list – you may name it “blog”. Now, snap a picture and send an MMS to your contact “blog”. Gmail will accept the MMS and due to the filter this e-mail will be forwarded immediately to your Flickr account’s special directly-to-blog-e-mail-address as an e-mail prober. Flickr will convert this to an image with a description and push it through its Blogger-interface, and voila: Your image has been blogged!

So it is: Nokia > [MMS] > Gmail (sub address) > [e-mail] > Flickr >[Blogger gateway] > Blogger

Easy as pie…

Wikipedia shows us that the combined knowledge of man is incredible and that Web 2.0 technologies can be used for something truly great.

But don’t forget that Wikis aren’t inherently good in any way – the very same technologies may be used for spreading stupidity and idiocy. Although it seems that to use Web 2.0 technology for that kind of misinformation you’ll have to control who’s contributing – to keep all us liberals out, you know. So, where Wikipedia is for all of us to edit, the fundamentalist Christian alternatives are not. And it makes sense: If they opened the door, saneness would be pouring in from all over the web.

On Conservapedia (a right-wing christian answer to the “liberal biased” Wikipedia) I stumpled upon a very short article on Thomas Edison which I’d found could benefit from some improvements. Among other things, I’d liked to add that Edison was a an atheist. But, as I’d expected, I am was not allowed to create an account on Conservapedia – I guess it’s only for American folks of the faith and keepers of the truth.

Wikipedia is biased, Conservapedia says. How about this description of “Atheism” in Conservapedia:

“Atheism is closely tied with Secular Humanism. Popularly-known Atheists and Secular Humanists include Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Other famous atheists include Pol Pot and Stalin.” [...] “No atheist has ever been elected leader of a democracy. The only political systems under the control of atheists are totalitarian and/or communist“

Biased? Naah.

Other scary reads are:

Conservapedia on “Dinosaurs“, Conservapedia on “God”, Conservapedia on “Liberal”

Also, don’t miss out on CreationWiki on Dinosaurs which answers that old question of how Noah did manage to make room for those bulky dinos inside the ark? Well:

It should be noted that although the Biblical description of Noah’s ark states it as large enough to host even the largest known specimens of dinosaurs, it is logical that younger / smaller varieties were taken aboard. Reptiles are the only terrestrial vertebrate that continuously grows as long as they live. Mammals on the other hand, have an adolescent period following which there is no further growth. Therefore, it is arguable that many of these “terrible lizards” were simply much older than modern varieties.

Mind boggling.

It’s true, Web 2.0 is a great thing! But, you’re not guaranteed a special place in the Great Hall of Buzz just because you call it 2.0. (and 3.0 isn’t any better
A couple of examples:

Publishing 2.0

Business 2.0

Global PR Blog Week 2.0??

Branding 2.0

Last weekend I decided to move to Gmail for real and say bye bye to Thunderbird for good. Easy as pie? Well… no, not if you want to do it right. But it’s worth it.

I’ve had a Gmail account for years but I’ve always stuck with my “old” account and my trusty Thunderbird. Don’t get me wrong: Thunderbird is a very good mail client. The best, in fact – but it’s still a local app, and we can’t have that, can we?

Also, as I’m using 3 different computers on an every day basis, even Thunderbird and an IMAP account isn’t the perfect solution. The SPAM problem was getting on my nerves too. I’m running a pretty aggressive SPAM filter on my ISP’s server but still a lot of crap slips through. Applying the Thunderbird SPAM filter (not bad, but not perfect either) and on top of that the very aggressive Spamato filter collection helps. But Spamato keeps filtering mails from my mom(!) and most of you will understand that precisely that kind of false positive is disqualifying. Above all: Thunderbird is not Web 2.0, because Web 2.0 is about trusting Google with all your data, remember? So here goes.

Switching to Gmail is of course easy. I transformed my ISP’s IMAP account to a simple forward, so that all my mail is still scanned for SPAM and viruses by my ISP and then forwarded to my Gmail account. No sweat.

But I still have 7651 old e-mails (not counting the thousands of mails I have sent since 2002, but they will stay on my harddrive for now) in my local mailbox on this very Dell Latitude D410. Among this immense pile of mails there just may be something of importance, so I want it all on my Gmail account for fast searching and easy access – and because I like Gmail’s neat labelling function.

First off I tried the GML (Gmail Loader) but turned out to be very slow and unstable. GML also uses forwarding to send the mails to Gmail, so the original headers are not preserved.

I decided to use the “Redirect” extension for Thunderbird instead. Doing a redirect the headers should be preserved – even though Gmail chooses to date stamp these mails with the arrival time anyway. Thus, each conversation (Gmail lingo for “thread”) is datestamped with the time ofarrival, but the date stamp of the original mails inside the conversation seems to be preserved. Good enough for me as all my old mails will be archived anyway.

So after having set up a Gmail filter to archive all incoming mail immediately and having deleted the largest of the old mails in my Thunderbird mail storage I started redirecting over 7.000 mails to my Gmail account. It worked, but my ISP’s SMTP chose to go into raving spamanoia overdrive and throttle me down. I had to kill Thunderbird a couple of times to get the redirecter up running again and found out that clearing c:\documents and settings\local settings\temp, seemed to help.

Anyway, here I am with 7000+ e-mails in my Gmail neatly stacked into 3.000-and-something conversations and furthermore compressed from more than 600 MB on my disk to 99 MB on Googles disk.

It’s fast – opening Gmail in Firefox is in fact faster than opening Thunderbird. And Thunderbird still is a Formula One car compared to that old freight train they call Outlook.

Yup – Gmail works like a charm. It’s just a really great service and the interface is so well designed. It’s not beautiful, to say at least, but it’s brilliant layed out and the use of Ajax makes it snappy in just the right places.

Sadly, I can’t get the Gmail notifier to work. A firewall or router somewhere between my home and Google just won’t let it through.

Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.

“O’Reilly as Tito?” What a pile of geeky bs. Mr. Thompson is really pissed that real people stole his wet dream and made up a trendy name for it.

Of course the presentation layer rules, Mr. Thompson. Because that is the one part of the system that we all see. So nice data presented in a nice way, yes please. A solid, scalable architecture – that’s great, but as long as the system delivers, I really don’t care.

Maybe, Mr. Thompson, the users got tired of waiting for you developers to get your shit together and to start producing interfaces and services that made sense on top of that nice code that you do. So they chose the systems that provide valuable services in a nice, usable way. Who wouldn’t.

The web right now is developing much like an organism. Not everything is perfect and not everything is build to last – nor should it be. But never before has the web delivered so much value to so users.

Nobody said the Web 2.0 paradigm is perfect, but it’s there, and that’s more than you can say about your promised metaverse of a new generation, scalable, modular 8th generation internet med for people that speak hex. Amazon, Google and even Microsoft are delivering – you’re just talking.

If O’Reilly is Tito, then you’re that young German guy who, seeing the colorful decadence of the Weimar Republic, decided to make us all walk in line towards that promised Third Reich: Ze plaze in which all zystemz will wörk in the zame way and no one will waste prezious coding time on that filthy rich user experienze.

Arh – just kidding. But so were you, right?

Just a couple of books that I would recommend on branding, design and innovation.

Tom Kelley: Ten Faces of Innovation.
A very inspiring book on how to beat the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization.

• Good:
  - All in all, it’s a very good book for anyone with an interest in generating creativity and innovation in their own company.
  - Kelley makes an very important distinction with his focus on faces and not phases. It’s people that drives innovation, not Gant diagrams and Project Management phases and schedules.
• Bad
  The next time Kelley writes about innovation, he should make up his mind whether he wants to promote Ideo or write a serious book about innovation. He knows a lot about innovation, no question about it!, but to much cheering about the wonderful successes of Ideo does not make him or his argumentation any more credible or convincing.

Tom Peters: Design

Tom Peters has the ability to get you pumped up with enthusiasm just by the way he writes and in this book the content is just as inspiring as well. This is a book with a message and you feel the commitment throughout the book.

• Good:
  What I like the most about this book is the radical all-or-nothing message that it sends out, for example this passage from the first chapter:

The harsh news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The microchip will colonize all rote activities. And we will have to scramble to reinvent ourselves – as we did when we came off the farm and went into the factory, and then as we were ejected from the factory and delivered to the white collars towers.
The exciting news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The reinvented you and the reinvented me will have no choice but to scramble and add value in some meaningful way.

• Bad:
  If you’re reading the book because you want to know more about design, you’re going to be disappointed, it’s not about design, it’s all about business and not about new colour schemes and design trends.

Martin Lindstrom: Brand Sense

The Danish Brand Guru Numero Uno has created a follow up to his previous bestseller Brandchild.

• Good:
  Basically, he’s making a point with his concept of branding for all five senses. It’s obvious that there’s room for improvement and that we need to consider all elements of human cognitivity when we are trying to make an impact on customers. But the way he’s trying to measure human senses is not convincing. It seems to me, that he’s got a point and he knows it, but in his ambition to prove his idea, he is crossing the line from giving proffessional advice and doing academic research. And there’s a very big difference!
• Bad:
  As in Tom Kelley’s book about innovation it seems to me that Lindstrom sometimes doesn’t know which one of his two objectives that’s most important. Is it to contribute to the shared pool of knowledge about branding? or is it to use his own branding abilities and tools to strengthen his own brand “Martin Lindstrom”? It’s not clear to me, but I would prefer a honest personal branding exercise without the want-to-make-ground-breaking-academic-research stuff.

Anyway, all three books are worth reading. Enjoy!

First of all, no one should be in any doubt that I believe that blogging and wikis can be used as an extremely powerful tool for corporate communication, but this demands a RADICAL change in the state of mind of most communication professionals. You cannot just add blogs or wikis to your existing communication platform without taking into account that this is just not another new tool, this is a completely new way of communicating. If you do not realize this difference, then your corporate blogging initiative is not gonna fly. To succeed, you need to rethink your communication/knowledge management strategy and it’s not done by:

“Lets do some corporate blogging – that will definitely put us right up there with the big shots in the Fortune 500 (and if not, we’ll add a Wiki, that’ll definitely do it).

You need to change! By now, devoted bloggers have praised and glorified this new medium for a couple of years and even the most well defended stronghold of corporate communication have sensed that something is happening outside side of the outer defenses. You can no longer attend a serious seminar about corporate communication without stumbling over talks on how corporate blogging will revolutionize business communication and of course the general worshipping of wikis as the greatest thing since Post It Notes.

More and more companies are showing interest in adding blogging and wiki-tools to their ever increasing portfolio of communication tools. And it’s just great? or is it??…

In my opinion, there is still a huge challenge to overcome and we’re not their yet. In fact we’re not even close!

A couple of years ago the “MUST HAVE” of communication professionals and one of the most popular subjects on communication/intranet conferences was portals and personalization. Did that really help us? Did the promised benefits arrive or have we just silently agreed on that we’ll leave the past alone and move on??

Now we have some new exciting “MUST HAVE” tools and that is the problem in a nutshell. Most communication professionals are just not getting it, they are thinking: “Cool, a new cheap digital publication thingy”. They should be thinking: “Amazing, the world of communication has changed, I must change before I’m obsolete”.

The new tools will not help and will not improve the way your business works if you don’t change your mindset. YOU need to understand that if YOU want blogging to create value for your business, YOU need to know how and YOU need to change accordingly.
Blogging is just not a thing you put on a server or get hosted somewhere in India. Blogging is a strategic decision about your corporate culture and it needs to be aligned with your overall corporate strategy and integrated in your company’s knowledge/information management strategy.

And most importantly – If you don’t feel it, if you don’t understand the media and if your not ready to bet your job on your corporate blogging initiative, you’re not ready for it.