Archive for May, 2009

Here’s a small selection of photos that I took on my recent visit to London:
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I’ve previously posted on how to measure the success (or failure) of a social media marketing campaign. But why do social media campaigns fail? This is an apocryphal quote – and I can’t find the source – but I’ve heard Alexandra Samuel talk about the default state of a social media marketing campaign being...
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I recently met Doru Ilasi at eLiberatica 2009. He’s the executive manager of Aplix Software, and we chatted about open source and education for a few minutes. He had mentioned a TED presentation on creative commons educational material, and just today passed on a link to the movie. It didn’t click for me when...
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I met such great people on my recent trip to Bucharest for eLiberatica 2009. There’s something about conferences and trips: you compress so much experience into so short a period of time that you feel like old friends with people you met just a few days before. Here’s a few that I want to...
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The best things in life happen by accident. Or, at least, partially by accident … to those who are open to opportunity and change. Last Sunday I was wandering around old Bucharest when I happened on the remains of Vlad Tepes’ old castle. It’s a fascinating place, and as I wandered around, checking it...
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Here’s a selection of my photos from Bucharest. The first few are people, and if you want the details on who they are and what they do, you might want to go to Flickr to see all the notes. The majority of the photos, however, are of the city and architecture … Click the...
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We did a very fun thing on the last day of the eLiberatica conference: Werewolf. Danese Cooper led this game in which audience members do quick 3-minute impromptu speeches on a topic of their choosing. Natuarally, Jeroen van Meeuwen pushed me forward and signed me up against my will, and I found myself in...
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As I look past the wing of the airplane down to the patchwork German countryside, I can almost believe the illusion that the earth is sliding past while I and the plane are stationary. It’s an easy illusion to indulge in, because as I leave Romania and Bucharest the experiences I had there in...
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Valer Mischenko of NLnet is speaking at eLiberatica on free and open source business models. One slide in which he contrasts business models particularly caught my eye: Proprietary business model: WAR Open source business model: OPEN - World as battlefield - World as construction site - Kill competitor - Defend the concept - Occupy...
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It’s 2 AM in Bucharest and the dogs are barking in the distance. I’m in town for eLiberatica, a conference on open source software, and I’ll be speaking tomorrow today, but I’m fully jet lagged and in spite of the fact that I was up and traveling for about 32 hours straight, my body...
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Classify this as a happy accident: I just happened to accidentally align a Mac OS X finder window with the TwitterMass website … which just happens to have a very similar color palette. After a couple of seconds I did a double take and realized what was happening. Funny!
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What is up with FriendFeed? After perhaps a year of having a FriendFeed account but doing very little with it, I’m suddenly seeing a huge jump in activity. For the past 12 months I’ve pretty much put FriendFeed on autopilot, receiving data from my other social networks and media activities, but not paying too...
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(Saw it first on BoingBoing.)
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Well in the wake of the Ashton Kutcher 1 million followers on Twitter event, BusinessWeek is making a big deal about celebrities powering social networks. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr win big when celebrities participate; no wonder they’re wooing famous users. While it’s self-evident that fans follow stars … it’s also obvious...
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I already re-tweeted … but I have to post this. In a great Open Forum post on How to Escape Mundanity (which is actually about how to start your own business), there’s this great quote from Pamela Slim: If you are in the very early stages of thinking about a business, spend your time...
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