Time to move on

I started blogging on a corporate blog mid 2004 when I was still at Lost Boys. We used Blogger so when I started my personal blog a few months later I chose Blogger again. I think it was around 2006 when I moved to WordPress because Blogger was not innovating it’s product anymore and WordPress really impressed me with the functionalities and ease of use. And they still do until this very day.

But yet…. I seem to view this blog and the tool used to make it – the WordPress environment – as an environment that is perfectly suited for creating long-form text-based posts.  Fact is that I don’t seem to be able to find the time to create long posts on a frequent basis anymore. And that results in “a World According to Carp” that is rather dead. And it sure isn’t!

I still have ideas and stuff I like to share but I seem to have moved on to other places and tools on the Web. I am a moderate user of Twitter, photoblog using Flickr etc. but looking back the real World According to Carp has moved to Tumblr.

I already wrote about it in December 2007, and what I really like about it is the simplicity of the tool, for example the browser bookmarklet in FireFox which I often use to select text quotes that are instantly posted to my Tumblog. It supports multiple forms of content – you can post audio, video, text etc. very easily. It is also a tool which I can use in different contexts, for example on my iPhone with an app that rocks and that lets me post anything from my phone to my blog. Just last week a Tumblr app was released for Boxee which enables me to watch photo’s and listen to music from the people I follow on Tumblr. Which brings me to the last point why I love Tumblr. The community of people within Tumblr that I can follow within the Tumblr editor is awesome.

In the line of something Clay Shirky said, Tumblr lowered the costs and difficulty of publishing big time. Just look at the frequency of my posts at Tumblr compared to the frequency of posts at my WordPress blog and notice the effects it has had on me. Therefore, it is time to move the World According to Carp over to Tumblr. You can expect a lot of short-form posts, ideas, snippets and the occasional longer post like I did at WordPress. As soon as Tumblr adds the functionality to import content from other blogs I will do so and delete this blog.

I will still use WordPress for our RealMee company blog in Dutch and English – and wish the WordPress team all the best in bringing their amazing platform forward.

One final remark. The most fun part of having a blog like this are your comments. If you enjoyed reading and commenting on it as well and are using a feed reader you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed over here. I will add a commenting system to my Tumblog during the coming days.

See you on the other side!

The power of the right question

Something I have been thinking about for quite a while now popped up again in a 12 minute interview over at Harvard Business Review with one of my favourite thinkers, Umair Haque. In the interview he talks about the Zombieconomy which is a term he coined for the economic situation we are in at the moment. He thinks the current economic crisis is for a large part the result of our inability to create sustainable value because we are focused too much on exploiting one fundamental innovation for a large period of time. This inablity is largely due to failing leadership which should push the boundaries on what is possible by asking the right questions. In his view, some examples of companies who are able to push these boundaries are Apple, Google, Tata (the Indian middle class cars), and Threadless (community powered t-shirt production). It is our inability to ask these questions which has led to the current situation.

This remark made me think of something one of my other favourite thinkers – mathematician and physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf (Dutch only) – said on the string theory. Advance in the development of this theory is not reached by researchers giving the right answers but by people who are able to ask the right questions, i.e. to think of new realities.

Makes me think about my ability to push the boundaries: am I asking the right questions?

“Our highest-quality format”

So, the new standard on iTunes has become iTunes Plus. Files purchased at Apple’s store before this move were encoded at a rate of 128 kbps in Apple’s AAC format. With iTunes Plus, they doubled the rate to 256 kbps.

So what? Well, this is still a lossy file format which means the quality is not as good as with the original lossless files used on CD’s for example. So, if you want to be able to replay your digital music files on a high end stereo set like I do with the best possible audio result, this is still not the way to go. I will stick with CD’s – for now – and import them using Apple’s lossless format. Do you use iTunes as well for your digital music management and want to know more about these file formats? Check out this forum and this wiki.

BTW I imported my complete 500+ CD collection into iTunes 3 years ago in iTunes using a lossy format. Wasn’t aware of the way it would limit me at the time. Ouch. Maybe this post will prevent you from making the same mistake as I did back then.

So, if someone knows about a ripping service like this one which also covers Europe, Apple Lossless and will cost me less than say $500 you will make my day Or maybe a nice job to submit at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

The paper as the platform

The New York Times opened their archives through an API. Which means anyone with an idea can start building it. The paper as the platform etc.

And then reality kicks in: I am a paying weekend subscriber for the print edition of NRC Handelsblad which costs me 200 euros per year. I cannot even use the online archives without paying an additional 5 euros per month. Unbelievable…

Drawing by Hugh MacLeod, Gapingvoid

Ernst-Jan, maybe one for the roadmap?!

Guard your own lifestream

I lost Aussie blogger Ben Barren a few months ago but found him again today at his new blog:

“Mad Man – Ben Barren.com: “DON DRAPER OR DICK WHITMAN I AIN’T. I WASN’T A MADISON AVENUE AD MAN IN 1963, BUT GOOGLE™ AND FLICKR™ DID DELETE MY BLOG AND PHOTOS IN 2008 SO WHY NOT DOCUMENT MY LIFESTREAM HERE; HIRED GUN / ENTREPRENEUR ””

It turns out that the reason I lost the guy in my RSS reader was that Google/the Google-bot killed his blog. Because it/they thought it was a splog. Ouch. He moved to his own domain www.benbarren.com using WordPress. In the meantime, the new Blogger/FeedBurner kahuna switched on his old blogspot account again, so he was able to tell me about his whereabouts.

Big lesson: there is a risk using and running all these social tools at domains you don’t own. Maybe I should move to ronaldcarpentier.com as well.

BTW the Mad Men series is awesome. Last summer I watched the first season on DVD with Margot. Can’t wait for season 2 to arrive on DVD as well. Apparantly, they just won the Golden Globe for best TV drama for the second time in a row.

Lemme think…

I find this article mindblowing (via Umair Haque). Check it out if you want to know where the losses at Merryl Lynch came from.

“Clawing back the 2006 bonuses at Merrill would not come close to making up for the company’s losses, which exceed all the profits that the firm earned over the previous 20 years.”

Talking about Black Swans…

Now, in this light, how do you feel about the US government deciding to grant Banc of America another $20 million bailout – paid for by tax-payers?

Luck favors the prepared

I have just finished reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I can heartily recommend it. Tom Peters calls it the best business book of the decade.

The book covers a very current subject, with the global meltdown of our financial institutions in the process of unfolding. His basic thesis is that a few events, which nobody can predict, can have a major impact on society, you as person etc. Think 9/11, the astonishing business success of Google, the current financial and economic crisis etc. He calls these events Black Swans. You can have them with both positive and negative outcomes.

I also remember reading this post from Seth Godin a few months ago. It really changed my view on the role of business books. It is all about action: if you do not want to change anything in your behaviour the read is a waste of time. So, I took his advice and these are the three things that I am going to change in my behaviour.

1. “Luck favors the prepared” as Louis Pasteur said. He knew something about accidental discoveries. You make them more likely by being exposed to the maximum amount. In his case, this meant “keep researching”.  In my case, as an entrepreneur, this  implies to keep trying new things and new routes to an existing opportunity in order to make serendipity happen – finding things of value you weren’t looking for in the first place.
2. “Collect opportunities”, as Nicholas Taleb calls it. Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like an opportunity. Being exposed to positive Black Swans is one thing, realizing you are getting a lucky break is equally important. This would mean that you cancel anything you have planned if some big-shot client or business partner is willing to meet. Which sounds logical but isn’t because everyday live and rhythm can make you more or less numb for these kind of signals.
3. I have always had the tendency to plan rigorously but this habit has been put to the test by the arguments of Taleb. Planning: yes, but to a certain extent. See your plan as a rough guideline only which has “to be tinkered with”, as Tom Peters would say. Better yet: be prepared. One killer question in the book: think about the one or two most defining moments in your life for a second. Were they planned? Wow…

What business book would you recommend and why?

LeWeb digested

Yes, it was cold, we were hungry, and the wifi sucked. The program on the first day was disappointing – with the exception of the talk of David Weinberger – but the second day was very inspiring. So all in all, I was happy I went, although the price tag for attending the whole thing is kinda steep for an entrepreneur just starting his business.

I had a few days to think about what I experienced and these are the themes that keep popping up in my mind. Let’s call them trends or important topics for the near future – at least:

• Changing leadership: As Mr. Weinberger said in his talk “…leadership is a property of the network. Leaders will only make decisions if the system fails”. Which was echoed by conductor Itay Talgam with his “leaders as connectors” meme.
  
• Meaning: Chris Anderson, curator of TED, had a very inspiring talk about global IQ that is rising as a result of technological advance. His vision is that it can be used for good as well as for evil. One of his main themes regarding use  for the better is “to teach”, to pass on knowledge for the common good.
• Identity: Being able to control and manage your own online identity was key in a number of talks and panels, most notably in the very interesting panel moderated by Marc Canter with representatives from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace and Six Apart/OpenID. Key developments: the “open stack“, a set of open technologies and technology frameworks to improve identity control and manageability. Interesting stuff we are and will keep supporting with our own identity management service RealMee.
• Intellectual property: Joi Ito followed up with a new dimension to the open stack by introducing the next frontier: rethinking current copyrights legislations to enable free culture and ideas.  His work with Creative Commons is one of the solutions to reach this goal.
• Search: Marissa Mayer from Google – 33 years old… amazing – had a very nice talk about the next frontier of search: personalized search (Google recognizing you and tailoring the results: e.g. 40% of all searches are repeat searches!), social search (what is the best restaurant in this neigbourhood – with answers from people from your network), and more media such as video where speech-to-text and face recognition are key. The impressive winner from the startup competition Viewdle seems to have tackled these last two challenges. If so, my guess is they are talking to Google right now since their VP of buying-other-companies was in the jury. BTW one interesting tidbit from Google’s hiring policies since day 1: “people that are smart & get things done”. Simple enough.
• Capital and financing: Yme blogged about this as well in Dutch and I agree with him. You cannot blame people to be a little bit more cautious these days but there is money in the market. If your idea is good enough. So, the bar has been set higher which leaves more money on the table for the real deal. Good for all of us. And yes, we want to prove RealMee is the real deal the coming period.

Would love to hear your take-out if you went!

What is the worth of Hyves?

Read this article at Nu.nl (Dutch only). It cites a study by internet security company GData that reveils that cyber criminals a.k.a. spammers are using social networks such as Hyves, Facebook and LinkedIn more and more to gather private information about users. It seems that 500 Mb of user data is worth 40 euro.

Which made me think… One Mb equals 1,000,000 bits which equals 125 kB. Suppose an average Hyves profile contains about 50 kB of user info in plain text. This means that 500 Mb of data is generated by approx. 1000 Hyves profiles. Yme stated that Hyves currently has 7.5 million users. This implies a valuation of Hyves of 7500 * 40 = 300,000 euro.

So, if they ever go public, don’t let those investment bankers fool you

Apps on the go

It’s taken a while but I have made my choice. I have ordered an iPhone. 

The camera kind of sucks, no video – although there is a way around it, I hear mixed reviews about typing because of the lack of non-tactile feedback but….. the applications rock. And it integrates nicely with my media center: it will transfer recorded movies automatically from iMac to iPhone when I enter the living room. Handy when I am going for a trip. Lastly, my iTunes library is shared seemlessly between media center and iPhone.

I thought the Windows based mobiles were a bit too clunky and I don’t need the Qwerti keyboard.

So, what apps do I want when the device arrives in a week or two? These are my favourites so far:

1. Google Mail/Calendar/Reader
2. Flickr - photo: not by Flickr itself but nicely done.
3. Buienradar - weather
4. WordPress - blogging
5. Tumblr - microblogging
6. Last.fm – streaming music: no coverage in Holland yet but will come eventually.
7. Nu.nl - news
8. Qik - video streaming – althought I will have to jailbreak the phone to use this app.
9. PDA.net – tethering device – gives you broadband Internet for your PC without needing WiFi. Again, the phone has to be jailbroken.

More suggestions?