Next week we’re a week off, and we’re renting a house in the middle of the country. Enjoying ourselves, playing with the little one, biking through the forests, looking forward to it. We’re definitely taking some books as well. I will finish The Black Swan - which I really recommend, but that’s a separate post - but I’m also thinking about a new one. I decided it isn’t going to be a business book - for which there are plenty of suggestions on my wish list at Amazon - but I’m still in doubt whether it’s going to be fiction or non-fiction.
Then I remembered I read something about a book being written by an Italian journalist about the Mafia. A good moment to check out the new book site (Dutch only) of Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad which they launched a month or two ago. They decided to open-up their library of book publications, reviews etc. So I entered “maffia” and “italie”, and there it was: Roberto Saviano’s “Gomorro”. Brilliant. And you can buy it on their site as well. They are finally learning.
As you know, the Euro 2008 championships football have begun. So far, we Dutchies cannot complain Last Saturday , I was watching Greece against Russia on my TV with analog signal and decided to try the live stream at the site of Dutch public broadcaster NOS (Dutch only) - which is a great site by the way. The quality of the stream was perfect. But I noticed a lag of exactly 30 seconds between the analog TV signal and the Internet stream.
It seems (Dutch only) that Dutch cable company Ziggo states that the lag between analog and digital TV is 1 second and the lag between digital TV and a live Internet stream is also 1 second. What happened to the remaining 28 seconds?
I have a 2Mbit synchronous DSL line directly connected to a fibre network via Telecompleet (Dutch only) which performs very well. Is this due to their performance, e.g. because of network buffering? Or do you have similar experiences?
And this is exactly the reason why we decided not to pay to get on stage with RealMee at the last Next Web Conference. And letting a good-willing community pay the conference fee for the startups isn’t the solution either. Making startups pay for presenting at conferences is evil.
This blog is hosted by WordPress which I think is a very pleasant and useful tool. Their customer support is also top-notch, especially if you realize this is a free tool. They used to offer you the possibility to add categories to a blogpost you had written. I actually thought they meant ‘tags’, which are more like keywords describing the content of a blogpost. But recently, WordPress introduced ‘tags’ as well. I didn’t get it.
Until I read this FAQ-item stating that what they call categories are more like sections. In my case, this could be ‘music’, ’sports’, ‘realmee’, ‘entrepreneurship’ etc. And when I read further they say they know people used ‘categories’ like ‘tags’, either knowingly or unknowingly. So, I was already tempted to start using the ‘categories’ functionality as well - thinking you could switch ‘categories’ and ‘tags’ easily. Until I saw the last Q&A in this FAQ-item:
“I had a lot of categories. Can I delete those and just use tags from now? What will happen to my existing posts?
You can delete them but all your posts will go into the default category. You will have to edit every post and add back the tags.”
Why don’t they offer people the possibility to change their categories into tags as a one-time action? I didn’t know there was a difference when I started using them in the first place. Would be really appreciated…
I read an interview (Dutch only) by Jan Volaard with Dave Grohl, ex-Nirvana drummer and current front man of Foo Fighters, in Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad last week. Nice read.
It tells about Jan Vollaard’s experimentation with an instrument called the Theremin. Had never heard about it before. Apparently, it’s one of the first electronic instruments invented in 1919. Basically, it’s a transistor radio with two antennas. In between the antennas a magnetic field is created. You get a specific frequency by moving one hand and a certain volume by moving the other. It took Vollaard a few years to master the instrument that you might know from the song ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys.
At the end of the interview he shows the Theremin to Grohl and demonstrates how it works by playing the Dutch national anthem. Grohl decides to take his turn and plays around with the Theremin for a minute or two after which he plays a flawless version of the “Stars Spangled Banner”. Brilliant story.
After reading the interview I couldn’t stop thinking about it and was very curious to see how this instrument worked. This is one of the clips featuring the Theremin I found at YouTube.
It’s all about perspective… Also found yourself in a discussion once with a number of 30+ adults saying that you really hold your breath when it comes to the writing skills of younger people as a consequence of their use of technologies such as texting, instant messaging etc.?
I only read the summary but this is what PEW found out and actually surprised me:
“Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.”
Last Monday evening I saw the documentary “De Groene Hemel” (The Green Heaven) by Roel van Dalen on the Dutch public channels (Dutch only). It tells about teacher Bert Ydema who has been teaching school children in Amsterdam for 40 years about the value of nature, and thereby of life, by jointly growing a public garden with all kinds of vegetables and flowers over the course of a year. Very inspiring. Watch it here.
So Google soft launched Google Friend Connect. If you want to gain more insight into what this could mean check out this post by Marc Canter titled ‘The Religion of Bringing Social to Software’. It explores the issues surrounding social aspects of web apps and the strategy of the major players in this field. Highly recommended.
His takeout with regard to the strategy of the different web apps providers:
“So the battlefield remains “which portal/platform” do users keep their MASTER info/data on.”
And, as Marc states, a more important question from a user perspective is if they truly own their data within those containers. Data portability etc. etc.
I was skeptical at first about human-powered search engine Mahalo but this page made my day. I want to add a few more muscle building exercises to my training routine but am rather ignorant in that area. So I decided to stop at Google with ’spiermassa vergroten’. The results sucked. Then I thought about Mahalo and decided to give it a try with ‘muscle’ and this brilliant set of links turned up.
I totally missed out on this but Flickr now tracks a number of statistics regarding your account at their service. I love these kinds of stats. I accidentally stumbled upon it when viewing one of my recent pictures by clicking the ‘photo stats’ link on the right hand side. These are some of my stats:
Interesting to see that most traffic is coming from the community at Flickr itself. Other remarkable stat is the traffic that my Flickr widget at my personal website at RealMee is driving in the short period of time since the launch of RealMee. I guess a perfect way to learn about someone is through their pictures. Last learning: the low number of clicks generated through the Flickr widget at this blog. What could be the reason behind this finding? Could it be that you are here to read stuff instead of being interested in browsing other items in the sidelines?
Last Saturday , I was watching Greece against Russia on my TV with analog signal and decided to try the live stream at 
