My current reading list nicely shows the professional interests I am currently persuading. A mix of social media and community engagement (Trust Agents and Tribes), Web Analytic so I can get better insights into web pages, The Four steps to the Epiphany since it’s always good read about product and business creation process and Laws of Simplicity that my brother was kind enough to shared with me to not lose the touch with the design philosophy.

I wonder if I’m missing something..

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Hi, I’m Jure and one of the things I do is to help people talk and work with their communities so they can improve their products or services. Often they want to outsource at least part of the talking to me, so I’m given a new online identity. The name is still the same, but you get a new email (with IMAP and everything) and often business cards with this identity. If you’re lucky it’s also a Google Account (via Google Apps) that you need to share calendars, gtalk etc.

As you help different organizations, you keep accumulating these identities that you can’t shut off because you never know who will decide to email you on that address or which account you’ve got registered. On top of that, you almost never completely stop helping them unless the project gets shut down.

So now you have tons of email addresses, that each connect to different identity that you use to talk to bloggers. The only problem is that there is a limited number of meaningful connections that you can have. So you email people from all these identities with different questions, forwards, reply-alls and so on.

This does at the end of the day mean, that I’ll have to talk to myself via different identities, CC other email or info@ accounts (that I control anyway) so that we can make sense of our world. That everyone knows who belongs to who, depending on the email domain.

I have yet to write multiple (personal) Twitter accounts or Foursquare logs, even though I’m sure that this day isn’t far away.

So if you see my replying to myself from a different domain, it’s all normal, it’s just that I don’t want to break online balance of identities.

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The mystical bottle of Eliksir

So why #fail?

It turns out that it’s incredibly hard to find, so hard that we are yet to find a place in Ljubljana that actually heard of it and none actually have it in stock. We’ve tried a number of pizza places and bars around old Ljubljana city center and we failed. We did get lots of Guinness and other dark beers.

Reading their promo material it states that it’s available in supermarkets and in selected pubs. That’s perfectly fine, but you’re doing a good job of hiding a list of places where it’s actually available.

So Laško, if you’re actually spending this much money trying to convince me to try your new beer, make sure that I can actually buy it.

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The trailer doesn’t do it justice, but maybe it will help you see it. (yes, I’m that psyched about it)

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1. 28.06.06

There are two ways to read your RSS feeds. You can skim through the text and the titles, getting general idea on the topic, or you can sit down, take a sip of the coffee and contemplate what you are reading. The problem with the second approach is that it takes real-time and dedication as those long posts often include videos that are several minutes long. A lifetime in terms of real-time web!

Somehow a video from Merlin Mann caught my eye yesterday. In the video (embedded below, that I highly recommend), he talks about play and how we have to give our bodies something to distract them while we think and come up with creative solutions. Like playing with pans, balls, etc.

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

The second interesting post I came about, and that I really wanted to talk about was from Dave Winer, where he wrote about Bruce Sterling’s talk at Reboot (mp3 of the talk).

He recommends the talk with the words:

Anyway, most of the time most of us are not in position to do anything about the mess in our lives. But listen to Sterling’s talk. It’s only 43 minutes. It might be the best 43 minutes you’ve ever spent. 

So how do you go about listening such an important talk (and I’ve heard Bruce talk before, so I knew it’s good), without being distracted by everything around me?

Simple: put the running shoes on, load the talk on an iPod and go running. Since it’s a rather long talk, a 10km run is just about right.

What you’ll experience is a full submersion in the talk. Since your whole body is preocuppied with breathing and moving the muscles, and your ears are hearing interesting talk that your brain has to process, there is no time for wandering thoughts.

The only problem with this approach is that you have to pick up really stimulating talks that interest you as otherwise you’ll just suffer. But luckily our trusted gatekeepers keep posting links to them all the time, so it’s rather easy to find them.

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As you’ve probably heard, I’ve left my job as a community manager and UX expert at Zemanta. It has been an incredible ride these two years and I can say that I’m now fully sold at the idea of startup business lifestyle.

Last three months in San Francisco were a great finish of this adventure, giving me time to think and reflect on how I want to expand my professional career. I realized that lately I wasn’t doing much of the things I love most: product development in every form – from designing, user experience, coding and of course interacting with users once we can get it to them.

With this in mind, the decision was simple. It’s time to find the next startup that I can help or found a new one, using some of the prototypes and ideas that are floating around.

I don’t have any concrete plans as of yet, as I plan to first help some friends with their projects and clean my backlog of things that I volunteered for and never got a chance to get around to. There will also be a lot of running as I prepare for my half-marathon.

If you have an interesting project, lets talk. I can’t wait to see to which city and continent the future will take me.

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Essentially we have a number of different style of events (from largest to smallest): conferences with expo floors, conferences, massive parties/launch events, networking/pitching events, unconference style events or hack days, evening hack meetups, talks and finally lunches and dinners that were loosely organized over Twitter.

There is nothing inherently special about these events, besides the fact that there are so many of them, happening all the time and that you can easilly bump into people that are very passionate about their subjects and that they’ve often also invented the field or at least made buzzwords in it stick.

The good: conversations, brain-stormings and presentations are more often than not incredibly inspiring, thought provoking and a pure joy to experience. Throw a bit of drinks into it, a pizza or Thai restaurant and it’s a great geek night that fully challenges you beliefs and makes you back to the drawing board and build even greater things.

The bad: there are just too many events and people to meet. Once you extend this to the whole Valley and also throw in all of the less official events, it just gets crazy. On top of that, there’s always a large local community that you don’t know and don’t have shared history with. It gets easier after the third monthly meetup but you need to give a few months and relationships usually can’t be rushed.

The ugly: you’re nobody and there are plenty of people around that talk buzzwords or just leech on the difference communities, without contributing anything back. Unless you have something to contribute on the topic, the community don’t really take you too seriously.

To be honest, the only real way to get noticed is to be involved with one of the hot startups, either as a founder, founding engineer or their advisor. The only alternative is to be a one of those people, that always seems to speak or organize events, knows everyone and is connecting people together.

Lessons learnt

You have to specialize. This way you can present on the subject, help drafting standards and not just lurk everywhere.

It helps to have a startup/company behind you. At that point you’re not really presenting yourself but the whole team and people judge you (in the beginning), mostly on the public perception of your company/product.

Know what you want and what you’re doing. While social events are great learning opportunity, it’s only really rewarding when you have a goal that everyone helps you achieve.

It also means that you have to stop wandering around different events and invest your evenings into building cool things to show off at those few events that actually matter.

In short: community really rewards and helps bold people that go out and ask the world for impossible, but you have to know what you want and you have to be able to demonstrate that you deserve it.

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Different city, different rules for vandalism (or self expression), this time using the classical “Hello, my name is..” stickers that are so very popular in the States, but you hardly see them in Europe. I love the way they’ve made effort to stay within the boundaries of the stickers.

Photo taken on a night bus in San Francisco.

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1. 28.06.06

More great fun a few days ago when a failed coffee attempt turned into opportunity to go to a concert of a group called Tortoise. Powered with only Wikipedia infobox, I decided to give it a try and see how I like them. I liked them a lot and based on my latest last.fm scrobbles, they have a new fan.

To get a feel for them, check Tortoise on YouTube:

There was another surprising thing with the whole event. The crowd was really, really nice to the degree it was almost unreal zombie experience. Everyone stood nicely in front of band, gave lots of personal space to everyone and besides a bit of headbanging of a few, didn’t do much. Just stood there like in a trance. Everyone had one beer and that was it. How very unusual.

Thanks goes to K. for the tip

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• Music Review | Tortoise: Subtle Indie Rock, Aged for 20 Years (nytimes.com)
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I totally forgot about this until I noticed posters for The San Francisco Silent Film festival across the city, with a bit of good luck I then managed to go and see a show – The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Jean Epstein and based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

I don’t know much about surrealism and the movies of the time, but I truly enjoyed the whole experience around the movie. Castro Theater is a beautiful old theater that makes the whole experience very authentic. In addition to that, lots of people in the audience dressed-up in the clothes from the era making it even more magical.

The film was accompanied by by a pianist, who made such a good effort that it felt like it was a really well produced soundtrack that was part of the movie. Additional narration and translation of subtitles into English (they were in French) made it also very unique.

I still haven’t found the original Silent theater location, but this was close enough. Go see a silent movie next time a festival is in town, it’s magical.

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