In pursuit of The Idea
February 16th, 2008 — Planet Kiberpipa, Planet LiveCD, conferences, zemanta
Source: WikipediaI am going to present the colours of Zemanta this weekend at SemanticCamp in London. Besides showing the latest secret technology we are developing I am also hoping that we can have some interesting debates about usability aspects of the whole thing.
February 3rd, 2008 — Planet Kiberpipa, Planet LiveCD, Tech, everyday life, zemanta
Saturday I visited BarCamp - Sezna Confini 2008, user generated conference, that was organized in Klagenfurt. Besides giving a presentation on Zemanta, I also made some interesting notes from some of the presentations that I’m sharing below.
In the first session “Time & ideas for blogging”, we heard from the authors of So Isses blog. They write a number of blogs and their recommendation is to find a personal routine for blogging, e.g., they like to blog in morning while having their coffee, just writing down ideas as WordPress drafts and then working on them more thoroughly. They also relay heavily on “publish in future” feature that allows them to time the posts in upcoming days. Right now they are already writing articles for mid-March!
Mathias, on the other hand, talked about Zipfs power law/long tail story. His proposal ist that when you’re analyzing data you plot it on log/log scale and if it shows a linear chart you can start investigating if the data follows the principles. He also presented some statistics about “the bend”, the part of at which you start getting exponential growth and your page views start getting . For a lot of online content this is at about 50 users. Check out his presentation.
Max talked about Blogs and their connectivity. There are about 800 new german blogs per day. Some services like blogfever.de, blogrush.com scan the content that you are reading and then locate similiar content to your blog.
He tried to design his own widget using yahoo term extractor. Problem with this approach is that when you take your tags, enter the into google blog search and you will get only one article - your own. Until you remove and suddenly you get 10k articles. This problem is same for google adwords, 95% of tags are not matching close enough. Too few or too many results.
He also created a cool project called Blogsvision.com, that plots blogs on Google maps and connections between them. His experience is that 6-degrees for separation is not working for blogs. Some blogs are totally separated from others in their own islands.
December 11th, 2007 — Planet Kiberpipa, Planet LiveCD, everyday life, happy, zemanta
After successful presentation at the Investors day, we had a nice evening out in the city. One of the venues we visited was the “Absolut Ice Bar London“. The idea is very simple, have a bar that is whole under ice and serve some nice cocktails to visitors, even though it sounded a bit more sensible in the context of Kiruna , one of the coldest places in Sweden.
Experience itself is not bad, even though the place is a bit small in the end, and you’re not allowed to be in there more than half an hour. You also get some cool penguin like coat to keep you warm. Sadly though, the toilets were not part of the ice covered area, so nothing really innovative in this field.
In general it is a nice experience to try as part of the night out in the city with a group of friends to have fun of the glasses made of ice and each other in funny coat.
(images blurred to protect the innocent, and because my mobile phone doesn’t take good photos)
December 10th, 2007 — Planet Kiberpipa, Planet LiveCD, Tech, everyday life, happy, ideas, zemanta
One of the perks of living in such a big city as London are all the interesting events a Web developer/entrepreneur can easily visit. Even if you do not live there, it is still worth timing your visit so you can visit them.
MiniBar occurs monthly where a number of startups pitch their ideas to the visiting public, with general theme towards Web entrepreneurs. Every presenting company gets asked the hardest question: how do you make money?
Event is free, but registration is required at their homepage.
Wiki Wednesdays are also monthly event, this time, as you might have guessed, oriented towards people who use and are passionate about Wiki’s. Even though a lot of participants are involved with Wikipedia, there is also a lot of buzz around usage of wikis in corporations and in other projects.
Event is free, but registration is required in their wiki, that can be found through their portal.
London OpenCoffee Meetup, is a weekly event for anyone more interested in entrepreneurial side of Online and Web business. There are all kinds of visitors there, from VC’s to developers or just people who are interested in breaking into this field or looking for someone to help them. Drinking coffee on top of Waterstones, Londons biggest book store and chatting with like minded people is also a great way to start a Thursday morning.
Event is free, with no registration required. They also have a homepage and a general page of OpenCoffee Club movement.
Dorkbot London is a monthly meeting of people who do interesting things with electricity, but more precisely electronic. It involves artists, engineers, designers and just about everyone who is passionate about all things electric.
Event is free, but sometimes registration is required, so check their dorkbot wiki.
Mashup* event is a monthly, a bit more commercially oriented event where startups once again present their creations to interested public. Since it is not free, there is a bit smaller crowd there so it might be easier to actually discuss your big idea.
Entry is 35£, with required registration at the event homepage.
December 4th, 2007 — Meme, Planet Kiberpipa, Planet LiveCD, happy, zemanta
These three months that I worked intesively with Zemanta felt a lot similiar to what, I imagined, in pre-.com crash times was. Shipping your core team to distant, yet cool place; provide insane amounts of yaffa cakes and cedevita, accompanied with either great in-house cooking or take-aways. The whole thing is then well rounded with some (for now) quiet hyping and talking to different potential investors and users at different conferences and trade shows.
Because of all this, and my overall tendency to like all Web 2.0-ish, I found the following music video from Richter Scales especially funny; at the same time I’m also hoping that we can sustain this hype for a while since I really think that the tech that it’s currently in the labs should be shown to the world and not lost due to “bubble” bursting.
