Author Archives: nchenga
nchenga
Return on involvement
How do you master a new skill and become an expert? How do you leave mediocrity behind?
I am thinking a lot about how to cross the so-called suck threshold.
I have experienced crossing this threshold for some topics, and that’s where I want to be.
How to get there? John C. Maxwell writes:
If [...]
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The 3Ps of News Distribution
Via Cyberwriter, here are the 3Ps of news distribution:
Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of [...]
Streams of Content
QOTD:
Successful businesses will not be everything to everyone; that’s the broadcast mentality. Instead, they will play a meaningful role to a cohort of committed consumers who give their attention to them because of their relevance.
via Streams of Content, Limited Attention | UX Magazine.
QOTD
Like this (Too long for 140 characters):
Addictive User Experience (Design) and Scalable Distribution Methods (Marketing) are the most critical components of success in consumer Internet startups, not Pure Engineering Talent.
Interested in technology
I stumbled across this quote:
We assume that people are interested in technology, just because we are. Most people aren’t.
My Basel bicycle tip
I managed to break the key of my bicycle lock last night.
Tomotec helped me to extract the broken key from the lock for free. Thank you.
Tip: remember to lubricate your bicycle lock at regular intervals!
Posted in Photos, basel Tagged bicycle shop basel, riehen, thank you, tomotec, veloladen Leave a comment
Twitter for the masses
I saw this retweet pointing to Jeremy Toeman’s article Will normal folks ever use Twitter?”. (By default that makes me un-normal….)
He makes an excellent point which matches my own experience. Most people don’t see the added benefit of using Twitter. The uses are difficult to grasp. Especially since Twitter turned off the SMS service for [...]
Posted in General, blogger, marketing, tech, wordpress Tagged connecting, how i use twitter, Jeremy Toeman, search, suggested uses for twitter, suggested uses list, sul, tatort, tech help, traffic, twitter, uses Leave a comment
Technology Leapfrogs
I like this quote from Hacktivate:
We need to stop underestimating people. Don’t expect Africans to be content with boring old SMS and voice for long. Smartphones, droids and even iphones are much higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than we realize, especially if nobody around owns a computers, your schools suck, and the government controls [...]
Posted in General, Malawi, tech Tagged cell phones, Malawi, mobile technology, smartphones Leave a comment
Connecting to the Internet from Blantyre
Just got back from visiting family in beautiful Blantyre. It’s rainy season now and there are regular rain showers every other day. Everything is green and lush. The sun is hot. The air is moist. And the shopping centres and outdoor markets of Blantyre are busy with holiday shopping. And except for a couple of [...]
Auto-upgrading WordPress and the .htaccess file
A pattern I have observed in the past months:
A couple of days after auto-upgrading WordPress, access to the WordPress blog is blocked.
My non-programmer’s workaround is:
Rename the .htaccess file on the WP level. The WordPress blog displays.
Login and go to Settings > Permalinks and re-save settings, or copy old .htaccess file content and upload by [...]
The web is evolving
Kevin Marks on Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups – New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web:
Snapshot from Budapest
A quick snapshot that I took on my daily trek to class:
Posted in Photos, flickr Tagged budapest, from buda side, hungary, parliament building, snapshot, taken from buda side Leave a comment
Wordpress Woes
I am having some problems with the .htaccess file on the Wordpress level. I tried regenerating the permalinks. Hope that will help for a while.
A couple of days ago there was a lonely s at the end of the file. Amakhala scared.
And:
I am seeing a lot of “MySQL server has gone away” error [...]
Posted in tech, wordpress Tagged dont understand, help needed, htaccess, MySQL server has gone away, wordpress, worried Leave a comment
Analog Tweet
I found this text on the back of a signpost in downtown Basel:
An example of an analog tweet…
Posted in Photos, basel Tagged analog tweet, street art, street tweet, twitter art, twitter comparison Leave a comment
How to Backup your Twitter World
As many of you probably learnt by experience, Twitter Search only shows results for the last couple of days.
I guess, one of the preliminary assumptions is that you consider your collection of 140-character-long phrases valuable. And would like to search thru them from time to time.
Friendfeed
One easy workaround is to add your Twitter stream [...]
Posted in General, blogger, tech Tagged dave winer, friendfeed, google reader, Opera, opml, twistory, twitter backup 1 Comment
Chiperoni goes Mobile (kind of)
As part of my ongoing research regarding internet access via low bandwidth connections, I saw App+frica displaying a mobile version at http://appfrica.net/blog/.
I installed the same MobilePress plugin and activated it a few minutes ago. Based on the plugin description, it should detect if you’re accessing the website with a mobile device and display a [...]
Posted in blogger, blogging, tech, wordpress Tagged mobile access, mobilepress, wordpress, wordpress app for iphone Leave a comment
Today’s link
Stumbled across this – very high-level but might be a useful reminder. Esp. the remark “life is short” in bullet no. 5.
1. Don’t worry about being perfect. There are never right or wrong answers to complex business decisions. The best that you can do as a leader is to gather all of the information [...]
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Impatient new-media pundits
Quote of the day:
One of the things slowing tech uptake by the rest of society is that you new-media pundits get so impatient you have moved on to the next thing before we’ve had a chance to digest your last idea.
via Scoble’s “Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore”
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Intro to SEO and SEM
I am faced with the challenge to explain SEO and SEM in a 1 hour presentation. The audience consists of business folks.
Where to start explaining is the hard part.
Also there are so many myths in this area – garnered by SEO vendors selling their services as a “Wunderwaffe” for instant web traffic success.
As is typical [...]
UTF-8, Charsets and WordPress
It seems charset and UTF-8 issues are following me around.
At the day job and here.
I moved my blog from one install to the other. After importing the MySQL db, several characters were no longer displaying correctly.
There are a number of plug-ins and descriptions:
How to Convert Character Set and Collation of WordPress Database [...]
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