Category: General

Forbes on:

Ten Laws of the Modern World

Gilder’s Law: Winner’s Waste. The futurist George Gilder wrote about this a few years ago in a Forbes publication. The best business models, he said, waste the era’s cheapest resources in order to conserve the era’s most expensive resources. When steam became cheaper than horses, the smartest businesses used steam and spared horses. Today the cheapest resources are computer power and bandwidth. Both are getting cheaper by the year (at the pace of Moore’s Law). Google is a successful business because it wastes computer power–it has some 120,000 servers powering its search engine–while it conserves its dearest resource, people. Google has fewer than 3,500 employees, yet it generates $5 billion in (current run rate) sales.

via Hactivate

Over 6 months after my first feeble design attempts with WordPress 1.2, I’m having a closer look at the theme functionality WordPress 1.5 offers.

If you have any issues regarding usability, fonts, colors, etc – please feel free to leave a comment.

[update April 25] checked the new design on sm windows and it looks… well… different. Esp. the font and colors.

The comment box is slightly smaller in size in Opera, but the proportions look about right in Firefox and IE.

To Dos:

• Remove centered line at the bottom of the page
• Add space between page link and content border
• Stripey comments
• Would like to add the Chiperoni Blue Skies or similar somewhere on the page.

REM: With WP’s theme functionality, the old design is just a click away…

They’re dissecting WP themes over at UrbanGiraffe

Business Week has launched a blog at blogspotting.net
and explains why business cannot afford to ignore the blogosphere:
Blogs Will Change Your Business

[update April 26]
excerpts from Om Malik’s comments on Business Week cover:

sell when Business Week’s cover says buy

Now that blogs are in the cover of Business Week, you can safely say two things – blogs have gone mainstream, and blogs are over.

OK with me… never liked the hype anyway.

Business Week cover means that companies will pay attention to blogs, hire consultants who at best are *dumb* in the ways of blogging, spend millions of dollars, make some people rich and eat into the ever shrinking marketing budgets.

hire me: I’m a savvy blog consultant

[update May 18] gapingvoid says:

The reality is, blogging is hard […]. It’s like figure skating- it looks easy, but it isn’t.

Expect a corporate backlash against blogging in about six months, once all the meatpuppets who read the recent Businessweek front-pager start finding this out the hard way.

I agree about the corporate backlash.

Today’s top news should prove interesting to follow:

Adobe said the Macromedia purchase, Adobe’s biggest-ever takeover, brings together two “complementary” products. Adobe is paying 43.8 times operating profit and 7.5 times sales for Macromedia, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Source: Bloomberg

What will happen to the Macromedia products where Adobe offers a similar product?

• golive vs. dreamweaver
• photoshop vs. fireworks
• illustrator vs. freehand

I’ve used all of the above software, except Golive, at different intervals and for various length of time in the past couple of years. I’m sure a couple of these tools will be discontinued very soon. Or continued half-heartedly and then dropped like Allaire HomeSite.

The deal itself is not without issues from a competition standpoint since the resulting business will almost certainly hold a sizeable chunk of the GUI market that would make it difficult for some smaller vendors to play in. The companies have overlapping product sets and a product portfolio that goes in many different directions.
Source: Silicon Republic

Five B2B Copy Myths by Jonathan Kranz, March 29, 2005

The next time you write, forget about trying to appear “businesslike” and really get down to business. Be direct, forceful and concrete. Write as if you were talking one-to-one with a good friend you respect. When you blow the dust off your prose, you’ll find the clarity you need—and the conviction that wins your prospect’s attention.

See also the summary at B2Blog

Open Source CRM Solutions Written in Java

I was grounded this week. No day job. No blogging. What felt like a bad cold was diagnosed as otitis media, a severe infection in the middle ear, which can lead to meningitis or can rapture the eardrum or cause hearing loss. It is – may I add – somewhat painful. But I’m back online. And feeling much better.

Just a note on the sideline, it’s great when you have a doc that cares. My doc has been very caring. Yes, I know – that’s what doctors get paid for. But it’s not the norm. It’s the little things that count like explaining the medication or offering telephone standby after hours. And judging by the very few encounters that I’ve had so far (and may they remain few), the Swiss medical system is more patient-friendly than on the northern side of the border.

Dogs
Here’s my contribution to keep blog content more balanced…

While traveling back from the doctor’s, I sat next to an elderly lady holding a poodle-like dog in her arms, which had obviously just been to the hairdresser’s… The dog, not the lady. I made one mistake: I commented on the dog’s appearance. Too late. The lady seized the opportunity to tell me all about the dog breed.

“It’s isn’t a poodle”.
“There’s only 2 Bedlington Terriers in the whole of Basel”
“No breeder in Switzerland. We had to go all the way to Germany.”
(much shortened version)

Hmmm – well my idea of a dog is somewhat different and looks more like the one in zkoo’s excellent photos [1] [2] [3]. Needless to say, dear readers, I politely listened. Thankfully our common journey was only a couple of stops long. After the lady had disembarked, another woman sitting opposite said that nearly everyone on the bus had heard the story at least once! Well, that’s one bus to avoid.

Nyambadwe Hill
Found a photo of Nyambadwe Hill in Blantyre. I used to scramble up this hill with all of my dogs. There’s a splendid view of Blantyre and the surrounding Michiru, Soche, and Ndirande mountains from the top.

NZZ on blogs
I just saw that another article about the recent blogger meeting in Basel has been published at NZZ online (in German only). There’s a summary at blog.ch.

today’s cultural event: went to see the exhibition, Blumenmythos, at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (along with hundreds of other visitors). The show is a “must see”.

Some of my favorites:

David Hockney, Mount Fuji and Flowers, 1972

Andy Warhol, Flowers, series, 10 sheets, 1970

I’ll probably go back on a quieter day to see the show again at a more leisurely pace (at no extra cost cos I have a Museum Pass for one year).

it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger

Practical examples showing how to use basic PHP to display dynamic web content:
Easy-peasy PHP

is it machiato, macchiato, or machiatto? non lo so!

Worries about rich web applications:

I know I’m just one quiet voice in a storm, but if you are thinking of developing any kind of “rich” web application, please, please, embrace all the aspects of the web experience we all love so much rather than rejecting them for your own preferences and assumptions. Don’t make your application an irritating, restricted and unfamiliar alternative to the web browser experience, make it a comfortable extension to the web browser experience. If you don’t allow your customers the control they are used to on the web, you will alienate your users and risk being out-evolved by a more compatible product.

I would rather endure the discomfort of adventure than the boredom of luxury.

Even introverts influence other people. Sociologists tell us the most introverted of people will influence 10,000 others in an average lifetime. Wow. How many people might you influence, seeing that you actually want to make a difference in the lives of other people?

source:
paraphrase from one of John C. Maxwell’s books on leadership I read some years ago

via kottke:
HBS Working Knowledge: The Leadership Workshop: Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload

Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10. It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

From Ongoing (via Haslo.ch)

If you’re still using HomeSite 4.5.1 on XP and you’ve activated automatic updates, you can start looking for an alternative HTML editor. I am.

Couple of days ago my HomeSite kept crashing, everytime I clicked the Design tab. Displaying the following error message:
No such interface supported.

A DHTML patch in one of the recent XP updates is causing the problem.

You can of course de-install the new DHTML patch that is causing HomeSite to hang up. But if at a later date you manually update your XP installation (e.g. to patch security holes that are being targeted by viruses), you’re back at square one.

My temporary workaround: I’ve disabled the Design mode.

But I guess it’s time to look around for a sturdy versatile HTML editor. For some coding, I’m already using UltraEdit. At a previous company I’ve used Dreamweaver 4 (can’t remember the exact version). I’m comfortable with writing HTML, but would like some visualization features for layout purposes.

Any recommendations? What are you using?

[Update April 16 2005] I’m thinking of switching to Nvu. Offers both a Windows and Linux version.

another day of snow biking in basel…