Autor: admin

Dears, since I´ve just moved from movabletype to typepad I wanted to get my first Moblog running – but guess what: it didn´t work, I got funny error messages from typepads postmaster, that the emial adress, I was posting from, was unknown. So it took me nearly a day to find out, that you HAVE TO WRITE A SUBJECT OR MAILBODY in addition to a photo you want to send from your mobile phone. Otherwise it wouldn´t work. Well, typepad crew: I love your tool, but this was just too crazy…;-)

Well, thanks Oliver for this nice article on fastcompany that fits so well in the current discussions around the corporate use of blogs, and the trust into companies. As I´ve experienced from my own companies, the possibility to invite your customers into your companies structures and make your (their) projects transparent, becomes more and more important. Since we`ve established bascamp as project-management-tool last week, our customers are very happy and thankful for the „view inside of us.“ Basecamp let´s you manage your Todos, define Milestones, send messages around your team, comment on them, and stay informed of all that by using RSS-Feeds. Our customers become read- and sometimes writepermissions in order to post new ToDos and comment on what we´ve done . So you can see it almost as a kind of blog. Let´s see, how future customers will react on that, and if this technique might give us a head advance of our competitors 😉 P.S. Thanks Oliver for the suggestion to use Basecamp. Your are the best geek 😉

Due to the fact that I love good food and nice amosphere, here is the new category „Eat`n Drink“ and the first entry from the „L. Fritz in Hoppers Hotel in Cologne“.
It´s a gastronomie inside the Hoppers Hotel St. Antonius, and has a very modern, but somehow „sacral“ atmosphere: the nicest place might be the garden, in which a big statue of „St. Antonius“ stands. The name „L. Fritz“ comes from a very influencing photografer from the beginning of the twentieth century. The entries are very big – you might see them as a big snack. I had Bruscetta and calf-ragout as main meal which was fantastic. Though the food was very, very tasty they had enormous portions – hell, I had to eat some of my grilfriends Gnocchis, too, because it was too much for her. Staff was very friendly, and helped us with the wine. They accepted VISA for payment. All in all it was a very nice evening and it gets 7 out of 10 points on my „MCDonalds – RITZ“ Skala 😉

Well, I´ve just found this intersting post on worthwile.com and it fits to an article I´ve read in the financial times about Siemens CEO „von Pierer“ speaking in front of the UN, about it´s role and economical possibilities in iraq (unfortunately it´s not online): The responsibility of companies in third world countries is to make jobs, giving people a feeling of building something up. I mean it´s obvious why Siemens takes this risc, of course they want to be development leaders – but brining fresh capital to these countries is critical for their success – it´s even more important to bring the right knowledge there, giving people the possibility to raise their own companies and infrastructures.

Check out this cartoon-site. Awesome.

This article on fastcompany has some very interesting examples on how companies suceeded to broaden their customer-base, to broaden their market. One main aspect is to change your view from inside-outside (what can I do for the market?) to outside-inside (what wants the customer, how can I serve him). I think this article is quite interesting in the context of Loic Le Meurs thoughts about the image of European entrepreneurs (in short he says, if you build up a business in america, and you suceed, you are seen as a hero, but in europe, you are not allowed to show your success, people will be jealous): changing your view on the customers needs, and changing your company-strategy is a kind of entrepreneural behaviour, too. Companies should start being entrepreneurs in changing to the right view, and broaden their pond (very good book: Ram Charan: Every business is a growth business

It looks as if google really wants to make itself a new kind of protal. Maybe I`m late, but I hadn`t heard of f r o o g l e yet!!! It´s a service which seems to compare prices etc. Will keep my eye on it, because I see a big potential in that business…

I had a very interesting e-mail conversation with Micah Sifry, about emerging democracy, and the power of blogs e.g. during the Dean campaign. We were quite controverse in the question how to deliver content to „the masses“ and back to the politicians, and how it would change democracy: In my opinion one has to get people, where they already are: in their homes sitting in front of their TV. Micah correctly argued, that playing this szenario in Italy under Berlusconis leadership, there won´t be real fair-democracy on TV. And I have to say he is just right. After all it´s a question of transparency and the will of „leaders to accept the criticism of their readers.“ Maybe therefore it was an idea to combine delivered-blog-content with digital TV? I´m very interested in these ideas: how will our children do their elections? How can we find ways to make democracy really democratically? Everybody has to raise his voice, and every voice counts.

Well, it´s quite interesting to see, that the comment-spam in my weblog concentrates on several keywords in my entries. Some weeks ago I blogged about K*A*Z*A*A (you know why put in the stars now ;-), and just in the comments to this article all spam concentrates. So my idea of a blacklist for weblogs might be useful? It works very fine for my e-mail account, too. What do you think?

Did you have the same problems, too? Through the last weeks I often found Spam-Comments on my weblog, and it is really damn crap! Based on this article it looks, as if Six Apart, producer of the major blogging-systems Movabletype and Typepad is going to introduce a new system, where you will get a central online-authentication, and then be able to post to weblogs. Let´s see if it will work – I`d rather suggest solutions like central-build blacklists…