The days started early today at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin – Robert and I are currently at Dion Hinchcliffe’s workshop on Building Successful Web 2.0 Applications.

You can follow my tweets from the event on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tadej (hash tag #web20expo).

Some other tags from the event:

*update* #w2eb now seems to be the one to go with

*SESSION HASH TAGS**
Strategy & Business Models :: #w2eb_strat
Marketing & Community :: #w2eb_mktg
Design & User Experience :: #w2eb_ux
Development :: #w2eb_dev
Sponsored Sessions :: #w2eb_ss
Keynotes :: #w2eb_key

There is also an official back channel.

Our friends from Zemanta will have (at least) two presentations here (let me know if there are more):

• Andraz Tori: Beyond Who Else Bought What
• Marko Samastur: Easy Deployment of Site Extensions With Browser Plugins

Related articles by Zemanta

• Berlin – the tag debate…w2eb?

I’ve just added the Disqus Wordpress plugin to this blog.

Disqus is an interesting application that lets visitors track replies to comments via RSS and even take the conversations across multiple blogs, following trackbacks to your posts and their respective commenters.

Here is my discussion page.

I love the idea as a lot of popular blogs suffer from communication blockage – e.g., if you write a great post that’s linked by a renowned site, chances are that the bulk of the conversation will be taken out at the other site and your commenters will have no chance of joining in.

With Disqus, we are getting a new level of abstraction (similar to what FriendFeed is doing with Twitter & co.) to everyone’s advantage.

The only drawback some might notice is that the comments are hosted at disqus.com – I don’t care, but I can imagine some people could …

I hope this service takes off as it should – being backed by prominent VC’s will surely help .

Last Friday, I was at the 2nd Web.Start conference organized by Initium in Zagreb (Croatia).

Like last year, the two main themes were technology and business.

Although I only attended the biz part (day two), there was a lot of opportunity to meet interesting techies, entrepreneurs and VC’s active in this region – and of course to catch up with old friends.

The line-up of presenters included Yoav Leitersdorf (YLVentures), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp), Patrick de Laive (Fleck), Jim McGough, Andraz Tori (Zemanta) and many others.

This provided for a good balance of entrepreneurs and VC’s talking about what it takes to get a successful startup running in Europe (and especially Eastern Europe and the Balkans).

Is building a highway to London really the only way?

I think not – but I do think starting to focus more on business than technology per se and getting some local biz traction are a prerequisite if one wants to get something globally notable off the ground over here.

Overall, a good and well organized conference – congrats to Berislav, Ivan & co.!

This region is definitely hungry for web conferences – it’s time we organize a good one in Slovenia, too!

The philosopher appeared in front of the Hotel Imperial and attracted a crowd by his actions. He removed his coat, folded it, laid it on the sidewalk, placed his hat upon it; then he drew a small rubber band from his pocket. He broke the circle with his fingers, and, stretching the elastic to its limit, held it above his head.

“Gentlemen,” said the philosopher, “and pardon me – ladies – I did not see you. In this little piece of elastic there is the philosophy of life and living. When it is stretched to its full length it represents the strained life; when relaxed it is the simple life.

“Appearances, ladies and gentlemen,” said the philosopher, stretching the elastic until it threatened to snap. He allowed the rubber to relax with a snap and chuckled.

“But there’s the goods. It doesn’t look so big, but it amounts to as much as is more solid.”

“And you, ladies?” Once more the elastic extended. “Dress! But there’s simplicity. And who shall say that the original Eve was less of a woman than any of you?”

That decided Policeman Xenodocius, the Classic Cop of the Tenderloin. He arrested the Philosopher of the Elastic Life.

“Pardon me,” said the sophist. “I have but one more lesson to-”

“Come on!” said Xenodocius urgently.”

“Well,” said Sergt Charles Place, placidly, a moment later, “I don’t see that he did anything dangerous.”

“Aha!” cried the philosopher. “Here is a man of good elastic. I congratulate you, Sir.”

As the philosopher turned to go, he saw the reporters. Out came the inevitable elastic.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “you see it is stretched. Now it is not stretched. This applies also to journalism. There is no need for you to make it the length of this. See!” And he slowly allowed the rubber band to contract. “Observe that it loses nothing but gains rather by compactness.”

A wave of his hand and he was gone.

- The New York Times; May 6, 1905

Here are some recommendations from the last couple of months:

Malcolm Gladwell: Blink
About “the power of thinking without thinking”, an excellent read about the decisive first few moments of looking. Available at Audible (audio book).

Fisher, Ury, Patton: Getting To Yes
A really good book on negotiation – getting the other party to agree without being at an unfair disadvantage that could haunt you later. Also available as audio.

Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point
Good marketing read about how little things usually make a huge difference. Also at Audible.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan
Fairly entertaining read about the impact of the highly improbable. Summary: Gaussian distribution sux for most cases. The ideas Taleb describes are interesting and useful, but DO NOT get the audio book as, adding to the writer’s very noticeable self-confidence, the narrator makes the whole thing sound terribly big-headed. I later heard Taleb speak at a conference and I was shocked at how nice the guy actually sounded .

Buckingham, Coffman: First, Break All The Rules
Great book on effective management.

Image via Wikipedia

Since Montenegro’s independence and the news of the highly lucrative .me top-level domain name assignation, a lot of people have been standing in line in hope that they’d be able to register their kiss.me, sex.me, call.me, find.me and whatnot.me domains.

Go home, people – GoDaddy’s got the contract with the government of Montenegro (here the contract in Serbian … ukhm … Montenegrian? – published last month).

This explains the mysterious delays in getting these domains to the market – I have been trying to get some news (in vain) from the people at nic.me for the last couple of months.

Yup – domains = $$$.

* I have recently noticed that this post has come to rank quite highly in Google and thus felt I needed to add some clarification, given the fact that a lot of readers do not seem to have understood the underlying sarcasm and the message it is trying to convey. This blog is aimed towards entrepreneurs and as such views this book as a potential time waster – even though larger organizations might benefit from its (however inconcise) message. As it is often talked about in entrepreneurial circles, I thought I’d give it a mention. For a more relevant list of reading material, please look at my list of Recommended Business Books.

Inspired by the terrific insightfulness of Blue Ocean Strategy, I have tried to capture the gist
of the book by comparing its own value curve to that of your conventional marketing business handbook.

On the x-axis, you see a set of values the books bring to the reader, on the y-axis their strengths.

(read on)

It is quite evident that marketing book A and marketing book B go down the usual path of trying to compete with similar emphasis on the individual value points, while Blue Ocean Strategy completely innovates the value curve and creates a blue ocean of uncontested market space for itself.

Yaay!

After having read (or rather, listened to) Blue Ocean Strategy,
I want to go out and buy one of these:

Don’t get me wrong, I like some of the ideas mentioned in the book (like value curve innovation), as well as the examples, but the way the material is presented worries me …

The later in their careers people read it, the better -

- just don’t adopt the stupid lingo .

A great talk about the long tail of technology – it’s not always paramount to be able to capture the biggest and the meanest of customers – success often lies in tapping the heterogeneous “rest of the crowd”.

At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, the (in-)famous blogger Robert Scoble was walking around with a Nokia camera phone doing impromptu interviews with people like Marc Benioff, Tim O’Reilly and Rick Warren (who runs the largest church in the US, btw) and streaming the videos live to Qik.

While I do find the way he ambushes people with a “you’re live on the internet” scare quite amusing (look at the video below with Michael Dell), I would rather have him do a quality interview with some of these people using a decent camera – I don’t mind waiting a couple of minutes for him to sync the video to see it online.

I agree that live video streaming for everyone is a very useful enabling technology, but just not very much so in this particular field. A clear case of using technology for technology’s sake.

Image via Wikipedia

In the past couple of years, I have stumbled upon a series of useful podcasts I listen to more or less regularly.

Below is a list of the ones I have found most useful.

1. Technology

• Hanselminutes - a great software development podcast by Scott Hanselman (focusing on MS technologies)
• TWiT - This Week In Tech – fun and informative weekly updates on what’s new in the tech world (by Leo Laporte & co.)
• Net@Nite – web tech updates by Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte
• SecurityNow - IT security by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte
• Ruby on Rails Podcast

2. Entrepreneurship

• Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders - Stanford Technology Ventures Program
• Iinnovate - about innovation and entrepreneurship

3. Language

• ChinesePod - great podcast for learning Mandarin
• Notes In Spanish (intermediate, advanced)
• P4 Klartext – daily news in clear and easily understandable Swedish
• The French Pod Class
• Selkouutiset - simple Finnish podcast
• Montaigne’s Tower – Steve Kaufmann’s podcast on language learning

4. Science

• Science Friday – great podcast about science
• Brain Food – easy listening, scientific facts

5. Miscellaneous

• TEDTalks - talks fom the TED conference – a must-have
• Manager Tools – great tips on managerial practices
• Princeton University Podcast 2006
• YALE University Podcast
• Visual Culture
• Futures in Biotech

Thanks to David for some of these links .