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 .

I love what Johnny Lee is doing – having fun with all kinds of seemingly simple designs and sharing them with the world. Here is his TED presentation, definitely worth watching:

Johhny showed everyone that $40 and a creative mind can sometimes have far bigger an impact that what most large corporations can muster with their immense budgets.

Another fun project of his even involves elasticity – literally. He built a giant slingshot that allowed people to bombard a soon-to-be-demolished building with paint balloons. Simple and fun!

This reminded me of the 3 days I spent in my basement working on a rotating-table 3D scanner I would use to capture convex 3D shapes, just for fun.

I remember the thrill I felt when the thing actually started rotating the way I wanted it to rotate -

but like with a lot of other endeavors, other projects came and took the limelight, and what was meant to be fun actually soon became a burden.

And as time went on and more and more projects seemed to be the most important thing since landing on the moon, I suddenly realized -

Did any of these make me feel nearly as full as my own little thing? Not even close.

Of course, everybody needs to make a living, and childhood dreams and pet projects rarely pay for rent.

But in the end, these are what keeps you going and make you wake up in the morning motivated and with a smile on your face.

It’s time to lose or at least loosen the shackles of everyday life and start digging through the basement designs .

You must read this brilliant post by Clay Shirky:
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html.

*update on May 15, 2008 – video, hat-tip to Dean*

The bottom line:
in the early phases of the industrial revolution, with the rise of accelerated urbanization, people (esp. in London) didn’t know what to do with the newly acquired “civic surplus” – and they turned to gin until they figured it out and started building public libraries, better education, etc.

In the 20th century, people started having more free time, but had no idea what to do with it – and this is why sitcoms became so extremely popular.

Now, well into the 21st century, perversities such as Big Brother are taking this cognitive surplus safety-net to the extreme.

Yes – to the average web citizen, this abomination of passive media is well below standard in terms of its ability to capture attention.

But to the average non-web-savvy consumer, it’s just about all there is.

Big Brother – the ultimate gin of 2008. The year that Larry Niven thought we’d had interstellar drives (link).

Yep – people sit back and enjoy looking at people with no life building one – while neglecting their own.

But as Clay Shirky says in his (I have to say it again – brilliant) post – we are all looking for the mouse.

Once everyone has a comfortable way of interacting with the media – they will!

If my grandma had a way of influencing the content she’s bombarded with on TV, she would. She would grab that mouse and tell that incompetent excuse for a politician to fuck off and do something useful for a change. Or she would connect with other folks her age or find someone who’s lived through the same borderline bearable times during WW2.

But she can’t do that. I wonder if she ever will.

Yes, the TV she has got now may be HD with a digital signal showing her hunderds of channels from all over the world. But it’s still the same thing as 50 years ago. Channels.

Gin is still gin, it doesn’t matter if it comes through normal post or DHL.

So – one shiny day in 2013 (or sooner, I hope), the huge beast that is mainstream media will be ready to take on clicks.

But will it matter then? Media will be pouring (as it is already) from phones, watches, walls, posters, T-shirts and the like, reacting to your every move.

Videos of missing children with submit forms for clues on milk cartons? Sure! OLED, multitouch, cameras … everything is shrinking, blending, melting into one nearly perfectly connected mesh of peace-seeking individuals (the Borg, anyone?).

It’s all about elegance. And sitting in front of the telly looking at stupid people doing meaningless stuff … passively … is far from elegant.

Step up. Do something. Even if you’re exhausted coming home from work/school/whatever, you’ll end up being the same stupid a-hole you’ve been watching and making fun of every evening if you don’t actually do something.

As Tolstoy (I think, ask Gregor) said – not living out what you were meant to be hurts you.
And I can hardly imagine someone’s purpose in life being watching other people jerk off on TV.

One life. Live it!

Source: WikipediaToday, our friends at Zemanta launched their blogging engine plug-in that finds related pictures and articles while you’re typing a new post.

This is my first “zemified” (as they call it) post, so let me try and include some meat and let the semantic magic do the slicing. I’m a little bit disappointed that no steaks appeared in the picture gallery as I typed “meat”. Or it’s the other way around, and the semantics go deeep .

Anyway, there seems to be a lot of work behind all of this and I think it brings good value to bloggers – although I would love their technology to be used for more projects like Odprti kop. But! Life in a startup is hard and you have to focus. This is what Boštjan (one of the founders) wrote about startups the other day:

The last time I was explaining to a girl friend about the crazy working hours in a startup, occasional adrenalin rushes, beating the competition, irregular sleep and regular food, important life lessons learned and lack of women in the process, she replied simply: “Well, guys used to go to the army, now you go to a startup.

This post is killing me . But I couldn’t agree more and I can totally relate as we are currently going through similar times with Motiviti and Surphone.

Too bad I couldn’t make it to their launch party today, good luck, guys!

Now I’m trying to get a really cool picture to pop up, but all I keep getting is a four-leaf clover and some other crazy stuff. Hmmm … let me try. Sexy twins. Sunshine love. Driving through Vegas in an old Camino. Naked girl. There you go!

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 .