FlorianDargel

Opusforum sold to Kinjiji

  Opusforum is a German Craigslist clone. According to iBusiness (reg req’d). Interesting background can be found here including listing charts comparing Craigslist, Opusforum and kinjiji. Another copy-cat success I guess ;-)

Update: eBay Press release here pretty nondescript though.

Impressions on reboot7

I’m late in blogging this but a holiday intervened.

Organisation

+ive: on the whole very good, smooth, on time compared to others tuff I've known, great atmosphere, working wifi, nice food and good location

-ive: I missed the first half hour, so I never really knew who the organisers were, too bad! A FAQ for newbies might have helped as well. I guess there should be a Danish event for all the foreigners who managed to get to CPX. Minor quibbles in all.

Presentations: Overall high quality. Some stuff I couldn't judge but solid, forward looking content. A few inevitable sales ppts (skype) and some flaky stuff (all the biology stuff, whoa). Where are the European keynotes (i guess 1 out of 4 is not bad).

On Jason Calancanis: What I didn't notice at first (I always thought it obvious) was his emphasis of "unfiltered blogs" ie not taking any editorial influence on his writers - perhaps a result of his larger than life blogging personality;-). It was always how I would prefer events to be run as well although there the connection between sponsorship and speaking slots are even more extreme. So although www.gizmodo.com disclosed the fact that Siemens was paying for their trip, they didn't disclose the part about the exposure that was part of the deal. Props to Jason for being principled there.

Doug Engelbart Demo: what took us nearly 40 years? 'nuff said. Cool also to have Ross Mayfield on the other side, iChat of course (would skype provide a better sound quality?).

Nokia: the talk was a bit of a wasted opportunity, but I'm still keen to get a S60 phone, preferably with wifi and a skype client. I'm in the market for a replacement phone that would allow me to work without firing up the laptop all the time.

Actually, it was curious how little gadgetry was in evidence. Just Macs, that was about the extent of it, no flashy displays of phones, digicams (ubiquitous but strangely unobtrusive) or other gear. Heavily stickered laptops maybe. A serious projector and microphones that worked were also remarkable in a way.

In short: I unwittingly went exactly in the spirit of the original event: a reboot after a long year with no holiday. I wanted a sort of brainspa for new ideas and unconventional settings, and it fully delivered on that. I recommend anyone to give reboot a whirl if you get the chance.

Google acquisitions

Interesting fact: Google acquired more companies _before_ it went public then after, so far. An interesting speculation on who the company might (or should) acquire next follows. European copy-cats take note.

Via Searchblog 

bolgjet error

Does anybody else have similar problems?

The question of AIM

  Interesting Networking event put on by Law-firm McGrigors in Edinburgh last night as the AIM Market turned 10 years young in June. Some good discussion, although it was more a celebration than a critical appreciation in the end. It will be interesting to see if the momentum building up will spill over into other countries. Some have their doubts that a preferred European public exit channel will appear soon.

 

 

 

Part of the panel: Andy McNair, Alasdair Robinson, Anna Brown, Bill Dobbie.

Travelling until the 27th of June

Only intermittent access to email, so see you then.

Loic le Meur / European Weblogs/ Good Bye

check here for the talk & info. (UPDATE: Apologies, this is just a link to the Loic's Wiki, I'm not yet podcast enabled)

I'll be off now, have to catch my train back to Munich. Thanks to the organisers, it was great! So long Copenhagen, and thanks for all the IRC!

Lee Bryant / tagging

Some notes on Lee Bryant:

tagging is flat, but needs very specific tags

needfor shared meaning:
- shared situation
- shared perception
- shared categorisation

bottomup emerging language allows for others to speak about stuff without reference to dominant language.

social tagging cases

- user-organised news
- local aggregation (pull everything together about a locale (eg brixton) and analyse the text)
- negotiating meaning for mental health work (bottom up taxonomy)

where do we go next?

lightweight social sw interface - killing enterprise deadweight taxonomies

here's a startup sw project: working out how to tag enterprise content in the intranet etc. (Actually Lee says it should be a pretty easy project of a competent M$ programmer)

Q is tagging a good way of getting feedback in the market, a cunning plan to kill market research institutes?

Q How do you get clients to use social software & bottom up tools? A: work on stuff where companies know things dont work. eg build on top of existing failed systems

Ben Hammersley

This should be a fun talk.

First blogger: Sir Richard Steele 17hundreds
Publishing "The Tatler" posts 3x a week, 800 readers, comments com back, loads of coffee, obviously a blogger

(actually: Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver cycle covers some of that ground)

Enlightenment: coffeeshop culture - tricky business because equal fashions crate lots of etiquette conundrums.

When Steele got tired of writing himself he started a group blog: "The Spectator" - giving advice on how to behave in coffeeshops/polite society.

"modern technology is rude"  - requires new ways of dealing with etiquette evolution.

cue mobile phone ("i'm on the train") etc etc

conclusion: need a new tatler teaching people how to behave with and through new tech.

Cory Doctorow / EU Broadcast Flag

I didn't know what the fuss in the US about the Broadcast Flag was about, and now it turns out that there are plans for an European Broadcast Flag. Oh dear.

Very interesting were Cory's casestudies about how DRM'ed, copyright protected industries perform less well  (if al all) than the protected ones. Didn't catch all the examples, but one was the fact based DB industry in Europe (protected, wilting) vs US (not, going like crazy).  I'd love to see more of that, and if it is a sustainable strategy for individual players as opposed to requiring a similar legal environment for everyone.