My personal Web 2.0

It is amazing what you can find on the web these days … lots of different “free” applications, Gigabytes of free disk space for mails, files, and pictures … and hundreds of productivity tools on the web 2.0. I spend quite a lot of my spare time to actually check these different offers. Some are really useful (do you know pandora.com?) … some are less than useful (who is actually using writely.com?).

Now to make a long story short – here are my favorite tools:

GMail - ok you probably know this one, but can you imagine … 2.5GB free disk space for emails. The link into their gtalk is impressive, it lets you archive conversations cross email and messenger … convergence of communication

Google Calendar - would be nice if it could sync with my Outlook, but it is still a really nice tool. If you enter an address, you can even look it up on Google Maps.

Google Reader – content syndication is probably going to become one of the big things. It helps me to keep kind of an overview on what is going on in the IT world without having to travel to two thousand web sites. But watch out … if you are on holiday for a week, it becomes a terrible mess!

Flickr – here you can store your pictures and send them to your friends. I usually use it while being on the road, to let my family know where I am. It is also a very useful picture store when you want to post something on your blog.

Pandora – it’s an interface to the music genome project. They calculate a vector based on your favorite song, and then setup a whole channel with music that you will probably like. For me it is not always a perfect fit, but I still get a lot of really surprising suggestions. I think iTunes should buy Pandora some day … I bought so many songs due to a suggestion on Pandora … it is a very good marketing tool for them.

Squidoo – this is the most dodgy name on the internet … and it is always a pain to remember that freaking name, but it is a nice idea. People maintain lenses that focus on a certain topic. So if you have a lens for lets say “Business Intelligence” you collect links to all sorts of information related to that topic. So far I have stayed away from setting up my own lens as it seems to be a lot of maintenance work (most of the lenses I have seen are partially outdated) … but it is still a very interesting concept.

WordPress – ok – you obviously know this one already … it is the engine behind this blog.

Asia 101

After spending one week in Singapore, either my internal antenna is now receiving signals that did not leave the noise level before … or every paper and magazine seems to write about Asia these days. Given the GDP growth numbers I assume it is rather the latter.

Here is a good glossary published by World Business this month:

Sea Turtle – A native Chinese who left China to pursue higher education, and who is now going back to China to work as an executive or to set up a company.

Seaweed - An unsuccessful sea turtle.

Banana – Yellow on the outside, white on the inside

Occasionally Connected

As I write these lines, I am on my way back from Singapore. We are traveling in 10.700m at 900km/h but still I am connected to the Internet. Boeing Connexion is a really amazing new feature on-board Boeing jets.

The really funny side note would be that the internet connection in my Hotel in Singapore was far worse and did cost more money than Connexion.

Singapore was a short but intense business trip. It was my first time to Asia and provided so many new impressions. We met up with our regional practice leaders from APAC and discussed our product strategy.

The world according to …

I just found a really nice link on Andy’s blog: World66. It lets you track the places you have been to in the world. I must say that Andy’s map is really impressive. Probably he gets greating cards from all major airlines for Christmas. It also explains the distinguished reading list Well, my map has some … let’s call it “white spaces”.

Here is my map for Europe … still lots of white space

You can create your own visited country map or write about it on the open travel guide.

Quote of the day comes from Oscar Wilde’s The remarkable rocket: “Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.”

SUGI 31 – San Francisco

Here are some pictures from San Francisco. Time passed by so quickly but we had time on Sunday to explore the city. The big topic of the event was Data Integration, Storage technologies, and how SOA brings all of this together.

The best blonde joke you will ever find …

… and I almost missed it. Given that so many people know the path, it is strange that I found the best blonde joke that late … still rolling on the floor laughing! Thanks to Robert Scoble for showing me the way.

… every journey of a thousand web sites starts with a single click.

Cheers, Ingo

Why do I spend time writing a blog?

WSJ’s Lee Gomes wrote a really interesting article about a shift in the area of technology blogs: „Tech Blogs Produce New Elite to Help Track The Industry’s Issues“. 

After getting my WordPress blog, I decided to spend some time reading about blogging and trying to find out which blogs would succeed and which ones would fail.  I think in order to succeed you (the author) need to be credible, so you need to provide a bio that lets readers know, why you think you should voice your opinion. Then you need to provide content that matters and affects people. And … last but not least you need a number of articles that let people understand your way of thinking. I also think it is important to let your personality shine through as it is all about connecting to and communicating with people.

 If these points come together, content gets alive – people gather and communities as described in Lee’s article evolve.  So the reason for me blogging would not be to represent my ego, but to become part of a community to share mindsets … funny … I did chose the name „mindfield“ for my blog, long before I wrote this article.
 

links for 2005-11-28

• Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?
  Harvard business school on writing blogs.
  (tags: writing)
• The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing
  http version of the reference manual for technical writing issued by MIT
  (tags: writing)

Hello WordPress

Thank you for the invitation – or should I call it “challenge”? There have been so many miserable attempts to write a blog in my history … I am really starting to fear the empty white space in front of my cursor.