Alex is blogging, too

2008 (not really)

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:25:17 +0100

I am on the TGV to Paris right now. Tomorrow we’ll continue on to Brazil to meet with friends and to spend some 4 weeks traveling around the country. I have not been to South America or anywhere on the southern hemisphere before and I can’t wait to see what it is like. We will visit Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Ouro Preto, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and everything in between. And even though I have obviously brought my computer I do not expect to spend much time online once there.

2008 has been a great year so far. I have started the transition from service to product (as in few clients with big contracts versus many customers making small purchases). I moved from London to the town of Salzburg in Austria. I left the seemingly safe haven of employment to fend for myself again. I traveled- maybe more than in any other year. I even lived in New York for 6 weeks…

(… I intended this post to be something of a 2008 recap but clearly the French TGVs travel much faster than I thought. Paris has come and gone and we have just landed in Sao Paulo. So 2008 has to wait.)

Smallish FF Theme update

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:14:59 +0100

A recent update to the Friendfeed widget had affected the design of my Friendfeed Tumblr Theme. The changes weren’t major and most people probably did not even notice. But if you did and care you might want to get the latest version.

It is exciting (and still a bit weird) to see so many sites use this theme. Some have ventured into customizing it further and I really like it! Others have been inspired to adopt the concept in their own more spohitsitcated ways.

You can be up and running with a site like this in mere minutes and with zero coding eperience. All you need is free accounts with Tumblr.com, Friendfeed.com and Disqus.com and a theme like this to tie them all together.

The state of blogging

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 23:36:00 +0100

Blogging is dying! Or at least that is the impression one can get when looking at the many good-bye-posts out there. I think in reality blogging is simply finding its place.

Some blogs (often blog networks) have ascended to become major media players with employees, sponsoring contracts and all that - even direct syndication of their content to forward thinking news papers like the New York Times.

Other blogs that are niche or an outlet for individuals simply stay that way - only that they now have to share their space with the social web. Photos, videos, micro-blogging, bookmarks have a life on their own. The need to combine it all into a blog is fading as our web presence is becoming distributed and yet linked together in a gazillion different ways (friendfeed comes to mind).

It doesn’t mean blogging is no longer part of the mix. The opposite is true: It is just one possible part of the mix and everybody can choose what they want in theirs.

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this..."

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:16:41 +0100

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

- Steve Jobs, 2003

Microformats or "why browsers are stupid"

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:40:00 +0100

If you see a link on a web page and click it, your browser opens the linked site. This is because your browser “understands” what a link is.

Now if you encounter a real world mailing adress your browser can not by default distinguish it from any other text on the page. If you want to add it to your adress book or look it up on a map you have to copy and paste it into another application. For the same reason you can not click on a telephone number to call it or automatically add events to your calendar of choice.

The content on the visible web is mostly designed to be understood by you (a human) but not by your browser (a machine). So for information to travel between sites and applications you have to do a lot of silly work (going back and forth, copying, pasting, etc).

This is where microformats come in. They add an additional dimension to the data - one that is not intended for you, but for the programs you use. So if an application makes the effort to mark up content with microformats other applications can suddenly make sense of it.

We have just made this effort for Permatime.com (see my original Permatime announcement). It still allows you to share any point in time with people in different time zones but if you use an add-on like operator for Firefox and navigate to a Permatime like this it will allow you to add the event directly to your calendar application. No silly copying and pasting required and time zone conversion is of course taken care of (this is Permatime after all).

More and more sites support microformats - and more and more applications understand them. I am pleased that our little contribution makes it so easy to create a hcalendar microformat. It’s the future :)

(If you are stuck with IE try Oomph for some microformat bliss)

Taking the fear out of time zones

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:42:12 +0100

More locations, a much improved interface, new features - we have just released the first major update for permatime.com since last week’s fantastic launch.

If you have ever struggled arranging a meeting across time zones you’ll know the pain. With Permatime you simply set a time in your own time zone and get a link for it. If you send this link to others they will see the same time but in their own time zone. Simple as that. Permatime also works great to announce events:

Apple Press event:
http://permatime.com/Europe/London/2008-10-14/18:00

or 37 signals’ live Q&A:
http://permatime.com/US/Central/2008-08-12/11:00

We have made the urls extra readable to boot (for when you need to put them in an email or document). Also cool:

Another Frightening Show

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:46:04 +0200

I am listening to episode 365 of This American Life just now: Another Frightening Show. They are doing a great job explaining some of the more abstract details of the current financial crisis. It seems much more accessible than what I have been able to find in writing so far. I am of course not an expert - but I guess neither are are many of you.

This American Life is one of my favorite pod casts. They also have a TV show these days, but I havn’t seen it yet. The radio show is brilliant though and I can only encourage you to subscribe! (iTunes Link).

Tumblr Friendfeed Theme Release

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:19:00 +0200

Tumblr is great for sharing content. You can set up a new site in mere minutes and it is completely free to boot. This site is powered by it and I am happy to release its theme for anybody to use under a Creative Commons license.

The theme is fully integrated with 2 other great services: Friendfeed.com (see my account) to aggregate your entire online life in one place and Disqus.com for commenting. There is plenty more to these two but that is for another post.

Combined these three services make publishing pure joy. I love it and I can only recommend for you to try it (with or without my theme).

You can see the theme in action on my own site: blog.kohlhofer.com (screenshot)
The sources are available on Github (raw template code ready for pasting) and include some light weight instructions to get you going.

Feel free to develop this further! Enjoy.

"The next time you meet with a prospective client that wants to make a newer, better Sharepoint or..."

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:14:01 +0200

“The next time you meet with a prospective client that wants to make a newer, better Sharepoint or clone Basecamp or replace MySpace, tell them thanks, but no thanks. Recommend them to a friend, but don’t take the project. Only take projects where you can do your best work. Where you can be proud of what you did. Even if you never tell anyone it was you.”

- Steven Bristol (less everything)

Where did all the noise go

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:30:05 +0200

In cleaning up blog.kohlhofer.com I have robbed myself of an outlet for all the fun (pretty, weird, .. etc) things clogging up today’s inter tubes.

Focus is ciritical and I really buy into that having recently unsubscribed from many blogs that have become too noisy. Information overload is real and I think it is important to give people options that are somewhere between all and nothing.

So I won’t polute this blog with every little video I enjoy - instead I have set up a dedicated place for that at littlesignal.kohlhofer.com. Content from there is still aggregated to Friendfeed and hence will show up in the sidebar of this blog, too.

Feel free to follow me there or go right to Friednfeed where you have some very fine grainded control over which updates you want to see from individuals - and more importantly - filter out the ones you do not.

Take control.

While looking for a suitable photo of me to use on the new snk...

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:17:27 +0200

While looking for a suitable photo of me to use on the new snk site, Christian found this photo in my flickr stream and did a fantastic job editing it! Compare it with the original.

Thanks mate!

Christmas is near

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:10:15 +0200

The lead up to Apple press events has started to feel very much like the time before Christmas. Awful? Cynical? I think for many it is just a matter of fact. But how can that be? It is not like we are getting presents or anything. In fact we only gain an opportunity to spend more money.

I can see two reasons for this craving for anything shiny coming out of Cupertino. The stuff Apple creates is so consistently good that many are happy to suspend their normal skepticism and simply trust them to deliver to their expectations. It certainly saves a lot of hassle. Or Apple has really figured out how to play us. In that case they might as well take my money for doing that without me noticing.

Either way. Can’t wait for what will be announced today. I got my credit card ready.

Belfast, Dublin, Munich, Salzburg

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:08:43 +0200

After an exciting week in Ireland and North Ireland with TN2020 I am now back in Salzburg. It kept me even busier than I expected and there is a lot to catch up with, now that I am back at my own cosy desk. I am quite pleased with the results though - TN2020.net is working well. I even had to make some layout changes to better accomodate the amount of activity happening there. The video podcast (link opens in iTunes) we have been producing is now listed on iTunes, too and I have just finished uploading the last episodes. We managed to produce and publish 1- 3 episodes every day.

I am really looking forward to seeing where TN2020 is going!

Inaugural TN2020 Summit

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:32:33 +0200

Tomorrow I am leaving for Munich for some meetings. On Saturday I will continue on to Belfast for the inaugural TN2020 summit. The British Council have asked me to support the summit and the participants in their online sharing of ideas and discussions.

The first piece of my work towards that has just gone live: TN2020.net. The Site aggregates all kinds of information relevant to the summit. It is all set up using tools like Tumblr, Yahoo! Pipes, Feedburner, Flickr, Twitter, .. and so on. For the blog search for example I use Google and Technorati as sources, a custom Yahoo pipe to remove duplicates and finally Tumblr to display the result. There are similar setups for videos, photos, bookmarks and last but not least Twitter.

For Twitter I have also set up an account (allTN2020) to automatically “re-tweet” everything tagged with #TN2020.

Now on to sending out some telegrams.

Its only been a few months since I have been to Pakistan to speak at the Citizen’s Media...

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:43:19 +0200

Its only been a few months since I have been to Pakistan to speak at the Citizen’s Media Conference and hold several work shops in Karachi and Islamabad (some even were at the Hotel Marriott). I have met some great people on this trip and I am so sorry to see harm come to their country and its people.

Pave the cow paths

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:51:06 +0200

I had not heard about “pave the cow paths” until James Tindall clued me in. The principle is not rocket science but it it feels highly applicable to where the web is currently at. Chances are you are already into paving the cow paths anyway. I am - but the phrase is a great reminder to constantly evaluate if you are really working on the right thing.

So what does it mean? Rather then designing and enforcing new ways simply help people (or users) by paving those routes they are using anyway: The cow paths where the grass is already trampled down. It is less work for you - and the adoption has already happend.

(Image by adactio)

I have updated plasticshore one more time. This image really...

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:22:14 +0200

I have updated plasticshore one more time. This image really says it all.