Deutsch?

Do you work in or with Social Media? Marketing or PR perhaps? Maybe you’re working in a completely different field and are curious about what exactly this Social Media thingamajig is all about? Are you a gear head or a techie with a burning passion for Social Media? Maybe you’re in a company or NGO that has already embraced it, maybe in a company, NGO or GO that fears and shuns it? Are you an Social Media champion inside or outside your company or organization? Are you perhaps an independent enthusiast brimming with Social Media chutzpah? Maybe you think Social Media is a fleeting fad, the emperor’s new clothes and the greatest evil facing humanity in the 21st century [and your name is Andrew Keen]? Do you live or work in or around Cologne, Germany? Maybe both? Perhaps you’re based outside of Cologne but keep constantly looking for excuses to travel to Cologne for lunch? Do you really need more than the Dom, Carnival and Kölsch beer to lure you to Cologne? Do you keep reading through really long paragraphs on obscure blogs with silly names?

Well, then the Social Media Lunch Cologne is most certainly for you.

What?

It’s an informal regular event in Cologne inspired by the Social Media Breakfast founded by Bryan Person where social media experts and n00bs alike come together to eat, meet, share, and learn.

When?

The very first Social Media Lunch Cologne launches

Thursday the 1st of July 2010, 12:30 – 14:00 CET.

Be sure to not miss out on the “I was there” bragging rights – success or failure notwithstanding! If you can’t make it – don’t be sorry for long. There’s going to be another Social Media Lunch Cologne just for you. Or one that you can quite possibly make it to. Sometime.

Where?

The idea is to keep rotating places in the Cologne inner city for variation. The first Social Media Lunch Cologne will be held at the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln.

How?

Tell all your friends, colleagues and relatives to come (or stay away, respectively), show up at the venue sometime during the timeframe or drive by and wave to the rest – just wing it and do it your way. Whatever you do be sure to bring some lunchmoney allowing for a handsome tip. That’s basically it.

If you feel like connecting and spreading the awesomeness, perhaps already craving to commit that RSVP – there’s a facebook page and blog for that.

No registration needed, though – It’s informal, remember?

If you’re into #hashtags feel free to use #smlcgn for your tagging and labeling needs.

Why?

Well, why on earth not? I personally am a grumpy zombie in the morning, I don’t eat breakfast and I currently don’t live in North America. I don’t know about you, but I do certainly need to eat lunch each and every day and I do live and work in Cologne, Germany and constantly find myself trying to fill the lunch hour with additional value to go with the grub.

Do we need another Social Media Meetup in Cologne? I personally think there’s potential in a local lunchtime event on a regular basis for helping Social Media professionals, the curious and enthusiasts alike, narrowing our serendipity funnel and helping to add value to our common passions and interests. I’ll let you be the judge if we really need it.

It is definitely NOT a replacement for or competition to other excellent social events and initiatives in Cologne like pl0gbar, twitwoch, Online-Stammtisch Köln, likemind, Last Tuesday, Web Montag and others. I have tremendous respect and bundles of love for the guys behind those initiatives and I for one will still be attending those event like before. Not to worry.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bryan Person for the original inspiration and Robert Wallis and Daniel Backhaus for their early support and encouragement.

Disclaimers

This is not a sponsored event. I’m not getting paid for this nor do I aim to make a profit. Sponsors may be sought in the future to help cover potential costs, and I promise to always be transparent on these issues. My views are my own and may not reflect those of my employer(s).

If you find yourself compelled to treat this event as your own sales show and hawk your services and/or products, please consider that people may laugh at you. Loudly. In public. It could even escalate to throwing of bread crumbs. Consider yourself advised.

Get in touch

What do you think? Would you attend? What would you expect? What would you like to talk about? Do you have something to show? Do you have some great ideas? Suggestions? Improvements? Special dietary requirements? Fears, uncertainties and doubts? Let me know – in the comments below, on twitter, facebook, mail me or call me (DE +49 (0) 221 3023 953 – INT +1 (650) 450-8047, both CET)!

I personally woud be thrilled even if only one person showed up for the first event. That would be truly awesome! Hope to see you there!

- Vidar ‘blacktar’ Andersen, Cologne and the Internets 15.06.2010

—

Arbeitest Du im Social Media oder beschäftigst Du Dich mit diesem Thema? Vielleicht im Marketing oder PR-Bereich? Vielleicht arbeitest Du aber auch in einem komplett anderen Bereich, bist aber neugierig was es mit dem Begriff Social Media auf sich hat. Bist Du ein Techie mit einer glühenden Leidenschaft für alles Digitale? Vielleicht bist Du aber auch in einer Firma die Social Media als neuen Kanal für sich entdeckt oder diesen wegen seiner  Neuartigkeit fürchtet und meidet? Bist Du ein Social Media Champion innerhalb oder außerhalb einer Firma oder Organisation? Bist Du ein unabhängiger Enthusiast randvoll mit Social Media Chuzpe? Es könnte natürlich auch sein, dass Du denkst Social Media ist eine Modeerscheinung, des Königs neue Kleider oder das größte Teufelszeug des 21. Jahrhunderts (und Du heißt Andrew Keen)? Lebst und arbeitest Du in oder in der Nähe von Köln? Oder beides? Vielleicht lebst Du auch außerhalb Kölns, suchst aber immer nach Ausreden um nach Köln zum Lunch zu reisen? Braucht es mehr als den Dom, Karneval oder Kölsch Dich nach Köln zu locken? Liest Du immer noch lange Absätze in obskuren Blogs mit komischen Namen?

Nun dann ist der Social Media Lunch Cologne genau das Richtige für Dich.

Was das ist?

Der Social Media Lunch Cologne ist ein informelles, regelmäßiges Event in Köln inspiriert durch das Social Media Breakfast welches von Bryan Person gegründet wurde. Social Media Experten und Newbies nehmen gleichermaßen bei einem gepflegten Mittagessen teil,  um sich auszutauschen und voneinander zu lernen.

Der Lunch ist definitiv kein Ersatz oder Konkurrenz zu Veranstaltungen in Köln wie pl0gbar, twitwoch, Online-Stammtisch Köln, likemind, Last Tuesday, Web Montag oder anderen. Ich habe großen Respekt und jede Menge Hochachtung für die Köpfe hinter diesen Initiativen und ich werde diese auch weiterhin besuchen.

Wann?

Der erste Social Media Lunch Köln findet am Donnerstag, 01.07.2010, 12:30-14:00 Uhr statt.  Wer beim ersten Mal dabei ist kann für sich den First Mover Status beanspruchen, ungeachtet des Erfolgs oder Misserfolgs. Wenn Du es nicht schaffen solltest, mach Dir keine Sorgen, der nächste Social Media Lunch kommt bestimmt.

Wo?

Die Idee ist den Lunch an verschiedenen Orten innerhalb Kölns stattfinden zu lassen. Der erste Social Media Lunch wird im Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln stattfinden.

Wie?

Erzähle Deinen Freunden, Kollegen oder Verwandten, dass sie irgendwann während des Zeitfensters vorbeischauen (beziehungsweise wegbleiben) sollen. Alternativ kannst Du auch nur vorbeifahren und winken. Tu wonach immer Dir ist. Vergiss nicht das Geld fürs Mittagessen und ein bisschen Trinkgeld mitzubringen. Das ist dann auch schon alles.

Wenn Dir nach connecten und teilen ist, wir haben eine Facebookseite und Blog dafür.

Registrierung ist nicht nötig – denn es ist informell, ne?

Wenn Du #Hashtags magst benutze doch #smlcgn als Label und Kategorie.

Warum?

Nun warum nicht? Ich bin ein unleidlicher Zombie am Morgen und frühstücke nicht. Ich weiß nicht wie es Dir geht, aber ich esse jeden Tag zu Mittag, ich lebe in Köln und versuche immer die Mittagspause mit etwas Sinnvollem zu füllen.

Brauchen wir ein weiteres Social Media Treffen in Köln? Ich glaube das es einen Bedarf an einem lokalem, regelmäßigem Mittagessen Event gibt, an dem Social Media Profis, genauso wie die Neugierigen und Enthusiasten sich austauschen, inspirieren und ihre Passion teilen können.

Ich überlasse die Notwendigkeit eines solchen Events Eurem Urteil.

Danksagungen

Danke an Bryan Person für die initiale Inspiration und Robert Wallis and Daniel Backhaus für die frühzeitige Unterstützung und Ermutigung.

Disclaimer

Dies ist kein gesponsertes Event. Ich werde dafür nicht bezahlt noch beabsichtige ich Profit daraus zu schlagen.  Sponsoren werden vielleicht zukünftig angestrebt, aber nur um mögliche Kosten abzudecken und ich verspreche bei diesem Punkt maximale Transparenz walten zu lassen.

Meine Ansichten sind meine eigenen und nicht die meines Arbeitgebers.

Wenn Du Dich gezwungen fühlst diese Veranstaltung als Deine eigene Vertriebsplattform zu nutzen, dann rechne damit, dass Dich die Leute auslachen könnten. Laut. Sehr laut und öffentlich. Eventuell kommt es soweit, dass Du mit Brotkrümeln beworfen wirst. Insoweit bist Du jetzt gewarnt.

Nimm Kontakt auf…

(Non-Flash version of the image slideshow)

I’d like to offer all the participants a big THANK YOU! Looking forwards to be seeing you guys either in Sorento and/or Bristol. You rock! Seriously.

The official German DZUG press release describes the results of the sprint quite well, so I thought I’d be a lazy bastard attach my crude translation below. Feel free to quote it, reuse and repost it as you may see fit.

PRESS RELEASE

DZUG e.V. (German speaking Zope User Group)

Forsterstr. 29 ∙ 06112 Halle (Saale)

Visuals: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12317756@N08/4448944324/

Official hash tag: #cathedralsprint

The Plone Cathedral Sprint 2010 in Cologne comes to a successful end

Over 25 Python developers from Europe, North and South America gathered at the GfU Cyrus AG educational institute in Cologne, Germany (http://www.gfu.net) to collectively push the development of the Plone Content Management System (CMS) forwards. As another Plone sprint, the Tahoe Snow Sprint (http://plone.org/events/community/tahoe-snow-sprint-2010 http://www.coactivate.org/projects/tahoe-snow-sprint-2010/project-home),  was being held at the same time in Tahoe, USA the developers utilized video conferencing and the differences in time zones to work on certain topics around the clock.

The sprint in Cologne was highly productive. During the sprint, the Plone 4 release manager Eric Steele even published a couple of screen casts where you could follow the progress and the results:  http://blip.tv/posts/?topic_name=cathedralsprint

More usability

The Plone Cathedral Sprint was dedicated to further improve and enhance the user experience. The search results from the native Plone search engine now return more information about the found article, making it easier for the user to find the right one. Additionally, the search results can now be further narrowed down by applying further various criteria incrementally.

The configuration of collections is also more intuitive and faster than ever before. Collections are saved search requests that show the search results as if the returned content would be located in the same area, or folder if you will, of a website. Creating extremely flexible websites is made simple by using collections and their numerous search criteria. The new collections user interface enables Webmasters to change and modify the settings faster than ever.

Commenting in Plone was extended to include moderation and captchas, thus enabling anonymous commenting in Plone out of the box.

The Plone event calendar was also enhanced to enable standard management of all-day and recurring events.

Starter help for German speaking users

Plone supports around 50 languages and is thus deployable worldwide. The numerous new functionalities of Plone 4 and the according changes to the user interface were translated to German and Dutch during the sprint. The helful links that now appear on a standard start page should be Of particular interest to German speaking users. This start page is automatically generated when creating a new Plone site. You’ll now find links to sources of information in German on the page like the Plone developer handbook and the German mailing list in addition to the documentation in English.

Sprints as culture

Sprints are a distinctiveness of the Plone, Zope and Python development culture. The list of successful and legendary sprints held all around the world is long. Traditionally, developers come together at the location of a developer community alternately and on a rotational basis to exchange ideas and work intensely focused on predefined tasks and goals. The Cologne Cathedral Sprint 2010 will probably be remembered in the Plone community for delivering results for quite a while.

About Plone

With its around 200 core developers, Plone is one of the largest Open Source projects in existence. The user friendly CMS is characterized by its workflow support, accessibility, scalability, expandability and high security.

Plone supports about 50 languages and runs on all common operating systems. Plone is Open Source software licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL).

http://plone.org/about

About the Plone Foundation

The Plone Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that was formed in May 2004 with the Apache Software Foundation as a role model. The foundation is the copyright holder of the Plone source code and the Plone trade mark. It is located in Houston, TX USA and is officially represents the developer community worldwide.

With around 200 core developers and 570 developers of Plone products the Plone community is one of the largest and most vibrant Open Source developer communities worldwide.

http://plone.org/about/foundation

About the DZUG e.V.

The DZUG e.V. considers itself the representative for the German speaking Zope users in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It seeks to better connect the interests of users and developers to enable a more efficient pooling of resources within the ever fast expanding Open Source community. The organization especially initiates projects that support spreading Zope within the German speaking world, like translation and documentation of software components and organizing training and informative events.

DZUG e.V. Deutschsprachige Zope User Group

Forsterstr. 29

06112 Halle (Saale)

Phone +49 (0) 345 122 9889 9

Fax +49 (0) 345 122 9889 1

E-Mail email@dzug.org

Press contact:

Jan Ulrich Hasecke

E-Mail juh@dzug.org

Phone +49 (0) 212 2331483

Yours sincerely,

Jan Ulrich Hasecke

This week I’m attending the first Plone Sprint held in my hometown of Cologne! The aim of the sprint is to focus on completing tasks for the upcoming major release of version 4.0 and even the next incremental version 4.1.

I’m working on the sprint group that is trying to clean up the search interface and make the Plone search experience a little bit better.  I think we’re making some progress already – and as always – it’s great fun! :)

So I went to the DNA digital workshop at Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) in Bonn following up the previous workshop in Berlin and yeah, I finally got to see the man – René Obermann – CEO of (DTAG).

The workshop partnered young tech and Internet savvy people from the DNA digital initiative with DTAG decision makers to discuss how their corporation could potentially benefit from and deploy new strategies for e.g. corporate culture and product development.

Sure enough, Obermann is every bit the charismatic leader that you’d expect him to be, but with 30 minutes of his precious time allocated to listen to the summary of our workshop, the possibility of a proper dialogue and discussion was accordingly limited. It was nice to see him take the time, though. Kudos.

It was slightly fascinating to observe the depth that some of the participating employees of DTAG would sink to in the presence of their top dog. It was like a sudden lapse of personal integrity, as if the teeth of the previous biting discussions had all but fallen out. I guess it’s all natural – the presence of the Alpha male and all that jazz – but slightly embarrassing nonetheless. I can’t help but think it would have been more productive for the discussions to not have Obermann present.

My personal conclusion of the workshop was that – although highly interesting topics and people – the Enterprise 2.0 is not my battle. I’m unfortunately not passionate enough about the topic. I have other fish to fry, bones to pick. It was an interesting ride. So long and thanks to everyone for the experience.

As long as enterprises see, in the lack of a better word, Web 2.0 as a trendy afterthought that can be tacked onto existing and outdated models of thought – it’s thanks but no thanks for me.

It is my view that Enterprise 2.0 (whatever that may be to you) involves radical paradigm shifts, by and large incompatible with current enterprise paradigms. Furthermore, I’m convinced that I as an outsider cannot change an enterprise; The real revolution and innovation comes from highly innovative and passionate individuals within the enterprise.

Here’s some more images from the workshop.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that does business with DTAG. However, I'm not getting paid nor am I instructed to write this blog or to participate in the Enterprise2.0 discussion.

Today I’m off to see the mann – René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) – with the DNA Digital guys in Bonn. There we will hopefully get to workshop interesting challenges of the Enterprise2.0.

What would you talk about? I’d like to know! Feel free to leave a comment on the blog or drop me a line on twitter.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that does business with DTAG. However, I'm not getting paid nor am I instructed to write this blog or to participate in the Enterprise2.0 discussion.

[tags]enterprise2.0, bonn, telekom, t-mobile, workshop, dna_d[/tags]

I’m attending a workshop (German) held by DNA Digital, an initiative to “connect the Internet generation with CEOs”.  Let’s find out what that means. I’ll keep you posted on how the workshop went.

For the third time in less than a month I find myself in the city of Berlin again. Life is but a long line of coincidences.. .

Disclaimer: I work for a company that does business with DTAG. However, I'm not getting paid nor am I instructed to write this blog or to participate in the Enterprise2.0 discussion.

[tags]dnadigital, digital, berlin, workshop, internet, ceo, enterprise2.0, dna_d[/tags]

This morning I read a blog post over at Read Write Web (RWW) that caught me by surprise. I recommend you read it too. It seems that twitter has removed what I consider an essential feature in their latest update.

I was so surprised that I wrote a comment in the emotional heat of the moment over at RWW and I decided to republish it here later on. My initial thoughts were as follows:

I’m quite appalled that twitter seems to me to be self confident – if not almost smirk – with removing a setting that potentially alters the mechanics of conversing and discovering on twitter on a fundamental level; In other words making twitter less like, well, twitter.

I find the idea of not listening to 2% of their user base quite grand. Did they do the maths? That’s not a tiny amount of people, is it? My guess is, that there are a lot of the early twitter adopters and evangelists in those 2% too.

Another bet of mine is that most of those 2% are most certainly not confused by the @ reply ‘system’. It’s inaccurate, not threaded and tracked – but who cares? It’s ‘the twitter way’ and some learned to live comfortably with it.

I’m also willing to bet that a much higher percentage was living under the illusion that they were getting every single public tweet from the people they were following and didn’t know that twitter was censoring and deciding what they could and could not see.

As to the topic of context, I personally find parts of the 2008 twitter blog post referred to in the comments over at RWW completely out of touch.

From the post:
“1) You should feel free to @reply people and not worry about it being out of context to some of your followers. In general, they won’t see it.”

To me, twitter is not instant messaging or email. To me, one of the most important aspects about twitter is enabling discovery, stumbling upon new interesting people, sparking curiosity, reading different perspectives. Why take all that away? I’m flabbergasted. Speechless.

Would it hurt too much to just leave the [promiscuous] setting as default OFF, but there to turn ON for the users who are comfortable with it?

Are there economical incentives involving either business plans or prohibitive cost-benefit ratios precluding it? If so, twitter should be up front and transparent about it.

Please bring ‘promiscuous’ back. I don’t want to have to subscribe to the RSS feed of every single user that I’m following in my reader of choice to get the complete unadulterated twitter stream (even from users that may have blocked me).

@blacktar

[tags]twitter, fail, twittermute, fixreplies, readwriteweb, rww[/tags]

Here’s an idea that occurred to me as I accidentally clicked a retweeted and shortened link on twitter this morning. The thing is, the link opened the target address in a frame (think Google image search) with a rather obnoxious self-advertising header. Eeeeeew!

Needless to say, I was rather put off by the whole experience. There are several services doing this and quite some people using them. To protect the names of the guilty I’ll not name the services or the tweep perps.

However, it got me thinking; What if an Amazon Affiliate-like approach would be implemented to an url shortening service like the one mentioned above? You’d sign up to the url shortening service and you’d get ‘rewarded’ for retweeting urls shortened by the service – or rather for spewing advertisement.

I’ve tried to illustrate it in glorious monochrome below, using Balsamiq Mockups and about 29 seconds.

Technically, the url could contain a hash – or whatever – containing User ID, Original URL, AD served, etc, etc, etc.

I’d like to add that personally, I don’t think such a service would survive. That is to say, I like to think that it can’t. However, such an evil scheme may already exist.

Do you know of any such services? If not, you read it here first and I want my blood money! ;)

Update (04.05.2009):

It seems like adf.ly has implemented something along these lines now. Hey! What about my cut?!

[tags]evil, business, twitter, rt, retweet, url redirect, advertising, ads, affiliate, service[/tags]

Lately, I re-read the Cluetrain Manifesto for the first time in about nine years. (I would recommend you to read it again too. Technology specifics aside, it’s as relevant and inspiring as ever.)

Kudos to Geir Bækholt for introducing me to it back in the days.

But people of earth, what I really wanted to tell you about is dog food and the conversation nine years on.

Reading it again made me want to order copies of the German translation of the Cluetrain for the German speaking/reading upper management folks I do wonderful business with. Much to my dismay, I found out that the German version is for some reason out of print [Out of print? Seriously, I thought we were over this medieval phase of media?]. Drat!

I thus turned to twitter – as you do – to vent my disappointment and asking for further clues to a possible procurement of a German translation.

One of the four authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger – all on twitter) actually caught wind of my gay banter:

Rick Levine then looked up the German publisher and told me how to proceed.

I’ll let that stand as a confirmation of Rick, the Cluetrain Manifesto and last perhaps not least twitter.

[tags]cluetrain manifesto, cluetrain, Rick Levine, social, socialmedia, twitter[/tags]

There’s been some discussion about marketing and ‘the Conversation’ lately – or more perhaps more accurately an ‘ Anti-Conversation’ meme in the making.

Brian Oberkirch recently blogged about it too, which inspired me to share my take.

Personally, I think Bill Hicks nailed it with regards to marketing in general. ;)

On another note, markets are conversations. That genie is out of the bottle.

Marketing depts, product depts and hired marketing agency guns must clue up and take a good honest look at their position – then enter the Conversation in an honest, professional and constructive way, if it makes sense. No doubt that there are a lot of companies that will not benefit significantly from – heck, should not even consider – ‘conversational marketing’, if there ever was such a thing. I guess I just can’t think of many right now, but I’m sure there are others than say personnel mines and cluster bomb manufacturers that should perhaps hold back on the conversation sauce.

The bottom line seems to me that it has taken nine years for the Cluetrain Manifesto to grow into mainstream marketing. That may be considered a lifetime in Internet years, but then again, marketing as we know it was never particularly quick to adapt.

To me it’s like this with every new concept, disruptive change or meme? It’s just the hype cycle gone full circle. At the end of it, you’ll have clueless snake oil peddlers on every street corner desperately trying to cash in on a saturated market. In the end we just can’t stand it anymore. Tired and wary from the multichannel onslaught of buzzword abuse, we welcome any change – perhaps sometimes too rash and noncritical – creating a situation ripe for fleeting counter trends and anti-movements. Alas, the circle starts anew.

On another further note, could this emerging anti-conversation ‘movement’ be a conscious self-serving marketing ploy snowballing from a handful of self appointed social media marketing prophets trying to (re)position them from the quacks and to the gushing edge of Intarweb marketing?

You tell me.

[tags]marketing, conversation, cluetrain, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Oberkirch, Jeremy Toeman, Alex Hillman, snake oil, social, socialmedia, anticonversation, anti-conversation, anti-socialmedia, antisocialmedia, antisocial media[/tags]

Yellow is not only the colour of easter; it’s the polar opposite of cowardice. Zefrank just started something called ColorWars 2008 on twitter (I loved his shows, by the way) – now, let’s all play.

Do you know Tibet? You should. Get involved and support the freedom of speech and expression of Tibetans as well as every other human being. Wear yellow on your on your avatars, wear a yellow t-shirt in front of your local Chinese embassy. Wave a yellow flag, shout your lungs out for basic human freedoms in the US and world wide! Join Team Yellow on twitter – We are all humans and we all have a right to be heard.

[tags]vidar, vidar andersen, vidarandersen, blacktar, twitter, yellah, yellow colour, color colourwars, colorwars, zefrank, freedom of speech, freedom[/tags]

It’s over a week since the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy but I’ll try to wrap up my highlights from the third and last day regardless of the lag.

At the socializing dinner on the evening of the second day I had the unexpected fortune of finding myself seated at a table next to Roberto Allende from Menttes and Plone Cono Sur. He seemed like an interesting guy, so I decided to check out his speak “Plone Cono Sur: creating a Plone users group from scratch” on the following day.

Long story short: That speak really made my day. It was both funny and highly motivating. Watch it for yourself:

So as soon as I got back to Cologne I got in touch with the local Zope and Python User Groups with the goal of contributing as much as I can. Let’s hope we’ll have A PZP (Python Zope Plone) User Group in the region soon.

Lastly I’d like to thank Luiciano Ramalho for the neat t-shirt. I’ve never slept with a Brazilian before. It was, uh… special. ;)

[tags]plone, ploneconf2007, conference, speak, motivational, rheinland, cologne, usergroup, rzug, dzug, zope, python, conosur, menttes, Roberto Allende, Luiciano Ramalho[/tags]

If there was a general theme to take home at the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy on the second day of the conference – beside from Plone now being officially trademarked – it has to be that “Plone is a Product” and “Plone is Democracy”.

Now everybody repeat after me… No, seriously – all together now! :)

I think “Plone is a Product” is a very important statement. It really helps to explain that “Plone is not technology” and it’s a helpful ‘tool’ to position and ‘sell’ Plone, both for the community and people new to Plone.

“Plone is Democracy” tells a powerful story with only three words. Plone is open for anyone who wishes to participate. Plone is you.

[tags] plone, ploneconf2007, conference, naples, italy, community, software, people, social, mantra, positioning, marketing, branding, trademark[/tags]

It’s now the 11th of October and the second day of the conference so I’m sort of lagging, but here are my impressions from yesterday.

The next best thing I took home with me on the first day of the Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy – after meeting a lot of dear new and old faces – was attending the “Top Ten Ways to Get Involved with the Plone Community” speech by Darci Hanning (Scott Paley has an excellent writeup on his blog) and the “How to market Plone the Web2.0 way” by Christian “MrTopf” Scholz.

The Plone community is amazing. It is Plone. That said, we can be somewhat insular. A lot of the time we are preaching to the already converted. I think we are all aware of that. However, we’d all like to see Plone spreading even further and bring more converts into the fold.

What I loved about Darci’s talk was the numerous points on how people who are not software developers can get involved in the community and make great and important contributions, really driving home point that the community is not just for code centric people. I think they serve as great motivational arguments to engage and motivate more people from the “outside” to join the Plone community.

I think Christian’s points about reaching outside of the community and spreading the word of Plone using web2.0 and social media was a healthy dose of long due common sense and I hope it will inspire more members of the Plone community to network on social networks, blog, screencast and podcast more about Plone. He’s also streaming talks at the conference.

| View | Upload your own

You can find the some presentations held at Plone Conf 2007 on openplans.org

More images from me will be up on flickr later today. In the meantime you can see what others have already uploaded on flickr by searching for the official tag ploneconf2007.

[tags]plone, Christian Scholz, mrtopf, Darci Hanning, Scott Paley, ploneconf2007, conference, naples, italy, community, software, people, social, blacktar, Vidar Andersen, openplans[/tags]

I hail from the southern most town (no, I didn’t write it and I wonder why there’s nothing about the imense drug problems there) of Norway called Mandal. It’s a tiny little place internationally speaking with its ca. 14.000 inhabitants. Like many other people growing up in tiny places I moved out as soon as I could. That was 13 years ago. Much has happened since then and I currently find myself living in Cologne, Germany.

For those of you who may not know, Mandal is a coastal town, surrounded by beaches, small islands and the ocean. Growing up and living a five minutes walk from the coastline, I fell in love with the ocean at an early age. (For those of you who may not know, Cologne is like 200 Km from the (Dutch) coast). I do travel back to Mandal once a year to see family and friends, but from time to time I find myself missing the beaches, the islands and the ocean – even just the smell of it all.

As I find myself going through the images I shot of the coastline visiting Mandal last Christmas, the thought occurs to me that you too may have left somewhere. That you too may be missing some aspects of what you left behind. I thought I’d share what I’m missing by posting the images on flickr and invite you to have a look.

I would be thrilled to know what you’re missing by sharing your story – perhaps even with links to images – in the comments!

[tags]Mandal, Norway, Norge, Noreg, hometown, Cologne, Germany, melancholy, nostalgia, ocean, coast, coastline, Iran, slashdot[/tags]