Off to vacation in the country where this here comes from: ...more

How do you differentiate the cost of presence in media?
Do you know your enthusiasts contact price? ...more

...more

The American Geological Institute just published an interesting statistics, detailed in this pdf.
The price of a barrel of oil has stayed steady to the ounce of gold since 2001. Whereas the price of oil to the dollar has risen even faster than compared to the euro.
What baffles me, is that oil is usually perceived as a scarce and finite resource. Demand for oil has risen fast in the last 7 years, and supply not risen significantly.
Whereas demand for gold has risen a modest 3% per year since 2001 while the production has dropped a little.
The gap between dollar and euro as a result of the weakening dollar is widening - further speeding this process.

When you want to watch really passionate sportsmen, just go watch kids. Whenever my son has a football match, he's absolutely passionate about that. His passion into the game is unconditional. In every game he's absolutely focused. That doesn't necessarily make him the best player, but it sure helps him, not to get distracted by pain, thirst, or the strength of the competitor.

Facebook is the one big name in social networking. And it has an impressive amount of users.
Richard MacManus at readwriteweb has an interesting interview with Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing.
Did you know, that the leading social networking platform, QQ, makes more in yearly profits than Facebook in revenues (while losing money)? QQ has five times more users as well.

It's a fascinating thing, that the internet really does work as its meant to be. It's even more fascinating when it's not working.
Interconnecting different ISPs or service providers is called peering. This boils down to: You can walk through my garden, if I can walk through yours. More specific: your customers can walk through my garden if mine can walk through yours.
In the internet, it's of course the customers customers customers customers.
And sometimes, major league ISPs don't play along well.
Renesys Blog has some details about an internet outage that affected customers of Telia and Cogent in a way, that the doors between Telia and Cogent had been locked up thoroughly.
As Renesys details: Of course, the list of impacted networks is too long to be included here, but they include a wide range of commercial, educational and government clients. On the Telia side, the victims include the Swedish Defense Data Agency, the Finnish State Computer Center, and broadband customers in St. Petersburg. With regard to Cogent, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Delaware, Kansas State University and Reuters America were all collateral damage.

As Friedman formed the widely known meme, that the world is flat, I cherish the vast amount of information available on the internet without the limitations of physical distance.
So now, it is the same effort to enjoy a rather surreal [Chris Onstad] strip as it is to reach out in to the Galaxion universe [Tara Tallan] or dig into the Faery Underground [Jean Ciolek].
The world is flat by the way is a very sexy meme.
Really, the world is not flat, it's a sphere, with the interconnected people sitting on the inside - everybody facing each other.

The next new big trend around seems to be narrative storytelling. At least that's what the exponentially rising number of courses, literature, and events round about this topic suggests.
Now that is what I'ld call a retro trend.
Stories are the very basic foundation of our human culture. The Lakota for instance, a native american Sioux tribe, had the death penalty for changing a story, telling it wrong or without permission. That is rather harsh but it undermines the importance of conserving history in a culture of only oral communications.
In our multimedia culture of fragmented, instant and ubiquitous communications, it seems, the knowledge of story telling is lost. And still, movies, ads, songs or speakers that reach into or hearts, are stories perfectly told. Just a number of people, evolved in a sequence of actions or experiences revealing hidden aspects or emotions and ending in a conclusion.
That is universally true whenever you try to make you point - whether in a presentation, a concept, or an e-mail. Involve people, have a sequence, come to a conclusion.
And to keep the art of storytelling, read more good stories to your children. That's a good investment.

Last time I had to use a commercial wifi hotspot, Swisscom did charge me with EUR 17,- for a mere 24h. That's pretty hostile to me with EUR 1.41 per hour.
Spending some quality time with my family on the dutch island Texel, I enjoy the hospitality of HotSpot Texel. They charge EUR 10,95 for seven days. That's a 168 hours or a friendly EUR 0.07 per hour.
Why I need Wifi while spending quality time on Texel? Simple: Skyping and weather forecasts.