June 25, 2007 at 11:00 am (11:00)
Filed under Business, Fun, Inspiration, Personal, Press, Travel
This morning I woke up and the first thing I read was a message from Scott Rafer with subject “you made wired!!!”
I once told Scott that my biggest wish would be to make it to the cover of Wired magazine. It would mean that I would have done something so special that it would be special enough for Wired.
So you can imagine that I jumped out of bed and ran to my computer to see what was up.
There is a large article in this months issue of Wired Magazine about Michael Arrington. The title is “TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz … and Cash“.
This is the first paragraph:
“Michael Arrington was sound asleep in his bedroom in Atherton, California, when three men burst in. Naturally, he was startled. His first reaction, he recalls, was to tell them to “get the fuck out.” But he quickly realized they meant no harm. Clad in white business suits and speaking English with a Dutch accent, the apologetic men looked more like dandies on their way to a garden party than criminals.”
Yes, that were Patrick, Arjen and me! Only we didn’t come there to pitch our start-up but just to have coffee and talk about The Next Web Conference where Michael would be a speaker. But still!
Right now I’m editing the video that Patrick made during our visit to Arrington. We will publish it later today on the Fleck.com blog. It is online now…
UPDATE: the Wired cover image is NOT real! I received a few mails from people who thought it was. You can generate your own cover too. Sorry for the confusion…
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June 24, 2007 at 7:25 pm (19:25)
Filed under Business, Design, Developing, Fun, Gadget, Innovation, Inspiration, OpenIdea, Personal, Press, Programming
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June 23, 2007 at 4:28 pm (16:28)
Filed under Business, Innovation, Inspiration, Personal
I have 470 contacts at LinkedIn, 50 friends at Hyves and 114 Friends and 185 Followers in Twitter and 1096 contacts in my AddressBook.
What I need is a set of rules to manage my Social Networking contacts.
Unfortunately most people don’t take the effort to introduce themselves in their requests to get connected. This led me to blindly accept any request I get from any of the networks. It is just too much effort to find out who these people are who invite me. even if I check their profile at LinkedIn I’m still clueless most of the time.
A while ago I met with Reid Hoffman in Paris. He is the CEO of LinkedIn and we spent 30 minutes or so discussing Fleck.com and LinkedIn. I enjoyed the conversation and we exchanged businesscards. Without hesitating I invited him to my network on Linkedin. This was his reply:
I only connect with people that I know well enough to refer to other people that I know.
That was impressive! So his rule is a simple one; if he knows you well enough to refer you he will connect. If he doesn’t know you well enough he won’t connect. Simple, but not too friendly either.
On the other hand, I would like to keep my LinkedIn profile clean and tidy and just accepting all invitations clearly isn’t a good strategy.
I read a complaint on Twitter from someone who tried to connect with someone he had been emailing and Twittering with for months. The person refused to connect because they had never met offline. That was his rule. Being an Internet Entrepreneur I can’t use that one either.
So what rules should I use?
What rules do you use?
Do we need rules or Etiquette?
Who deserves to be in my LinkedIn profile and who should I delete?
Does it matter if you allow people you don’t even know to connect with you?
My temporary strategy will be to only accept people who are real friends, partners and people I have worked or communicated with before.
I am going to refuse other people but ask them why they would like to connect with me so I might be able to add more reasons to connect.
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June 22, 2007 at 12:17 pm (12:17)
Filed under Personal, Posted via Blackberry
Almost every morning you can find me at the terrace outside of a small coffeebar called Nero at the Vijzelgracht in Amsterdam.
The Vijzelgracht is an important street and a lot of people use it to get to work. I waved at a few start-up founders (visitopia.com, eBuddy, draftworldwide) and other friends. This morning Onno Bakker from eBuddy ended up joining me for coffee.
He told me this funny story about how his mother uses Hyves.nl now but once had trouble with email. She had sent him two messages. The first one ended with “I’m going to tell you the rest in another message because this screen is full”. She continued her story in her second message.
And now she uses social networking. Isn’t that cool?
I’m installing WordPress for my mother. She wants to start blogging and is tired of her static website because she can’t easily update it herself.
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June 20, 2007 at 9:40 pm (21:40)
Filed under Business, Design, Developing, Innovation, OpenIdea, Programming
A few months ago I posted an OpenIdea here titled “OpenIdea: twittermail.com” in which I proposed that someone would build a simple ‘email to Twitter.com engine’. It took a while but 3 days ago Lennaert and Bram contacted me with a plan to actually build Twittermail.
They started on Sunday and I expect them to finish the whole thing before the end of the week. In fact, it already works but they are adding some extra features and polishing the site.
I have been using the service for a few hours now and so far it works very well. Hardly any delay in posting and very easy to set-up. They also contacted the Twitter people who promised to add a small “Posted via Twittermail” message to each Twitter that comes from Twittermail.com. I expect the whole thing to become very popular!
It would be nice to get some people to beta test the service before we go live. If you are interested email me or leave a comment here.
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June 20, 2007 at 4:26 pm (16:26)
Filed under Business, Design, Developing, Gadget, Innovation, Money, Personal, Programming
…you?
I always liked that domainname! Weblogistan.com just sounds cool.
Right now we are using it for the LinkCloud Widget and the ClickMyBut widget.
Both have been growing steady and some Buts get a lot of clicks! But it isn’t something we spend a lot of time on or have any plans for.
So if you are interested in buying the domain, developing it together with us OR have a great idea for a service to add to it let, me know in the comments here.
Or just go and get yourself a ClickMyBut or LinkCloud…
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