TiesMorskate.nl

And I’m not just talking about the Nike slogan, even though it’s probably one of the best and most fitting slogans out there. I’m talking about the fact that if we, and myself in particular, would stop whining and do something about [it] anything could happen. Just Do It! Or through the quote that inspired this realization:

Blame no one.
Expect nothing.
Do something.
- Bill Parcells

A great post on how the way we are using social networks is changing. I think it will keep evolving for some time, and I know it’s not Facebook that will be here in a few years.

Instead, there is a new trend happening: We’re not really paying attention to our friends we’re connected to online. Take Twitter, for example. Twitter used to be a great place for many early adopters to talk tech. It wasn’t so long ago that there were few enough people on Twitter that you could read every single tweet in your stream.

Read the full article here

And for some reason I don’t know if that’s a good thing. In the Economist article ‘Remember when books were worthy of burning?’ the author argues:

In London in 2011, however, bibliophiles can breathe easy: despite the riots, books have tended to stay safely on their shelves, their subtle power blithely overlooked.

Often the book stores are the only ones not looted by the retarded mob. One Waterstone’s employee went on saying: “If they steal some books they might learn something,”. Which is very, very true.

Read the full article here.

Any company screws up one day. And the way you handle yourself at that moment is of key importance. Airbnb refused to help out one of the people that rent out a place to stay through their community. After she blogged about it a huge outcry started in the community and kept up for about four weeks. They now finally took measures to prevent this from happening and published an official apology. CEO Brian Chesky writes on the company blog:

With regards to EJ, we let her down, and for that we are very sorry. We should have responded faster, communicated more sensitively, and taken more decisive action to make sure she felt safe and secure. But we weren’t prepared for the crisis and we dropped the ball. Now we’re dealing with the consequences.

It doesn’t make it okay, but at least they own up to the fact that they screwed up. And that takes what a company like Airbnb needs; guts.

The full story can be found on the AirBNB blog.

I just wrote the following post for the Not a Penguin blog of De Merkelijkheid:

Ever had the feeling you know what you want to say but it’s hard to actually say it? The core of your message is crystal clear in your mind’s eye, but as soon as you start explaining you’re completely lost? It happens all the time. Almost all companies have a unique identity, a core, an essence that makes them who they are. But how many companies do you know that communicate exactly and just that? So you probably agree that it’s hard, but the question remains, why is it hard and what can we do to make it a little bit easier?

(more…)

One of the things I have been interested in for a long time is domaining; selecting valuable domains, acquiring them and then make money of them by either selling or parking them. While my interest hasn’t been lessened I noticed that because one of my key influencers; Frank Schilling of domaining blog Sevenmile, is much less active publicly, I lost my focus on it. Where I used to check the drops and developments at least on a weekly basis I now only check Sedo for recent sales.

While it is not strange that focus changes, normally if a focus is connected to a major interest it just stays up on the lists.

It got me thinking, what other interests have fallen away just because one or more of my key influencers quit? Or even more interesting; what are YOUR major interests that are mainly fueled by a key influencers activity?

My Klout score is remaining at 41, which is kind of strange since Scott Schuman has only a 64 and he’s one of the most influential bloggers around. So what purpose does Klout serve? Or does the algorithm just suck? Oh wait, that’s the same thing.. Any thoughts?