The concept is simple: the resort lets you spend a flower-scented romantic weekend with the virtual love of your digital life. Mind you, not the gorgeous long-legged girl that is operating your favorite manga avatar. Nope… a weekend with a virtual cartoon.  Hundreds of manga addicted, 3G sidekick packing men are visiting the resort to date… an avatar.    A Japanese beach town has found a new tourism niche by drawing young men and their virtual girlfriends. The Ohnoya hotel and the nearby town attract over 2,000 real visitors for this!

All over the resort, these men point their smartphones at AR codes -a two-dimensional barcode that looks like tiny black and white squares-. Thanks to “augmented reality” (AR) software, their fetish manga avatar appears on the screen overlay of their phone.

Last year, a Japanese man calling himself SAL9000 married his favorite cartoon beauty Nene Anegasaki in a tuxedo ceremony that was an incredible hit on YouTube.

Now obsessed young men hunt for scarce dressed manga girls all over the peaceful pacific Japanese coast to fulfill… well, I’m not exactly sure what .

Lately online titles crack me up. Browsing through twitter biographies I find Chief Social Media Officers, Gurus, Specialists, an  Onlinemetrist, Padawans, SoMeYedi’s , Experts, a Tweetpert (I kid you not), Chief Online Conversation Analyst, Conversation Managers, Mavens, Social Media Cross Over Consultants, and –I hope you are sitting – a non-executive chairman of a digital thinktank. Nomen est omen.

I have the bizarre feeling that the more a person is in the dark on what to do for a living, the more eccentric the online title becomes .  I need to build a reputational savvy global positioning creditproof title for when I grow up. Rainmaker. I think it suits me .

So we showed up at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.  General Mark W. Clark said one day “all we asked was enough soil in which to burry our dead”, and here it was:  172.5 acres of perfectly landscaped memorial grounds are overlooking Omaha beach and the English Channel. It contains the remains of 9,387 American military dead, most of whom were killed during the invasion of Normandy and ensuing military operations in World War II.

It was raining cats and dogs. It was cold. There was a stormy wind that chilled us to the bones. But hearing superintendent Hans H. Hooker talk about his cemetery was heartwarming.  In the pouring rain, he sketched us the grim details of the landing, bringing back lives of young men that died on those beaches, Americans and Germans alike. Here is a man with a passion for history, simply reminding us never to forget, urging us to remember.  I just hope that people as passionate and respectful as Hans will still be around for our kids, and the kids of our kids.  Over 9000 white crosses and stars of David silently witness about the absurdness of war. We need people to continue to tell their story…. .

Sometimes there’s a man… I won’t say a hero, ’cause, what’s a hero? But sometimes, there’s a man. Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.

• Take a couple of steps back from the ball.
• Have your striking foot in front of your non-striking foot.
• Make a decision on what side of the goal you are going for. Do not change your mind.
• Hit the ball with the inside of your foot.
• Hit it with power but focus more on the placement than the power.
• Go for the low corners. This will make it hard for the goalie.
  • It is also a good choice to go for the top corners, but this is more risky and requires skill, so practice this to make sure you can do it consistently.
  • Do not stare at the spot you’re going for, but try not to deceive the goalie by looking at the other side because this will affect your accuracy.
  • Do not go for the middle.
  • Try not to go for top corners unless you are confident.

This is a concern I have voiced for a long time now. Do people really know what they are sharing? Do people really want to tell every last detail of their most private lives online, for Google to index? Do people realize that that very cute picture in that minuscule teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini is available for their future boss? What about the massive tagging of pictures taken by smartphones in the dark of a hen night? Do people realize Tweets are indexed and kept, long after their authors have deleted and forgotten them?

Schmidt has a point. Digital citizens should be more aware of the digital traces they leave behind. Some social auto-responsibility is required, indeed. Some social clean up even: map your real friends. Find a circle where sharing is mutual and well defined. Un-friend and un-follow the shady ones. Be online street-smart. And we need more e-netiquette. The freedom of waving your digital camera around ends where someone else’s freedom (for privacy) begins. An opt-in/opt-out for tagging?

We all can become social-digital smarter. But we’ve all been young. We’ve all partied. We’ve all made big, social mistakes. Luckily, for my generation, the memories of those mistakes have been blissfully eroded by the softening hand of time. Should we now be merciless on youngsters that made that one drunken mistake online? Should we continue to judge that one girl for loving the wrong guy just a bit too much, and ending up tagged on exgirlfriends.com?

Maybe Eric Schmidt and his all-powerful Google have a responsibility here: can you get a second chance from Google? Imagine, mister Schmidt, if a youngster made that one online mistake, and motivates why he/she would like to see it blown into –permanent- oblivion.  Could you alter your logarithm, and give the kid the rest of his/her life back? Would that not be easier, more respectful, and more educative than just offering future generations the possibility to change their names?

But I do not want to put the entire burden on Eric Schmidt’s shoulders, I agree with online consultant Suw Charman-Anderson who said somewhere:  “As a society, we are just going to have to become a bit more forgiving of the follies of youth.”

All of this bleeding edge law technologists are using misty and dusty papers dating well back to 1500 (!) AC.  Honestly. Michelangelo carved David out of a piece of rejected block of Carrara marble, making it one of the most astonishing and beautiful pieces of art. There was no Italy at that moment. There was a Florentine Republic. So who owns a piece of that magnitude?

Does the current state of Egypt own the Pyramids? Do the Lascaux cave paintings belong to the Republic of France? To whom belong the Dead Sea rolls? Can you claim the Mayan cities as your own? Can you prove Manchu Picchu is legally yours? Could the UK sell off Stonehenge?

All of this makes about as much sense to me as warm beer. It’s like those crazy certificates that give you ownership of a star, a piece of land on the moon, of some acres of sun…

David is world heritage. He belongs to us. He belongs to our children. Lawyers should stop quibbling about ownership, and start determining who is ultimately responsible for its preservation.

As a watch lover, I’m very fond of Patek Phillippe’s slogan: “You never actually own it. You merely look after it for the next generation”…

My birthday is coming up. I know all of you desperately want to make me very very happy. But what could make me happy? What has little LED’s, some augmented reality, a remote control and enough coolness to chill even the best bottle of Zubowka into an ice cube?

Well, luckily, Nicolas Halftermeyer pointed me towards Henri Seydoux. SEydoux,  from the Paris based Parrot company,  is still a boy in his own right. He and his engineers came up with about the coolest toy on this side of the galaxy: a flying drone, iPad controlled, augmented reality enhanced, all wireless and with an OOMPH factor to freeze hell all over. Twice.

The Parrot AR drone. Look no further. As said, I am easy to please.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I can find a plethora of well paid, highly intelligent consultants counseling their clients on digital: without any experience, knowledge, frame of reference or even remote understanding. People with less than a handful followers on Twitter, who never tweet, who are not experimenting, who have no access to any metric tools are helping brands decide on how to communicate. Do not get me wrong. I do not think for a moment that all wisdom and results come through or from social media. I am an honest believer in integrated communications. Keep the best of the past, add the best of today, and you’ll be armed for the future…

But, seriously, how can you give valuable advice on something you do not practice, that you do not know, and that you do not master? How do you take the responsibility? It beats me. These people do not have a clue how social media can be a great add-on to the communication mix. . The reason is mindblowing simple: they do not know, because they do not use it themselves. Management by example. Counseling by example. Only people who actively participate in social media are able to determine if their clients could benefit in any way. Not being involved in social media gives you absolutely no insights on what it is about. So you should be silent about it.

On every corner of the street, there is a self-proclaimed social media guru now, shooting some buzzwords in a presentation, and trying to tap into the marketing honey-pot.

Never take advice from a guru with an online social capital that is lower than your own. Call it street wisdom.

But I do get the flying green space invaders looking at messages, tweets and posts that get seeded by #’s. I know hash tags are a useful thing. I love hash tags. Heck, I use hash tags. But I would love it if people would just use them wisely, with caution. Not all the time. Not #everywordbelongsbehindahashtag you know. And if you need a hash tag so #yourmessagelooksfunny, maybe you should redefine the metric fun system.

O well. #maybeImjustgettingold.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Call me a nostalgic. But I am still living out my Star War years. X-fighters. The Wookie. Princess Leia chained in a teenie weenie gold bikini. The Force. It’s dark side. The little beeps of R2D2. Yoda.

Sometimes, I admit, I hoover through highway traffic similar to Han Solo swinging his beloved Millennium Falcon through a treacherous asteroid field… with brio .

And now, on top of the delicious Yoda wisdom (Do or do not, there is no try), some Star Wars illuminati have developed a whole range of Star Wars referring Yoga positions. When Yoda goes Yoga, the force is powerful .

Most blogs, people magazines, press and Joe six-pack tend to hate, despise and envy them. Them. Their lives. Their wives. Their fortune.

But what know?  Thirty-four U.S. billionaires pledged today to give away at least 50 percent of their wealth to charity during their lifetime or after their death and to publicly state their intention with a letter of explanation. This remarkable pledge is part of a campaign started and spearheaded by investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. (Both. Extremely. Rich. People.)

Among the billionaires that apparently joined the campaign are (quoting Reuters here), -of all people- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, entertainment executive Barry Diller, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, media mogul Ted Turner, David Rockefeller and investor Ronald Perelman.

I am baffled. There might be hope for this planet after all.

I thought I was over it. My therapist thought I was over it. But some Bonobo did it again… they will roll Titanic 2 soon. With a delicious plot: On the 100th anniversary of the original voyage, a modern luxury liner christened “Titanic 2,” follows the path of its namesake. But when a tsunami hurls an ice berg into the new ship’s path, the passengers and crew must fight to avoid a similar fate.

Some plots should be shot before they’re pitched…. and quartered for good measure.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A freelance healthcare writer, co-presenting at the event, is an excellent    journalist (with a focus on print media). However, I had to disagree with her when she stated that off-line information is per definition better than on-line information, and that online providers of content are mostly inferior to off-line providers.

And that is when the sleeping journalist in me roared. When I was a young press monkey, older journalists were better, and journalists with a blue accreditation cards were better than the ones with a green card. Now the quality debate shifted to it’s online, or offline.  Honestly, that is enough nonsense to propel a pound of half-cooked beef in an orbit around Betelgeuse.

It is NOT about off line or online. It is about quality of content. If the content is good, crosschecked, weighed, referenced, footnoted, transparent, honest and correct…. I could not care less if it is written by a journalist with a diamond incrusted press card, or by a nerdy blogger in a Hindustani basement.

Encyclopedia Britannica, the self-proclaimed God of wisdom, proves to be less correct than the crowd sourced, wiki-drafted, and community controlled Wikipedia.

Trust me, you will also find fine and balanced content online. Written by journalists; bloggers; moms and dreamy eyed students. Not all of those have nihil obstat press card blessing… who cares?

Honestly, they succeeded quiet well.  I was managing reasonably good, trying to be mister almost perfect. And then… I bought an iPad. And my world shifted. Because mister Steve Jobs disagrees with mom. He does not want me to be a nice citizen.

My iPad has all this great tools and things. It’s a fully mobile, highly connected dog-and pony show. But to make half of the stuff work, mister Jobs wants me to cheat. I live in Belgium, and iTunes will not let me buy ebooks. ITunes will not let me buy TV-series. iTunes will not let me buy movies. No buying, no renting. God and Steve know why.

I cannot even buy my favorite stuff in another country than Belgium. iTunes will not let me. American Express and Visa ensure there is nothing wrong with my credit. There is something wrong with iTunes. There is something wrong with Steve.

Now that he pocketed a small 1000 dollars, I discover that some nice features of my iPad only will work if I rip or download illegally. Apple will not take my good money for legal entertainment on my kosher personal iPad.

Sorry mom… blame Steve. But nothing will stand between me and an iPad driven Monthy Python.

Every day something pops up that shakes the web and throws my beloved Tweetdek bananas. But I can live with that. It puts a smile on my face, makes me a little wiser, and gives me something to talk about in the elevator.

But trop is too much. I hate football, yet the whole twitterverse cracks at its seams because a couple of million bonobos all over the world painted in their favorite war-colours (seriously orange?) chatter endlessly on how  where and when a midsized leather ball should roll. Seriously, it’s football. Keep it in your sofa, between your pizza and sixpack.

In about a weeks time sweating men with shaved legs will take over the twitterverse, steaming up and down some way overrated French hills in de Tour de France. And, mind my words, Twitter will crash again.

I have nothing against all that healthy sporting on TV, but when it crashes my online universe I’m getting annoyed. I’ve seen more Twitter fail whales than I can handle. I hate fail whales.

So does Mariana Pugliese, a web savvy cake designer from sunny Buenos Aires. The haunting fail whale chased  her so badly at night, that she decided to create it in real life… and eat it.

Cool. A Fail Whale Cake. Can’t wait till @princess_misia makes me one….

This is a small reminder of our tweet up that will take place on Wednesday, June 23!

During the teet up you will meet with the Porter Novelli digital experts including:

Gary Stockman, Porter Novelli CEO
John Havens, VP, Social Media at Porter Novelli and the author of the book, Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media To Maximize Value and Build Their Brand
Marta Majewska, Digital Expert
+ me

and discuss social media in a lovely atmosphere – with snacks and bubbles!

The tweet up will start at 4:45 pm and last till 6.30!

Location:
Porter Novelli Office
Louis Mettewielaan 272
1080 Brussels

Tweet me @dannydevriendt or @pnbr5 if you wanna join!

All of this garbage-nagging gets to me by phone, over a beer, on Facebook, Twitter or when I’m bolting something manly and robust on my Landy. Most often the people who shower me with this nonsense tilt their head a bit to the left, and wait expectantly. For the argument. For the arguments. For that flood of highly intelligent, moist-making logic, highly skilled ratio and passionate savoir-faire.  They wait for me to tackle their opinion, to try to convince them otherwise, to prove them wrong…

They’re waiting for a fight….

But frankly, I cannot be bothered. I just don’t care. If people think they should not be on Twitter, that is fine by me. They can quit Facebook, any day. They can blow their blog out of the water.  I care as much as them trying to buy a pink Hummer.

Honestly, it’s a free world. You have the right to think Social Media is wrong, overrated, annoying and will affect us as a species in a way that most certainly displeases Darwin.

Just do not bore me with it ….

But do not jump too quickly to the wrong conclusions. Since Gutenberg invented the book press (and people eroded contemporary literature with vulgar versions of the Bible and its interpretation) , every increase in freedom to create or consume alarms people who want to defend the old system and set of metrics….  Every century, the “old ones” accuse the new technology to make the younger generation stupid. And still, humanity seems to get smarter, week by week…

Close to two billion people today are connected to the same network, spending more than a trillion hours a year of free time, creating a cognitive surplus so gigantic that even a tiny fraction of it that can be seen as “valuable” creates breathtaking positive effects.

The Wall Street Journal states that: “Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible.”

On this rainy Sunday I agree. We’re watching a digital revolution: on communications, media, press, conversations, connections, privacy, work/life balance, and countless other holy grails.  There is never an easy way through a revolution. We’ll have to ride it out, bolting the rails just in front of a fast moving train.   Of one thing I’m convinced, in the end, when we will lick our wounds, and watch how the dust settles… we’ll discover it will have made us stronger, and smarter.

41, and trying to find a way to justify an iPad. Midlife crisis, is that you?

Brilliant. Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world. Food for thought: tempus fugit!

Impressed by Dariusz’s attitude and determination, Porter Novelli decided to support the project with strategic advice, media and social media activities, celebrity endorsement and sponsoring. The action has started on June 1, International Children’s Day, and already attracted a lot of media and public attention. In addition to receiving an extensive coverage in the Polish National TV, press and radio, the project is being supported by a large group of Polish celebrities including TV presenters, popular actors and politicians. Some of them will run with Dariusz and that includes our own Joanna Pruszyńska-Witkowska, Headlines CEO, who will accompany Kacper’s dad as he runs through Warsaw. Many fans are following and encouraging Dariusz through the project’s Facebook Fanpage, his Facebook profile and his blog and we are hoping for even more support in the upcoming weeks.

Are you inspired by this story and would like to help? Please visit the project’s website for further instructions on how to contribute: http://www.kacperkowy-skwerek.pl/.

Most Belgian politicians are following slowly however… they discovered social media just in time for the last elections. Bizarrely (or predictably?) a lot dropped their engagement again just after being elected… with the new elections a two weeks off, they started to target their online friends and followers again. Not very respectful, and frankly lots of orphaned followers do not take this treatment kindly.

Twitter behavior is also bizarre. Some Belgian politicians have gathered a couple of thousand followers, but do not take the courtesy to follow back. That is about as polite  as giving somebody a business card, but coldly refusing the card that is offered back… it is rude, and arrogant.

I know it is not about numbers, and I do understand you cannot interact with everybody. Star profiles like Bill Gates, or miss Spears cannot possibly even follow back their countless followers. But a Belgian politician? Should follow at least the people who are interested in him/her. Out of courtesy, for one, but also out of curiosity.

How can a politician who is not listening represent me adequately? Ignorance, or arrogance… I do not care. I will not give my vote to someone who is not even interested in following me back.

And you?

find the Belgian politicians on http://www.netvibes.com/politicibelgie

“It” eats no meat, and gazes all day to a computer screen while texting friends. No worries. You’re fine. The fruit of your love is not turning into a lonely socially challenged psychopath (well, most are not, anyway).

You just have a digital native at home. And trust me, that plethora of connecting devices; battery eating little gismos and flat screens that comes with your sweet little teenager are what the riffle is for a Para trooper: gear for survival. In todays connected world, mastering the social connection abc is simply a must.

Many parents fear that all that digital and electric hocus pocus interacts negatively with the way kids develop relationships, emotional bonds, and ultimately their own identities. Many fear that it will negatively impact the ability to communicate, interact and work with others.

Amori Yee Mikami, a University of Virginia psychologist, just conducted a research that proves that your kid is..; well doing fine actually. More than fine: Mikami found that the kids that spend the most of the time on social media sites are often the healthiest psychologically. How’s that?

After GPS in car and navigation on mobile devices, the first steps of true location based applications are surfacing fast. Twitter, Facebook and other networks scatter to embed location in their offering.  Gowalla and Foursquare constructed their complete business model around it.  Most users still look a bit hesitant at these services. Checking into places is a nice gimmick, but what does it really bring? And how quick do people tire of collecting mayorships and badges? Pay-offs will have to be found to keep as well consumers as businesses and brands in the game.

The tracks are now being laid in front of the fast moving train. Starbucks, the coffee phenomenon, already rewarded frequent customers with a collectors Barista badge on Foursquare. It now jumps a hell of a step further by offering a stunning 1 dollar discount to people holding a Starbucks mayorship on Foursquare.  

Getting a full $1 off a $4 Frappuccino is a baffling discount. For the first time, loyal customers get a tangible pay-off for their location based social media advocacy of their favorite brand.

Collecting badges, adding new places, posting reviews and sharing tips just jumped from mouth-to-mouth sharing in a game-esk set-up to a possible lucrative business with a direct ROI for participants. The rules of the game have fundamentally changed. Did any-one notice?

Armed with a tiny Sony Cybershot HX5V, Romain Pergeaux and Alex Profit, made stops in London, Cairo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York. They crammed three weeks of intensive driving in 80″. Jules would be proud…

about a week ago I sent you an open post, tweet and mail: on you and Twitter. You probably did not see it, but lots of people (yours truly included) offered you some insights and do’s and don’ts on social media.

But you and your colleagues had a busy week, we know. A week where the people of this country, and people interested in this country followed every single syllable of the politicians that are negotiating the future of this country.

You twittered about nice flowers and our Belgian tennis babes. Nothing wrong with that. And you went to sleep at 1 in the morning on Wednesday. One of my American followers found that useful information. And in the midst of the negotiations on the future of Belgium, you found time to tweet about cycling.

And half the world was amazed to hear two hours later from sleepy journalists that you did not find the solution to Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde.

@alexanderdecroo warned on Twitter that he would bring your government down, if you had not a solution today. Did he not tell you? See, you could have known if you would have followed him on Twitter?  And @svengatz said already on Wednesday he would split something, anything really. But you do not follow Sven either.

I realize negotiating is hard and perilous work. But looking from a distance, we, communications people, see a clear lack of communication. People who do not reach out, who do not find each other. Who talk, but do not listen. Who communicate egocentrically…

Maybe, going forward, you and the other politicians could start interacting, listening. To each other. To citizens. That can start with real simple things. Like following each other on Twitter.

Tell me how you tweet. I’ll tell you who are…

sincerely,

@dannydevriendt

“Men With iPhones Are More Attractive to Women”. People with way too much time on their hands apparently conducted a survey of 1500 women that suggests that men who own the Apple iPhone handset are more attractive than those who do not. 54 % of women will date you quicker when you have Apples cutest… and iPhones owners are luckiest in love. There, I said it.

The study used topnotch techniques to come to quotes as “if he has an iPhone then he’s obviously intelligent and well-off.”

Now look, it took us, men, a gazillion generations to judge women on their intelligence, humor, wits… and not on the length of their skirts. And now some heavily paid marketing bonobos discovered that those women judge and label us on the size of our… phones?

But I’m not giving in. Let’s get an #equalphoneday right after #equalpayday until all men will be treated equally by women, independent on the status of their phones.

First there was Generation X, and then came the fully connected web-designed smart kids of generation Y. Here @ Heliade towers, we’re still trying to figure out what those Y-ers eat (lactose free bio vegetables?) and there comes Randstad with a new label: Generation R.
According to a study conducted by Randstad, a human resources group, Generation R describes a whole generation (there you have that word again) frustrated professionals who have survived the recession. Yep: the R stands for recession.
Many companies had to downsize (rightsize, optsize, lay-off or fire) a lot of staff, leaving those who stayed with much expanded roles. These survivors had to shape up and take on roles above their job titles and pay-checks.
Needless to say that these people progressed way faster in this lean and mean environment: skills and experience were injected and generated Red Bull-fueled progress.
Now that the economy stops sputtering a bit, and some slow traction can be perceived, Generation R wants to be rewarded: upgraded, refitted and boosted. And we’re talking paycheck, title, and career path. If they do not get what they want, fast… they leave, to cash in their new status elsewhere…
I guess the keys of all those lonely Audi R8’s and Porsche GT3-RS’s that were slowly gathering dust after the financial bubble, will be tossed to Generation R now.
Heck, I’ll have to ask mom what generation I am….

And you have tweeted close to a hundred times by now, to the delight of your almost 2000 followers (not too shabby by the way, for a rookie ). It puts you ahead of @svengatz (just under 500 followers) and in pursuit of Minister Q (@VincentVQ more than 3000 followers).

In your latest post, you apologize that you’re still learning Twitter. You should. Contrary to some of your tweeting political friends you’re still mostly in broadcast mode. Sharing what you are doing, thinking, and doodling is fine. But it will not get you a lot of brownie points. It’s meant for “conversation”, you see?

So start following some interesting people (you follow nine now, which is not at all in balance with your followers ratio), interact with more people (I know you tried a couple of times), and get a conversation going.

Heck, this is wild suggestion, I know: but follow some national and international politicians, journalists, and web communicators. Look how they are using Twitter, and you can interact with them.

Dear Yves, do not make the mistake to use Twitter as a broadband broadcast tool. You have your newspapers, blog, website and co to do that. You’re a busy man, I realize that. But take the time to use Twitter to dialogue with people who care about you, this country, politics and life in general. You’ll see, it will give a complete different feeling at the end of your endless workday…

All the best, let me know if I can help…

@dannydevriendt

And with the Cladoselache Digitalis Mother Nature’s most able fighting machine has a new variety: the digital shark. These are the hungry dark forces of evil that lurk in the swimming areas of the digital decade,the merciless soldiers of fortune that hunt for inappropriate content, revealing pictures, stupid career quotes or private life threatening remarks.

I’m still flabbergasted how younger people carelessly share all of their thoughts, pictures, movies and views… unprotected and online.

I admit. With my grey hair and old bones, I’m not exactly the role model of the digital native, and maybe I am growing too ancient to understand. But if I look at what some people share on their Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and tutti quanti my heart just misses a beat. Do they know I know? Do they know I can see? Do they know that, if I can  so can the whole of west-Timbuktu?

Sharing thoughts and nice moments is fine, as fine as snorkeling in the Blue Lagoon. Just be careful…. Old Bones is telling you it’s a jungle out there.

And what you share can be used… there is a difference between a digital native, and a digital naive…

Honestly, I’m not interested in adding to your barn in Farmville, and your fish in Aquarium really would be better off in sushi. I did not receive any complaints about my reproductive hardware, and do not need a system upgrade for that. I have followers by the thousands, so am NOT interested in buying half a Pondukuriststan province into following me (buying followers, you’re joking, right?).

The 350 million dollar you want to put on my banking account would just get me in major trouble with my ego and the Belgian tax authorities. I am not into renting exotic beauties either… I hate anything that smells like TrueTwit, and if your golden formula to get rich is working, why do you still bother bothering me?

So I’m looking for a Cyber Rambo willing to root out the evil accounts, bots and tweeps that dirty my online existence. There is good money to be made

Nowadays, a plethora of quick and very revealing technologies permit your social online communities to follow your life in the most revealing and private depths of your being. And yes, your status updates, location beamers, and tagged pictures are carefully being analyzed by Aunt Beth and uncle Freddy.

Trust me, they’ll spot that new gorgeous witty blonde in your life quicker than you can deal with. And when is a relationship official? When you introduce him to your parents? When you take her to that friend’s diner? The first joined breakfast? Or an updated Facebook status that beeps from “single” to “it’s complicated”?

O my, as a social media consultant I can see golden times ahead of me …

Click here to view the embedded video.

A new breed Knights of the Round Table boldly crosses city borders and mountain ranges and dwells in ridiculous expensive cocktail lounges and fashionable trade shows to collect and unlock the most prestigious badges.

For you, dear readers, that have been living under a stone for the last 14 months, good morning,  Foursquare is a location centered application that allows users to update their location, and share it with friends.

In this most Holy Quest, some are really pushing it far. Let me tell you the tale of fifteen-year-old Parker Liautaud and 44-year old David Newman who are on this  most very moment racing themselves through endless miles of powder snow and wee-wee freezing temperatures to be the first to check in at the North Pole.

That’s right. The North Pole. Just to unlock a badge that looks exactly like this.

O well. Let them have it. I will personally leave no stone unturned to get an even greater badge. This one.

You get it when you recklessly showed up in 25 different pizza places.

Do you hear this, Parker and David? 25! Choose your battles carefully!

No better way to test it than trying to blend…. Well… about everything. Here is the blender test for the shiny new iPad!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Luckily, my good political incorrect friends @Topgear can easily beat this. With no one buying power cars, how about using the V8 engine to power a food blender! Richard Hammond and James May are left to taste Jeremy Clarkson’s Beef, Bovril and Brick smoothie, which goes down a treat!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hell, yeah

But go to the middle zone… some bloggers really are influential, know what they talk about and use deontology that even surpasses that of some newspapers I know… Some journalists have a great 2nd life by blogging online personally, or on news sites…

And is a news site inferior to a paper magazine?

I agree with a one liner that was tweeted to me (@leoexter): “Job defines title, not the other way around”…

In the new news landscape, online will have an exponentially growing part, and most newspapers and magazines are gearing up for the battle for the Kindle, JooJoo and iPad. The Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest will give a brilliant future to the best news and topic reporters. They will honestly not care if we think them journalists… or not

And now Professor James Watson from the University of Utah found the answer to that question in a global psychology study. It explains why I feel most comfortable working on three computer screen. It explains why I can hold endless phone calls through my hands free system while driving way too fast through traffic, while following the sultry directions of my navigation unit… without having to replace the 8 airbags of my car every two weeks. Seriously, Watson claims that only 2,5 percent of the global population can do that without their windshield exploding in an angry rain of face-altering green. And I am very, very good at it .

Watson calls it being a “Supertasker”. I have not read the rest of the study, but I like it. It sounds right. It feels manly. And it is so true!

I decided that professor James Watson just became my best friend. I took that decision without sending that aging pedestrian that recklessly crossed the street in an orbit around Neptune.  I rock …

Now, do not get me wrong. I’m all for it. I love “conversing” online, swapping witty reflections with notorious clever people with a laser sharp vision. I love the gentle battle of like wired minds, the old jousting with rock solid arguments.

Mind you, I do enjoy intercultural reflections on life, the universe, everything, even with people I only know as a slightly silly, greenish one eyed Avatar.

But what bothers me lately is that some virtual nitwits these days position it as a “sine qua non” for digital presence; as a “must do”. As a “have to”.

I hate “have to’s”. I listen to everyone. Most is not interesting, short of even vaguely amusing. Some is nice. Some is intriguing. Some triggers desire to engage, comment, swap, battle, encourage…. I gladly succumb to these feelings…. Because I want to. Not because some digital guru with a fan club thinks it is a wise thing to do.

You’re seduced in a conversation, invited into one, sweet talked into one, maybe even bribed into one… but never ever forced into one

Conversing is an art form of connecting, persuading, pairing up. You have a conversation going on, or not. There is no grey zone. It’s a war on my terms

So you, conversation manager, better be a darn good artist….

“Conversation should be with people who give a rip what you have to say, not just anyone with a frontal lobe”

It was great to share thoughts, and drive the debate with this fully connected generation, and interesting to see how divers the different positions on this mobile-sharing lifestyle are. Food for thought, for more debate, and more reflection. People who want to contribute to this conversation can do so on this wiki, and add thoughts on the OGI (the Outernet Guidelines Initiative).

If this sounded like mad gibberish too you: no worries. The fast generation just overtook you on your blind side .

250,000 free ice creams later, Ice Cream Man has become the living proof of the American Dream. “This is about getting people to think about things a bit differently, proving that you can do anything with your life,” says Allen in his “Of the Wookie” booklet: “I want to give away ice cream. It’s that simple. I can’t be the only one who thinks this is a good idea. Why not bring all of these like-minded people together to do great things?”
With big brands sponsoring massive dollars in his one man mission, Ice Cream Man is a happy camper making other people happy…. With free ice-cream. Is there an MBA in happiness?

One of the ones that caught my eye was this “Monkey Wrench”. A Panamarenko- meets-special-mushrooms type of clock-activated red monkeys. Still haven’t figured out what the link with the company’s day-to-day business is, but it looks kinda cool, no?

Augmented reality applications allow relevant information and exciting features to be overlaid on top of the visual reality. Usually this would be through a laptop or -even more handy-, a mobile phone.

Noora Guldemond from metaio demonstrated with skill (great presentation with utterly visual slides. Refreshing after some of the other death-by-Powerpoint I witnessed here @ #SXSW) how AR starts interacting in a compelling way with our increasingly mobile lifestyle.

AR tags trigger -once decoded by the devices camera- a plethora of information that is projected on top of the reality, making use of data more easy, or adding exciting possibilities. Creating visual interaction in both real and virtual worlds makes even dull every day products as a shoe into exciting high-tech game and content controllers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can’t wait to try more of this out!

Maybe I should blame my jetlag, or is it my down to earth Belgian mentality… but a lot of these so called digital upper crowd make no sense at all. I hear a lot of quacking about nice dreams, but three or four questions into the conversation you notice that they have no clue what the real-world-out-there rules of engagement are.

What is the benefit of the tool/platform/technique/gimmick for the user? How does it make life better or more interesting? How do you monetize it? Who will you partner with to make it happen? Is an-all English tool to conquer the multilingual world the best you could come up with? Have you realized not ALL people use an iPhone?

I see a lot of lonely, nearly desperate people with shiny airbooks struggling to explain the one great idea they have.

Once the connection with the real world is lost, even the most brilliant nerd is doomed. My advice to these too pale web ghosts is: unplug. For a while. Take some air. Take a minute AFK (Away From Keyboard). Meet real people. See what they’re like, what drives them. How business is done.

You’ll see, you’ll get there. Eventually.

Luckily, there are still enough people here who DO know what they are talking about…

Finally met the complete Porter Novelli Austin gang. Funny to shake hands with some of my favorite online avatars… Great also to see some good old familiar faces. Setting up the #SXSW booth, picking up our badges, testing equipment; fine-tuning the plethora of Social Media channels that we’re going to lean on (heavily ) over the next days…

Arriving on Austins friendly airport always makes me smile: deep-rolling Texan accents and real-blue jeans. A cabdriver with a Stetson reassures me: I really made it to Texas, spending the next days and nights on and around #SXSW (Social Media Wonderland). I’ll keep you all posted!

What is astonishing is the near real time experience. The constant stream fully local tweets gives a hallucinating vivid image of what is happening. Multiple channels (more people tweeting on the same event) and location tracking filter out hoaxes and disinformation. Direct links to online pictures, videos and text-content give this crowd-journalism a cross-media and very visual impact.

As Social Media can be done on most mobile phones these days, the technical barrier to use it is extremely low. Anyone armed with an 89 dollar phone can cover, edit, shoot, post and share news-as-it-is-happening and will probably have hours of head start before a traditional journalist can work on the premises.

But as the stream of abhorrent news kept on flooding my trackers and feeds, the big difference between this unfolding disaster covered by people who are involved (even committed) and the more distant approach of the traditional channels became very clear.

It is not all about speed, and volume of data. TV gives you a filtered, selected story based on information that is carefully put in a context. It is calibrated for a normal audience. Too shocking or disturbing facts and images will be polished, or left out.

The news will be packed in an item that is tailor made for understanding and assimilating.

Social Media feeds are unfiltered, un-blurred, and raw. It puts you right at the receiving end of a fire hose of pure emotion and drama that is happening right now. You are simultaneously voyeur, analyst, journalist, editor and news anchor.

My question is: can you handle it?

I know, it’s personal, but I’m getting a bit annoyed with how mainstream press is handling Social Media, and how they are covering it. @samfeys (great online chap by the way) drafted a nifty, nice, lighthearted piece and highlighted the vision on Twitter of a politician, a DJ, a radio presenter duo, a cinema group and an entrepreneur.

Apart from the entrepreneur (@netlash), none of these have a detectable Twitter street credibility. I follow all of them. They are nice. So is Sam. Really.

But sketching the whereabouts of social media, and the impact of Twitter on the Belgian landscape on just these people is a bit thin and shallow. Luckily @netlash, a fellow Social Media consultant was able to inject some SoMe wisdom into the article.

We’re living in a world where big brands are massively shifting their marketing/communication spending towards more online dialogue; where Twitter stays one of the most influential communication channels through knee deep trouble (Iran, Haiti,…); where celebrities can cash in their influence and translate it into tangible massive help efforts (@aplusk)…

Belgian companies and organizations are using Twitter (amongst a plethora of other digital tools) for mind casting and data mining. Belgian companies are moving towards using the crowdsourcing power of micro blogging and Predictive Web. Increasingly big brands go out of their way to forge an Intelligent Dialogue with their customers. Because that is what customers want: to interact with a brand that cares.

Not a lot of our politicians got it right at our last elections here in Belgium. Still toying with the medium, without really understanding it. Obama got it right though… it propelled him into the highest charts. It funded big parts of his campaign.

Even the presenter duo @wimenanke are still discovering the medium. In a nice and good way. But with no more followers than you can reach on an average sunny day terrace  they are still warming up, flexing muscles.

To determine if Twitter is hype or not, you need to interact with @princess_misia, @netlash, @mindblob, @horationelson, @bnox and the like. You need to interact with the marcom people of the big brands. You need to crowd source the Belgian Twitter scene.

I’ll just finish my coffee, and read a Dilbert.

It is amazing to see how the web evolved in just a couple of years from an asynchronous web, (archiving thoughts, information and events) over the Real Time Web (instant two-way interaction) to Owyang’s Intention web (metrics used to predict trends and events).

Using both online conversations metrics and online archived knowledge we slowly -but surely- evolve the web towards a worldwide connected grey matter that produces Real Actionable Intelligence. It is safe to say that most of humankind’s sec knowledge is archived and search-able on the net. This vast knowledge library fueled with the flavor of instant, measurable and chart-able online sentiment and online conversation gives an extremely powerful forward-looking knowledge tool.

Adequate metrics, linked to location, time, profile and projected calculated intention give intelligence that can be acted upon instantaneously: Actionable Intelligence is what (personal) brands and corporations will be fishing for in the future. Data tools, metric systems and analytical wisdom to turn this gargantic knowledge pool into tangible and tailored bits will become the moneymakers for the years to come…

The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the NORAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.” The Director of Operations and his staff checked the world’s most powerful radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole. Children who called were given updates on his location, and a tradition was born. Now you can track Santa’s flight on Google Earth…

Click here to view the embedded video.

The fact that employers, future employers, co-workers, clients, friends and family have a fluid access to their online lives is something that is too easily forgotten. The barriers between 3D life and onscreen life are quickly eroding away, and will increasingly continue to do so.

Google and other search tools give an online profile of just anyone in a nanosecond. Accessible to everyone that has internet access. More often than not, reputations are made or broken based on this first digital check-out. And some people just see way too late that too much of their live is for grabs out there…

You are what you are, the sum of your real self and that of your digital Avatar…

Having passed way too much time in airports, media markets and online stores lately, I noticed that my taste evolved. Before, I was irresistibly drawn to the most performant object. Now I select my toys on real use expectations. Why would I want a water-cooled quad processor in a lightweight laptop that I will mostly use for internet access and PowerPoint? What’s the use of 16 USB ports, when I can connect all that matters through WiFi, Bluetooth and a high def screen cable? Why carry an extended battery when free power is available everywhere, including trains and planes?

I notice that lately I am mostly hunting for practicality, lightweight and coolness. I pay for fashionable usability over overkilled specs. I silently laugh when I see wonnabees use enough processing power to recalibrate Wall Street just to update their Facebook.

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I lost it. I might even get more sensible. But when trop is too much, I’ll go for good enough…

Man, seeing captain Kirk and pointy eared  Spock being teleported into the most incredible places  by a simple “beam me up, Scotty” command still makes me raving jealous.

And look now here, scientists at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute successfully teleported data from one atom to another in a container a full meter away.  They beamed stuff!  A full meter away! From one container to another!  Time magazine claims that “… a landmark in the brain-bending field known as quantum information processing, the experiment doesn’t quite have the cool factor of body transportation; one atom merely transforms the other so it acts just like the original. Still, atom-to-atom teleportation has major implications for creating super-secure, ultra-fast computers.”

Not cool? They beamed stuff! You’ll see, one of our next meetings, I’m going to get beamed directly into a meeting room, far far away…. You can have all my travel points and air miles…

I’m in that stage in my professional life where I am at conferences, meetings, seminars and exhibitions often, very often. Luckily, most of the time I am asked to give the keynote or presentation but I cannot avoid having to sit in and listen to a plethora of other speakers, executives and guru’s.

To be honest, there is nothing I enjoy more than listening in to a good speaker. But I am astounded that there are so many bad speakers around. Most of the time, when I look around me I see people with glazed looks and brain-dead features open-eyed falling asleep. And that is a shame, because all the people called on stage obliviously are knowledgeable, smart, and credible (well, at least they should be ).

So where does it go wrong? Well, it’s not because somebody has three letters on his business card labeling him or her “boss” that that person is the most talented speaker. Use your upscale C-level people to determine content. Let the most gifted speaker deliver the keynote.

Speaking is an art. It requires understanding of the audience, a flexible knowledge of the topic and an adaptive attitude towards the social behavior in the room. Golden rules are simple. If you want the audience to read, send them a book or an email. Slides with text on, force your audience to read: they’ll never listen to you and will fade away within seconds. Moreover, text filled slides prevent you from being flexible.

I NEVER saw a good presentation with a lot of text on the slides. So, do your homework and build a deck with good, humorous, intriguing and capturing pictures or graphs and build your story around it.

The best presenters are people telling a story, taking you for a fascinating journey. If you tell the story right, your audience will walk with you. Use the presentation to illustrate and highlight.

Good presenters interact, smile, are dynamic, vocally creative and masters in playing the room. There is not a lot of them around. Threat them well…

How do you keep two screens, a beer and a discussion going? The gargoyle scene from Neil Stephenson’s amazing book Snow Crash comes into mind: people who make their living connected to the web are better off if they integrate their gear in their clothing… and body. Kurzweiler’s been announcing this for years.

Maybe on my next trip: overhead data projection on my designer shades, middle-ear-implanted voice link, trousers with a terabyte of data storage, keyboard-projecting shirt button.

And a water-cooled in-brain Twitter add-on decrypting fact from the vapor of nuance. Hell yeah!

Here in the Porter Novelli Brussels Towers, we’re installing a Social Media Lab on our fifth floor. We conveniently branded it PNBR5 (area 51 was already taken….). It’s an area dedicated to studying Social Media phenomena’s and to integrate online strategies and tactics into communication models. Here online buzz get’s measured, analyzed and rendered into accountable intelligence.  We have training facilities, a meeting room and a fridge.

That will do for now …

When leaves fall,

It starts to rain a little.

Outside.

(and deep in me…)

Why this project? Mike Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, on ‘Sharing4Caring’ initiative:

“The Bluetooth SIG represents more than 12,000 members, so sharing is at the very center of everything we do. We share intellectual property, best practices, creative ideas, everything that enables us to take the next step in further enhancing Bluetooth technology. We decided to take this one step further and show how sharing can improve lives of people all over the world if we put our will and energy to it. That’s also why, after careful selection, we decided that Kiva, with its strong focus on sharing, was the best fit for us in this endeavor.”

Wanna help? Visit the Bluetooth SIG website now and take 2 minutes of your time to help them do good!

But I’m getting a bit tired –must be my advancing age- that any weirdo with half a broadband connection, 9 friends on Facebook and a couple of dozen followers on Twitter suddenly labels himself a Social Media Guru. SMG’s spread quicker than a field of rabbits on Viagra and sell themselves hard and expensive. Way too many have no clue on life, the universe, everything.

It takes more than an occasional Internet visit to guide people around the digital spider webs out there, and I am a bit weary with people who try to do it on a guessed estimate. Having a healthy sense of communication strategy, social interaction laws, agogics, and the ability to calculate a healthy ROI for clients should be mandatory. Most often, it’s not even an option.

Clients wanting to buy Social Media Services often are way too inexperienced with the new game in town to be able to safely choose the right partner. I just hope that –as always- the wannabees will fall through the ice soonest.

This video shows what I mean. You might not want to click on it if you’re sensitive to a stronger language…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nothing kills your testosterone levels quicker than banging a tee-off towards the wrong fairway, or missing a 15 centimeter “put”. Seeing good friends effortlessly overshooting the green with a meager meter on the first shot on a par 4 just invites me to strangle them surely and slowly between the 13th and 14th hole. And then you have the pro’s that navigate their shots around the course with chirurgical precision. Urgh. On a Golf Video Game, players pointed at an impossible shot of the Tiger Woods Avatar walking on water, and miraculous saving his game with what was labeled “the Jezus Shot”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Laughter all over. Then came the video response:

Click here to view the embedded video.

 I rest my case. I’ll do something more easy in my life. Turning water into wine or something .

Too often, before that snail of traffic moves, I surely have enough time to get acquainted with most of the people around me. That nose plucking sweaty teenager in the pimped up pink Clio behind, the yelling kids in the back of the Beamer in front, the aspiring Elite top model on my right. They are not moving either. They are intriguing.

But there is simply no way to shout out on a highway: “Hey! You look interesting! Want a tissue? Great car! Where do you work?” Nope. Everybody looks around, listening to some bonobo-on-steroids on the radio that is way too awake and loud for the beginning of a day. No way to connect. No way to reach out.

That’s why I decided to put my Twitter handle on my car. Hoping it will become a new trend. So people can Tweet me goodmorning on the highway. It’s safe, because we’re not moving anyway. It’s social behavior. It’s fun. I got a tweet from a Landrover Discovery today, and it made me smile. just for that I’ll keep TweetTweet, the tweet car on the road.

To paraphrase Snow Crash (great book):  The TweetTweet car has enough potential energy packed into its motor to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a Johnny box or a BoomBoom beater, the TweetTweet car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished exhausts. When you put the hammer down, shit happens. TweetTweet is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta… And it’s bloody stuck in traffic somewhere near you. Send me a tweet

I’ve flown over the Hecla in a helicopter, saw the sun go up from a hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon, saw the Aurora Borealis in Spitsbergen, and I’ve been on top of the Atlas Mountains at sun set. I saw cheetahs dining, elephants fighting, dolphins playing, snakes digesting.

And each time my wheels grind the stony curvy roads of Trouville-la-Haule, a minuscule little village in the darkest part of Normandy, my heart feels at peace.

One day, this old buccaneer will drop his anchor somewhere in the midst of this stately apple trees. I’ll own a cat, drink homemade cider and play petanque.

One day….

With 80 million bloggers around, and citizens that Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook quicker than the badly implemented software on their iPhones can handle, information becomes for the first time truly decentralized. Conscious web users have a plethora of tools to share their views, real-life-product tests, opinions and grieves with the inhabitants of the World Wide Web.

There is no faster, better or more balanced way to spread information. By the people, for the people, socially controlled by a busy cluster of very critical web users.  News that is aimed to consumers can now easily circumvent journalists and media and hit millions of online users in an eye blink.  Forums, bloggers, social networks and very active Twitter jungle birds are passing along what they identify as news faster and more thoroughly than the classic news channels. Corporations scramble around to find creative ways to harness the power of these social media.

As a former God, it amuses me tremendously. J

People who know me well have figured out by now that I suffer from occasional insomnia. Last night I decided to crawl out of bed, and go for a stroll. Contently nibbling on an illegal piece of chocolate, I saw my very first Perseid meteor this year. Yay!

Each year, our good old blue Earth is thundering through a stream of rusty dusty snowy debris from Swift-Tuttle, a comet that was re-discovered in 1992, after being lost for a small 130  years. The golf ball-sized pieces are responsible for a spectacular firework show called Perseid meteor shower every year around August 11th and 12th, but as I could testify, the early flashes are already lighting up the sky!

So wait for another 10 days, spread your blanket in a dark corner (avoid parking lots J), bring a bottle of Chianti and your loved one and stare dreamy towards the shower’s radiant in Perseus. It’s a most romantic experience. Trust me, I’m a consultant J

But I glow in the dark. Really. My carefully shaped and nursed body J literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day. Trust me, it´s true. A bunch of highly smart and smartly paid scientists are there to back my statement up!

In an article scientists reveal that the body emits visible light, a phenomenon thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals. Faces glow more than the rest of the body.

See? I glow in the dark. Next I´m going to work on my telekinetic powers…

Climbing higher on the social media ladder, deciding who to connect and interact with is extremely important. Where do you put your time and energy? What will get a maximum spread of your messages? What will effectively enhance your reach, impact, and social velocity?

Let´s get real, chances that the Oprah´s, Kawasaki´s and tutti quanti of this world will even notice your tweet, let alone retweet it to their followers is extremely remote. They are industrial machines, programmed to push forward their personal or business purposes, and clearly too swamped being big to notice you at all. 6 digit follower people look nice in your followship, but they will not get you in the charts spreading your precious messages.

Aim for the little fish. People roaming in their first hundreds of followers. Reach out to them, help them grow their turf. Give them tips. They will notice you, as they do not have to skim (yet) through a gazillion tweets. They have time clicking on your links, and most often happily retweet good content, (which you provide J)… and by connecting to them at their early intro you will make it to their favorites easily with a good chance of staying there while they go up the charts. 

My personal rule? 80\20.  I spend 20 percent of my effort learning from big whales, 80 percent goes into interacting with the shiny silver fish.

It feels extremely good to feel the work recognized, and see that the integrated communication mix ranging from viral tactics, social networks, event support and more traditional die hard PR execution did not go unnoticed.

No communication strategy can be pulled off without a client believing in us. Kudo´s to Mike Foley, PhD., Executive Director of the Bluetooth SIG and Anders Edlund, Marketing Director and their team for having faith and keeping us sharp.

Thanks also to Marta Majewska and Dirk Bosmans, for great work, creative thinking and going the extra mile (and knowing Bluetooth better than a camel sand…)

And the day after, the self proclaimed King of Pop died… The social media craziness following the first announcement was mind boggling: Twitter reporting well over 30 percent of all conversation dedicated to Michael Jackson, and having to shut down some of its functionality to keep from fail-whaling. Facebook updates showed signs of mass hysteria as a gazillion people expressed whatever they felt like sharing in their status lines. I dotted down updates like “disaster”, “horror”, a “black day”, “my world ends” (!)… I need to go back to the web just post 9/11 to see so much emotion expressed. It largely beat the social online concern right after the tsunami…

Michael beat the charts big time, not only are his songs propelled right back at the top of the iTunes charts, but his death generated more compassion than the passing away of thousands of dying kids in dark Africa.

I´m not sure I like that… maybe we should recalibrate our priorities…

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever. This is not her story. But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman. Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.”

Happy Towel Day!

Click here to view the embedded video.

And now they are building a nest in our hedge. I think they meant to keep it a secret… so we pretend not to know what they are up to. J Can´t wait to meet the little blackbirds…

There will be a lot of Twittering in the garden soon, of all kinds…

The principle is geniously simple: you ask those in your network to help you out with advice, or by answering a specific question. Tap into the collective intelligence of your hang-arounds and you by-pass expensive third party vendors, and Rolex-ed market analyzing consultants. People who are well connected can easily datamine a couple of hundreds, even thousands followers or Facebook friends. Cheap, easy, fast. Then, it´s just a question of a bit of common sense and some good analyzing software to turn this data into charts, insights, trend previews and shiny statistics.

People as Marian Salzman, Martha Stewart, Don Tapscott and many others have found clever ways of using Twitter as a spider web for collecting data. And that is a good thing.

I do have some future looking concerns though. People are genuinely so happy to help out in these online communities that they answer to calls for help and info often. Too often. Over the last week I´ve been asked my opinion on healthcare, millennials, blogging, the situation in Israel, baby food, tracking software for photographing stellar constellations and the ideal coach for the Belgian national soccer team. On 4 of these items I do have insufficient knowledge, insight, or authority to add anything useful to the conversation. Still I was asked, and I did answer.

I´ve seen outcome of crowdsourcing – based analyses that was dead wrong, because the question was shot at a wrong but very enthusiast audience.  You catch my drift: to gather great insights on most topics, laser profiling your focus group is very important. Crowdsourcing is testing the water with your toe. For indepth analyzing, the ability to narrowcast down to selected audiences will differentiate data butchers from data surgeons…

I was flabbergasted. But a little research showed me quickly that it is indeed a new trend. It is good to be OK. It is bad to show so. Fellows at the car club keep their cabriolets inside.  They are fueled up, fully insured, but apparently it is not ok to be seen in it. A local service club voluntary ¨downgraded¨ their two-weekly meetings to a restaurant without a Michelin star. They drink the same expensive wine, smoke the same parallel imported Cuban cigars, but feel better parking their wives car @ a lower cost venue.

I overheard a conversation between two well doing fashionistas. One was selling off her Louis Vuitton  handbag from last season before swiping her credit card on the new one. Not because she cannot afford keeping both, but because “she does not want people to think she is not affected by the global crisis”.

So meet the New Faux Poor: doing well, financially extremely sound, but not willing to be seen spending. Because that is not politically correct.

The old grumpy me in me staggers. Trying to think down at that level gives me a burning headache. You´ll have to forgive me, but I´ll drive my cars as long as I can afford fuel, I´ll be waving my Breitling for ages to come. It´s a damned fine watch and I like it. The day I cannot pay the rent, I´ll sell it.

Be Real Rich. Real Normal. Or be Real Poor. Don´t fake either….

I use it mainly to keep track of new ideas and online expertise and share thoughts. It is also a great search tool that complements the battery of RSS feeds, e-letters, and netvibes monitors that fuel my curiosity.

As usual, the biggest challenge is finding out who and what to follow. Everybody seems to Tweet these days. And that is where my old grumpy self gets annoyed. There is a blatant lack of respect and etiquette in Twitter land, and it will kill a perfect good tool if people do not get hold of themselves quickly.

Far from telling other people how they should behave, I prefer to share some rules that will get you out of my personal Twitter land… quickly.

I am interested in your thoughts. Occasionally retweeting is fine, but if that is all you  do, I might as well follow the people you retweet constantly. I will. Same with all the great articles, movies and sites you spot. It is fine, and from time to time I will click on one of your tiny-url´s and see what it is about. If you have lots of them, get a blog: I promise I will visit it. Oh, and DO have the decency of telling me in three words what the link is about? I am not psychic, so “this is great: http://tinyurl.com/dcabd3 “ does not tell me a thing and annoys me… profoundly.

And direct message (DM) does exist on Twitter. Use it. Please. I follow a US PR agency that goes “@Boss: will be there in three minutes. @Employee: hurry, client is already waiting. @Boss: oops does he look mad?” and that all day, all night.  If it is useful, funny, remotely entertaining: by all means, share it with the world and me. If it is meant for one person only, get the DM function. Just having your private conversations in the open, and forcing me to witness, is too arrogant for words.

Most of us are adults. Use real words. If you have more than one word starting with “tw” in your Tweet (like in “Tweople, if you have a Twuestion just Twask and Twadd my friend”) I will delete you into oblivion.

And I do have a genuine interest in you, and your life. But if you feel the urge to update your Twitter 43 times in 90 minutes I can as well move in with you. I have no desire to know what even my very special ones are doing by the minute, and that should tell you enough J.

For the rest I am fine, thank you very much. Follow me on http://twitter.com/dannydevriendt

“Switch off your lights for 60 minutes… and stop global warming,” says the WWF advert. What a Brilliant Idea! How have all these scientists not thought of this before?

Now, let me get this straight: I am all for Worldpeace, Saving the Whales, Preserving the Planet. But let´s get real. Cheap demagogy like Al Gore’s movie or the Earth Hour initiative will not change the problematic in any way. They are meant to ´educate´ people, and to mobilize them. I guess that is fine.

On the other hand, I am convinced that the strongly implied message of virtuous and holy self-denial by switching of lights for an hour is absolute the wrong one. I save more CO2 (equivalent)  emissions by  having invested in replacing my light bulbs timely, and driving a German car with more filters in it than an average Manhattan skyscraper, than by turning lights off for Earth Hour. On the contrary, electricity nets all over the globe will have dumped a precious hour of unused current into the ground, and will have had to put auxiliary (polluting) units on to struggle with the biggest power-demand peak in human history when all those bonobo´s switched on their precious lights again…

I am against light pollution. I love watching the stars. I am for reducing lights on highways permanently, and against this nasty habit of lighting up church towers with Eiffel tower ambitions all year long.  I asked my city council three years ago to extinguish the power-eating bastard light poles next to my house that kill half of my star field, and only give clarity to the sheep in my back garden. Non is possibile… Can´t be done. But the same city did switch off the lights in the city hall for an hour. And feels good about it.

O well…..

Well, excuse me. Blogging is not dead. It is far from. The number of people starting their own web-log still vastly tops the ones dropping out silently. And I am a bit sick and tired to hear that Twitter and Facebook are the tomorrow’s successors to yesterday’s blogs. That is like claiming that the electric Lotus Tessa is the successor of the Hummer H1. They both have wheels. They do not play in the same field. They´d better not J.

Boutin´s basically bases his claim on the fact that there are too many other blogs (hardly a proof point of it being dead and over with), that writing more than Twitters 140 characters is too much work, that professionals start blogging, and that the notorious Jason Calacanis has stopped his praised blog.

Well, if Calacanis thinks that 140 bits are enough to spread his message, that´s fine. I can live with that. Luckily there are thousands of people over there that do take their  time to develop their thoughts in a more readable form. Let´s be honest, SMS turbo speak did NOT kill books, micro blogging like Twitter will not push back blogging to the dark ages.

Same with Facebook. Why would it kill the blogosphere? I´ve around 500 people on Facebook, a couple of hundreds are following me on Twitter. That hardly puts my more than 150.000 monthly blog-page views in perspective not?

I tend to agree that the web2.0 ecosystem expands. We had sites and mail, we added blogs and instant messenger. Fine. Now we´re building a new layer with Facebook and Twitter, we spice it up with YouTube and Flickr. Our online house becomes more complex.  More channels to express, share, connect.

Instead of replacing and burying blogs, a plethora of other social media will add to the reach of the Web2.0 user who is able to think a bit strategic. Blogging, in my humble but very wise opinion is still the thriving motor of a big chunk of the social web. Try to convince me otherwise in 140 characters. J

I know. I’ve said this before. But I’m sure of it. There is more stuff in my inbox than amoebae in a comfortably decaying puddle of ice-cream. Just looking @ my mailbox gives me slight nausea. More email than anyone can possibly deal with, and that on a quiet day. The fact that all those digitally encoded and encrypted pieces of art arrive on my BlackBerry does not really make a difference. There they are, mails… most of them pure information (fine, I’ll file it), questions that mattered yesterday (ok, so?), spam or silly jokes. About all of them marked with red exclamation marks. If I need to read them all, I cannot work anymore. At all. Heck, life as I’m used to know it stops. So I ban most of this email mountain temporarily out of my life, keeping secured timeslots in my agenda to sift through them. Early morning. Noon. Mid afternoon. Just before diner.

Last week, a train trip to London allowed me to file, respond to or trash 992 mails. No kidding. And earlier this week I had to sms a client on his mobile phone to have a look @ my mail, on his BlackBerry. He had over 300 mails in back-log. So much for e-mail as an effective way of communicating.

Email, is the new snail mail. It has become about as efficient as a quick communication tool as sending a letter in Christmas-card period. Actually if you chose your stamp wisely, you might get noticed way earlier using snail-mail. Or send a pigeon…

Back to fast sms to interact with mobile people. SMS for the fast track, email for stuff that can wait. I believed Twitter messages might be good. But Twitter world is getting so crowded that it’s getting difficult to see the trees through the forest. So your best option: IM. Instant Messenger, complete with camera-feed and audio for fast, cheap and instantaneous reaction when it matters. Works on PC, laptop, smartphone, Berry, and –I heard- even on iPhone…

Most of my communication with clients and teams runs over IM these days. It saves me time. It is as close to inter-acting as it gets, it’s useful when phone calls or life meetings are a stretch. It’s refreshing, real time, ad hoc communication.

It frees up time that I now can spend meeting people. Meeting people. IRL In real Life. Can you imagine?

Basically, he claims that computers are slowly migrating into intelligent devices, capable of heuristic data treatment and parallel processing. In other words, create a nice neural computer, set it up nicely and it will learn. By itself. It will become “intelligent”. Transhumanism and some hybrid thinking (you, with some extra computing power and techno-gadgets imbedded, like a pacific version of Robocop J) made up for great reading, and freaked the heck out of my trusted friends who thought I finally lost it.

But see: revenge is mine! In a newspaper (The Financial Times) Kurzweil is prominently projected on the first page. Nasa and Google are throwing their weight behind a new University in Silicon Valley that will be headed by Ray Kurzweil and will teach people how to think about machines that will be able to improve themselves, and will help us find solutions for problems as energy, climate change, malaria…. And snow.

Somewhere along our evolution path, something went terribly wrong. I’m sure you know what I mean… I am talking about “the others”. Those people who still have to look for their ticket when they try to check in. The ones with the oversized bags. Without the required visa. No, they cannot remember the name of their hotel. Yes they forgot to fill in their landing card. The Hawaian-shirted, sunburned passenger.

They scare the heck out of me. They have these nice cabin luggage that fits easily the complete wardrobe of a midsized African village, and they squeeze it elegantly, and with a vengeance above my suit jacket. In the next hour, that luggage will be opened about a dozen times, to accommodate his K-way, to get out his Sudoku book, etc…

Next thing is that the other will ask me to take his picture. Framing him, and his travelling tribe. And then, he will be recording the take off with a turbo sized high-def camera (note the Sony labels are still attached, noblesse oblige) while muttering half-loud (for the off-camera track, you understand) everything that he sees.

After that, the stewardess will ask him to move to his assigned seat, which is going to be next to me. Obviously, he will try to sit on my lap to get there, and will whack my Bloody Mary over my computer.

After that he will tell me his life. All of it. From childhood over the second divorce, up to the happy kids. And the other one loves garlic. And he will use my 50% of the armrest. And he will go to the restroom plenty, Hey, it’s for free. And he will share if it’s a number 1 or a number two. And he will explain me all the funny bits of the movie he is watching while I try to work.

And he sweats. God, do other ones sweat. And their deodorants are packed, and shipped on their way to Timbuktu. A week ago.

And mind you: @ landing the other ones will clap, applaud, and whistle. As if putting down a 747 is a circus act. And right after the landing other ones will leap over your lap and cram the gangway with their souvenirs, luggage and kids. And they still think they get out faster by pushing hard.

Other ones should walk… or bike.

Most (social) media attention these days were focused on America’s new president, and I think that stuff on that has been said and written plenty. So what about some lines about the inauguration of President Barack Obama? 

Google homed in the brand new GeoEye-1 bird, the satellite that will supply Google Earth with even higher-resolution imagery of our little blue planet to take some bleeding edge, high-resolution pictures of the inauguration. Taken at around 550 of altitude, at a staggering speed of roughly 25.000 kilometers per hour it shows everything in perspective . When new technology meets a new president….

Some people have way too much time. Some mad scientists actually calculated that today, of all days, is the most depressing day of the year. Right. *deep sigh* thought I just share with you Marvin, the depressed robot, to cheer you up…

Personally I’m interested in his Blackberry. Like the Belgian ex-prime minister Yves Letherme, Barack Obama is keen on being connected to information. Information that comes in a digital form through his Blackberry.  Tons of articles are now speculating whether Obama can keep his beloved Blackberry or not. And apparently he cannot. Something to do with the safety of the US and the free world, and the fact that presidential correspondence needs to be kept like, forever.

Now, duh. Mail can be encrypted, safely exchanged, password protected. Electronic files can be stored, searched, retrieved.  Most captains of industry are on mobile mail every day (and most of the night) through their Blackberry’s, HTC’s and iPhones. As far as I can tell, this has not resulted in corporations going up in flames, or smaller nations going on the fist because of an intercepted “secret” email.

Let’s be a bit careful with forwarding  the launching codes for the A-bombs, and continue to send highly military secret stuff around with good-old double-muscled and lip-sealed spies. But for the rest, let the new inhabitant of the White House please stay comfortably in a web 2.0 connected world! Heck, I hope the man’s on Twitter.

These days, we’re identified by way more access points. We move faster, carrying our digital identity with us. Wherever we go. Our music. Our pictures. Our networks. Our access codes. All condensed in small black battery operated devices.

Intelligent phones or blackberries hold the key to a scary big part of our lives, and have factual become our portal, our Stargate to the worlds out there: clients, family, loved ones…  Some of us even have digital Avatars literally re-presenting ourselves in a virtual world.

Are you keeping track of your Digital ID?  Email addresses? LinkedIn? Plaxo? MSN? Sametime? 2nd Life?  GoogleID? Gmail? Facebook? Twitter? Etc… How many versions of you are out there?  Do you already need one of those fancy pieces of software to keep track of all your logins/ID’s/password? Or have you given up entirely –as I do-, trusting on the biometric scanner of your devices to be able to connect you to all those digital highways? How much time does keeping track of all that cost you a day? Or do you need smart software mashing and merging lots of these digital presences?

Clock your digital day. Google yourself and watch the creepy resume of your web life over recent years…  trust me, I tried it J.

Few people did it smartly, realizing that personal information, personal data, and private lives are precious and deserve high protection. Few people were careful on what to share with whom, what to publish and where, and how to deal with incoming digital requests.

Others are slowly waking up in a digital nightmare, wondering where it all went wrong.

My prognosis for 2009 is that it is going to be a year of “un-publish”, “un-list”, and “un-friend”. A year where people will try to scale down the enthusiast openness with which they hurried themselves and their families into Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and the like.

Because, yes, there is a difference between a “digital” friend, and the normal notion of “friend”. Because Facebook labels contacts as “friends” does not necessary mean that it is wise to share life, data and all pictures blindly with the hundreds of people in the “friends”-list.  Would you share your half naked pictures with all the people in your phones dial list? With all the people on the mailing list of your company? So why are they open and unprotected on your Facebook again?

And the millions of very revealing pictures on Flickr? Tanned girlfriends on sunny  beaches, drunken in-laws, sweaty Karaoke sessions…. all to share with colleagues and business contacts as well?   And though I love cute babies, finding unprotected pictures of the helpless thingies draped on their innocent sheepskins on MySpace accounts and other picture sites makes me extremely uneasy. Do people not realize that everyone might be watching?

Tread with care. The web is a social place. It is not a protected area where you only meet friends. Chose carefully what to share. Protect your intimate life, your dignity, your reputation, and your loved ones.

Once it is online, it is in the open. Pretty much for ever.  On the web “un-something“ is a myth…

This book is not for the faint of hearted. Jonathan Strange, the magician mentioned in the title, does not even make an appearance until page two hundred and eight.

It took me the better half of two nights, three steaming baths and a great bottle of Bordeaux to finish it off. It’s a great book, I’ll put it between Ulysses of James Joyce an God created the Integers of Hawkin: to re-read when I am retired J.

Summary: Communication has evolved. More direct. Web-based. Global. Lightning fast. How do you deal with the new media? Where/when do you blog? Are you LinkedIn? Facebook-ed? How’s your digital profile? Will you survive working with millennials? To help you keep the pedal to the metal and lay rubber on the road, I’m auctioning off a two-hour adrenaline session. With a Lotus Elise R. No ABS. No airbags. No power steering. Just you, me, and the road. And yes, you can drive J.

We’ll wind down over dinner in the Ostend Queen restaurant -watching sunset- for an in-depth chat on how you can add web tactics to your communication mix. Or anything else you want to chat about. Just one small thing: one of us has to drive back….

To place your bid, click:

http://www.porternovelli.be/auction/index.php?page=forsale&id=36

There are of course exceptions. Though I am fully mentally prepared to go through the pains of getting a pilot license, being ridiculously heavy colorblind prevents me from it. And my accountant claims I cannot afford an airplane yet. So I give my money to airliners that threat me like cattle, give me bad service, Lilliputian overcooked food and make me miss my connections.

A bad knee prevents me to cross the North Sea swimming, and even if I could, last time I checked my cherished electronic gadgetry did not like moisture very much. So I have to train. Well, trust me. Trains hate me. They do not run on time. They never go where I want to be. Their staff speaks a multitude of languages, none of which I master. And very simple requests like “can I sit down together with my wife” or “could I get another Coke” is met with an ice-cold “none is possible”.   I know. I’m nagging. But I paid 525 Euro Business Premier hoping to get some service. Which I did not.

Ever tried the London metro travelling with suitcases? These endless corridors? Automatic ticket control machines that smash your luggage? These steep stairs that force you to backbreaking escalades? All that for 5 euro for three stops?

Excuse me, but Jeremy Clarkson is right. I cannot be bothered. Where are my keys?

I paid 11 pounds for visiting A photograper’s Life in the London National Portrait Gallery. There must have been wiser ways to spend it. I like Leibovitz. I was disappointed by the poor setup. Great work deserves better.

I got invited to a nice Belgo-Mexican evening that started off with some serious free-style wrestling in the Roundhouse in London. I’m by no means a fan of this sport, and when I see the all oiled up testosterone pumped action heroes on the TV screen, I know it’s high time to call it a day, and doze off.

In real life wrestling is down straight funny. Masked Mexican muscle machines with terrifying names as Speedy Gonzales or Hannibal Junior are happily throwing each other around the ring, and demonstrating Double Flying Neck Twisters, or Back Breaking Air Scissors. Downed with some spicy Tacos and Tequila flavored beer the bad acting on stage is an absolute must see! J

So I got all excited when I saw a bright neon advertising Dune while I was in London. And now the little boy in me is hurt. Shoes? You have to be kidding me… L.

Some snowy rain and temperatures that flirt with freezing. Ideal weather for some serious off roading. I must say that a taste of adventure was more than welcome after a nerve breaking week.  Incredible what a thirty year old jeep still can do…J

Honestly, think again J.

My favorite constellation is Orion. Called The Hunter  by the Old Ones, it is one of the largest constellations, usually visible near the equator. Orion has three magnificently lined up stars in its belt, that listen to incredible names: Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. Alnilam is my silent favorite… it shows me the way to the Trapezium, the Orion Nebula, and the Horsehead Nebula. Simply beautiful…

I met people as well. Friends. Clients. Strangers. Mostly friendly people. So I chatted. A lot. Visited their preferred spots on this virtual planet. Got amused with some good natured flirting with some great looking avatars. Raced on endless beaches against other virtual cars.

Tried it for business as well. Met online virtual journalists, went to virtual meetings, looked at virtual powerpoints, sat at virtual meeting tables drinking virtual Starbucks coffee.

And decided I could not be bothered. I ditched my virtual body behind a non existing tree, and deleted the software.

And you know what? I missed it. Big time. I’ve been wondering for weeks now if things have changed, if resolution got better, if…   It’s like waiting for the new Sex and the City season. You do not really want to, but there you are.

So yes, my virtual self is back.

I was given a book Market Forces, by Richard Morgan, painting a pitch dark view on the corporate world in the very uncomfortable close future. Consultancy firms respond to tenders (hey, that’s my world!) from global corporations. Over time these tenders are fought more and more grimly. From showing up with the best team, to showing up first… to –well-  showing up basically.

In  Market Forces, tenders and pitches are fought out on the road, on the way to the client. Pitch teams kill off weaker opponents on the deserted highway to the pitch. No rules. No witnesses. Quickest reflexes and biggest cojones wins. Competing consultants only stop to collect the bloody plastic corporate nametags from their dying opponents. Clients get the consultant that has proven to be the last man standing, natural selection. The consultant that went the extra mile, and lived. “Show up early, with blood on your wheels… or do not show up at all”. 

The day I find that on a real RFP (Request for Proposal) I quit. Although….. J

Click here to view the embedded video.

Men and their toys… the pointy haired, brain muscled shirts from CERN have successfully fired up their newest gadget; the Large Hadron Collider at CERN1. Powering up thousands of bleeding edge components, fine-tuning them to within a billionth of a second, lining up the staggering amount of power and then shooting electrons around in the 27 kilometers of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator so that they bang together at Einsteinian speeds is a show case of what international scientists can do, if they put their minds to it. To be fair, it only took them a little over two decades of preparation to make it work.

The colliding electrons will annihilate each other, and while dying they will hurl their quarks en hadrons into the batteries of sensors that monitor the Collider. (Just the names of these quarks…. Up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom J).

We might learn something about time, gravity, space and gravity this way.

Sounds a bit more exciting than another Olympic Show…. What you?

One of the best books ever offered to me (tx Kate!) is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The science fiction novel triggers my interest in computers, virtual worlds, the power of language, viral marketing and ancient civilizations.   William Gibson touched me deeply with pattern recognition. Stephenson intrigued me from beginning to end. You’ll just have to read the book, and follow Hiro Protagonist. And discover what I do for a living: condense fact from the vapor of nuance…. J

Luckily there is Lego. Their Mindstorm series allow for the building of extremely complicated (that is for a 39 year old. My young nephews prove way smarter builders) robots with a plethora of sensing devices, programmable and remote-controllable through Bluetooth wireless technology.

If you are up to building a good old R’Bot, with nightvision, motion detection radar and the like, you should  quickly visit http://www.bluetooth.com/Bluetooth/Products/Signature/Robot.htm and build and enter your Robot. Nice thingies to win.

My colleague Dirk and I will build a docile, beer fetching, bottle opening, pizza ordering  buddy Bot. We’ll call him BlueBot. And you?

Every year the cozy little littoral village of De Haan time warps itself back to the early 1900’s.  Around the uniquely styled tram station the whole village dresses up in the magnificent costumes and gowns of the Belle-epoque, and as by magic horses, steam vehicles and old timers tuftuf agreeable through the street, watched by over a hundred thousand delighted tourists.

We thought it would be an ideal moment to showcase the endless possibilities of wireless technology. So we managed to get hold of some priceless 100 year old wardrobe, and used our trusted old MG as a Trojan Horse. It’s true, the MG TF from 1952 is way too young for a early 20^th century happening. But trust us (we’re consultants), nobody in that crowd sees the difference between a Ford T racer, a Bugatti 1940 and our Bluetooth enabled vehicle.

Security guards let us in without so much as the blink of an eye, and we dived deep in to the festivities. The roaring music power blasting out from our 750 watt kicker system in the back of the MG (powered by Parrot’s incredible RK8200 radio) generated a good deal of street dancing. Not to worry, we equipped our Sony Ericsson phones solely with foxtrot and charleston tunes.     

And a lot of splendidly dressed damsels and gentlemen got a fair taste of Bluetooth stereo headsets. When the future of today meets the past… it was a good event J.

Well, I do have a soft spot for older cars. They are often proud relics of ancient times, appealing to my poetic soul J. When I saw this old veteran casually parked in the back of a dead ugly truck, my heart was bleeding. Here is the ancestor of 4×4, survivor of the landing @ the beaches in Normandy humiliated by a rusty lorry. Sigh. Some people have no respect.

We were invited by the Vespa club de France (thanks mister Reine!) to showcase our Bluetooth enabled fleet on the docks of Quillebeuf sur Seine on the 14^th of July.  Parrots MG TF, and both the Lotus and the LaRo Lightweight featured alongside vintage Vespas and a plethora of French classic cars.

Thousands of people took turns around our wheels, admired the stunning audio blasting out of the Parrot RK 8200 radio (we linked it up to a 1800 musical watt installation in the Lightweight J), and posed in, on or around the vehicles.

Our youngest admirer was 1, the oldest one just turned 97. We drained the batteries of our Sony Ericsson phones while streaming audio to our speakers for more than 10 hours straight.

A sunny day. Lots of demos. Sunburned. Sore feet. Aching backs. Tortured ears. Hungry. But very satisfied… we smile

In my eyes, the most beautiful sailing ship in Rouen is the Amerigo Vespucci, a tall ship of the Marina Militare, named after the famous  explorer Amerigo Vespucci.  She was put into service in 1928 and was used by the Italian Navy until 1943. She is used as a training ship ever since.

So all excited we floored the jeep into the most obscure corners of the woods de Bretonne and the steep slopes of the Seine estuary. We jumped over tree trunks. We splashed through water. We did see an abandoned Toyota buried in a muddy field. We dived into mud pools that could hide a camel. We tractored through prairies. We pushes fences. We ploughed through ditches. We ripped of branches.

We had lots and lots of fun, sore bums and bruises. But we could not get the Lightweight stuck. Sigh. There will be other times!

Apotheosis is a couple of visits to Rouen, where the most magnificent sailing ships of the planet gathered together before majestically sailing down the Seine on Monday 14^th . With a forecasted reach of over 10 million people, a hell of an event. J

Our trusted Bluetooth SIG Lotus, and Parrots 1952 MG TF will be joined by a paratrooper Landrover Lightweight. Three more days. And this is what the car looks like right now. Don’t panic.

 I have the impression that the early days of 2008 one by one went out to buy cigarettes, never to be seen again. My nostalgic mind wondered night after night outside, watching the stellar constellations shift across the sky with the majestic speed of a 1986 modem. And finally, it is all lining up all right:  summer solstice.  The axis of our little space vessel is now most oriented toward our private star: the Sun .

Solstice, (Latin for the sun stands still) announces the beginning of my favorite season: the summer. The ancients lighted big bonfires , and simply enjoyed all kinds of warmth in celebration of a hot season. It’s summer. Enjoy it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Found a viral movie featuring the Smartbadge. It is –of course- politically incorrect. J

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since four years now, I occasionally throw a car in to the communication mix. People just like it better when they can see or experience things. And a car is a highly visible, highly mobile, highly versatile tool that can be used on tradeshows, press events, in viral actions, or on the move.

We have the Lotus for its high coolness factor (heck this is the car that Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear bought for his wife!); we have the MG TF for its looks. What we lacked was some brute dare-develish thing with lots more space to build in stuff. Something that could go places. Road or no road. J

We thought Hummer, but gave in to the political not correctness of that monster. So when Stefaan from SD-motors found an old paratrooper Land Rover Lightweight we smiled.

It’s dirty. It’s old. It’s pure bruteness. But Stefaan will turn it in to a perfect marketing/communication vehicle. In 20 days. No pressure J.

I was one of those kids who constantly wanted to know why. And why, why. I spent hours and hours watching the sea. The stars. Wanted to know what they were, and why.  Basically, that flavor of childish curiosity pretty much turned me into to what I am today: challenging briefs, finding patterns, plotting plans. Always trying to find the why.

It was a bit startling and confronting to see that my sister’s oldest Oscar is made in the same mold. He tried out a 100 year old telescope this weekend. Discovered that it can blow up or shrink things. Now he wants to point it at the stars, like I do. But he needs to wait till it gets dark. And that is way past bedtime.

Life is unfair….

When I was offered Stardust by Neil Gaiman, I could not stop reading. I read it twice in three days. Here was somebody, offering me a book that I adored. That was written in a way that made me shiver, and glow, and smile. The little boy in me enjoyed the fairytale, the writer in me fell in love with the sparkling language, the rest of me simply dreamed away.

It takes big cojones to write a tale for adults that involves witches, falling stars and enchanted forests, and features talking goats, helpful unicorns and burning love. Gaiman’s prose creates me a parallel world that fits me. I parked the book on my trusted shelves, next to my all time favorite Dune by Frank Herbert. And I’ll be watching out for falling stars….

Good as new. But I notice that my time between charging up batteries  has decreased. A lot J. So if that is the ideal excuse for more break-aways, where do I sign?

Just sometimes, there is a man, I won’t say a hero, because, what’s a hero? Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.

Robert Gernaey was such a man. This Belgian priest called Normandy his home since 1953, and cared about the wellbeing of 16 happy little villages. He made a pulverizing impression on all he met, including me.

For more than 20 years he was a soulmate. He was wise beyond believe, painfully honest, tolerant, open-minded, and kind. I’ll miss his grumpiness, the sparkle of his eyes, his razor-sharp logic. I’ll miss the long conversations on life, the universe, everything. I’ll miss the friendly dueling between my atheist logic, and his solid faith.

Robert passed away yesterday.

To live in the hearts of those you love, is not to die.

I do love viral marketing. Visual messages on the web can be great fun. To make, or to watch. Very often, viral actions make me smile, or grin. But just sometimes they are way way over. See what I mean? 

Click here to view the embedded video.

A two minute tongue-in-cheek tutorial on viral movies. It sounds easy, no?