Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Social networking - making the world really small

Haven't blogged in a while. Never mind that.

The other day I realized it is not only Estonia which is a small place - this whole thing, cyberspace, blogosphere, what'ya'call'it, is becoming - or maybe is making the entire world, a really, really tiny place.

As I was ready a rather silly article on swedish Today's News ("Dagens Nyheter"), about someone who as a publicity stunt had placed a significant kiss-mark on some modern art masterpiece. Beside the article in the "blogs about this" box was a link saying "Here's the painting the woman in France kissed". Silly as I am I of course checked it out, and found Jack Hansen, self-made expert in guerilla marketing and search engine optimization.

This guy's blog was pretty interesting - no doubt was he good at attracting traffic, he had at least lured me in there with a pretty meaningless entry about a modern art painting, but I was disappointed to see as so often seems to be the case, the people best at getting your attention have the least to say, at least in what you came there for in the first place - "Empty barrels make the most noise".

Either way, one thing Jack was writing about was how he desperately wanted to be a beta tester of Spotify. That's interesting, I have heard of Spotify but do not quite remember what it is, Jack seem to think it is the coolest thing since sliced bread. So what does google and wikipedia say about Spotify? Well, this wikipedia diff on Ludvig Strigeus pretty much says it all. Very cool, so that is what my old prodigal classmate is doing nowadays. Sounds so much better than "working for the automotive industry".

Also, the other day I met the guy pretty much responsible for nicking Chalmers programming language guru Lennart Augustsson to dump that boring old university for an investment bank. He had a whole bunch of interesting stories to tell, and pretty much summed his profession up as "locating people who are desperately trying to cut a steak with their forks, then finding and selling them a knife". That sounds like a nice business, beneficial for all; the people who get to eat their steak, for he or she who sells the knife as well as the knife him or herself.

They say that once you graduate, your most valuable book is going to be the address book. Speaking of which, Sugardaddy, if you're reading this, I have got a most interesting business project in mind; involving some valuable technology evangelization, and a whole heap of excellent, unsold knives. I'll be in touch.