RSS feeds have feelings, too

From my 1,490 RSS subscriptions, over the last 30 days I read 48,284 items, starred 21 items, shared 5 items, and emailed 11 items. At least, that's what my Google Reader tells me. I spend at least 1,5 hours every day reading my feeds. Often I get up early, skip lunch or stay up late just to catch up with all these updates. In my Google Reader Trends graph above, blue is for Items posted, orange is for Items read. You can see that once in a while I "mark all as read" and read hardly any RSS feeds at all - that's when I'm actually getting a real life ;-)
Unfortunately, the Google Reader interface is rather boring. Which is why I recently installed the Feedly Firefox Add-on (also available as Google Chrome extension). Feedly organizes your favorite sites into a sexy, magazine-like start page. It's based on Google Reader and Twitter. I really like the looks of it, and most importantly: the "j" key for "next" still works. You can tell when I'm reading my RSS feeds when you see my finger tap "J, j, j, j, j," (and an occasional "k" to jump one post back).

Only today I discovered that Feedly also has a feature called Karma: "an experiment we are running to help you get more insight on how people react to the content you are sharing on twitter." Below is part of my Karma page (zooming in on my How to Suck at Facebook tweet):

Compare to the bit.ly info page for this link and you'll see what I mean.

We are all the Stig

Top Gear Live must be one of those rare events where the queue for the ladiesroom is far shorter than the one for the men's rooms. The event was completely sold out and I'm pretty sure a good time was had by all. Maybe it was the loud explosions, the spectacular car and motorbike stunts, the yelling and laughing at Clarkson & Hammond's jokes (mainly Clarkson's), or maybe we all simply got high on the fumes but the atmosphere was great.
The part I liked most was the walk behind the scenes and in "the paddock", where you got all the time you needed to gawk at and take pictures of the machines that were used on stage. I noticed some of the stunt cars got serious dents in them so now I know I'm not the only one with a little oops from time to time.
Except, of course, I don't play football with my car.
Thank you Dunlop for having us!

Top Gear Live - football from Imke Dielen on Vimeo.

Monday February 8 is Pink Monday at the Affordable Art Fair

The screenshot above is from ArtIsContagious.com. I'm in there somewhere!
ArtIsContagious.com is the playful side of The Affordable Art Fair. The idea is to upload a webcam picture to win a Thalys ticket to Paris, of an extra free ticket for The Affordable Art Fair itself. This open and affordable contemporary art event runs from the 8th of February 2010 in Tour & Taxis, Brussels. Thanks to its large range of styles and supports, collectors as well as novices will be able to discover and buy the perfect work of art, whatever their budget is.
The very last day of the event, Monday 8 February, has been dubbed Pink Monday because you can choose to donate your ticket price to breast cancer awareness project Pink Ribbon. And ladies, bring a friend: women who buy 1 ticket for the benefit of Pink Ribbon, get 1 free.

Bad girls go places. I'm going @TopGearLiveTour in Amsterdam!

Time for you to get to know a darker side of me. A couple of months ago, when I first heard about tyre manufacturer Dunlop's sponsoring of the Top Gear World Tour 2009 / 10 and their idea to give away two tickets to the Amsterdam event to Brussels Girl Geek Dinners, I tried to pull some strings to be able to go myself.
Yes, I know.
But I have some excuses: I really love Top Gear. My father used to work in the automobile industry and when I was little he used to tinker with old cars. He often asked me to hold the lamp while he was trying to find out, often forgetting my presence and cursing, why a particular car wouldn't start or make strange noises. This is why, for a girl, I know pretty much about cars and what's more: I love the smell of spent car oil and tire rubber, the sound of car engines roaring and the way your tires screech when you take a short turn in an underground parking space. And yes, I'm a bit of a car snob too, and when I drive my Audi I sometimes go "POWAAAAAH!" in the bends.
You're free to criticise me for my "please Dunlop please pretty please" but yesterday night I got news that I can go along with the two winners of the Brussels Girl Geek Dinners Dunlop contest, Imke Dielen (@ImkeDielen) and Eveliendb (@Eveliendb). We're planning on driving to Amsterdam together and it's going to be fun!
Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go places! Thank you Dunlop. Kudos to you, and to Muse Communication, for succesfully convincing Dunlop that girls are car lovers too!

I think I found a Good Thing for my N97 mini: voice guided navigation off the grid

As you know I'm looking for as many uses as possible for my N97 mini, preferably without having to get a second phone number / data plan. And today I think I found one at Nokia Press Releases: "Nokia today announced plans to make walk and drive navigation free on its smartphones as part of a new version of Ovi Maps, available for download at www.nokia.com/maps."
Why is this big news? It's a free download from Nokia.com/maps and has no hidden costs (unlike, say TomTom, that always charges you for the juicy bits). But most of all: No network connection required when navigating. From the press release: "Avoid expensive, battery-draining network connections with Nokia’s unique hybrid technology. Maps can be pre-loaded on to your Nokia smartphone so you can set Ovi Maps to offline mode, saving battery power, and the navigation system will still work."
If this is true, I'm going to let my N97 mini guide me through the streets of New York in April. The service includes voice guided navigation for pedestrians. I will be able to totally blend in with the locals, pretending to listen to an iPod or something, while at the same time knowing exactly where I'm going.

Blippy / What are you spending?

Blippy"is a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying. Automatically share your favorite purchases from iTunes, Amazon, Zappos, Visa, MasterCard, and more."
I didn't hesitate to install the Google Public Location Badge on this blog. It shows which city I'm in, at any given time. I don't have to "check in" or do anything else: it automatically displays where I am (or to be correct: where my Blackberry is). I had expected to become uncomfortable after a while but I've had it since May last year and it's still there. Just like the Last.fm Scrobbler for Mac, which publishes what I'm listening to on my iTunes machine or the Last.fm stream. And allows me to create cool infographs of my listening patterns as an extra benefit.
But Blippy... I don't know. I buy a lot of songs on iTunes, and that's pretty innocent e-commerce information, but I'm not sure why I would want to publish that. Even worse with my online visa behaviour. Yes I booked a flight to New York last night but who'd want to know how much I spent? Plus: I might be able to accept comments like "Wow you're listening to Justin Timberlake???" or "What on earth are you doing in Hamme-Zogge?" but I'm not sure about "What? You spent 120 euros on books again?"
What do you think? Is Blippy a bridge too far? And is what you are able to spend (and what you spend it on) a taboo?

My Music Taste as an Underground Map

This Last.Fm Tube Tags visualisation shows the changes in my listening over the past 21 months. Each coloured line represents a tag, with key artists listed underneath. The white circles appear with tag names whenever there's an increase in listening for that tag, so you can quickly read the bias for that month.

And this is just one of the many visualisation tools at Last.fm Playground. My favourites:

• Listening Trends: Create graphs comparing your listening trends to your friends'. My listening trends as opposed to Gil's.
• Musical Soulmates: Find similar listeners using our new neighbours service.
• Most Unwanted Scrobbles: The tracks that got removed most often from user charts. (Hint: lots of Lady GaGa)

Drifting through London

Came across this fascinating video today:

Drift from mustardcuffins on Vimeo.

The maker explains: "I drift, half awake, half asleep. Moving through the city I recall but have never been to.
This film was made using a digital stills camera to create a stop motion animation."

Wish I could do that: take digital stills mitraillette-style, then stitch them together and animate them with some kind of stop motion software. Look at how these waves in the wake of the boat move! I would use a realtime audio track underneath, not the weird crackle and noise you hear in this one. But would be perfect for e.g. a long shot of a walk through the city, or a flight over land with a hot air balloon.

Telephone: I no longer love you

Why People Don't Like Video Chatting - TIME: "Skype breaks the century-old social contract of the phone: we pay close attention while we're talking and zone out while you are.
As soon as you begin to talk, I feel trapped and desperately scan the room for tasks I can do to justify the enormous waste of time that is your talking. I wash dishes, I file receipts, I read news sites, I make little fake suicide faces to my wife Cassandra (...) In desperate times, when I am on my cell phone in the middle of nowhere, I will pace. (...) But Skype requires me to look at you while you're talking, which is totally ridiculous."

I remember a time when I would run to the phone when it started ringing, full of anticipation. You also had to run because if you missed the call, there was no way to find out who called or what the call was for. Some time later I got myself an answering machine, only to find out I was at the beck and call of the little green blinking light and felt obliged to call back whoever tried to reach me as soon as I could.

Now we're, say, ten years later and I no longer have a landline, deactivated the voicemail on my mobile phone, and only pick up when my address book recognizes the number. If my phone rings while it's not in my reach I curse (something I only realised when my children started cursing too when they heard my phone's ringtone). I pace, break pencils and make faces while I'm on the phone.

And I wonder why. Because the majority of phonecalls I get bring a positive change somehow, and often make my day. I felt utterly lost and disconnected when I lost my phone a couple of months ago. So here's something I don't understand: how can voice calls still be so important in my life, and still make me so reluctant to pick up the phone?

The Privacy Battlefield

In 2010, one of the main battlefields will be that of privacy vs online identity. To illustrate:

• Earlier this week Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.
• Yes, your are on Google Street View demotivational poster shows a guy picking up prostitutes somewhere near Barcelona in Spain.

This is why I like Street with a View so much. On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more.
Some of these had been picked up (or leaked to?) bloggers and Twitter users, but others have been hidden gems in Street View for quite a long while. The difference with the John picking up hookers? The people in Pittsburgh knew the Google car was coming and had prepared for its arrival. I'm not sure if all Facebook users know how to tweak their privacy settings either. Some of them don't even realise that everything they say online can be published or republished, often without them know. Check out LameBook to see what I mean.

On to the 3rd year of Brussels Girl Geek Dinners

There have been many times we thought about giving up or were accused of having jumped the shark, but still they keep on coming: Brussels Girl Geek Dinners. The twenty-third (!) edition will be on Wednesday 6 January at 6:30PM at the Mirano (Leuvensesteenweg 38, 1210 Brussels).

What girl geek dinners are about is pretty clear: they are events for females who class themselves as girly and geeky. The events have a technical focus and are light hearted and fun. Some of the events are rather girly (especially the ones where we mess around with chocolate, make-up, or pretty party dresses), others are rather geeky (like 3D printing, or Designing & Developing for Mobile). But after 2,5 years of organising them, the most important aspect to me is still that the events are not only light hearted and fun but also open and free.
Open to me, means that everyone who would like to come, should be able to do so. BGGD events are quickly booked full, but to be honest we usually get all the reserves in. And yes we do have "females only" events - it's called Brussels Girl Geek Dinner after all. I'm not sure if it's politically correct to say so but I don't care: the events are definitely more lighthearted when the boys are not around.
Free is the hardest part. I don't feel guilty about not always having a goodie bag for the ladies, but I insist on keeping the Brussels Girl Geek Dinners free for the girl geeks. We're very fortunate to have lots of people helping out and nobody is getting paid (not even the speakers). But if a cool location always works with e.g. a catering service, someone has to pick up the bill. And lately the fail rate of finding someone to cover the catering costs has gone up to over 50%.
I'm not sure what to do about that.