The crooked road from Micciano to Libbiano

Last week, while we were on holiday in beautiful Tuscany, Gil drove the Audi from Micciano (population: 65) to Libbiano (population: 27), both part of the municipality of Pomarance, in the province of Pisa, region Toscana.
It's a short but exciting 11 km drive, all the way down from the mountain Micciano is built on, down the valley, and up to another one to Libbiano.
On our way down the road looked a little like this:

And if you put the Bloggie on the dashboard it goes a little like this:

The only thing I have to give you is a poor gift and it’s myself

Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Danny & Annie on Vimeo: "Danny Perasa and his wife, Annie, came to StoryCorps to recount their twenty-seven-year romance. As they remember their life together from their first date to Danny’s final days with terminal cancer, these remarkable Brooklynites personify the eloquence, grace, and poetry that can be found in the voices of everyday people when we take the time to listen."

Good luck parking your car in this part of Mechelen

Oh the irony.

Monday evening, when I had just parked my car in what was the only spot in the street that wasn't marked with a no parking sign, I posted this picture to Flickr. Tuesday I stayed home to write. Today, Wednesday, I couldn't find my car. Someone (I'm guessing local police) had placed even more signs somewhere between Monday night and Tuesday morning. And had my car towed away - I think this morning.

Usually I'm not the Not In My BackYard type, and usually I don't lose my temper at the local police station but today I did. This is madness. Just look at this wild wood of parking signs. Some of them are randomly placed by workers at one of the three construction sites in the street. Others are owned by one of my neighbours - she rents them out to any one (like construction firms) who need more space for their vans. And others are here because it's Maanrock festival this weekend in Mechelen.

Don't you think if there's so many of them, they cancel each other out?

Crowdsourcing Mini brand associations: next steps

Remember 6th of august, when I asked my Twitter followers and Facebook friends this question?

I was a little overwhelmed but very happy with the feedback: 63 replied on Facebook, and about 75 on Twitter. It took me about a week to crunch the data and bring some system into the madness.
If you're of the curious type: the full "social sentiment" map of all your feedback is available at Mindmeister.

One of the recurring associations with the Mini brand was... well... that's it's a small car. Some examples:

So what happened next? Sylvie Dewaele of Mini's ad agency introduced me to Mini's marketing manager for BeLux (Philip Eeckels) and we used the mindmap to talk about the perception of the Mini brand. He told me MINI is about to launch the Mini Countryman - a crossover between a "normal" Mini and a contemporary Sports Activity Vehicle. It's Mini's first model with four doors and a wide-opening tailgate. It's bigger ("extended and highly versatile use of space") and even more fun to drive ("slightly raised seating position & optimised ride comfort").

Does this combo really work out? I don't know about you, but that sounds like something you have to try out to know. A little bird told me there are a series of closed Mini event on on 8 to 11 September in Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp and Liège (in that order, event starts at 17:00). Want to get in? Let me know in the comments. I'll try and pull some strings. And to be honest, would love to try some of that "crossover driving" myself.

Welcome to the dandruff club

Earlier this week I got a big flightcase with my name on it. Inside were a doctor's coat, a safety mask and glasses, a pipette, a sample bottle and some instructions. Oh, and a digital camera the size of a credit card which I couldn't get to work :-(

The instructions required me to take a sample of my anti dandruff shampoo, publish proof of the fact that I did, and send the sample to an address in Brussels. (iprospect, formerly known as Extenseo, is at the same address but I'm sure that's a coincidence).

What fascinates me is that the accompanying letter mentions that similar flightcases and instructions have been sent to 16 other bloggers. Which means I'm on a list of bloggers with dandruff. Hey, if this gets me a life's supply of shampoo, why not. So far only Smetty and Kleintje/Verbeelding have come out as members of the Dandruff Club. Where are the others?

Lennon! Again?

Gluko & Lennon colourful animation.

Gluko & Lennon ENG from Gluko & Lennon on Vimeo.

Do the music blog shuffle

Shuffler "is internet-radio made by music blogs.

• A fast, fun way to browse and navigate what's hot on the music web
• Discover music on thousands of music blogs and sites
• The web is your player, bloggers are your dj's

"

Surfaces, surfaces darling!

Cult of Less Blog — Is it possible to own nothing?: "Is it possible to own nothing?
Well, maybe not nothing. Nothing is a little extreme. But is it possible to own close to the nothing? I hope to have the answer to that question soon. Inspired by [The 4-Hour Workweek], I’ve decided to try to see if I can rid my life of most of the clutter. The goal? Condense my life into 2 bags and 2 boxes.
How will I do this? It seems simple to just say: get rid of everything. To realize how much junk I own, I have put myself through the misery of documenting every single possession of mind, no matter how insignificant. This gives me a solid metric to measure my progress against. [...]
The 2 bags and 2 boxes principle will hopefully allow me to live anywhere and move instantly. This is the Cult of Less."

I wish I could do that. But I'm trying! I'm moving to my new house mid october and so far I got rid of

• CDs. All the albums are on iTunes anyway.
• DVDs. If I really need to watch a movie again, I'll download buy it again.
• Books. Sorry, no. I've stopped buying business books since I got Kindle for the iPad, but the novels will have to stay.
• Electronics. Boy are they a bad investment. Gil is putting most of the old clunky stuff on eBay.

The Flying Ostrich

YouTube - Cadbury Creates Moment of Joy with Flying Ostrich TV Commercial "created by Saatchi & Saatchi Johannesburg, who came up with the innovative concept of a flying Ostrich."

Moment of joy? Yes, just like last time with the Gorilla who loved Phil Collins. Innovative? Only if you never saw Kiwi or Penguins in Heaven.

A pretty map of Mechelen

Mechelen is somewhere in the middle - the bigger clusters are of course Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent.

prettymaps | august 2010 | about: "The white ghost-like shapes represent all the places where Flickr users have taken photos; the blue and green lines are OSM motorways and paths respectively; the orange shapes are urban areas as identified by Natural Earth. Unlike traditional maps most (and sometimes) all the data for a given layer is displayed, with only subtle variations in line width and other design considerations, regardless of zoom level."

The Origin of Words

Signing, Singing, Speaking: How Language Evolved : NPR: "[L]anguage is a behavior, not a physical attribute. So there is no fossil record of when it first appeared, says David Armstrong, who spent decades studying the origin of language before retiring from Gallaudet University, a university for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C.

'We have no way of knowing exactly when or how people began to speak, or in the case of sign language, when they began to sign or to gesture in a way that was complex enough for us to consider it to have been language,' Armstrong says."

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

O hai Evy Gruyaert!

Today I took my 11 year old to Activia's Hula Hoop World Record attempt at the Ostend beach. It was big fun! But exactly how many people showed up to try and hula hoop simultaneously during two full minutes? I went up and asked Evy Gruyaert - known from the still very popular "Start To Run" podcasts.

What the f*** should I do with my life?

Outsource your life changing decisions with http://wtfshouldidowithmylife.com/. Like Google's "I feel lucky", but for your life. I could do this.

My favourite motivational speech

"Thanks. Thanks for doin' this. Keep it real. Think slow. We should get through it just fine.
Low Rider, Donny. Donny? Low Rider."
#All my friends know the low rider. Coz the low rider is a little higher#
...
"Okay, let's ride."

Sometimes I fantasize about delivering this speech to my (imaginary) crew. Including the cue to that awesome War song.

Crying all the way to the bank

How Your Money Works on Vimeo: "How do you think your money works for you? Green City Energy and Musclebeaver give you the answer in this animation."

How Your Money Works from MUSCLEBEAVER on Vimeo.

Watched it twice with my 11 yr old. She asked a lot of difficult questions. But it was worth it.

Tête de con

GOMBINOSCOPE!! : "bienvenue dans le générateur de têtes de cons"

conversity.be wordmark - the result

conversity.be wordmarks, originally uploaded by CWillaerts.

Crowdsourced some rough ideas for the logo/word mark of my conversity.be project yesterday. A couple of hours later a good friend of mine (a professional designer) sent me these. I liked them immediately!

Thanks again for everyone who helped. Next step: building a corporate site in three languages and transfer my conversity.be blog. In Wordpress, of course. Almost there!

Polabook, or Faceroid

Artist Kevin Van Aelst (who, in spite of his name, was born in Elmira, New York) "created wall drawings made from polaroid photos taken of friends over the last decade. The shapes on the wall are pixel-by-pixel recreations of facebook icons for such actions as 'Add a Friend' and 'Join Group.' These images are about how fleeting and impermanent relationships and social circles can be, as many of the subjects in the polaroids have come and gone from my life. This contrasts with how simplified ideas such as friendship are online--as they are formed by a click and represented by a very simple pixelated icons."

Social Doc Templates: know your friends, please your mother

Microsoft's Google Docs killer Docs.com has a nifty feature: Social Doc Templates that help you "make docs instantly using your social info on Facebook with these doc templates."

FriendChart, for example, analyzes your friend mix based on gender, age, and location. Mine are mostly Male, between 31 and 40 years old, and living in Ghent or Antwerp.
The second Social Doc Template, Resume (Look sharp and stand out in the workforce.) is a bit weird, since you'd rather use pdf export of your LinkedIn profile for that.
But the third one solves one of my social problems of the last two years or so: my mother refuses to join Facebook but misses out a lot of the pictures like this. Being in the older female demographic also means she enjoys sending and getting heavy powerpoint slideshows (if you have a mom with a laptop and internet access, you know what I mean). Slideshow sucks your Facebook Photo Album into a Powerpoint slideshow - ready to go and send to your mother.

Hat tip to Kris Hoet.

Crowdsourcing my corporate logo: which one do you like best?

As you know, I had been documenting my ideas and your feedback around social media for businesses by blogging here and, after I got this new job at Sanoma Magazines Belgium, at the conversity blog.

But since "conversity.be" is a business unit, it needs a proper corporate site and a logo. Let's start with the logo: which one do you like best? And how would you improve it?
(I really like the bee/honey metaphor, by the way).

The Puss. The Octo-pus.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of How to tell the Birds from the Flowers and other Wood-cuts, by Robert Williams Wood.:

"The Octopus or Cuttle-fish!
I'm sure that none of us would wish
To have him scuttle 'round the house,
Like Puss, when she espies a mouse:
When you secure your house-hold pet,
Be very sure you do not get
The Octopus, or there may be
Domestic in-felis-ity."

This is almost 100 years old. Awesome never ages.

Being right is overrated

Doc Searls Weblog - On being wrong: "The trick in conversation is not just to listen, but to do two things that come hard for people with an unhealthy need for being in a state of rightness. One is to respect the other person as an original source of interesting (if not necessarily correct) things to say. The other is weigh without prejudice the substance of what the other person is saying. Neither, of course, comes easy. Both, however, are helpful."

Bear Switch

Between Bears on Vimeo is Eran Hilleli's graduation film at bezalel academy of art and design. He describes it as " a dept to my childhood and other lives i hope i lived. inspired by words of songs that i admire."
Original music by Ori Avni and Daniela Spector."

Take your time for this one. It is beautiful and mesmerising.

Between Bears from Eran Hilleli on Vimeo.

Win a Microsoft Xbox Kinect - sporty game included

I know this is technically a repost, but if you like hi-tech gaming consoles and keeping fit, this is for you: Activia (you know, the ones from the World Record attempt on 14 August in Ostend) is hosting a cool Facebook Contest. You can win an Xbox Kinect + 1 game. Kinect for Xbox 360 is a controller-free gaming and entertainment experience by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game platform. In stores only in November, but you can win one right now by answering two really simple questions in the life stream of the Facebook Page. The game is Your Shape: Fitness Evolved ("Burn calories while having fun like never before"). To give you an idea, this is what it looks like:

Contest ends on August 13.

Who's watching the Watchers?

Dictionary.com, "the world's largest and most authoritative online dictionary helps people get smarter any time, any place." According to an article in Wall Street Journal, they also allow 234 trackers to observe and remember people’s clicks, in order to build and sell detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. 168 of these trackers don't let users opt out, 143 of them might share information, 121 may collect financial health data, and 133 may keep information indefinitely. I don't like the use of "may" and "might" here! What do they actually do with these data? According to their own TOS, "Through cookies placed on your computer, third-party advertising networks may recognize you when you visit other sites and properties where they also place advertisements."

So what's the deal here: selling sensitive personal information to the highest bidder, being able to target advertising better, or something in between?

A text from your liver

Body Language: Wieden Kennedy New York Responds To PSFK Future Of Health Report - PSFK: "Body Language – a dynamic system combining wearable body sensors, a mobile phone app and a simple messaging system that facilitates an honest and informed dialogue between you and your body, giving you advice about what it needs and what to do. [...] The system could also respond to data from your social networks. For example, after observing several Foursquare check-ins the previous evening, you might get a text from your liver":

"I looked at foursquare... uhh, long night. Remember to drink plenty of water to avoid dehydration. It'll speed up recovery from your hangover."

And it's not just about the apps. Mobile devices can be used for self-tracking, automatically monitoring and logging your weight, caloric intake, heart rate, treatments, sleep patterns, condition and symptoms of, for example, depression, infactions, or high cholesterol.

Passionately Curious

Quote Book

Responsibility Scallop

Responsibility Scallop 2: "Artists need inspiration - Find yours in random CAPTCHA phrases"

Harness social currency to drive buzz

Hadn't used that one before. What's yours?

whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com

Hanging out to dry

1000 Awesome Things - #448 The smell and feel of bedsheets that dried in the sun: "Drift and dream into that crispy clean." Being able to hang the bed sheets out to dry in the wind is about the only thing I miss about living in the country. That, and having chickens. Having chickens and feeding them scraps is awesome. They are like ferocious little dinosaurs.

Food for thought

Really interesting: serial entrepreneur Koen Delvaux (blog, Twitter) is looking for career advice. I was the first one in a series of 20 he will take out for lunch and interview about work, internet, the economy, and good food.

20 Knappe Koppen. Inspirerende lunchmeetings over werk, internet, economie en lekker eten. Het resultaat verschijnt hier dagelijks als interview.

A Japanese workhorse in Versailles

Two years ago I went to see the Jeff Koons exhibition in Versailles. I remember there was some controversy in France: is it really a good idea to bring contemporary art into the halls of the Chateau of Versailles? (Of course it is - especially if it's kitschy, like Koons'.)
Today the Palace of Versailles has released a preview of its planned exhibition of art by one of my other favourite contemporary artists, Japanese workhorse Takashi Murakami. Last time I saw his work (in Brooklyn museum) many jaws dropped at the sight of "the artist’s sculptures of naked, anime-style figures ejaculating or jumping ropes made of breast milk". But judging from the pictures, the Versailles exhibition is going to be a little bit more subdued.

Murakami Versailles runs from 14 September To 12 December 2010 at the Château de Versailles.

Help break this world record, on 14 August in Ostend

The record for simultaneous hula hooping is currently set for 2,290 participants at Chung Cheng Stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on 28 October 2000. The idea is to break that world record on Saturday 14 August 2010 at the beach of Ostend. For this we need at least 2,300 people hooping at the same time for at least two minutes. No need to bring your own hula hoop - the event is sponsored by Activia and they will hand out thousands of them that day. TV personalities Evy Gruyaert and Julie Taton will be there too.
If you like the idea, "like" the Official Facebook page of this event. If you'll join me on 14 August, RSVP "yes" to the Facebook Event.
In the meanwhile: a little YouTube movie I made at Brussels Girl Geek Dinner #33 last month:

The Power of the Flower

YouTube - The Flower: "The Flower contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition."According to the United Nations (UN), cannabis "is the most widely used illicit substance in the world." In Belgium, there is no legal way of obtaining cannabis except if you grown your own female cannabis plant. In the U.S., the possession, usage, purchase, sale, and/or cultivation of marijuana is prohibited. Medical marijuana, however, is legal in 14 states, including; Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

Lost in time, like tears in the rain

BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels on Vimeo: "An experimental film in tribute to Ridley Scott's legendary film “Blade Runner” (1982) This film was made as a unique picture with a resolution of 60.000 x 60.000 pixels (3.6 gigapixels) It was made with 167,819 frames from 'Blade Runner'."

BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels from françois vautier on Vimeo.

Very meta, but a really cool idea!