Planblog

This is another session from CommunityNext that I think really stood out.

The Threadless project started as a hobby. The goal was never to turn it into money — the founders were simply interested in art.

Again, it’s people doing what they are passionate about and doing it very, very well, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell of skinnyCorp give a prime example of that. Their motto is: “If we’re not having fun, we’re done!” (their measuring metric: a fun scale).

Their four commandments are:

1. Allow your content to be created by its community (and by content they mean pretty much anything).
2. Put your project in the hands of its community.
3. Let your community grow itself.
4. Reward the community that makes your project possible.

I mean, think of how much fun it must be to be able to come up with stuff like this (at work, that is).

Watch the video here.

I found this panel at CommunityNext to be insightful, inspirational, and very entertaining. Gives a good glimpse into what I see is the spirit of Silicon Valley (or, in a way, the West Coast in general).

Bottom line: Do what you’re passionate about and give it your best shot!

The video is now on Youtube.

Panelists (from left to right):

• Sean Suhl, Suicide Girls
• Akash Garg, hi5
• Drew Curtis, Fark
• Markus Frind, PlentyofFish
• Max Levchin, Slide
• James Hong, HotorNot

Moderated by Guy Kawasaki.

By the way, I couldn’t find the original image that started it all on Fark’s website, but if you Google for “squirrel nuts” you get the idea. Go figure!

I’ll be attending the Deliberative Democracy in California conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA tomorrow and Saturday. Leaving now for a rainy drive down 101.

Man, miss a season and you’re completely out of the loop. Apparently, there is more than just one island, more new people keep showing up, as more backstories (or “pieces to the puzzle”) unfold. Problem is, I’m kinda lost. Oh wait, that’s the name of the series.

Innsbruck is the second city in Austria to join the Web Monday community. 11 people have signed up so far. Please help spread the word if you know anyone in that part of Europe who might be interested in the future of the web (and how to build it).

Vienna seems to be off to a good start, too, and with the recent Barcamp Klagenfurt getting rave reviews and all, maybe something is really going on in Austria with regard to that internet thing.

Welcome, everybody! Make yourselves at home.

Lars is doing a nice job (again) mindmapping FOWA London:

• Kevin Rose: Crowd Generated Media
  
• Last.fm - Lessons from the Building of the World’s Largest Social Music Platform
• Ben Holmes - Everything you need to know about venture capital

And plenty more.

Startupgermany has been a blog experiment I started almost a year ago. I wanted to dig into some of the issues and challenges related to “the future made in Germany” (e.g. education, economic growth, unemployment, social security, demographic changes, immigration, innovation, our place in Europe etc.), and how we Germans, as a society, manage to address them (or not, depending on how pessimistic you are):

• How do we want to live in the future?
• What do we need to do in order to get there?
• What are our strenghts, where do we need to get better, and what can we learn from others?

While I’m still very much interested in these questions (in fact, I believe they are quite essential), I have found that the blog has not been the right way to approach them. At least not the way I set it up. That and the fact that I have spent more time on other things over recent months has led to the blog’s being silent pretty much since August 2006.

So, time to bid this blog farewell. It will shut down some time over the next few weeks probably. I may have already found someone with a successor project, which I’m sure will make much better use of the domain.

I’m spending too much time reading all kinds of blogs, following certain keywords, trying to keep up with some of the interesting conversations that are going on all across the internet. It’s browsing the 800+ feeds in my feedreader (only 10 percent of which I actually read on a regular basis), picking the items that seem worth reading, then reading, then maybe bookmarking, or downloading any documents that may be referenced, and reading those, or otherwise processing all this information etc.

Problem is, it takes way too much time out of my day. It’s been bugging me for quite some time now, too. I guess I have to either set strict time limits or find better filters.

I’m on JoinR.  Feel free to join me.

Not that I need another social network (I don’t even know if it’s any good), but it’s from Germany so I’m biased.

They’ve been making good use of their blog (in German) leading up to the launch.

I’m at CommunityNext in Stanford today. And when I come back, I will monetize the living #$*! out of you, my dear reader community.

Any important issues I should look out for? Anything you’d like to ask the panelists? Let me know.