Leo Xavier

Como eu vejo os números das Eleições Presidenciais 2011

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:08:00 -0500

E como eu acho que toda a gente, incluindo a lei eleitoral (e a constituição que a rege), os deviam ver.

Nenhum candidato conseguiu que 50% dos portugueses lhe desse um voto de confiança.

Isso implicaria que neste cenário se repetissem as eleições, e que os mesmos candidatos (ou outros) fizessem o esforço necessário para conseguirem os 50% - nem que para isso tivessem que reinventar a maneira de se fazer política (wouldn’t that be something…).

E se isso implica agilizar o recenseamento eleitoral, eliminar eleitores-fantasma, melhorar condições para votantes no estrangeiro… hey, grande oportunidade! Eu ajudo se precisarem.

Admito que não estudei o tema a fundo e pode-me estar a escapar algum impeditivo político, social, histórico, etc. - mas no mínimo os votos brancos deviam ser contabilizados.

Spreadsheet com os dados

Auto-refresh on news sites

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 10:54:00 -0500

I won’t go into details as to why auto-refreshing a news site every 5 minutes is bad - these two posts (from 2002 and 2009) sum it up very well.

In terms of quality everyone loses: users, advertisers, and in the long run the newspaper itself. And everyone who cares about big numbers - instead about what they represent qualitatively - wins.

Remember: this basically means that if you leave your favorite news site open for an hour, it will automatically refresh 12 times, counting as 12 pageviews and serving 12 times the ads - that no-one views.

So I did a little state of the nation in terms of auto-refresh, with a special emphasis on portuguese news sites. Sadly, it seems that we’re the top auto-refreshers when compared to major international news sites.

The graph:

Spreadsheet available here

Notes:

Google News, a site that has arguably the most up-to-date content from this list, and is the only one that doesn’t serve ads, refreshes every 15 minutes. So the argument for a standard would be: if your news site is extremely frequent in updates and doesn’t cheat advertisers with it, every 15 minutes should be enough.
There are tons of techniques to update content only, without serving “blind” ads or counting fake page-views. From user activity detection to small notices inviting the user to refresh the page, there is no excuse not to auto-refresh every X minutes without any rules.
The Wall Street Journal handles auto-refresh in two ways: the whole homepage reloads every 20 minutes, but in the meanwhile breaking news, headlines and (from time to time) ads reload every minute.
The O Jogo website doesn’t refresh, but judging by their code and web skills I guess it’s because they never thought about that option. Otherwise they would have implemented auto-refresh right away.

9 years of Quodis

Wed, 05 May 2010 06:14:00 -0400

Today Quodis celebrates it’s 9th year of existence. For me personally that represents most of my recent life - from 17 to 26 years of age. Even though I only finished my studies two years ago, and arguably the first few years were only spent with a part-time commitment, looking back I know that every day had a role in shaping what Quodis is today.

I remember an infinity of episodes, good and bad decisions, successes and back-falls, and I know that I learned and evolved with each one of them. I guess that’s what they call “learn by doing”, which is the biggest gift of having your own company and having no one telling you what’s right or wrong.

Sometimes I wonder if I could have gone faster. I usually take quite some time before taking risky decisions - I still remember how daring it seemed when I first rented an office space and hired someone. It was a huge leap. But it just seemed right then - and not sooner nor later. I guess that’s what they call “right timing”, which is even more relevant when you take decisions by yourself - you learn that your gut is king.

I love sustainability - and I’m not talking about growing vegetables in my garden. I love not having to rely on external capital, borrow money or have to bet other people’s wealth on something I believe in. I know this makes me incompatible with and endless amount of business sectors and methods, but I wouldn’t be happy otherwise. Although we have some borrowed capital for cash-flow-survival-purposes (yes, we too have an average of over 60 days to get paid).

At Quodis we’ve been growing at steady and solid pace. We’re far from where we want to be in some years time, and that’s good: we have challenges ahead that keep us - or at least me - dreaming and moving forward and waiting for the right timing to take the next step, without having to sacrifice something I might regret in the future. I guess that’s what they call “keeping it real”, and I’m really glad we didn’t take the baits (and there are lots of them around) to make evil, short-sighted and money-oriented decisions.

And as we work to turn our next dream into reality, we’re having a hell of a good time celebrating another year of Quodis. Thank you to everyone who took a part in this enterprise. I could have done it without you, but it would have gone terribly terribly wrong.

Quodis - Est. 5 May 2001

Ramblings

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:37:15 -0400

In no particular order:

Ricardo Mestre has an excellent event once every month: Green Tone Bits, now on it’s 13th edition. It’s a DJ session promoting tons of absolutely free and gorgeous music, at Ogâmico bar in Lisbon, with free live stream on the Internet. And he keeps an archive online of all music he ever played, free for you to download (yes, free. Here’s why).
SHiFT 2010 happened despite volcanic activities. It’s a conference about lot’s of stuff, but mainly about inspiring you to do better. Although I didn’t stay long, from what I hear it went very well and put together a lot of people and ideas during two days at a challenging but inspiring setting at Teatro Aberto in Lisbon. Congratulations to the team, all my respect.
UX Lx (love the logo) is upcoming. Bruno Figueiredo is doing a hell of a job setting up a major professional conference about User Experience in Lisbon (at FIL) out of nothing, attracting professionals from all over the world - both to speak and to attend. Great sponsor lineup, including portuguese companies. Sadly I won’t be able to attend.
I hate these strikes we’re having in Portugal. Nothing against the right to strike, but everything against the abusive use of that right. The only positive effect? I loved the way traffic turned into chaos the day trains were on strike: an excellent proof of what the city would be like without everything that has been done to keep cars out of it (parking fees and fines, closed streets, more mass transport systems, buss lanes, etc etc).
Since I’m hating stuff: some weeks ago two days of semi-national-holidays were announced around the pope’s visit to Portugal. That already was bad enough (and I won’t even talk about the economic timing). Today the government announced all schools will be closed the day the pope is in Lisbon. I do not understand, really.
Back to the good stuff: betahaus, an awesome coworking space in Berlin I hope to visit soon, is going to promote a betalab in Lisbon during the month of May. Together with Cowork Lisboa these are all really great news for the freelance and micro-startup community in Lisbon. In the meanwhile all desks at Liberdade 229 are taken :)
I was checking some facts, and it turns out that the domain quodis.com was registered on May 5th 2001. That will be 9 years ago in some days. 9 years since I started this adventure. For the first time we’re going to celebrate this date (albeit in a small circle), and it feels good!

Do what you do best. Do it now.

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:39:00 -0400

Some months ago a good friend of mine convinced me to have a long Q&A session with a group of 30 students she’s teaching at a Design course.

In between the more practical and curious information exchanged with the bright students, at one point I think I gave them a really valuable advice, at least for those that consider themselves to be creative.

It’s nothing new, and tons of people said it before - but so many still seem to be miles away from it. If it would be an exercise, It would go something like this:

For a moment, ignore your context - academic, social, familiar, etc. It shouldn’t keep you from following your true passion.
Look at what you really love doing. Writing, painting, designing, programming, talking, collecting, travelling… what-ev-er, as long as it’s something that creates value.
Do it more often. Even more often. In your free time. With nobody paying for it. Just do it. Get better and better and do it even more. It shouldn’t bother you, because after all you love doing it!
Thanks to an ever more transparent and global society, somebody will find your work and love it because it’s more genuine and mature than most of your counterparts.
Voilá, you have the chance to get paid what you do best and love to do the most.

It’s only a hypothetical scenario, and the path is never this smooth, and it requires tons of trial and error. But be sure of this: if (for example) you’re a graphic designer, and write an application to a webdesign company saying

“I’m really eager to start doing webdesign, I love it, I’m ready to learn from you”,

what I read is

“I’m surely not in love with webdesign, because if I would be, I’d have tons of stuff done on my free time already, and wouldn’t be waiting for someone to pay me and teach me this, and this is NOT my future passion”.

Do, do, do what you love. If not at your dayjob, then on your freetime. You won’t get good at anything - much more at something you really love - unless you do it for yourself. Only then you might get a dayjob where you get paid to do what you do best and what you love doing the most.

Audio recording of my 20-minute participation at Talks 2.0 at...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:14:42 -0500

Audio recording of my 20-minute participation at Talks 2.0 at FEUP, Porto. Link to meeting ticker

Talks 2.0 - Lesson learned

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:09:00 -0500

Photo credit: Nelson Reis. That’s me on the right.

Yesterday I did a short 15-minute talk about the motivation of being an entrepreneur at the Talks 2.0 event in Porto, Portugal, for an audience of 350 students and young professionals.

In a line-up of 9 speakers I was second. And that made me nervous as hell: the audience was tough, clapping was strictly formal. The welcome notes were all cold, formal and some times even political - and almost all the speakers had either a suit or a blazer on.

I also quickly realized that almost all of the speakers were entrepreneurs with experience in raising capital - which is sort of a different league for me and my humble experience of growing slowly and in a financially sustainable way (or at lesat that’s what I try to do).

Here’s why I was nervous: I had prepared 15 minutes with an hippie, almost esoteric approach on the motivations, spreading of opportunities and transparency in the way I try to choose my paths. I had prepared a speech where I would make clear that

I have no rules - everyone has it’s own reasons and motivations to be an entrepreneur and build something
Lies attract liers, honesty attracts honest people
We are free to build our own context, build our own luck
We are like farmers, spreading opportunities like seeds
You should be true to yourself, to who you are
The motivation to build a company should be true to who you are
The company should be true to itself and those who work there
The more transparent your company is, the easier you’ll attract people and clients that like it for what it really is - and for what it does best
And so on… (audio will - I hope - be available soon)

While the first speaker was up there and sharing his ideas about success and failure at his business, I kept thinking if I shouldn’t change what I had planned. Maybe I should be more practical. Talk about numbers, rules, business experience, how to treat your clients, etc. And be formal. Hell, if I could I’d geven run to the next store and get a blazer.

I took five minutes to get the answer to that: don’t change a thing. And suddenly it was as clear as water: just apply what your speech praises, be true to yourself and what you are. I gave the speech just as intended. And it went REALLY well - not just for me.

Never I had gotten so positive feedback (both through twitter and at the coffee break) from so many people. What really hit me was this one guy that came up to me and asked: “How did you do that - what is the trick to be so convincing and transparent, and transmit a message so well on the stage?”. You know the answer: be true to yourself and to what you are.

Sidenotes: Excellent organization. Both young and experienced, mostly inspiring speakers. Full house for a saturday afternoon. A shame I couldn’t make it to the networking dinner.

#cp #fail

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:50:00 -0500

Péssimo serviço da CP. Chego à campanhã, leio “Circulação suspensa IC e Alfas”. No horário de partida mantém-se tudo normal. Pergunto na bilheteira, dizem-me “pelas 20:30, mas já n vendemos bilhetes” (guess why). Na plataforma, cheia de gente, o plcar diz a hora original. Até chegar a hora. Aí atrasa dois minutos. E a cada 2 mins atrasa mais 2 mins - de maneira que parece ser sempre iminente.

Decido investigar. Volto à estação, vejo que há um IC por chegar de lx. Chegada prevista dali a 1 hora. Portanto já sabem que nunca vai ser antes.. vou outra vez à bilheteira. “Não sabemos de nada - isso gostava eu de saber”. Pergunto se é o mesmo comboio que está por chegar: “Sim é, e ainda tem que se fazer a limpeza”.

Reparo que nas chegadas a chegada desse comboio vai também sendo atrasada de depois em dois minutos. Finalmente a voz anuncia: “Por motivos de temporal, atraso imprevisto - assim que possível daremos mais informações”. That’s it. Vim para o café, encontrei uma tomada escondida no piso superior.

A aventura continua.

Há tantas, tantas maneiras de melhorar a experiência do cliente nesta situação que o que me pasma é como conseguiram não implementar nenhuma única delas.

UPDATE: O comboio vindo de Lisboa lá chegou duas horas depois, surgiram os primeiros sorrisos de esperança. Saíram os passageiros, e desapareceu na escuridão. Still no feedback, nenhum anúncio, nada. Pensei que tivessem dito “assim que possível daremos mais informações”. Guess not.

Meia hora depois chega o comboio, e acaba a aventura. Ninguém, em momento algum, pediu desculpas ou explicou o que se passou. Sei que São Pedro é o culpado pelo tempo. Mas pela (falta de) comunicação com os clientes não é de certeza.

Motivation for potential entrepreneurs

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:18:00 -0500

If you’d have to listen to me talking for 15 minutes ~~you’d have enough of hearing me after 5~~ about the motivations to start your own business to an audience of students interested in the matters of entrepreneurship:

what would you like to hear?
what would you want to say?

Suggestions very welcome. My first ideas are:

If you’re not already motivated, don’t force it - go do something else, there’s tons of other stuff you’ll be naturally motivated for
Don’t imitate other life stories: every entrepreneur and every start up has it’s own DNA and reason to exist
Set goals, ones that you are really very passionate and naturally motivated about. by default they will be hard to achieve
You don’t have to explain yourself. Even with all the books and talks, you’re still one of a kind, and either you know it’s right or don’t
I love bullet points
More ideas?

The event is on the 27th at TALKS 2.0 in Porto, Portugal

How to be honest

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:44:41 -0500

Don’t lie

Hiring again

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:03:00 -0400

Just finished an afternoon with three interviews for someone special to join our Quodis team. So much I can tell: all of them are great people and together make the best set of talent I ever had to choose from.

All of them share a great passion to visit new places and learn new techniques (sort of the same thing, isn’t it?), and they are all extremely autodidact and multidisciplinary. Plus, they all share the same passion for music - not sure if that’s a coincidence. Seems like I hit the jackpot: from the over 40 applications I got, at least the three I chose for an interview are great matches.

Another big plus: two of them actually applied to Quodis (and exclusively to Quodis) because of our reputation as a place to get some great work done while maintaining a unique team with a super working and experimentation environment. That makes me extra happy and increases the challenge to keep it that way.

If I could, I’d probably hire at least two of them.

End of a chapter: The Star Tracker

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:30:00 -0400

I’ve received some questions about the recent announcement that The Star Tracker’s new IT platform will be developed by our friends over at log consulting, instead of my company Quodis that did the original development (in sweet old ASP 3.0).

We never knew TST would grow to have this kind of attention, and when it did, Quodis transfered its share of TST to the newly founded company Ixion, where I was a co-founder. As time went by and things at Quodis changed (focus on clients, SaaS, new partner, new mindset) it became clear that rewriting TST in a new language (be it RoR or PHP or or or) was a challenge that would completely take our time and focus in a direction we do not want our teams’ focus to be set.

In the meanwhile a new purpose and context for TST emerged in the hands of Tiago Forjaz: Fundação Talento, a project to promote portuguese talent around the world. At this point I decided to commit all my focus and resources to Quodis, donating my share of TST to Fundação Talento and leaving Ixion behind, and convincing everyone that we needed a new IT partner to keep developing TST.

I was closely involved in the process of choosing this new IT company, and still maintain an active role in IT advisory for TST. Quodis currently still does The Star Tracker’s hosting and maintenance, and we will work hard to help the guys at log prepare a smooth transition to the new platform. From there one, I will once and for all have no practical ties to TST, other than the obviously great memories and experience I gathered throughout these 2 years, together with a Mashable Open Web Award and 30.000 users from over 140 countries.

Novo slogan da Pepsi em Portugal baseado na análise ao...

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:29:06 -0400

Novo slogan da Pepsi em Portugal baseado na análise ao comportamento de 95% do mercado português com a marca. Credit a alguém que deu esta ideia na mesa de almoço do último Barcamp PT em Coimbra - não me lembro quem!

Plataforma "Camões" para controlar os alunos com Magalhães

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:27:45 -0400

O @jneves twittou sobre este artigo no Expresso, em que algumas pessoas defendem que “Se cada criança tiver um Magalhães na sala de aula”, explica esse responsável, “são 20 computadores que ali estão de costas para o professor, sem ele saber o que é que os alunos estão a fazer”.

E que portanto não ter o “Camões” instalado em todos os Magalhães torna-os inúteis e em ferramentas lúdicas (leia-se perigosas) nas salas de aula. Não conhecendo bem nem o Camões nem o Magalhães, eis o que sinto: em vez de os professores perderem tempo a controlar 20 alunos em simultâneo e a tirar-lhes toda e qualquer privacidade, que tal focarem-se em darem tarefas que não deixam sequer espaço para fugirem à matéria durante as aulas?

Se um aluno acabar o exercício mais cedo, porque não deixá-lo navegar livremente e com toda a privacidade na web, ou jogar os seus jogos preferidos? Afinal qual é o nosso objectivo: que estejam uma hora a estudar, ou que estudem aquilo que tem a estudar? Resultado ou aparência?

Não sendo sendo nem pouco mais ou menos especialista em pedagogia, sei que irei sempre premiar resultados e eficácia, e não apenas os que “marcam o ponto” ficando uma hora a fazer um exercício (ou a fazer nada) sem pensarem em maneiras criativas de o resolver mais rápido e com menos esforço.

Se os alunos tem a aula inteira para utilizar o Magalhães como ferramenta lúdica, das duas uma: ou não estão a cumprir as tarefas que lhes foram pedidas e sofrem as consequências na hora da avaliação, ou então o professor não lhes está a dar suficiente que fazer porque está mais preocupado em garantir que fiquem uma hora sem utilizar o Magalhães para outras coisas.

Bom, e depois disto decidi fazer uma pesquisa sobre a empresa que está a desenvolver e vender (bem caro… 40/aluno/mês, por confirmar) o Camões, a Microfil. E fiquei ainda mais assustado com a ideia. Alguém pode confirmar algumas das acusações abaixo ou contextualizar melhor? No transparencia-pt.org apenas encontro duas referências inofensivas.

7 medidas para o Magalhães de Ouro?
Microfil - As Tecnologias de Desinformação
Tecnológica-fantasma da SLN chegou a deter a portuguesa Microfil
Jornal de Negócios
Judiciária investiga António Nunes
Novabase

ideia fórum with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Biz Stone in Lisbon

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:06:00 -0400

I was lucky to be invited to the conference promoted by the portuguese i newspaper at the Museu do Oriente in Lisbon on June 24th, in the context of their idea promotion. Lucky because otherwise I most certainly would have not paid ~700 Eur to get a ticket - regardless of the event’s quality, which, I must say, was very good. Probably that’s why there was only a half-full room.

The conference was split into 2 x 2 hours, the first being dedicated to Nassim Nicholas Taleb (yeah I know, nice website - but read the last sentence), challenged by four major portuguese entrepreneurs, including from two national banks, and moderated by the newspapers director, Martim Avillez Figueiredo.

It was a very interesting debate, starting with the black swan theory and ending with practical ideas of how to prevent big corporations - specifically banks - from failing and having catastrophic consequences for the society. In a nutshell, everyone agreed that greed, lack of ethics and lack of effective regulation is responsible for the current situation and part of the solution.

“Sort of a no-brainer”, you’ll think - and I agree, but the interesting part was actually observing the tensions of these heavy-weights on the stage and watching their expressions and body language when defending themselves or attacking someone else.

Taleb also insisted on the idea that “if you want to take a risk, don’t play risks with banks”, since that is something like a critical service for our system. Two sentences I remember: “You can more easily fool one with billions than with thousands”, and “You can more easily fool a group of people than one single individual”.

The second 2 hours were dedicated to Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone, moderated by the newspapers co-director André Macedo and challenged by Elvira Fortunato, António Câmara and Paulo Querido. Biz Stone sure has a superstar status but delivered not more than the predictable. He is clearly in neutrality mode, and although you could take some lessons of what was said, it was more of a fact-check and than an inspiration or any other mind-blowing experience.

There was only little time for intervention by Biz’s challengers - most of it was spent explaining what twitter is (starting with the basic “why 140 characters?” question) and its evolution. Which makes sense in an audience where only a hand-full of people knew what South by Southwest is, and not many more actually use twitter on a daily basis. The usage of the #ideiaforum tag on twitter was at least disappointing.

Elvira Fortunato had little time to intervene (and she did admit not having a twitter account), António Câmara made a point by explaining how - even tough being harder - you can build an IT-based startup in Portugal and how twitter is a great marketing tool, and Paulo Querido brought in some numbers about twitters (supposedly lack) of growth in Portugal that were sort of useless to the debate, and rather felt like a necessity of giving some answer to the moderators question of “what might be twitters biggest weakness”. Yeah.. I can see mashable’s headline already, “Twitter’s growth in Portugal stopped… shuts down worldwide operations”.

Contrarily to the first 2 hours, this time there was some nice time for Q&A, and I did get a chance to ask about the necessity of not focusing on revenue long enough to achieve a critical mass of usage that, only then, allows you to discover previously unimagined revenue models. It was a sort of “yes, I agree, and it depends” question to him, but I still got an interesting 5-minute answer.

Thanks i for the excellent organization and setup. There was also a free live stream on their website (you can also watch the whole conference on video here) which is very rare for our standards - again thanks. Only negative points are some cast choices that could have been better (not sure Joe Berardo was relevant, and clearly there’s a lack of good Web-oriented entrepreneurs and journalists to take stage), and the tickets were way to pricey.

Democracy again - let's do this!

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:47:00 -0400

Ok.. I’ve been as good as dead in the last few months - if you measure my hearbeat by my blog activity. But my brain is going bananas with, you guessed it, web-democracy.

So here’s the deal: after years of thinking about this topic I yesterday stumbled upon O’Reilly’s strong efforts on this topic, mostly concentrated on Septembers Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit, which - if I get the money for it - I will really love to attend. And I saw a bunch of institutions and platforms going in this direction - mainly in the US.

Some of you heard about my ideas during this Spring’s BarCamp in Coimbra, Portugal, and having regional elections in Portugal at the end of this year, but not only because of that, I think the time has come to put my money (my time, that is) where my mouth is.

So, dear summer: you won’t be about holidays, but about trying as hard as I can to bring to life this weird project I just can’t get out of my head. And heck, I’ll even give it a try on Ruby on Rails, which I started to learn last week (so far so good, ‘though it’s a huge jump coming from ASP 3.0).

It’ll be something that promotes a closer relation between citizens and deciders. That focuses on democratic decisions, and not about its’ discussion (for which we have tons of other platforms). That promotes transparency and accountability, and rewards intelligence and seriousness. And that is not focused on politics, but rather on decisions. But then again, “Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.” (wikipedia of course), so I guess yeah - it’s about true politics.

And if it does just that, I’ll live happy for another year. Will keep you posted on this, wish me luck!

Payment day!

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:00:27 -0400

Don’t know if this is just a Portuguese cultural issue, but if you run a business on this beautiful peace of land by the Atlantic, you probably have been through the same problem: clients tend to delay payments.

By delay I mean paying in three instead of one month, or worse. So there we have it, the whole system is setup to punish (cash-flow-wise) those who pay when due, and enrich those who have the most aggressive and nasty techniques to delay payments to keep cash (without interests) on their side.

Had I known in advance how bad payers some of my clients are, I wouldn’t have done business with them. I’d rather have good payments done on time, tough slightly smaller values, than bigger ones coming late.

Why the system doesn’t auto-regulate, in the sense of bad payers = bad reputation = bad business? a) Because everyone is an accomplice in the crime, it’s a loop, b) Because there’s not enough transparency for it to become a reputation issue for a company.

So I’ve made clear I know how to complain. Now let me try to be part of the solution (besides trying, as good as possible, to pay everything on its due date in my own company)

Plan A

You know those “ISO” company quality certifications? How about one of those, but with a clearer and better brand, for all those who pay on time? This symbol could then be proudly displayed by good companies, and bad payers would implicitly be denounced. Build an online catalog/search to see who has the badge and who doesn’t, and voilá.

Plan B

Knowing that plan A needs a lot of logistics, money and good will, why not just build up a website for corporate reviews. Every company has a profile, and you just share your experience doing business with them, and how fast they do or do not pay. Sure, we would have to make sure there is no abuse, and that reviews are only worth for themselves. But that could be up and running in a week, and potentially build momentum to push for plan A.

Anyone?

Microinformation

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:52:00 -0400

Most of you web-addicts might be going through the same process as I am: suddenly days, sometimes weeks, go by without me checking back to my google reader. Paying regular attention to twitts from the right people, keeping an eye on facebook and having regular conversations at your geek-filled workplace will do the trick.

Those are our social filters to make sure we only end up reading the titles (I’m not even talking about their body anymore, google reader was great at allowing me to just browse all the blog’s titles) of the posts that might be relevant to us.

Main reasons are the bigger and bigger flow of information and the speed at which we can read information. I can’t remember the last time I read a long article online, and barely the last time I read something longer than a page on paper.

That’s also because everything is real-time. It’s becoming rare that an event occurs during a few days, we don’t know about it, and then have one article from one source compiling all the events necessary information in the way we like it, giving relevance to the aspects we care about.

Now we read about the event (be it a conference, a war or an election) in real-time, from multiple sources, that already act as filters to make sure we are only informed about the aspects we care about, leaving out all the paragraphs we would skip in a longer article.

Which helps killing bad journalism with crappy reports, but also sort of kills the role of a journalist that only reports on facts, completely unbiased. There’s real-time reporting from our social network for that! Long texts only make sense if they add something new to the facts: opinion. Which is great, as long as it isn’t hidden as “factual reporting”.

Unless there are opinions in a text, it is just an outdated way of transmitting information.

Direct Democracy, Socially Responsible Web

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:13:00 -0400

Shouldn’t the web help us to better execute our role as citizens? It barely does… don’t get me wrong, I love all the reactive twitts to what’s wrong and right. We all love to complain and debate, twitt and blog.

But what tools are there to actually get things decided and done in your community, city or country? Last time I got involved into something it was using the now-mostly-disregarded online petitions.

It’s amazing how egocentric we all get (and rightly so), expecting that for every opinion we shout, somebody else will listen and act upon it. This will never happen, so at least we should be able to make a point by getting together with like-minded people. The more you are on the same side, the bigger the chance to make a difference.

We understood that the web is not just about reading, but more about sharing information. Now, what about deciding, organizing and actually doing things we all should be doing as citizens? I currently can’t see the web offering enough tools (or maybe it’s users don’t offer enough will?) to go this way.

Notes

This post being just another one about the thoughts that lead me to thinking about ways to build a collaborative decision-making platform, where, based on direct democracy and proxy voting, you get to actually make a difference as a citizen.
Thanks “asd@asd.com” for your comment on my previous post on this row. You are right about the concerns of power abuse - I think the solution is to be absolutely transparent, as in “all votes are public no matter what”. Or at least close to that. Because corruption != transparency

About Hiring

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:16:41 -0400

Some bullet-point-love on what I’ve retained both from my experience and my casual readings on the topic. All of them apply (at least) for a small, young and creative startup without intentions to grow too much.

You’ll want to attract talent, not run after it
Until you don’t have the team-spirit, scale and identity to do that, some out-of-the-box ads are the way to get the out-of-the-box talent’s attention
An Interview is a two-way communication. You have to sell the opportunity and see if the person falls in love with what you have to offer (I’m not talking money here). If not, it’s not worth forcing the motivation
An Interview is not about the CV. Actually, I don’t even look at CV’s anymore. With designers, a quick glimpse at the portfolio will do it, with developers, it’s about feeling the passion and ideas.
Hire those who you imagine as potentially becoming your friends
Hire those who you respect and admire
Hire those who will bring a challenge to your company - if they don’t, than it’s because they will bring nothing new
Usually half of the people you hire are failures and will have to leave - accept that
And the obvious: answer to all applications, and make every interview an opportunity to exchange ideas and knowledge. It’s a small world!