Whatever. It has come to the point where my trusted readers start sending me email wondering if I’m OK. So I simply wanted to tell you that I am completely fine. Unfortunately I haven’t even had time to announce my public presentations lately. The last one was Mediaforum in Strømstad.

Image: Lawrence Lessig is one of the persons interviewed in the movie I mention at the bottom of this article.

Last week I also had a quick trip to Stockholm. In addition to some meetings I attended a debate about rights management at the royal institute of technology. It wasn’t really a debate, because the panel in general agreed on most issues. But it turned out to be an interesting discussion about youth culture, sharing, creativity, privacy, freedom of speech, business models and the modern media world. I hope to get back with more from that debate.

After the discussion I was fortunate enough to have dinner with the panelists and some other very interesting people. Pirates, politicians, university people and content producers. One of them was Henrik Molkte. Together with others he is responsible for an excellent documentary about remix culture and copyright law: Good Copy, Bad Copy. It’s worth the hour. Watch it on the website or download it through BitTorrent and enjoy on your favourite device.

Unfortunately I have busy days ahead as well, but hang in there. I’ll not stop sharing interesting stuff here at eirikso.com.

So. We’re over at the new server. Now you can start commenting on all the stuff that’s not working. Files that I forgot to move. Plugins that I forgot to install.

Of course I hope everything works out fine. I’m back on Dreamhost, on a “Dreamhost PS”-based server. Meaning that I have my own protected space on one machine. Please let me know if you find my site slow or unstable. It shouldn’t be. At least not in the US. Depending on the traffic over the Atlantic it might be a bit slow here in Europe.

Also, use this post as an excuse to tell me what you would like me to write about! Or throw in a comment just to tell me that you’re out there… According to Feedburner more than 1000 people subscribe to this blog and according to Statcounter something between 1000 and 2000 users are visiting every day. A whopping 1.8 million users have been here since I started using Statcounter back in 2005. But the best motivation is still those good old comments from real readers!

When moving back to Dreamhost I also found that I have five pretty decent invitation codes if you consider them for hosting. The invitation codes will give:
- Up your plan features to 2TB disk and 20TB bandwidth!
- Give $150 off a 5-year signup or $200 off a 10-year signup!

But maybe you would want to wait a couple of weeks. So that I can share my experience with Dreamhost anno 2008 before you select them. They have some very user friendly functions and a very powerful control panel. One click installs, one click upgrades, one click google docs and google mail etc. But that’s all useless if they’re slow and unstable. I’ll get back here with my experience.

Anyway, if you want to use dreamhost right now, comment here and remember to put in a valid email in the form (not in the comment itself) and I’ll send you a code.

And by the way, this blog post is one of the shortest I’ve ever written. But I think it’s an important observation of where publishing is heading.

To give this headline a tiny bit of credibility I must add that it’s not me that says this. Eirikso.com is awesome according to Blogvaria. So now I have to list five awesome blogs as well. There are some rules, so group blogs like BoingBoing, Engadget, TUAW and TechCrunch are out… And because this blog is in english I’ll choose blogs in english. Sorry loRdx, Sverkeli, Espen, Andreas, Iacob and all the others… Here we go:

1. Presentation Zen
Fantastic blog about presentation skills and design. Look out for priceless comparisons and links to fantastic content. Not to talk about very good lectures.

2. Thomas Hawk’s digital connection
Fantastic photography, strong opinions and a lot to learn.

3. Buzzmachine
Jeff Jarvis talks about the media industry. Still very high quality. Still huge amounts of thoughtful analysis.

4. Seth Godin
Marketing guru and master of telling things clear and simple.

Instead, like a million organizations before them, defending the status quo is far more politically correct than change. So they stand back and let dinky startups with no natural advantages run like crazy.

From It (almost) always happens this way

5. Micropersuasion
Steve Rubel on how technology is revolutionizing media and marketing.

Naaaaah. That wasn’t too original. Big well known high quality blogs. These are essential, but what about the up and coming? The not so well known? Okay:

1. Happygolucky
Mr. Arnesen switched to English and shares thoughts on travel, photography and the internet. Pretty personal blog, but a lot of true marvels in there. Mr Everest up close, fantastic kite images and insane travel descriptions.

2. web 2.?
Even Aas-Eng on marketing and new media. About interesting campaigns and important business.

3. Herrklein
Lasse Klein designs fantastic lamps and tells you about television screens.

4. The Digital Society
You’ll not be overloaded with articles, but when Francis D’Silva writes something it’s good!

5. Jill/txt
Jill Walker on how people tell stories online. And so much more.

And why on earth haven’t you mentioned the truly excellent blog of Mr. Oyvind Solstad? Brilliantdays. Well, he is currently too busy publishing his exellent stuff over at NRKbeta. But no matter where that guy moves you should follow him.

So, Arnesen, Aas-Eng, Klein, D’Silva and Walker. Now you have to list your favourites. And you don’t have to do it twice, like I did here.

There are so many good blogs out there. I share stuff I find as I read it in my Google Reader Shared items. And please comment with stuff you find valuable.

I had some issues with the design I implemented earlier this summer so I went ahead and found a new one. Then I moved all the tailored code and spent some late evenings having fun with CSS, HTML and PHP. You should see the result in this blog right now.

Please click around and have a look. I still have some issues in Internet Explorer 6 (surprise!). If you use that browser I apologize. I will probably do some more adjustments, but the real solution is to switch to Firefox, Safari or Opera…

The current theme is based on a theme called Durable from Blaze New Media. Or, to be precise, it’s based on the widget ready version of that theme.

As you can see I have done quite a bit of adjustments and will probably keep experimenting. Feel free to comment on any errors, change requests etc.

And this article is an answer to the Norwegian comment here. He’s complaining about the fact that everything written on this blog isn’t perfect english.

Some background:
I am the author of this blog and I am Norwegian. Meaning that my native language is Norwegian. Meaning that I write better Norwegian than English.

But the main point of this web page is to share information and get in touch with people that have thoughts on digital media, marketing, technology and the other topics I cover. If I write in Norwegian I can reach about 10 million people. The 4.5 million native Norwegians and possibly some people from Denmark and Sweden.

When I write in English we’re talking a potential of about 1.8 billion.

Still, because I am Norwegian about 6% of my readers are from Norway. For a blog in English that’s more than average. But switching to Norwegian only would leave out 94% of my current readers.

I know that I can write more, faster and better in Norwegian. I could focus more on local issues. But as mentioned, that would leave out most of my current readers. Of course I wouldn’t do that.

And I love the fact that people comment and take part of the discussion. I have comments from people all over the world. Comments in perfect English from people in the US and UK. Comments in not-so-perfect English from people in Spain, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, Russia, Japan and you name it.

I love that. All the comments are an important part of this web page. So please keep commenting. Even if you don’t feel completely comfortable when you write in English. People understand your point. If they don’t understand it they ask. Other people will help you out by emphasizing your point. It’s no problem.

And, if you want a Norwegian blog with Norwegian comments I am publishing in that language over at NRKbeta.no. Some articles that are more or less a Norwegian version of articles I write here and some NRKbeta-only articles.

Keep reading, keep commenting. And please feel free to correct me when I write really bad English. That’s how I learn.

And for the statistics junkies. Here are the numbers for the last 30 days on eirikso.com:

Hi Eirik,

We noticed you reviewed our software on your blog. We’d like to thank you for taking the time to give our product a go and write about it.

If you have the time, could you tell us a bit more about the problems you had and what didn’t feel intuïtive to you. We’d certainly appreciate that as this kind of feedback is invaluable to us. We know the interface by heart after testing it for hours and hours… A fresh look on things always helps us to look at it from a different point of view.

Thanks again and good luck with your blog,

Maarten Bruyninckx & the iNuron team

This is a win-win-win-win-situation. I immediately think of iNuron as a serious company that listen to their customers. Chances that I remember them is instantly higher because of that mail. Chances that I write about them again (like right now…) is higher. And I will probably give them valuable feedback when I get back to the software and test it again.

I am not the New York Times or CNN, but I have between 800 and 900 subscribers on my RSS feed and thousands of unique visitors each week. If you have a quick look at this blog you will see that the content is mostly about media technologies and internet services. So, the people hanging out around here is probably pretty interesting for a company selling media server software.

And even better, the prize of that mail was a couple of minutes worth of writing. Cheap, effective and non-intrusive marketing if you ask me.

Some examples

I have experienced this a couple of times during my years as a blogger. Tim Cutting of Niveus media that immediately answered my pretty bad review of their remote control. Gibu Thomas of Sharpcast commenting on my review and communicating with my readers. Lucas of AmieStreet really listening and discussing their product and possible improvements on my blog. And other small signs of attention like Mary-Louise that works for Guy Kawasaki commenting and the quick “Thanks” from Jeff Jarvis.

And how do they do it?

Here are two (of many) solutions:

1. Follow the logs of your own web site. Look at the referrers. Suddenly you see that you have some traffic coming in from a strange place called eirikso.com or something similar. Check it out. If it’s a blog or a forum consider leaving a comment.

2. Subscribe to a search with your company and product names. Two places to do that could be Technorati or Feedster. Learn how to use an RSS reader and add a search feed. For the guys from iNuron this search at Feedster will always keep them up to date on blogs mentioning their product. Or this one at Technorati.

For corporate people that only check their email it is also easy to add such a feed to Outlook or run it through another service that can give you an email alert.

If more people knew this maybe companies like Lefdal would have commented on this one etc…

Now you have no excuse. Join the conversation.

Yes, all the images and my presentation is online. Here’s the short story:

I just returned from a very nice weekend in Ljubljana where I was the keynote speaker at Blogres 2007. A very successful Slovenian conference on blogging. Huge amounts of credit to Renderspace for the arrangement and the hospitality and the aucience for interesting discussions.

I go to a lot of conferences and very often they are influenced by the fact that people send senior workers and leaders to them because they have been with the company for a long time and deserve a trip to a conference. At Blogres 2007 it was a young, interested and enthusiastic audience. Mostly Slovenian bloggers, but also representatives from different companies and Slovenian media. I was also interviewed by Slovenian national TV and a Slovenian magasine. I’ll get back to that if I manage to dig up some links.

After my keynote speech I also attended Nicolas Fermont’s interesting presentation about creating a snowboard community and Michael Manske’s funny and oh-so-familiar presentation about how foreign media cover Slovenia. I am from a small country myself and could really understand the frustration.

In general I found Ljubljana a very nice place to visit. Slovenians seem more organized than the Italians and less eastern european than the Croatians (and don’t get me wrong, I really like both Italians and Croatians as well).

People in Ljubljana in general speaks very good english, they have excellent (and for a Norwegian very cheap) food and beverages.

Slovenia is even smaller than Norway regarding population. They’re about 2 million and we’re about 4.5 million. But there are a lot of similarities. I could understand a lot of the challenges regarding what you face when you’re small country with a small language and your own very special culture.

And, Slovenia is nearly as high tech as Scandinavia. More than 1.7 million mobile phones and pretty good coverage of broadband.

And of course I shouldn’t forget arts and nice architecture…

I have published my presentation on SlideShare with links to relevant articles.

I also snapped a lot of images. Some from the conference and quite a bit from the city of Ljubljana. You find the complete Flickr set here.

I am verry sorry for the fact that I took the good weather to Norway when I left. I had a fantastic weather during my stay, but it started raining the second I entered the taxi to the airport.

But don’t be afraid. I’ll come back to Slovenia. That’s for sure!

A troll is a fearsome member of a mythical anthropomorph race from Scandinavia. Their role ranges from fiendish giants – similar to the ogres of England (also called Trolls at times, see Troller’s Gill) – to a devious, more human-like folk of the wilderness, living underground in hills, caves or mounds. In Orkney and Shetland tales, trolls are called trows, adopted from the Norse language when these islands were settled by Vikings.

Wikipedia on trolls

Because I’m from Norway I grew up with stories about trolls. From the really bad ones to the more or less cosy ones. It’s a part of our culture. So for a Norwegian it’s interesting that this word is also used about the irritating people that comment on your blog, replies to forum threads and in general use the internet simply because they want to say bad things. The internet trolls:

In Internet terminology, a troll is someone who intentionally posts derogatory or otherwise inflammatory messages about sensitive topics in an established online community such as an online discussion forum to bait users into responding

There are a lot of different trolls out there. I don’t have many of them here at eirikso.com. I’ve met them during discussions at Digg.com and various forums. Usually I stop them with two very different approaches.

1. Some of them can be stopped or made more serious by confronting them. By simply joining the conversation. Those are the ones that post a comment on my blog simply saying that I am an idiot because I forgot a detail or whatever. Very often they can be turned into intelligent and contributing people by simply answering. If you join the conversation they tend to stop or they come back with a more serious comment. Often with an apology related to their first comment.

2. But you also have the trolls that simply want a fight. The best way to silence them is to not take the bait. Silence will stop them. Of course it is difficult to know wich ones that will come back with a more serious response and wich ones that will love the fact that you answered and come back with even worse comments.

Cory doctorow has an interesting article about internet trolls over at information week:

You can deal with trolls in many ways. Many trolls are perfectly nice in real life — sometimes, just calling them on the phone and confronting them with the human being at the other end of their attacks is enough to sober them up. But it doesn’t always work: I remember one time I challenged someone who’d been sending me hate mail to call me up and say the words aloud: the phone rang a moment later and the first words out of my troll’s mouth were, “You f*cking hypocrite!” The conversation declined from there.

(Via Thomas Hawk, image from Garder Troll)