I am at the phone with my friend Asbjørn Følstad of SINTEF in Norway (The Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research). He asks about my recent trip to Ljubljana. I answer and also directs him to my blog where I have published my presentation and some images from my trip. He looks up eirikso.com while we’re still on the phone. Suddenly he says somethink like:

- “But, what!? That’s me!”
My immediate answer is “what are you talking about?”.
- “I am talking about that boat that is about to be run over by the large ferry”
- “That’s me and my friend out sailing last sunday”

Now that’s a bit of a coincidence! Mr. Følstad is an experienced sailor and could tell me that the situation was not too dramatic. He knows the water and the course of that ferry very well. Still, there wasn’t a lot of wind and the Crown of Scandinavia was closer than usual.

But the fact that I shoot that image from several hundred meters away totally at random and then we learn that it is a friend of mine on board. Improbabilities…

Then this happens:

Some minutes ago I recieve this comment on my post from Ljubljana:

Ana Says:
June 15th, 2007 at 1:27 pm e
Oh, by the way, the guy on a bicycle with a blue T-shirt is my schoolmate from grammar school, his name is Matjaz.

What should I say? There are about 300 000 people living in Ljubljana. And one of my readers know the person in this image. I was busy shooting something else when this nice combination of colour and people and motion struck the corner of my eye. Strange stuff.

And by the way. I do a bit of street photography. A lot of the images are not published on public sites like Flickr because I don’t like to publish images of people that I have photographed without asking. When the images are as nice as this one I use my right to publish images photographed on public places. If you find yourself in any of the images in my Flickr stream or here on eirikso.com and want to be removed please drop me a line.

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!