One of these Days

One of these days, I'll go through my Blogger console and just hit "Publish" on every one of those unpublished drafts I've been nursing. Many of them lack just one final insight, a few just lack a little bit of polish. No reason to pull a Hank Moody [*] on you guys.

Just post it or nurse it to quality? That is here the question.

[*] And by Hank Moody, I'm referring to writer's block, not bad parenting or tooling around in a Porsche.

Experiment: Positive Thoughts on Posterous

I've started an Experiment: I now have a Posterous blog at gaborcselle.posterous.com where I'm going to try to post one inspiring / uplifting quote a day (Plus random photos from my iPhone).

Being an entrepreneur is hard because it's a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs. Without any substantial or factual change at all, you'll feel awesome one hour, and awful the next. Sometimes it's enough to just load one positive thought into your brain's state and it'll all work out fine.

Many of the quotes I'll post might be lifted straight from Barack Obama, Paul Graham, VentureHacks, Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work, or something that a speaker at YCombinator might have said.

Mail me any good quotes you might find - my email is on my homepage.

Why did I choose Posterous? Because Garry Tan is a cool guy and because Posterous lets you blog via email. And everyone knows how much I like email.

Stay subscribed to this blog, though - this is where I'll be posting original thoughts and content.

So - here it is: gaborcselle.posterous.com

BlogCampSwitzerland Roundup

I went to BlogCampSwitzerland today, a BarCamp-like unconference about blogs. It was really crowded! I guess I underestimated the number of Swiss bloggers who would show up at an event like this.

One interesting session was Bruno Giussani's talk about BondyBlog. During the French riots in the banlieues, a group of Swiss journalists went to one of these suburbs and blogged about the daily lives of people there. Eventually, they handed over the blog to some locals they trained in blogging. The blog has since become the voice of the 'other France'. A great story about the citizen media.

Bruno had a couple of interesting anecdotes about how the site came to be: One incident involved one of the banlieue kids asking Nicolas Sarkozy for his phone number and through outright brashness, getting it.

As at BarCampZurich, I once again tried to ignite a discussion, this time about the future of blogging technology. The slides I used as an intro for the brainstorm are here. Stephanie Booth has a great summary of the session. And yes, we spent a lot of time talking about Twitter, which for some reason has become insanely popular. (I've also chatted about it with the Bits und so guys.) Great discussions ensued. Some people felt that we missed an authoritative conclusion of where blogging is going to go, but you wouldn't really expect such a thing from a group discussion, would you?

BlogCampSwitzerland

When Corsin and I started organizing BarCampZurich last year, we had lofty ambitions: I remember sitting in an organizers’ meeting in a basement in Chur, Switzerland, explaining to a room of skeptics that we’ll have 50 or more attendees. It worked out pretty well, though: Almost 100 people showed up. (Here's a summary of how BarCampZurich worked out.)

When I heard that Dominik Tarolli et al. are setting up BlogCampSwitzerland - an unconference for European bloggers - I was on the side of the skeptics: "They’ll have 50 bloggers, maybe," I thought. So far, they have more than 150 signups!

I hope the European blogger crowd will be as interesting as the roomful of geeks who met last October. I’ll try to be there and may even host a discussion.

BlogCampSwitzerland, March 24, 2007, 10 am - 4:30 pm, ETH Zurich.