OpenLife

I have become a social media addict. Both in my private and professional life, I have become more and more dependent on if not staying ahead of the curve then at least on surfing the social media wave. I need to update my status on Facebook and to read all my friends tweets and look on the Flickr (sorry, 23) photos not to feel socially isolated. I need the same social media to  make clients and potential clients as well as journalist and the public at large constantly and continuously aware of my legal and other business skills in order to secure a steady stream of billable hours from which wonderful invoices can be generated.

But this is becoming harder and harder. Even though all the tools are mine for the taking right there on my laptop, right there through my browser, so many new things are happening everyday, so many new services, so many plugins, som much fine-tunning, RSS feeds syndication, SEO, adwords and so on.

I need someone to help me maintain my online persona, to amplify my status updates, blogposts and tweets. I am not looking for a ghost writer. I know what I want to communicate and I am perfectly capable of authoring my own content, thank you.

BUT I NEED A SOCIAL MEDIA ASSISTANT

Ideally, you would be an university student probably working your way through the first years of one of those new fancy communication, media or information technology programmes that were not around when I was young.

You should help me about 5-10 hours a month with optimizing my use of social media, in particular:

• keeping house at my blog media “family”: vonhaller.dk, openlife.dk and lexlinux.dk
• getting blogposts syndicated by trackbacks, RSS feeds, blogrolls, twitter, facebook and so on,
• monitoring traffic at Google analytics,
• updating widgets and plugins,
• organising other content (slides and presentation, calender, photos and video)
• editing and tagging podcasts and videocasts
• basic SEO and adwords
• setting up affiliate deals (t-shirts, books and rapports)
• some general proofreading and editing of blogcontent
• and much more.

I will pay on a hourly basis in accordance with rates normally paid to a student.

If you are there, please show yourself.

Charlotte Sahl-Madsen and Lars Løkke Rasmussen at an event at Danfoss Universe a couple of months before the appointment

In a year or so the Danish center-right government is facing an election. But I am pretty much apolitical and I find the choice between on the one side a new center-left government lead by spineless, opportunistic leftist career politicians backed by revamped old communists and on the other hand a tired, lethargic, sitting government with an apparent lack of intellectual substance who relies on a social-national party for its parliamentary majority as a choice between the plague and the cholera.

With such a pessimistic and cynical outlook it was a real pleasant surprise to hear this morning that as part of cabinet reshuffling a friend of mine, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, was elected as the new Danish Minister of Science, which post has as its unofficial title: Minister of IT. This is good news for science, information technology and more generally speaking, innovative thinking in the Danish society.

The Danish media has been speculating since the announcement about who is the new minister. To her great credit, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen has not spent much of her time trying to make a name of herself within Danish mainstream media. She has held leading positions in the strategic departments of both Lego and Danfoss, two pillars of Danish exporting industry. Lately, she has worked as leader of Danfoss Universe, a wonderful science park in the south Denmark that I have visited several times with my kids.

What can Charlotte Sahl-Madsen achieve as new minister of science (and IT). Probably not wonders. But that is due to the unfortunate low status of that particular ministry within the hierarchy of Danish ministries. But I think that she more than any other minister of science before her can set the agenda for innovation within the ministry and its resort. I expect her to be much more genuinely interested in open innovation, open government, open data and all other good things than any of her predecessors that were all more or less clueless in this field.

Charlotte Sahl-Madsen has IMHO the potential to be the best minister of Science that Denmark have had so far.

Full disclosure: Charlotte and I are both members of VL67 – a network for Danish leaders with business and culture.

Taj Westend Hotel, Bangalore

True to say, I am not really a globetrotter, and I haven’t stay at many luxurious hotels. I have never been to Dubai. But I have tried a couple of hotels that have marketed themselves as five stars.

However, I have never stayed at a better place than the Taj Westend Hotel in Bangalore, where I am spending 5 days in connection with a conference. The room are spacious, the buildings have patina (it is not totally new and “soulless” building like with many other five stars hotel) but are well-kept, the food is excellent and prices are very reasonable – in particular in comparison with Scandinavian hotels with two or three stars. And almost all services are complimentary which is great as I hate being at American hotels where you always have to add many more dollars to your bill, if you want to use eg. the fitness center.

But most of all, I have never before met so courteous and friendly staff. Everybody is smiling in a sincere that automatically makes you smile back and in makes the mood barometer jump upwards. I don’t think that I am just naive, I really think they enjoy their jobs and to provide good service.

I am already planning to take the whole family with me to Bangalore for the ITECHLAW Asia 2011 conference. That is if  the venue is Taj Westen Hotel again.

I appeared this evening for another interview on the legal aspects on the use of Facebook. This time the topic was hategroups on Facebook. It really seems to me that we are near the end of what can be said about this topic

Check out the interview here (in Danish).

How would these guys have done it?

However much I hate to name anything these days as “something 2.0″, I nevertheless think that it is time for a serious reboot and and a new version of my blogging activities.

I started OpenLife way back in the beginning of 2002 and since then it has been the outlet of a tirade of more and less (mostly less) relevant rants from my side. The posts have been pretty unstructured and chaotic spanning from personal stuff over posts about chocolate and music to a lot posts about open source and IT law.

After the advent of social media such as Facebook and Twitter a lot of my online activity has moved away from my blog. The small quick post are now added to Twitter and Facebook. So what is the role of my blog these days?

I think there is still plenty of reasons for someone like me to keep on blogging the old fashioned way. Here are three reasons that I can think of.

1. I have little control over my content at online social media such as Linkedin, Facebook, Plaxo and Twitter. Yes, I might still hold copyright to my postings at all these places, even though most of these sites would probably try to sneak in terms in their terms of service that try to erode these rights. But as long as all the data shared on these sites are not both de facto and de jure based on open format, it will be very difficult to export any of my content and data in a format where I can actually use or re-use it.

So I need to maintain, update, evolve my blog, as this is where I have ultimate control over my content.

2. It’s been good to learn to limit rants and outburst to 140 characters. The Haiku style of Twitter and other status updates forces you to limit yourself to what is important. But sometimes I need to have more space. On occasions, believe or not, I feel that I have something relevant or important to say that takes up more than 140 characters.

So in the future I will try to make far fewer post to my blog, but each longer and more compelling. History – and Google analytics – will judge me mercilessly.

3. Finally, my blog have to be targeted. As mentioned, OpenLife has been dealing with tons of unrelated topics. A visitor’s only change to find anything coherence has been to use a purge based on “categories”. This does not work. I know from my own experience as an avid blog feed subscriber that I only have time to read postings from blogs that deal exclusively with issues that have my interest and from which reason I have subscribed to.

So my plan is to split OpenLife into three blogs. First, openlife.dk that will deal exclusively with my life and interests. Second, lexlinus.dk where I will blog on issues related to open source. And finally, third, newmediahouse.dk (or another name) that will deal will new media law and IT law in general.

Let’s se what happens!