I already posted this a few years ago, but it is still valid (or even more).

Image taken from Luis Suárez Last weekend I attended the Evento Blog España conference in Seville, and one of the more attractive talks on the schedule was called 2.0 services and technology in business by Luis Suárez, technology evangelist at IBM. Luis explained how he stopped using e-mail completely and replaced the functionality by a variety of web 2.0 tools, each specialized for a specific task. When he started talking, I remembered how Tim Ferriss also ‘attacked’ e-mail in his book.

Lately I notice more and more cards driving around in Lleida with the Apple logo, and each time I see one I think by myself “why on earth would somebody stick that onto his car?” I also have that sticker at home, but it never occurred to me to stick it on my car. Of course, Apple is a cool brand, is different and has a very nice logo. But whichever way I look at it, I see it as a profitable company, and sticking that logo on your car is free publicity for this company.

This is just a short post to commemorate the eleventh birthday of this blog. Eleven years ago I decided to post short notices on my personal site, not realising that this habit would become very popular eleven years later. I still like it, and probably will continue blogging for a long time.

Since I started writing on my Spanish productivity blog El Canasto, I had less time to write on Brain Tags. But it looks like it was worth any minute of my time, as today I received the good news that El Canasto has been nominated for one of the Premios Bitacoras.com, the Spanish Bloggies. The past month, Spanish blog readers could vote for their favourite blogs in several categories. El Canasto quickly took the lead in the Best Business Blog category, and maintained the first position until the end of the voting period.

Sometimes you have to let go some good habits to adapt yourself. When I came to live in Spain, I was used to drive all day with the lights of my car turned on for better visibility. However, the people over here do not have that custom, and friendly as they are, they tried to warn me to tell that I forgot to turn off my lights. That is nice if it happens a few times, but actually it happened several times a day, and after a week I was getting quite fed-up with it.

The EBE is Europe’s second largest blogging event (after Les Blogs in France) and will take place in November in Sevilla. And yes, on November 14 I will take the airplane to Sevilla to be present at this event. When the event was first announced I doubted whether I should participate due to the high costs (plane ticket and accommodation; the EBE itself is free) and decided not to go.

Today is Blog Action Day, a day on which thousands of bloggers write about the same topic to raise awareness, and this year’s theme is Poverty. Just like last year, I signed up to participate without thinking. But now that I start writing I realise that I am by far the right person for writing on this topic. Right now I am sitting in my own house behind my €1400 Macbook with a high speed broadband internet connection.

I just found a very interesting plugin for Movable Type: TagSupplementals. As the name says, the plugin provides extra features for working with tags. I am using the plugin on El Canasto to create a Related Entries list on each individual entry page. The related entries feature of this plugin has two weighing modes: constant gives each tag the same weight and simply sums up the number of tags the entries have in common, while idf gives each tag a weight of 1/freq, where freq is the number of entries tagged with that tag.

I have been using Delicious for a long time, but lately I have started using Google Reader more and more, basically because I can share items without having to open the site. But yesterday I found out that I can make my links in Delicious available in Quicksilver, which means that I have a ton of information available with just a few keyboard clics. Instantly I am very interested in Delicious again, and surely will start bookmarking more sites again.

I’m presenting myself as a candidate!

Today I launched the new design for Brain Tags. For a while I have been using the default theme provided by Movable Type, but after updating the blogging engine to version 4.2 I decided to make some changes to make fully use of the new features offered by this version. The theme I used is called Mid-Century and is a good example of the possibilities of the latest version of Movable Type Pro.

For a long time SmartFTP was my favourite FTP application for Windows, and I have recommended it to many friends. However, SmartFTP suddenly has changed their licensing structure and is now obliging me to purchase a license. Of course, I immediately uninstalled the software and installed FileZilla, which for sure is going to stay for free.

My macbook has been without backups for several months now, so I started looking for a backup solution. Time Machine is out of the question, as I don’t want to hook up a USB hard disk while I’m working (and when I don’t work I don’t want to leave my macbook switched on) and the Time Capsule is out of my budget. On my PC I happily use Carbonite, but they haven’t released a version for mac yet.

That is the question I have been asking myself a lot this year. In the past I always had a clear answer to this question, but lately I struggle with the aim of this site, which is why it has been very silent over here. The first incarnation of Brain Tags was simply to inform my friends abroad about what was going on in my life, which was a very novel idea back in 1997.

For a while I have been using TwitterFeed to automatically announce new blog posts on Twitter, but I stopped using their services and am considering to stop following others who are announcing every single post on Twitter. I love Twitter to follow what people are doing, and what they are thinking, but in most cases I am not interested in every blog post. And if I am, I simply add their blog to my feedreader.

Exactly three years after starting the Wizard Of POS weblog, I leave it. Followers of the Wizard probably already noticed that it has been very quiet ultimately, with the last posts in February 2008 and October 2007! The past three years The Wizard of POS had established itself as the leading weblog about Point Of Sale software and hardware, but I simple lacked the time and focus to continue working on it.

Notes 8.5 will have fewer icons in the Notes Mail template: So, in Notes 8.5 you will see an Inbox that’s easier to scan, with 10 improved icons for mail message types. The biggest changes are removing the icon for read mail and using a blue star for unread mail. We also adjusted meeting workflow items so that the most time-dependent ones (e.g., new invitation, reschedules, cancellations) stand out and those that are not so time-dependant (e.

I am multi-lingual: born Dutch, living in Spain and speaking English for most part of the working day. In the past it was easy to choose the language to use: Dutch, unless the other person doesn’t speak Dutch, in which case I spoke English. I also choose English as my preferred language for everything related with IT, as more software and documentation is available in English, and because of the horrible translations in the first Dutch operating systems.

I just realised that I have been ignoring my good ol’ blog for a long time. Of course, I am still actively blogging at El Canasto, and you can find some signs of life at Twitter, but over here it has been awfully quiet. Next action: plan some posts for Brain Tags.

Just came across this on YouTube. How I wish more presenters would think about how they use PowerPoint. Get back to basics and remember you need: Significance Structure Simplicity Rehearsal [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFfFQ9XU7Jw&w=425&h=355]

First there where blogs, then came the e-books and now there are Interactive Learning Environments (ILE). Building an ILE is a novel way of sharing your knowledge. For the last two months I have been following the Teaching Sells course, and I am very enthusiastic about it. The course is divided into five parts: Instructional design, marketing, creating multi-media content, business models and building membership sites. The more technical parts are not that interesting for me (just some links to the software used is enough for me), but the other three courses are well worth the money.