Svein-Magnus S�rensens Blog @ menneske.org

Experiencing Defrag 2009

2009-11-28T21:20:18Z

The past year I've been speaking at several both large and small conferences in Norway, but this month I also went abroad to speak at the Defrag social technology conference in Denver, Colorado. This conference is one of the most interesting I have attended, so to share my experience I've written this piece about the experiences and insights that I got out of Defrag. Now if you'd like to start off by getting an impression of what went on during the conference before I get into my analysis, then go have a look at the Defrag 2009 liveblog that Graeme Thickins did throughout the event. Another good starting point is to look at the twitter-talk that took place with the #defrag and #defragcon hash-tags, which is all documented at Defrag's EventVue page. Finally there is a guerilla video stream covering most of the conference that were being created and put online by ReussDesign. My talk on open data was also filmed by Reuss and can be found about 12 minutes into the recording titled "Defrag Conference Clip 4".]]> Pre-conference dinner The conference experience began with the pre-conference dinner on the night before the official opening. Unlike most conferences this dinner wasn't just a meet&greet, but also a conference session in itself where all attendees were given a choice of groups to join for dinner, each group being sponsored by a different company with a set discusson topic for the night. I had selected a topic titled The Inbox as Filter hosted by Gist, a web-service that aims to improve email through improving your connections and relationships with the people of your inbox. Of course we didn't stay on topic during the entire meal, but combined with the presentations by Gist it was a great way of to start off conversations among a bunch of like minded guys that touched onto a range of interesting topics throughout the italian tapas dinner we were served. Absolutely a great way to kick start a conference! Defrag Conference Day 1 The next morning the conference itself began with a short opening remark by organizer Eric Norlin before moving on to the first keynote by Andy Kessler, accompanied by digital gadgets in every hand of the audience. The Defrag crowd would easily out-tech any of the developer-conferences I usually attend, well helped out by the gracious availability of both WiFi and power-strips everywhere at the conference. I'd estimate that nearly half of the audience sported laptops during the talks, with most of the remainder was keeping a keen eye on their smart-phones. This was especially interesting during Andy's talk as it caused quite an uproar among the audience, but all of it happened in the silence of the digital back channels so Andy himself might have been entirely unaware of it until leaving the stage. One of the effects that this had on the conference might have been somewhat unsettling for some speakers, as only a fraction of the audience were paying attention to the stage at any time. The rest were mostly busy enhancing their conference experience by following Twitter and the other back channels, the chatter of which in many cases turned out to be as interesting as the speakers themselves. For myself I absolutely felt that this secondary stream of information was a good addition to the conference experience, and while it took some of your focus away from the talks it also provided fresh perspectives while the topics were still relevant in your mind. Next up on the agenda were presentations of four current problems, as well as the afternoon topical explorations, neither of which I found very interesting as many were nothing but poorly disguised marketing pitches for a company or product. Due to this I found the largest value of this conference to be the small-group interactions and networking with all the amazing attendants, something that came especially well to light in the very high quality open space discussion session held just before lunch. This was unfortunately the only such session in the program, and something the conference could only gain from adding more of next year! Crowding back into the main hall after the topical explorations we were greeted by a series of very interesting 10min "fragments", of which the presentation on Atlassians use of 20% time were especially inspiring. Then to sum everything up at the end there was a lively panel discussion with Chris Sacca and Chris Shipley, the two 'douchebags' :-) doing a great job of setting the mood and giving everyone a bunch of laughs before the evening reception with the sponsors. Unlike some other conferences I've been to there was no organized dinner in the evening of day one, so during the reception people clumped together in groups more or less at random to go out for dinner separately at various restaurants around central Denver. Afterwards those most eager to network randomly reconvened back at the hotel bars to squeeze the final bits of action out of the day, which let me have some great chats with amongst others Robert Scoble and Eric Knipp. Defrag Conference Day 2 The second day of Defrag proceeded in much the same way as the first, with a few talks being very interesting while many were a bit light on content. Especially interesting were the fragment on the Synaptic web by Khris Loux, as well as the collaborative keynote on Discovery vs. Search where Robert Scoble among other things showed one of his FriendFeed-streams on-screen, a literal torrent of information flowing past as you can see for yourself beginning at 5:25 in this clip from the panel. Other than this the chats with all the great people attending were still the highlight of the day, and at the stands in the lobby I was introduced to a bunch of upcoming technologies including both brand new ones like Lijit and promising ventures that have been around for a while such as Xobni. Amongst these I got a great demo from Atlassian on their next version of Confluence, a tool I'm working with a lot these days, and I also got turned onto Box.net as a serious Sharepoint-competitor in the hosted space. Day two was also when I did my own talk in the topical exploration session called 'Leveraging the Open Web'. In brief the session started out by an introduction to the industrialization of content creation Peter Sweeney, after which I covered the basics of Open Data from where I handed over to Paul Miller to talk about Linked Data. After the talks the session was then rounded off with a short debate facilitated by Ben Kepes. I must say that I rather liked the format of the session that began with four lightening talks around a central topic leading into a catalysed group discussion where both the speakers and the audience got engaged, however I believe that it could have been made even better by setting aside more time for both the speakers and the facilitated discussion, as the constraints forced the exploration of the topics to be cut a bit short. For a more detailed summary of the discussons in this session see the coverage by CMSWire, where you can also find writeups of the other topical explorations at Defrag. After these sessions the conference wrapped up with a keynote discussion that looked back on the 10 years that have passed since the publication of the Cluetrain manifesto. It was a very interesting summary of the thoughts that have shaped the American internet economy, but it didn't feel very relevant to me due to the limited influence this book has had on the IT business in Norway thus far. Hopefully this will change a bit over the next couple of years. After this final panel the conference was a wrap, and everything died down pretty quickly with most people understandably being tired from two long days at the conference, so we said goodbye to everyone except those of us with later flights out of Denver that ended up going out to dinner together and keeping the conversation alive for a few final hours. The digital back-channels As I mentioned the digital back-channels were a very important part of this conference, much more so than at other conferences I've attended. This meant that a lot of people spent much of their time following the continuous stream of tweets and other web-content about the conference that were published during the talks, some instead of following the actual talks themselves, which might have been just as interesting in some cases, as shown with Andy Kessler's talk mentioned above. According to one summary the Twitter-hashtags clocked in at nearly 5000 messages during the two days of the conference among the 400 participants, meaning an average of 5 tweets per minute if you only consider the actual conference hours! In addition there were quite a few blog posts and articles published along the way, something one could easily keep on top of using the OneRiot real-time social search engine, so obviously the things going on at stage weren't the only thing holding the attention of Defraggers :-) Not only did the back-channels provide a very interesting set of insights and commentary that you otherwise wouldn't get, but through these channels the conference itself can even be influenced directly by those only following the online streams, as described in this post about twitter and the ricochet effect. Such live coverage as this not only gives the attendants an extra level of insight and connectedness at the conference, but it also provides a lasting reflection of the event through all the tweets, blogs and videos that are published online for posterity. This is especially valuable for those that didn't attend, as the insights gathered can be found in the many blogs that has been written about the conference. For those interested in more on Defrag, these posts provide a good overview:

Defrag 2009 retrospective by Mike Brevoort
80legs Defrag Experience
The DefragCon Wave
Are web factories stealing your job? by Peter Sweeney
Beyond Social Media by Doc Searls
nPost blogging Defrag
John Wilker at Defrag Day 2

Last but not least an overview of more Defrag posts can be found at Lou Pagilas Defragging the Defrag Coverage.

Getting around the real name length limit in Twitter

2009-10-06T17:46:03Z

Since I started using Twitter last year I've been especially annoyed with one thing, and that is the arbitrary length limit on the real name field in settings. The field is limited to 20 characters, but my full name unfortunately is 21 characters including spaces. This means that I've had to either truncate part of my name or remove the spacing between my first and last names, neither of which are good solutions when considering one of the main reason for having the real name field at all, namely search engine findability. As can be seen from the forums at Get Satisfaction, I'm far from the only one having a problem with this, but despite this there isn't any satisfaction to get as Twitter themselves are dead silent on the issue. Luckily I have now discovered a work-around for this limit, published here for the benefit of all those with a "long" name of more than 20 characters!]]> Get Satisfaction forums to see if there had been any new developments. As usual there were no news from Twitter officials, but I noticed a post from @McoreD who claim to have spoken with the Twitter developer who implemented the change that limited full names to 20 characters. That this limit was a late addition is the key bit of information that put me on track to finding a work-around. This info was significant for two reasons: First of all it meant that the backend database would likely still be able to support longer names than 20 characters, and second it made it a possibility that all of the validation code wasn't properly updated to match the new limit, which is a common programming error when modifying field limits. As it happened both of these assumptions turned out to be correct with the consequence that it should be possible to input a longer real name by simply removing the field length limitation in the browser, which is something you can easily control yourself. As I had hoped this worked perfectly, and I am now enjoying my 21 character real name on Twitter! Please note that while the fix appear to work perfectly for me with my single extra letter, it might not work with longer names or this could cause weird problems with Twitter or especially with third party clients or services, so use the method below only at your own risk! Now onto the details of the workaround, which is actually a bit of a hack. There are many possible ways of unlocking a form-field in your browser, but this is the easy way I did it:

First run Firefox with the WebDeveloper add-on installed.
Log in to Twitter and go to the settings page for your account.
While there select "Forms" and "Remove maximum lengths" from the WebDeveloper menu.
Then type in your long real name in the correct field, and simply click save!

After saving you'll see a validation error about the long name, but despite this the name is still being stored for me, so hopefully you too can now enjoy Twitter with your full real name! UPDATE: It appears that while the long username-change seem to work for a while just after-being applied, it is reverted back to the old name within a day or so. This has now happened to me twice, so the hack unfortunately isn't very permanent. Sorry :-( !!! WARNING !!! While this work-around could probably also be applied to the Username field, I would strongly advise against doing this as it could cause serious problems with API-clients and SMS-services that depend on the Username-field being of limited length. Ultimately messing with this could get your account deleted!

Three special kinds of chocolate

2009-09-06T21:44:03Z

Since Christmas I've had several unexpected but inspiring chocolate experiences. As I've been very busy recently blogging have not been a very high priority, so unfortunately these stories have been a bit delayed in reaching the world. However now they are finally ready, and as the saying goes; better late than never, and I must say that this especially applies when it comes to chocolate! Also note that this is a special post and that I won't make it a habit to regularly review specific chocolates on this blog. I've made an exception in this case due to the extraordinary circumstances surrounding each of the chocolates described below, including a nice bit of innovation, impressive entrepreneurship and an excellent example of social media marketing done right. ]]> Lindt Weihnachts-edelbitter-chocolade Now, for the first piece it was December 2008 and I was visiting the Christmas market in the German city of Kiel. While looking around for gifts and goodies I stumbled across a stack of beautifully wrapped black and gold chocolate-bars. The bars were Christmas-flavoured 70% chocolate-bar with cinnamon and coriander from the famous Lindt & Spr�ngli chocolate factory in Switzerland, so I just had to get me some of those. After bringing them safely home destined for the holidays I eventually tasted them, and I have to tell you: they were good. Really good, and very christmassy too. The bars had a nice dark colour and were quite thin and separated into breakable pieces, each piece with a thicker bubble of chocolate filled with a rough spiced praline. The aroma of the spices were clearly noticeable through a nice earthy chocolatey taste, and the tastes were very well balanced. As Lindt bars often are the chocolate was distinctly bitter, especially in the after-taste, but not so in an overpowering way. All in all, a great find for the holidays! Healthy chocolate; as shown on TV! Jumping forward to February, I was attending a networking event where I got talking to a guy who was in the early stages of creating and marketing a new class of healthy chocolates inspired by the raw food movement. Their brand Sjokoladeprinsen was a competitor at Skaperen ("The Maker"), a televised entrepreneurship-competition on Norwegian TV2, and they were looking for partners. With my higher than average interest in chocolate we immediatly hit it off, and I was invited to come along to meet the team at the live semi-finals that were taking place the very next day. I naturally took this opportunity, and after they managed winning the day I was treated to one of the first production-samples of their healthy raw chocolate. To keep it a certified raw-food the chocolate can not be heated above 42�C during production, meaning it is not roasted or shelled like regular chocolates are. As it is during the roasting that most of the chocolate taste develops fully, removing roasting from the process naturally affected the taste quite a bit. Being unroasted the chocolate had a very pure unprocessed chocolate-taste without any of the usual sub-notes you can find in most chocolate, and it was also more powdery than regular chocolate as well as nearly completely devoid of any after-taste. To keep the chocolate healthy adding sugar was of course also a no-no, so the chocolate had instead been sweetened with natural aspartame from birch, giving it a very cold and lingering sweetness. These things caused the chocolate to fall quite below my usual expectations, but it was still very much on par with most regular mass produced confectionery-chocolate, while at the same time being much healthier. All in all a very good first attempt. Eventually the chocolate-makers went on to win the entire competition securing one million NOK in funding. With these funds a set of limited edition healthy chocolates with plain, orange and mint-flavours were released by the end of May, branded as Sjokoladeprinsens Ekte Sjokolade ("Real Chocolate by the Prince of Chocolate"). Using more professional production equipment for this release the powdery issues were gone and both colour and consistency of the pieces was very nice, but by being moulded into thick chocolate hearts the chocolates were almost too hard to bite into. As before the taste was still good despite lacking depth, making it a great munching chocolate! I'm told that regular bars of Ekte Sjokolade are in the pipeline for a fall release in Norway, with hopes to quickly go international as well, so these chocolates are definitely something to keep an eye out for. Camaya chocolate slabs My third and most amazing special chocolate moment occurred in March. Being a fine chocolate afficionado I follow a selection of chocolate-blogs to get new impulses, and one day the Chocolate Note had a review of some Cashew & Sesame bars by the new artisan chocolatier Camaya that looked really delicious, so I left a comment on the blog saying just that. Later that very same evening I surprisingly got a email from Anita at Camaya, saying that if I replied with my address they'd mail some samples of their chocolates for me taste at no cost. I naturally jumped at this opportunity, being very impressed by their outreaching social media strategy, and just a few days later I found a set of three Camaya chocolate slabs in the mail. Very impressive! In addition to the above-mentioned Cashew & Sesame slab, I also received a spicy slab with Chilli and a milk chocolate slab with Mango & Cardomom. The slabs were uniquely created with pieces of fruits and nuts melted into the top, and while this made the slabs somewhat quirky to eat, the taste more than make up for it. Starting out with my declared favourite slab, the ingredients list on the back states that it was a 60% created with Belgian chocolate, I'm guessing couverture from Callebaut. The slightly salted cashews was glazed and covered with sesame seeds before added to the slab, a perfect match for the dark chocolate making up one of the best nutty chocolates I've ever had: salty, sweet, and just a tad bitter at the same time, combined with a rich dark chocolate taste. Yum! Next I took on the mango-slabs, which turned out to be the hardest to eat due to the large pieces of tough dried fruits, making up 10% of the slab! The dried fruits could preferably have been juicier and a bit more flavourful, but this didn't detract much from the otherwise very good and velvety 33% milk-chocolate perfectly rounded with cardamom in both aroma and taste. Absolutely a recommended pick for milk-chocolate lovers. Finally I went for the last of the three, a chilli chocolate. Very spicy chocolates like these are usually a special treat, and this one was no exception. A powerful chilli burn spread in my mouth almost from the instant I bit into the slab which was covered with chilli-seeds, and as the dark 60% chocolate melted the burning chilli moved further back and chocolate notes started covering the tongue. However this didn't last very long before just the hotness from the slowly waning chilli was left, overpowering any residual chocolate notes that would otherwise be left. While I must say that this slab was a bit too hot for my tastes, especially to begin with, the quality of its pure chilli burn was the most amazing I've had in a chocolate, so if you are into hot chilli chocolates I'm sure you'll eat this one up. That unfortunately is all I had for you tonight, but stay tuned for more postings about chocolates and other topics, eventually :-)

Learning to Fly!

2009-03-18T21:08:18Z

A more common look at creativity than the one I presented earlier is what could perhaps be called applied creativity, namely the type of creativity commonly associated with idea-meetings and brainstorming sessions. One of Norway's leading experts on such applied creativity is Stig Hjerkinn Haug of Stig&Stein Id�laboratorium, which I've had the pleasure of meeting several times. Most recently this was at a meeting in the Norwegian engineers association Tekna, where he held one of his inspirational talks on fostering creativity and learning to fly! Since the lectures of Stig are truly amazing, there is no substitute to attending one yourself. However I that is not an option for everybody, so while you might not learn to fly without actually being there I'll recap the highlights of his creative methods and some of his amazing stories here to try and give you at least a bit of air under your wings. Also remember that if this leaves you wanting more, then you can always buy Stig's books (in Norwegian) or even hire the man himself for a lecture or workshop. The stories he spin about his life with creativity are just incredible, and if you believe him mostly true as well. They include everything from practical tips on idea-generation to stories about inspired new ways of doing business, and how just being curious and doing things differently can be a powerful force in itself.]]> Creative companies Like some other notable lecturers I've heard, Stig's lectures often starts out with the story of his life, focused around some of the businesses he has attempted. His first project was something most people would consider borderline insanity, namely starting a Secret Company. It was to be completely secret, down to doing absolutely no marketing and having its only line of communication through an Israeli P.O. box. Surprisingly this didn't pan out due to a lack of interest from clients, so most people might actually have been right in it being insane. However you couldn't possible have known that unless someone actually tried, now could you? Again a lot of people would say 'yes you could', but if everyone had listened to those people then such crazy ideas as telephones, disinfectants and aeroplanes would ever have been realized. This is why you always have to try out the ideas you believe in, especially if 'most people' tell you it won't work, because when people say this it isn't usually based on actually considered the idea and deciding that it won't work. Mostly they say this because the idea is so different from everything they already know that they don't have a suitable box in their mind to put it into, and if it doesn't fit in a box then it can't really be possible so their first impulse is to just throw it out without giving it any further thought. Next after shutting down the secret company, Stig and his buddy Stein decided to go into the business of radio advertising. Neither of them had any clue about radio advertising and also they were going to do it differently than everybody else, so they started out with a few ground rules. Firstly they were not allowed to call any potential customers, and secondly they would only accept calls from the creative directors of the ten largest advertising agencies in Norway. In addition they found that the competition were pretty evenly spread among cheap, medium and expensive companies, so to avoid those groups they decided to be extremely expensive. Also they would routinely fire their creative director and only hire new people that also didn't know anything about radio advertising. Sounds like a recipe for success doesn't it? So what do you think happened to this company? Well, after thinking long and hard on how to market themselves they issued a press release with the names of the ten creative directors in the title and got it printed in the major business-newspapers in Norway. Since anyone would stop short by seeing their own name in the heading of a full page newspaper article, they promptly got called by all ten of them and thus became an instant success! And not only did they eclipse the previously non-existent market for extremely expensive radio advertisements by getting deals with all of the big agencies, but due to their turnover-policy they also became a de-facto training ground for advertisement-managers, with their people over time getting hired in key positions by all of their customers! Now that is a real black swan event...! Luck, or curiosity? You probably now wonder what the real secret behind the success of such a seemingly outlandish venture was, maybe it was just a lucky break? Well perhaps it was just that, but then how did these two regular guys become so lucky? The British psychologist Richard Wiseman has discovered that luck is really just a way of approaching the world. People who are being curious and staying open to new opportunities, as well as thinking positively, tend to feel better about their lives and stumble upon more lucky chances than those who do not. Norwegian actor/director Aksel Henie is one person who in his own way prescribe to this point of view. He has had a lightening career in the Norwegian movie-business so far, partly caused by getting several lucky breaks when doing things previously unheard of. When asked about how he came to be so lucky, he believed it had to do with always trying to live his life on the yellow blink (of a traffic light), meaning that instead of always playing it safe ("green-light") he has made his own success through making a concious effort to do things and find opportunities nearing on the impossible, those which everyone else believes and says that can't be done. By now I hope you're warming to the idea that doing things differently can be quite powerful. The reason for this is that most of the stuff we think about as reasonable ideas can be thought of as being within a narrow band between the impossible and the inane, but the problem is that we commonly misjudge the size of that band, so much of what we commonly consider impossible is actually quite possible and potentially even world-changing! Getting in a frame of mind to find those ideas in the near-impossible band is very hard for most of us however, often because we limit our creative energy too soon. Stig's solution to this is to begin brainstorming sessions or idea-meetings by suggesting exactly those truly impossible ideas, because then you'll have to move through the near-impossible band when scrapping the craziest ideas on the way down to what can actually be done. Combine this with having motivated co-workers as I wrote about previously, and this will really get you on the road to doing things differently.

"If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

The next step to creative success is to get the other people to come along with you in being different, and this can be really hard. People in general (and Norwegian people in particular) dislike taking action on their own, especially risky actions that is breaking with societal tradition, like doing one of these completely different things. However if a task requires several people to help out and you get them on board together, then you'll have a much easier time with it because this way they won't feel like they can be singled out and put to blame, and also they become part of the group that -did- something, two powerful social forces both of them. No more instructions! Once you have your group on board with the above, you just need to get them to think creatively, or differently if you will. Often can only happen by throwing away all the instructions first, and this is important, because most adults today are addicted to following instructions. To illustrate what he means by this, Stig tells a great story about this one time he held a birthday-party for his kid. At the end of the party when the other parents came around to pick up their kids he gave everyone a box of Legos and said it was a building contest, father vs. son. Playing to peoples competitiveness, everyone immediately starts ripping up the boxes to get going, and all the kids starts building something at once. The parents on the other hand start looking for the instructions sheet, which Stig secretly had removed from the boxes beforehand. This really throws off the parents, and while a few improvises instructions by reverse-engineering the picture on the box, most are at a complete loss on how to proceed due to the lack of instructions. All the while their kids are happily building something, anything, completely without relation to what the box was supposed to contain in the first place, like kids normally do. It is this kind of motivation that kids has for just doing something that many of us need to bring back from our childhoods, from the time before we became addicted to having instructions for everything we do. According to Stig this is one of the four main parts of the life cycle of innovation. Going through it step by step it is wise to begin the life cycle with having motivation or it will be very hard to achieve anything at all, as you probably already know. Next by throwing away the instructions that limit the possibilities of our motivation the circle brings us to creativity, where the real gold can be found. Lots of unrestrained creativity rarely gets us anywhere however, so in addition we need to apply some methods to identify and refine the ideas into something that we can actually work with. Many creative sessions and idea-meetings end just after this phase of identifying the ideas, and forgets all about picking one or more ideas for actual implementation. This obviously breaks the circle by not increasing motivation, and thus making idea meetings harder to do every time. This is because the true importance of the implementation doesn't lie in what the idea actually achieves, but in the sense of purpose and motivation that people get by seeing the changes they suggested actually happening. People will remember this and bring this boost in motivation to bear at the next idea meeting for a self-reinforcing positive effect that over time will let them move into the near-impossible zone of great ideas more and more often, and this is where the ideas can start to provide you with a real competitive edge. It will however take some time with creative training before people reaches this level, so a good way to foster the development of creative solutions right from the start is to expose people to a virtual crisis situation, because through evolution people have become extremely adept at doing even the seemingly impossible if they know that they absolutely have to. This can easily be done for practice by for example making a list of all the components that are absolutely necessary to your business, and then removing them one at a time and doing some brainstorming on how to overcome the issue of that missing item. At Stig&Stein Idealab for instance, they regularly train their employees in creative thinking by putting them in just such situations, for example by making the annual Christmas party into a surprise creative event where everyone receive a small sum of cash each and have to participate in organizing a restaurant, music, food and drinks for the entire party on just a few hours notice, or there won't be one. Another time they gave their employees 24 hours to prepare a stand to present a fictional company at a tourism industry-conference. The employees ended up presenting "Baby Xtreme", an adventure company organizing gun-training, sky-diving and other extreme activities for babies. Despite the stand having been put together at a moments notice, even the press took the bait and ran a series of articles on how horrible and unsafe this would be for the babies, including tv-news interviews with children's psychologists and doctors that condemned such exploitation of children. All of this just goes to show what can be achieved with motivated people by unlocking their creative potential, and such feats can be accomplished by anyone! Finally to wrap this entry up, lets see some creativity in action: Enjoy :-)

The Makings of a Taste - Fine Chocolate for Beginners (Part 2)

2009-03-04T16:33:06Z

Before reading this you might want to have read the first part of my guide to fine chocolate for beginners. It's not strictly necessary of course, but it is a good place to start if you are new to fine chocolate.. Read it? Good. Now lets take you to the next level. As you may have guessed yourself, the taste of a chocolate-bar is not only dependent on the declared ingredients on the back, but also very much on quality differences in both the cocoa-beans themselves, and even more so by the processing they are put through. So lets get into the chocolate production process from pod to bar to give you a understanding of how it all fits together, so that finally we can explain why some chocolates are so much better than others. First a quick recap: Chocolate production begins with harvesting ripe cacao pods which are opened and emptied to extract the seeds and pulp. This mass is then fermented for up to a week until the pulp have disappeared, leaving only the seeds which are then dried for shipment to chocolate-makers around the world. There the beans are roasted and shelled to separate out the cocoa nibs, which can then finally be milled and refined into a liquid cocoa mass, the basis of all chocolate as we know it: cocoa-liquor. Much of this liquor is then separated into cocoa-powder and cocoa-butter for further industrial use. Cocoa-powder is commonly used as an ingredient in baking or to make hot chocolate, while cocoa-butter is amongst other things used in cosmetics and medicines. Most importantly however, some of the cocoa-butter is added back into cocoa-liquor along with sugar and other ingredients, which after another couple of days of conching, tempering and moulding finally become the fabled chocolate bars that we all love so much. Whew, that was quick. If you couldn't follow me through all of that then have a look at how chocolate is made for additional details. Now lets dig into the details to see how all of this combines to affect the final taste of a chocolate bar.]]> Cacao varieties The cacao pods that chocolate is made from grows on the stem of a tropical tree called the Theobroma cacao. These trees originated in the Orinoco and Amazon basins of Mesoamerica where they were discovered by early humans, ancestors of the Maya. Over thousands of years the Mayans and their forefathers have cultivated the cacao-trees to their liking, thereby giving rise to the variety of cacao now named Criollo. This cultivation has turned the Criollo into a very vulnerable and low yield crop mainly available from plantations in Venezuela and Colombia, but one that is also highly aromatic and with little bitterness and astringency. It is therefore currently the most sought after cacao-variety for use in fine chocolate, and according to some it is the only variety that makes the cut. Note however, that true Criollo cacao hardly exist any more, as most Criollo cacaos nowadays are actually hybridizations between multiple other varieties and thus with similarly varying properties. Also different such hybridizations often grow intermingled on the same plantations, making the business of separating the harvest near impossible without a detailed genetic analysis of each individual tree. Outside the true Criollos the grouping of cacaos are even more disputed, but it is commonly talked about 3-5 main varieties. Most wild cacaos of Mesoamerica, as well as most exported cacaos grown in the rest of the world, is considered to be of the Forestaro variety, which means it is a large and diverse group with varying properties. Forasteros are generally very hardy and most provide large crops, but is due to its commonly high bitterness and astringency considered to be inferior to other varieties of cacao. An environmental disaster on the island of Trinidad in the 18th century led to the first intentional crossing of Criollos and Forestaros there to save the plantations. This cross became known as Trinitario from its origin, with its properties being halfway between its parent types. It has become increasingly popular and is now grown on many islands in the Caribbean and the Indian ocean, as well as in Papua-New-Guinea and Cameroon. Again calling it a single variety is somewhat misleading, as Trinitarios today are hybridized from different types of Forestaro and Criollo, and therefore has varying properties as well. In addition to the big-three there are also multiple maverick cacaos that are not usually grouped along with them as they have very different properties. The most famous of these is Ecuadors 'Nacional' variety with its floral aroma. Some more information on the different varieties of cacao and their properties can be found in the history of chocolate from Richart chocolates. Cacao preparation: Fermentation and roasting After the ripened cacao pods have been harvested, they are opened and the contained seeds and a white pulp called mucilage are placed in wooden-bins or earth-pits and covered with banana-leaves. There they are left to ferment for up to a week depending on the type and quality of the pods. The heat from the sun causes fermentation, which creates flavour-precursors in the seeds and reduces their natural bitterness and astringency. After fermentation the seeds are dried in the sun or in wood-powered heaters to stabilize them into proper cocoa-beans to prepare them for storage and shipment to chocolate-makers around the world, bringing us to the beginning of the true chocolate making process. It is however critical during this process that the beans are not exposed to smoke from the heaters or other sources, as this will affect the taste and quality of the beans. Upon arrival at a chocolatiers kitchen or in a factory, the next step is roasting the cacao beans, just like what is done with coffee-beans. This allows for removal of the bean shells to bring out the cocoa nibs or bean-meat from the chocolate, but most importantly the roasting fully develops the flavour-precursors from the fermentation process into the rich variety of aromas that is the staple of fine chocolate. It is the art of perfectly controlling the processes of fermentation and roasting that separates the taste of regular chocolates from the truly exquisite ones, and both are equally important to the quality of the end product. Finally the roasted cacao nibs are crushed and milled into a fine powder and then further refined into a liquid cocoa mass, namely chocolate liquor, the base ingredient that all manufactured chocolate is made from. As mentioned in the recap some of this liquor is then separated through hydraulic presses into cocoa powder and cocoa butter, which allows for adjustment of their relative amounts when making chocolate bars as well as for use in other products. Chocolate manufacture: Conching and tempering Now with chocolate liquor and cocoa butter at hand we're finally ready to start making real chocolate, but to do that a few more ingredients are usually needed. The reason is that cacao as mentioned earlier is very bitter, easily confirmed by tasting a 100% cacao-content chocolate bar, which I must warn you is an acquired taste. I would suggest easing into it through sampling a variety of 70% and 85% bars first. Making these requires rounding off the bitter taste of raw chocolate a bit, so in addition to adding more cocoa-butter for extra smoothness, a bit of sugar and usually some vanilla is also added. To create the smoothness we expect from our chocolate this mix is then melted and stirred for up to several days in a machine named a Conch, in a process aptly named conching. This slowly transforms the rough mix into a perfectly smooth liquid chocolate which is actually ready to eat. The only thing now remaining is solidifying the liquid it into chocolate bars, but this too is easier said than done. Chocolate solidifies through forming multiple types of fat-crystals, each with its own particular properties and melting point. Simply cooling the chocolate liquid straight to room temperature causes uncontrolled crystallization and a variation of fat-crystals, including some that make the chocolate very crumbly and that melts at room-temperature (Type I at 17�C and Type II at 21�C). Other crystals allow for somewhat firmer chocolate, but one that still melts in your hands (Type III at 26�C and Type IV at 28�C). These can often be found in cheap mass-produced chocolate since getting rid of them is both time-consuming and exact work. Making fine chocolate involves creating as many Type V crystals as possible, because these have a melting point of 36�C and therefore melts in your mouth while still keeping firm and glossy at room temperature, and even in your hands to a degree. To achieve this the chocolate liquid must first be cooled to exactly 27�C to allow crystals of only type IV and V to form, before it is reheated to 31�C to break up the type IV crystals, leaving only the desired type V's. This process is called tempering and must be repeated several times until as much as possible of the cocoa-butter has crystallised into type V before the chocolate can be poured into the desired moulds and cooled entirely into the chocolate bars that you get from the store. Variations in Taste If every part of this process; from careful harvesting through controlled fermentation and roasting, to milling, conching and painstaking tempering; is performed with quality in mind, then you will likely end up with a high quality fine chocolate with a good snap, even colouring and a smooth texture. The taste however will still vary immensely based on how all of the above processes are performed, and especially on the roasting of the beans, which becomes clearly evident by tasting similar chocolates from different manufacturers. For instance does Michel Cluizel usually create bars with a round fruity taste, while the products of Domori on the other hand often have a very burnt and raw feeling to them. The taste can even vary between bars of the same brand from a single manufacturer, especially between seasons, which is why many renown chocolatiers are not only creating origin-bars with beans from a single plantation, but also vintage-bars branded with the year of production, like these vintages from Valrhona. The aromatic properties of cacao are said to surpass even those of wine-grapes, and certainly most other kinds of food in the world, so there are potentially hundreds of distinct aromas to be tasted even in a single bar of chocolate. Which of these aromas dominate and how they change during the tasting can vary greatly, much due to variations in any one of the steps described above, not to mention the various tastes and fillings that can be added. Therefore trying out various brands and makers, from the good to the bad, is the only way to discover and know these subtle differences for yourself. In doing so you will hopefully expand your chocolate horizons and in time become able to find your favourite styles, and perhaps even attempt to create one of your own. Based on this there is really only one simple advice to give: Eat more fine chocolate! To learn more you can go and read the next part in my Fine Chocolate for Beginners series for some tips and pointers on makers, brands and bars to start out with!

Creativity in Organizations

2009-01-21T19:31:36Z

A few days ago I attended a very inspiring lecture called "The creativity of organizations". It was about how effective changes can be introduced to any organization to improve productivity, decrease sick days and increase motivation among employees. And all of this will be very noticeable in less than a year. Sounds impossible, doesn't it? Well, not so according to Swedes G�ran Erikson, initiator of Better Working Life, and Mats Birgerson, former CEO of the ventilation systems manufacturer Fresh AB that has proved such changes to be possible. Their theory is that motivation and productivity are directly influenced by the creativity of employees, and that the keys to fostering an improved and more creative working environment is to accommodate freedom, understanding, participation and contributions at all levels of an organization. Under their management they have successfully implemented a range of changes to this effect in dozens of organizations across Norway and Sweden. Fresh AB did for instance, despite the ventilation-industry having a negative market development, go from beeing an apparently doomed business heading towards bankruptcy, to having a 50% productivity increase per employee that allowed a tripling of their staff and being named among the top 25 employers in Europe in less than five years. This amazing achievement and the ideas they presented are certainly very intriguing, and many of them are absolutely worth their salt. I can myself vouch for the advantages of several of the changes they suggested as I have personally experienced them in action at my former employer. For me it was both motivating and inspiring to work in a culture of responsible freedom and mutual respect, and I believe that this applied to most of my co-workers as well. But how exactly does one create such an environment? Below I've compiled an overview of some of the ways to go about this that was mentioned in the lecture.]]>

Aim for 4-5% turnover and 1-2% absence due to illness
An economist might tell you to aim for having both these numbers at zero, as both are so called cost-centres, but that can actually be disastrous for productivity. Allowing for a reasonable amount of sick-days gives people the security of knowing that they can stay home if they actually get sick, while it at the same time inspires them to come to work when they can. Having people force themselves to work when ill decreases their productivity both on the days they would have been away, but also for several more days due to longer recovery times caused by a lack of rest. Also they might infect other people and decrease their productivity too for a net loss! Aiming for zero turnover means pressuring people into staying in jobs they might not like for longer than they otherwise would, again causing a loss in productivity over time due to a lowering motivation for the job. Allowing such people to move on and replacing them with motivated people both avoids this loss as well as bringing in fresh perspectives and a change to the workplace that might be inspiring to the rest of the employees, and increase their productivity too.

Allow for fully flexible working hours - across a whole year or more! This means that employees can come and go as they wish, as long as they make sure that their tasks are completed and that they end up clocking in an average of 8 hours a day over the course of the year. In theory this means people can work 16 hour days for 6 months, and then take the rest of the year off. In practice however, the protestant work ethic keeps people coming to work as usual, but the knowledge that they can take a day or a week off if they want or need to gives a boost to their feeling of freedom and control, and thereby increases motivation and productivity. G�ran claimed to have achieved this effect even in unlikely positions where such flexibility is considered impossible, like with hotel cleaning staff or restaurant waiters. However this requires careful planning and employee ownership of shifts to pull of.

Have regular improvement meetings with employees While asking the advice of outside specialists to improve your processes will likely work quite well, your employees might already know about things that are lacking in their work, and maybe even how it can be improved, usually very cheaply. External specialists cost a lot and therefore focus on making changes that give big results, but increasing the efficiency of 100 processes by 1% each is just as good and probably a lot easier than improving a single process by 100%. By asking your employees you can identify all these little percentages, month after month, and since such small improvements usually doesn't take a lot of planning or large investments to implement, you can start doing them today! In such a system the employees will over time gain ownership to the processes that they have helped improve, and thus be more inspired to help reduce waste and locate even more efficiency sinks in the process since it is their own. This effect lets you have a continuing process improvement in all parts of the organization, and its really cheap too!

Mandate in-house internships All employees must spend one week each year in an intern in a different internal position than their own. Everyone must be free to choose any other role in the organization for their internships, including roles in accounting, sales or even upper management. While it might sound counter-productive, this will give all employees an insight and understanding into how the whole organization fits together. It will also let them discover negative aspects of "glamorous positions", like that being a sales representative and travelling to fancy hotels aren't all fun and games when it means you have to spend entire weeks away from your family, and thus reduce jealousy of those in such jobs. Through such internships a few will naturally discover something they like better, and by working towards such jobs potentially make themselves more valuable to the organization. Most people will instead find that the grass isn't greener on the other side and get a renewed inspiration and satisfaction about their current job that they couldn't have gotten any other way. All of the suggestions above were introduced during the lecture as examples of effective measures that have actually been implemented in real businesses of various kinds, and with great results too. Since most of the cases went unnamed I cannot verify these facts, but as I mentioned I have been lucky enough to experience some of them myself and they sound very promising to me. There is one concept that stands out however, one that Mats introduced to Fresh AB, and it is decidedly the most controversial of the bunch. As the story goes Mats was been becoming annoyed that some of his employees too often ended up yelling at each other and calling each other stupid and handicapped over trivial disagreements or misunderstandings. One morning, during that supposedly most creative time of the day just before you wake up, he thought of a solution. The idea was that if some of the workers actually were handicapped, then the others couldn't really go around calling each other that any more out of respect for them. So he decided to hire actual handicapped people from a local institution to be working in every group at the company. Of course the employees reacted with shock to the news at first, but eventually agreed to try it out for a few months. Since he probably wouldn't tell the story otherwise, it naturally worked out great with the working environment markedly improving, not just for the 'regular' employees but also for the handicapped people that was getting so inspired by the creative working environment that they blossomed and performed nearly as well as everybody else. At a tour of his facility some government visitors were eager to see this miraculous improvement, and the visitors were to their surprise unable to identify which of the employees they met with that were from the institution. Mats explained this to them by saying that we are all handicapped in our own ways, and thus they are no different than the rest of us. It certainly makes for a good story, but while this final improvement worked out nicely in a factory-setting, it still isn't something that I would attempt in a knowledge based organization for instance. But the power of the story is to really show how much can be achieved if one is only willing to take a chance on change. And with Obama taking office yesterday I just want to say that this truly is Change we can believe in.

Improving folksonomies with tag-typing

2009-01-07T18:13:42Z

With my company having a large degree of knowledge workers it is a fairly common event in the company to hold internal conference days with in-house specialists giving talks on their various topics of expertise. The previous one was held in the middle of December, and several of the talks of the day was about using tags for organizing information. While this probably isn't a particularly cutting edge topic any more, one of the talks by Filip Van Laenen stood out in being about how one should leave hierarchical code repositories behind, and instead use various forms of tagging to organize files with source-code in a so called tagarchy. While this is both a novel and quite interesting topic in itself, what really caught my attention was a mention of how using a combination of distinct 'hard' and 'soft' tags can be used to good effect in logically organizing files of program code. The example was that a set of 'hard' tags would describe generally unchanging technical aspects of the code in the file, like for instance pattern-types used or services provided. Then a separate set of 'soft' tags would be more about code usage, like for example if it is needed by or contains login functionality or whether it supports one or more particular areas of the business logic. The presentation rapidly convinced me of the potential usefulness of having a distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' tags for semi-structured data like program code, but I sensed that the concept could be put to even better uses elsewhere. A rather obvious application for this would be to improve the currently popular approach of single level folksonomy or social tagging, like that which is used on YouTube, Flickr and Del.icio.us amongst others. By separating the tags used to describe items on such services into multiple logical groups, one will immediately get an extra level of semantics for searching or filtering the otherwise unstructured data. This should make the tagging systems of such services a lot more powerful and useful than they currently are, especially in providing better findability for items and more descriptive search-results on the service. It is however apparent that a clear limitation to the potential of tag-typing hinge on which selection strategies are used to decided on which logical tag-groups to include. A first impulse could be to continue with the successful crowdsourcing used in the original folksonomy tagging, and simply let the users themselves assign the tag-groups. While tempting, I believe that this would not alleviate the current trend of non-semantic tags and neither provide any particular advantages, so in this case going towards the other extreme of semantic taxonomies appears to be more suitable. But while semantic taxonomies are generally considered very advantageous over folksonomy tagging, a major downside is that they are often overly complex and thus can be very demanding to work with, especially for amateurs. To alleviate this I instead propose using a professionally selected, limited set of tag-types, and combine these with folksonomy tagging within each type. This way one can get the best of both worlds by obtaining a modicum of semantic meaning from the tag-types, while at the same time providing the freedom of independent crowd-sourced tagging as we already know it. On which tag-types to expect I would suggest that images for instance should have separate tag-types to describe its actual contents, its context, any persons depicted and perhaps its intended usage and any special techniques used to create it. With the addition of such tag-types the accuracy of an advanced search on Flickr or iStockPhoto would most certainly improve greatly. The big open question then is if this is an actual feasible technique, or if there are a bunch of reasons for why this wouldn't work as I have proposed here. Please enlighten me if you have any thoughts or experiences about this, as I feel that a system such as this could be a suitable next step towards a more semantic web.

Updated Gravatar plugin for Movable Type 3.x

2008-12-02T09:33:46Z

When launching this blog I started out using Disqus for the comments functionality as it seemed a good choice that would be more interactive than regular comments. However I soon discovered its many downsides, including a lack of search-indexing and the instabilities caused by having the comments section generated in Javascript, which currently is the only option when using their Movable Type plugin. There is a v2.0 plugin for Wordpress that avoids these downsides, but there has not been any word from Disqus on whether a v2.0 plugin for MT is forthcoming. Due to this I have now returned to the regular MT comment-system. However I still wanted users to get neat avatars next to their comments, and the easiest way I found to do this was to add support for the Gravatar user-pic service and Favicons to my comment-listings. Adding them was very straightforward as there are ready made Movable Type plugins for both, except of course that neither of the Gravatar-plugins worked. *Sigh* After some research it turned out that the Gravatar-supplied plugin is outdated and also only supports Movable Type versions pre-3.0, and the MT supplied plugin only supports MT 4.0 or later. Combine this gap in supported versions with Murphy's Law, and it is just obvious that I still had to be using MT 3.3. I did upgrade to MT 4.x once, but it caused so many problems for me so didn't keep it for long, and attempting that upgrade again was not an option right now as I just don't have the time to get it working properly. That leaves the option of hacking the plugin! Yay! With no plugin-documentation to be found and me never having toyed with MT-plugins before, the task naturally stumped me a bit at first. However I figured out soon enough how to get it working, so for anyone else having the same problem I hereby present you with the updated Movable Type 3.3 Gravatar plugin! Enjoy :-) And now all that remains is for my readers to get their own Gravatars. Go fetch!

Fixes for slow browsing in Windows Explorer

2008-11-21T12:48:52Z

After a recent defrag of my harddrive it suddenly became excruciatingly slow to browse 'My Computer' and other folders with Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) in Windows XP. Sometimes just opening a regular folder with a few files in it would take more than 5 minutes, as well as having explorer.exe hang and be not responding. As none of my other applications were noticeably affected it really had me stumped as to why a regular defrag would cause such a slowdown for folder-browsing, until I discovered that browsing was still near instantaneous when using other file-explorers like Total Commander. Relieved that it wasn't a problem with my drive but likely just a bug in Windows Explorer I set out to find a fix that would bring it back to its old self, but that was easier said than done, and I spent several days searching and experimenting with various fixes. Apparently many people are having problems with Windows Explorer being slow, and for a host of different reasons too. Most commonly I found the obvious suggestions to run windows update, antivirus, antispyware, defrag and chkdisk, as this will commonly fix the performance and many common issues that crop up on computers that are not kept and maintained by professionals. The next step is to improve performance by adjusting the Folder Options in Explorer. Good tips here are to disable the automatic search for network folders and printers, as well as using simple folder view and to not cache thumbnails. But it didn't make any difference and explorer was still just as slow afterwards. Then I downloaded and ran CCleaner to do a full systems checkup and registry cleaning, and I also removed all recent network paths from my "Network Neighbourhoood" as these things also appear to cause many slowdowns too. Still none of these suggestions made any difference. A thread at Google Answers hinted to NeroVision Express as a possible culprit, but I didn't have that installed of course. Finally I stumbled across a Techspot thread describing how you by logging in as a different administrator user and deleting the folder "c:\documents and settings\\local settings\application data\microsoft\windows", can fix the problem of extremely slow browsing in Explorer, and this actually worked! It seems that something had corrupted that part of my windows user profile, but deleting the folder and inducing an automatic recreation of it on the next login fixed all of the problems I was experiencing. Another good thing to come out of this is that all the other tweaks has made the rest of my computer faster too :-)

HTTP 503: President unavailable

2008-11-16T13:37:43Z

Through the Enterprise 2.0 blog I discovered an article in the New York Times discussing how President-elect Obama may have to give up his personal Blackberry when accepting the position as leader of the free world, while he might be the first President to actually keep a computer in the Oval Office. It is really food for thought that the most powerful man on earth does not have the freedom to use the web as he likes or even to read his own email. Maybe then its not so strange that high-ranking politicians are becoming more and more disconnected from their electorate. On a different note Eirik referred me to some maps from StrangeMaps comparing the southern election-districts where Obama won with the cotton producing plantations in 1860. While not surprising, the overlap is certainly striking!

Fine chocolate for beginners (Part 1)

2008-11-16T11:29:17Z

So you just read my last entry on how I found my way into the world of fine chocolate. Maybe you got a little bit inspired, and now you want to try out some fine chocolate for yourself but you don't really know where to start. Traveling to Belgium just to sample chocolates might be tempting, but due to cost or other concerns I expect that most people would like to start off a little closer to home, like at for instance their local grocery-store or a nearby deli. Picking out the right chocolates in such locations can be a challenge however, so here I'll provide a few pointers on how to put quality into your chocolate enjoyment. First things first: The wrapping. This is usually the only thing you have to go on when picking out chocolates at a regular store, so its naturally one of the things you must pay close attention to. It is well known that the branding and presentation of foods can have a great deal of influence on your perception of taste. This means that chocolates from a brand that is exquisitely wrapped or advertised to be a product of quality and luxury will often be a good buy, if only because the presentation will make you think it tastes better than the other brands. Also you will rarely find high-quality products in a lousy packaging, so by going for the pretty boxes you have at least reduced the chance of making a bad choice. Note however that many manufacturers tend to wrap poor products in quality packaging to sell more or to fetch a better price, so only going by the quality of packaging is far from a sure thing.]]> only contain these ingredients:

Sugar (Preferably raw sugar)
Cocoa liquor / cocoa solids (Not used in white chocolate)
Cocoa butter (Avoid if partially replaced with vegetable fat!)
Soy-lecithin (Optional but common emulsifier. Used to give a smoother mouth feel.)
Vanilla (Optional but common flavoring. Avoid if replaced with artificial vanillin)
Milk fat & solids (Optional: Should only be found in milk-chocolate)
Natural flavorings (Optional: For instance fruits, berries, nuts, salt or spices)
Fillings (Optional: Anything from liquors and to nuts and berries )

You should bring this list to the store for comparisons, and remember that if a chocolate contains anything not mentioned here it is usually bad and something you might want to avoid. The most common flaws you will encounter in the ingredients list of mass-produced chocolate are these:

Vanillin instead of vanilla or other artificial flavourings (Artificial flavourings give a metallic after-taste)
Vegetable fat replacing some or all of the cocoa butter (Very unhealthy!)
Artificial sweeteners instead of sugar (Unhealthy and has a different taste and texture)

These things are usually put in chocolate to reduce production costs, but they also reduce the quality and taste of chocolate and should therefore be avoided. Now on to the final thing you are in a position to consider about your chocolate, namely the storage conditions. They are often the cause of the gray-white coating that you have probably come across on your chocolates from time to time. Most often this is caused by too warm storage making the fat in the cocoa butter dissolve, or by humid storage that dissolves the sugar crystals in the chocolate. Both effects leaves the dissolved fat or sugar as gray-white deposits on the surface of the chocolate. This is known as 'bloom'. Bloom is not dangerous, and does not usually affect the taste or texture of the chocolate much, but it does make the chocolate look less appetizing. To avoid this chocolate is therefore best stored in a cool semi-dry environment, preferably at around 12-16°C and at less than 50% humidity. Also note that the cocoa-butter in the chocolate readily absorb strong flavours from nearby food, especially cheese and spices, so the distance to such items is an important consideration. If the conditions in the shelf-area of the store are outside these values, either due to the outdoor climate or because of bad positioning, you might want to find another store to get your chocolate from. Of course in many places it might be difficult to avoid such high temperatures during the summertime, so as always it is a matter of consideration. While we are on the topic of storage I should also mention that the usual shelf-life of dark chocolate is about 12-18 months at the most, and for white and milk chocolate it is only around 6 months due to the milk-contents. Both types can be kept in a freezer for an additional 6-12 months, but then beware of the moisture when thawing! If a chocolate is stored any longer than mentioned above it will generally start to bloom regardless of conditions, and also the cocoa-butter might be getting rancid and start affecting the taste, but that all depends on both the quality of the chocolate and the storage conditions. Then over to the awaited tasting part. You should always bring the chocolate out of storage early and leave it to temperate until it reaches about 22°C, or common room temperature. This will give you the most taste sensations from the chocolate as it will more readily melt in your mouth and release stronger flavours. Some people claim to prefer eating refrigerated chocolate due to its increased hardness and different mouth feel. This is usually caused by much common chocolate being badly tempered or containing much milk and vegetable fats, which allows the chocolate to readily melt at room temperature. Quality fine chocolate on the other hand is usually plenty hard even at room temperature, and only melts at 34°C. Finally I would just like you to remember that taste is a very subjective matter. Purist connoisseurs even argue whether lecithin and vanilla is acceptable in fine chocolate, and some claim that 100% cocoa-content chocolate is very tasty (I disagree). The best advice I can give is therefore to trust your own tastes to tell you what is really good. If you enjoy your bloomed chocolate with artificial flavourings and vegetable fat, then by all means indulge yourself! It might not be "fine chocolate", but it can still be heavenly good from time to time. And that concludes Part 1 of this basic introduction to fine chocolate. Continue to Part 2 for more about different cocoa-beans, production methods, brands and fillings and how those affect the taste, as well as information on where to buy true quality chocolate.

Pitching makes perfect

2008-11-15T12:52:02Z

While doing my Masters degree I used to volunteer for the student organization Start Norway, an organization working to promote entrepreneurship and innovation among students and faculty staff at higher-learning institutions all across Norway. This experience inspired me to apply for a graduate programme called the Norwegian School of Entrepreneurship, where I was accepted and got to spend three months studying and working as an intern in the heartland of IT, Silicon Valley. Both during my volunteering and during the entrepreneurship programme there was of focus on learning and doing the so called "elevator pitch", a very valuable skill that everyone should learn and perfect for their own needs. For those not familiar with the term, an "elevator pitch" is simply a short practiced speech that explains in an enticing way what you do during the time one usually spends in an elevator, often 30 seconds or less. And why an elevator in particular? Because it is based on the assumption that if you by chance should find yourself in the unique opportunity of being in an elevator with someone you badly want or need to talk to, having a prepared elevator pitch to present might pique the other persons interest enough for you to get a real meeting later, and with that a real chance to present your business or idea properly. That's not to say this is only applicable in elevators of course, as using it successfully in an elevator will likely be a very rare occurrence for most people. However it is also a very useful and efficient way to present yourself to new people in various other settings, for instance when people at a party ask what you do, or when you are presenting yourself at networking events. Having a good elevator pitch prepared in such situations lets you stand out and be interesting to the people you talk to, and lets you avoid having to say those conversation killing words: "I'm a consultant" So how do you prepare a good elevator pitch then? Well, like most things there is no single answer to how to make the perfect pitch, but good suggestions abound on the Internet so check out these resources:

And finally have a look at other peoples pitches to see how yours compare!

Discovering fine chocolate

2008-11-13T18:32:17Z

Ever since childhood I have been especially fond of the filling round taste of dark chocolate, something that may have originated from me habitually sneaking bits of Mom's baking-chocolate from the kitchen-drawer, a preference that stayed with me ever since. Naturally I greatly enjoyed most other kinds of Norwegian chocolate too, and while growing up I gradually expanded my chocolate horizons. Early in my travels I discovered Swiss Toblerone, and later I randomly came across the amazing Cote d'Or and Guylian imports from Belgium. With my studies abroad I found myself delighted by Australian Cadbury and American Ghirardelli, but I always treasured the one special kind of Freia baking-chocolate called "Selskapssjokolade" from my childhood far above all others. This all changed in 2006 when I started traveling regularly to Brussels to visit my girlfriend living there. Flying down so often allowed me to thoroughly taste my way through all of the amazing chocolate-shops we came across on our travels around Belgium, and I got to try an amazing range of delicious pralines the like of which I could never have imagined, as well as the wide selection of Cote d'Or, Galler, Jacques and a host of other brands available in the grocery stores. But one day I came across something different, namely a set of three country-labeled chocolate bars in the display-window of a Neuhaus-shop. The label "Occumare Venezuela" especially piqued my interest, so I simply had to try one...]]> Sao Tom�" and "West Africa". Those too ended up surprising me, but not in the amazing way that the Occumare did; The West Africa bar tasted very much like most other regular chocolate to me, and while the Sao Tom� bar was somewhat better it too felt dry and boring in comparison. I couldn't help but wonder why the Venezuelan bar tasted so much better than the other two in the series, and also whether the special "Occumare"-label found only on that bar had something to do with it. I immediately started Googling for answers. Now, I'm not going to turn this into some mystery novel about Chocolate so I'll just give you the simple facts. After days and even weeks of spending my free time reading about chocolate on Wikipedia and a host of other sites, I started getting the hang of it, and it turns out that cacao isn't just cacao after all. It consists of a myriad of different varieties roughly divided into three main groups, of which the South-American version called Criollo is highly praised for its aromatic properties and the one most often used to make quality chocolate. This type of cacao combined with quality preparation is what made the Venezuelan bar from Neuhaus so amazing. At that time it was actually considered to be one of the best bars available so it turns out that me finding this particular bar was a stroke of luck, as it was its special combination of an amazing taste and the branding mystery that led me to begin my search to learn about and discover the world of fine chocolate. And what of the "Occumare"-label you ask? It turned out to be the name of a green valley leading to a small seaside municipality on the Venezuelan coast, a place where the cacao-harvest has been a staple of life since the Spaniards created their first plantations there in the 1650's. It has since been one of the most famous sources of cacao used to create quality chocolate, and even more so in later years after origin-bars stating their source of cacao has become popular among artisan chocolatiers. Now if you are curious to learn how you yourself can identify fine chocolate in a store, I will be writing a follow-up to this post in a few days, so read up on chocolate history in the meantime and stay tuned! Update: And why was it notable that Freia Selskapssjokolade was my favourite as a child you may wonder. Well it turns out that up until the new millennium and the booming interest in fine chocolate that followed, that particular brand was one of the purest and most high quality semi-dark chocolates available on the Norwegian market. This means that the preference for dark chocolate that led me to chocolate connoisseurship in Belgium was likely caused by me being randomly exposed to one of the only somewhat fine dark chocolate-bars available when I was a child! That certainly is a strange twist of fate :-)

Improving strategy through 'piracy'

2008-11-08T10:14:16Z

Chris Brogan recently wrote a very thought-provoking post about how businesses could deal better with hard times through the time-tested strategies used by pirates on the high seas. The analogy may be historically flawed, but the concept itself is surely one to take note of, and one that resonates very well with Nietzsche's concept of creative destruction, as named by economist Joseph Schumpeter. That this is how the world of business actually works might not be obvious at first glance, but this has been thoroughly researched as presented in detail by Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan in their book by the same name. It was among the readings for a university-course I once did on ICT and Markets, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone working on business strategy, should that be for a company or just for yourself. Finally I present you with a more personal take on creative destruction, as put forward by Rachel Cornell like this:

"When you find your life is in pieces, don�t get out the super glue. Find the shard that matters the most to you, the one element that you are the most passionate about and build something great out of that."

External links in a new window?

2008-11-07T12:28:02Z

Since the early days of web-publishing I have been adding a target="_blank" attribute to all the external links I create on my websites. This has partly been to keep readers from 'forgetting' about my site after leaving through an interesting link, but mostly because my personal browsing preference is to open most links in new tabs so I can complete reading that page later. It makes sense to me, so it should to everyone else too, right? Maybe not, so have googled a bit to find out other peoples preferences on this topic, and while the opposition to forced new windows appear very vocal, these polls surprisingly shows that a majority actually prefers links opening in a new window, especially if it is indicated on the link that it is so. From the debate around that poll and on other sites I came across, the opposition to forced new windows generally take the stance that users are not ignorant and should be allowed to choose for themselves, since browsers make this very easy nowadays. Adherents to forced new windows on the other hand claim that many people hardly even know about tabbed browsing, or even the back button (!), so helping them discover this is a good thing. Besides those who already are in know are likely to open the link in a new tab anyway, since that is the reasonable way to browse for experienced netizens. I would tend to agree most with the latter statements, but I'm still considering to get rid of my forced new-window links as a token of good faith to my readers. Well and also because Jakob Nielsen is against it, but what do you think?