First, check out their video, if you haven’t yet. It’s really worth watching, even if you don’t like their music. Analysis after the jump:

As you’ve seen it’s a Rube Goldberg inspired music video that is doing everything it can to keep your attention. It starts with a shock view of singer that looks like he just slaughtered a cow and as that grabs your attentions it gives you an interesting machine to observe as you watch the video. If they kept your attention for 30s you’ve probably managed to be enthusiastic enough about it to instant message it to your friends as well shared it on Facebook etc.

Based on their recent open letter, this is exactly what brings money today to a band – YouTube advertisements and the only way to actually make serious money on YouTube, besides having 500 videos that you released over last 2 years is to go viral with a well thought our video.

This brings to a completely new problem: what sells of the internet is porn, but if you can’t show that, kittens and lolcats will do. So the best tactic for an indie band that would like to get a lot of views would be to get some cute girls and somehow embed fuzzy kittens and puppies into their video. This way you’ll have a few bonus points in terms of views and maybe you’ll be able to achieve tipping point that will allow you to skyrocket the number of your views.

Did you spot any other details in the video that would contribute towards virality and sharing?

Related posts:

1. Bubble video
2. Neo-futurists video [failed uxweek notes]
3. Tortoise

I’m excited about this MobileCamp for two main reasons: we’ll be bringing local mobile phone developers together for the first time in such numbers. This is important for Slovenian Mobile scene as there many indie iPhone and Android developers that need to see that their peers are active in the industry and that they’re not alone.

The second is that this venue is much bigger in terms of space so we should be able to introduce more people to concept of unconferences as well prepare grounds for a series of smaller MobileCamps later in the year if there will be enough demand.

We’re seeing increasing demand for iPhone and Android developers from companies and entrepreneurs as well as demands for applications from users, so lets expand this market fast and catch-up with the rest of the Europe. This time we’re switching back to English as primary language and we’re hoping to attract broader community also from the neighboring countries.

As always, go to http://www.mobilecamp.si for all the gory details and how to sign-up for your spot at the MobileCamp.

Related posts:

1. Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana
2. Group Roller Blading in Ljubljana (Ljubljana Nightskate)
3. Geeky events in next two weeks in Ljubljana

We can say once again that our last event, RealTime WebCampLjubljana, was a great success. We didn’t run out of coffee, there was enough electricity and WiFi as well as a great mix of people and the quality of talks and discussions was astonishing.

There are a few things that we did differently this time that had effect on the ‘camp feeling:

• Smaller group – instead of going with 150+ we went for 50+ crowd. More intimate and it allowed for more open discussions.
• Two tracks only – moved from 3 tracks format to 2 tracks as there was less people and we also had to optimize for the available rooms. We still managed to create a nice balance of tech vs. non-tech oriented talks.
• Slovenian language – despite protests from our friends in Croatia, we decided to go with Slovenian as a primary language this time. My current feeling is that this made it easier for everyone involved and we should consider sticking to Slovenian for smaller camps that are not intended for international audience.
• ‘Hackish venue’ – instead of going for university or conference venue, we crashed in Hekovnik this time, a new hackerspace in Ljubljana. This had a totally different feeling of more ‘ad-hoc’ and less sterile environment. It seemed like people enjoyed this more.

There is still a question – how to encourage people to prepare more sessions and how to time the event. Going for early Saturday morning as a start (8am-ish) seems to work great for now. Regarding more sessions, I’m not sure if we can expect more than 30% of attendees to run their own session, would be interested in recommendations on any literature on the topic of facilitating sessions.

Did I miss anything important that we should take into consideration for our next ‘camps?

Related posts:

1. Announcing RealTime WebCampLjubljana
2. MobileCamp Ljubljana in late March!
3. WebCamp break out session #1 – Adoption challenges (for social network portability) and ways for solving them

It’s been two months after last WebCamp and it’s time for another party. Following the idea of BarCamps with story line, we’ve decided to organize RealTime Social WebCamp Ljubljana.

This time we’ve decided to focus on a single emerging technology space: Real-Time Social Web. If you’re not up-to date with the latest buzzwords, it’s about next generation RSS protocols like HubSubPubBub, RSSCloud, XMPP (that powers GTalk), Synaptic Web, Twitter API and a bunch of other technologies and ways of thinking about the Web and Mobile space.

Intended audience are developers and people who are close to them (e.g. interface designers, product managers, etc.) and will need to innovate in this space in the next 6 months.

We’re doing it a bit more limited this time, just 50 spaces. I’m interested in seeing how a smaller and more focused group changes the dynamics of such gathering.

The rules for the tickets are the same as the last time. Send description of your talk early and you get a ticket, or hope that you can click fast enough for the left-over tickets later. I believe that extra effort should be awarded.

The official language this time is Slovenian since we’ve figured out that locals that are not native speakers understand our geek talk enough that it shouldn’t be a problem and we can understand them as they lecture in their own language.

As always: all the details are at http://www.webcamp.si

Related posts:

1. Announcing WebCampLjubljana
2. RealTime WebCamp reflections
3. Announcing BarCampLjubljana

My current reading list nicely shows the professional interests I am currently persuading. A mix of social media and community engagement (Trust Agents and Tribes), Web Analytic so I can get better insights into web pages, The Four steps to the Epiphany since it’s always good read about product and business creation process and Laws of Simplicity that my brother was kind enough to shared with me to not lose the touch with the design philosophy.

I wonder if I’m missing something..

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1. How do you design? – Free E-Book

While observing 4chan’s attack on Spar’s “create your shopping bag” online tool, I started to wonder if Internet meme’s ever die or they’ll continue to haunt us well into the future. I’m sure that on the trivial level, we’ll soon see in Jeopardy question type: “popular internet meme’s of 90’s”, but there is a different component. Given that a large amount of our current society and youth is influenced by short and not-so-short lived meme’s – what are today’s anthropologists doing to document and conserve this information? Will we need to resurrect it from old Wikipedia dumps, before they get removed for not being notable enough?

One of the notable things happening in this area is that Jason Scott has an archive of 10 million 4chan threads and while he isn’t releasing it to the public just yet, I’m confident that this will happen in a few years time.

I do hope that there is a whole generation of graduate’s in anthropology that are wondering how to capture all the memes so they can build their careers on top of it.

Related posts:

1. The importance of identity in online communities
2. Slovenian government is trying to censor the Internet

Most forms of gambling is illegal in Slovenia with a few highly regulated exceptions that are given concession from the government. Most notable are Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Lottery) and Športna Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Sport Lottery) in addition to real-world casinos and gambling places.

With growing popularity of online gambling these organizations as well as government are facing a problem with how to deal with insanely popular betting sites like Bwin, Expekt.com, bet-at-home.com. Government already tried to order ISP’s to block access to these webpages in 2006, but it turned out that they didn’t have legal ground for it so it failed.

That is why they decided to fix the law that would, among other things, require ISP’s to prevent access to web pages that would offer gambling related services. Failing to comply would result in fines from 7.500 EUR to 52.500 EUR and 1.500 to 10.000 for the person in charge. Parliament already approved the law on 18th of December 2008, but it got vetoed at the next stage in the process so they will have to vote on it again.

There are many troubling aspects of these recent developments:

• From legal aspect it introduces censorship at the price of freedom of speech because part of the government decided that they need it. Who will be next to demand blocking of unwanted content?

• From technical aspect it’s really hard if not impossible to block web pages. The only real approach would be using Deep Packet Inspection technique, that requires ISP to analyze each internet package violating privacy of the communication in the process.

It’s now up to the citizens and experts in the field to carefully analyze answers and proposed government changes to the law to make sure that it does not pass in its current form.

If you can read Slovenian, there are three excellent articles on this topic that you have to read:

• Naš veliki kitajski požarni zid (bigger political picture)

• Zakon o igrah na sre?o uvaja cenzuro spletnih strani (legal)

• Cenzura prometa na stranska vrata? (technical analysis)

Original version of this article appeared on Netokracija

Related posts:

1. Using the Web to make government consultations better – TellThemWhatYouThink [BarcampLondon4 notes]
2. Facebook v slovenščini! (Facebook speaks Slovenian)

Does this mean that next version of OS X will slowly start introducing “hide unused tray icons” like with Windows or there is nothing that we can do as we need all of them?

How is your tray? Wider or shorter? Am I missing anything?

No related posts.

In the process we all learned a lot about GIS systems, different GEO API solutions, Geonames and that it’s not a trivial problem.

For now I just want to give thanks to everyone that helped in this transition and I’ll try to blog more details about the transitions and lessons learned in upcoming weeks.

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1. Prevoz.org in Google Earth

Today everyone blogs and we expect everyone to have their own blog, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile etc. Being present on as many services as we can. We can then measure measure engagement levels with one of the many different approaches (number of followers, sales, replies or even Klout rank).

What often don’t see is companies taking a deliberate decision not to be present on every social media fad, but instead decide to focus on a few communication channels and spend the rest of their resources on their actual product.

The one company that does this beautifully is twidroid. They make a deliberate stance that they don’t do tech support over Twitter and that you should use email. Their message is simple and it helps drive customer to the right medium.

We can take this a step further and take a look at different ways some of social media tools can be used:

Facebook Page
Is our audience on Facebook at all? Is this a replacement of Newsletter or do we expect to do tech support and discussions here? Do we just count number of fans so we have more than competition?

Twitter account
Do we plan to become a leader and Tweet  about our industry or do we just push announcement every once in a while. Is this account to do tech support over? Do we want followers or engagement? How personal is the voice of the account?

Blog
Do we position ourselves as progressive thinking company that regularly writes in-depth editorials or do we push product announcements and speaking gigs. What would be most useful for our business goals (hyping up vs. consumer focused)?

LinkedIn and everything else
While we all love new social networks the only real question is – do we actually reach anyone on that platform?

Do you know why your social media presence is structured like it is? Or is it legacy setup already?

Related posts:

1. 10 Basic tools of social media presence for organizations
2. Social media advice to Seedcamp finalists
3. Personal branding, social media and pretty pictures