Is this the result of today’s massive Twitter exodus?
Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category
…on a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet 
Cinco dias depois da encomenda na Apple Store Portugal, lá chegou a minha cópia do Leopard. Foi expedida ontem da Holanda e chegou hoje. A caixa e o manual têm a maioria dos textos em português e o mais curioso é já vir com a URL do novo site da Apple Portugal (www.apple.com/pt). Ah, e 5 Estrelas para os efeitos holográficos na caixa 
No correio veio também a segunda remessa do Startup Schwag, desta vez com uma t-shirt da Reddit e mais uns stickers
I know, I know… I’m a geek…
I usually make a small balance when I grow a year older. One year after creating this blog I made the same for it, since it’s a part of my life, not a very significant part but it’s growing. One year ago, the balance was positive, still many changes happened. I put some ads here, mainly to cover domain related fees, the design has been improving slowly because I’m don’t want to spend much time improving it, I’m still using K2 has the main theme with a few modifications and it suits me just fine. But besides all the technical differences, I think the major difference is as always, the maturity. New projects came along and that meant new readers, but let me rant about the projects a little bit.
The Projects
In 2006 this blog was part of the Planeta Asterisco, a portuguese blog aggregator that after a few changes to it’s core and format was terminated. From it’s “ashes” the PrintScreen project was born, which soon become one of the best technology portals in Portugal. I had the opportunity to help in the early stages, being part of the organization but mainly giving a helping hand in the graphics department designing the logo and some other graphic ideas. Only recently I left the team due to the lack of time for working on the project and other personal reasons.
Another project that was featured in this blog was the OpenCoffee Club Lisbon. I took the initiative of bringing the OpenCoffee Club idea to Portugal, more specifically to Lisbon and used this blog to spread the word. Well, the experience wasn’t what I was expecting and a small summary of the project can be found here. The project evolved and it’s taking shape. In a few days I’ll write a post about it but for now, as a little glimpse, I’ll lift a little tip of the veil 
What Now?
Well, now the goal is to reach the 3 year old stage, using this blog as a platform to communicate, to create new opportunities for innovation, for more projects and as usual, more rants. But all this wasn’t possible without one fundamental person: you, the reader.
Thank you!
Technorati Tags: Blog, Odrakir, Planeta Asterisco, PrintScreen, Prt.Sc, OpenCoffee Club Lisbon, Project Bit
I got a two side printing accessory for my HP C6180 to save some paper, and I needed to test it with some text what would take more than a page. I went to ARS Techica, picked an article and clicked the print button on the article. For my surprise, instead of the Firefox printing dialog box, an HP Blog Printing window popped up showing the latest articles on the site, giving me the option to select which ones I wanted to print. It’s a great idea, specially when you click print and it delivers a PDF file with all the articles you picked for you to print or read offline. The best part is that HP offers a Wordpress plugin (which I then installed on my blog). Very handy
Now I have a “Print Posts” button on the sidebar and on each single post page. Give it a try!
In April, I took the initiative of bringing the OpenCoffee Club project to Portugal, most specifically to Lisbon. The project started as well as it could, with more than 10 people signing in the first week, which was good considering the nature of the event.
For the fist OpenCoffee meeting we had 6 persons showed up, which was not a good number considering that by the time of the event, we had almost 20 members in the group. Nevertheless, considering that the OC philosophy consists in a informal meeting, almost like a coffee with friends, these 6 members (me included) had a really nice time, sharing experiences and knowledge as it was meant to be, unfortunately not all the goals of the OC were met.
What failed?
Well, today VD, one of the members that is present on OCL since the beginning, wrote about the fact the OCL could not be successful as the OC in Boston (or any other around the world). The reasons he pointed (very well) are based on a few side chats we’ve been having since the first OCL meeting.
- - We don’t have a lot of (new) entrepreneurs. The VC scene in Portugal is waaayyyy behind the rest of the world. Just go to London and see the differences, and that’s a 2 hours plane trip.
- - Portuguese like agendas. If you organize a meeting / event with every aspect and topic detailed, people will criticize you but they’ll come, no matter how inflexible the agenda is. If you put people comfortable, say it’s an open meeting, say let’s go with the flow and bam! You get no one. That’s too risky and too “out there” for the majority of the Portuguese folk. We have been taught to follow the agenda, trade 100 mails deciding which does what, and without that everybody is lost. There’s no agenda in OpenCoffees, we could have it, but that removes all the purpose of the OC.
The biggest mistakes I made was to rush things too much and trust that people would show up, but since it was the first one, it would be more of an experience. We didn’t had a second OCL meeting not by procrastination as Marcos ranted about, but because we saw immediately what failed, and unlike Celso’s opinion, the OpenCoffee formula doesn’t work in Portugal, not with the original format at least.
The Next Step
VD and I tried to figure out a formula that could work here, and we took a glimpse at the major tech events here in Portugal so we could decide which elements would be beneficial to a new project. The OpenCoffee club was unlike all the others due to it’s easy going structure and philosophy, it’s not like Barcamp, TakeOff, Tecnonov, or any other except perhaps the regular meetings of some communities like the Perlmongers community.
One of the most successful events we analysed was Barcamp Portugal which takes place in Coimbra since it’s implementation in Portugal. Actually if we take a look at the events I mentioned before, the majority took / takes place in Coimbra, so having a OpenCoffee Portugal like Marcos mentioned would probably end being done in Coimbra, that’s why I took only the Lisbon share and let others take the initiative for they’re own cities.
We won’t be doing an OpenCoffee Portugal or a Barcamp Lisbon. In fact our idea, like VD mentioned, is to make something between an OpenCoffee and a Barcamp. Our goal is to get a stable core of persons meet every 15 days to discuss whatever people pre-submit to an agenda (yes an agenda!) and depending on the agenda and the number of persons who’ll be attending (besides the stable core) we can take the event to one of the two possible formats:
If there’s a good number of people attending we make it like a Barcamp, if there’s just the core group and a few number of persons we make it like an OpenCoffee.
What’s your point?
Well, our point is to carry on the OC philosophy, enrich it a little more with some structure and content type of a Barcamp and at the same time decentralizing most of these kind of tech events here in Portugal. I don’t have anything against Coimbra (I actually love the city) but there’s lot’s of people interested in this kind of events in Portugal, not only in Coimbra.
Soon we’ll have more information about the project and begin to recruit some voluntaries for the core. Meanwhile be free to join the OCL mailing list, we can then contact everyone from there.
via TechCrunch.
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