(An apology to my podcast subscribers)

Dear listeners,
It’s been a while since I uploaded my last podcast episode. Therefore I’m happy to tell you that Klaas Weima invited me to do a show together… and as a result I have a new MP3 waiting for you!

Klaas is one of the few Dutch podcasters who puts in enormous effort to bring you interviews and insights on digital marketing and inspiring (business) people. (And we can’t thank him enough for that!)

In this interview Klaas asks me questions about TED, Virtual Happiness, Podcasting and Social Grazing. You can subscribe to his podcast here and you can look at the website of his company Energize (boosting brands).

Klaas, many thanks! And it’s my honour to pass on the stick to Mitch Joel

 

 Interview by Klaas Weima [29:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This morning I presented at the morning session of TED University. Lots of people asked if I could mail them the presentation. So I decided to upload it and make it available for download. A little transscript is below the slides.

Transcript: 8 ways to create a succesful TEDx

When you’re part of this community that strongly believes in “ideas worth spreading” and you give them this wonderful format of TEDx, no wonder these TEDx-organizers also want to share their ideas about what makes these local events so special. So, in the next couple of minutes I would like to present to you the 8 most important learnings that we as a TEDx-community have discovered this last year.

1. Don’t do it on your own
First of all: Don’t do it on your own. Form a team. You need people who are better than you on so many subjects. Don Levy said: “… we 
are making this as much of a 
community effort as we can.”

2. Try harder on the location
This is a picture of the European Parliament. Who would have thought that you could organize a TEDx Brussels over there? Or this one. A TEDx-event at Nasa. Space for Ideas. And it’s not that bigger is automatically better.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of spending some time with Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter. In 2007 his biggest concern appeared to be hardware: “How can we keep on growing like this when everytime we plug in another machine the website is down?”

Few years later it’s amazing to see how fast the website has grown and how little downtime their is nowadays. A series of smart moves (among them: buying summize.com instead of building their own search application) later, Twitter seems to have shifted from “What are you doing” to “What’s happening”.

My guess is that this is the result of Twitter becoming mainstream. It used to be a tool for modern -look at me-marketeers, but it’s becoming more and more a tool for civil reporting. Thus, the question: “what’s happening?” can be easily answered -in realtime- on Twitter.

That’s why I like to state that Twitter became mainstream on 9 December 2009, the moment they changed from What Are You Doing to What’s Happening.

When I was at TED earlier this year in Long Beach, the other founder (Evan Willliams) gave this presentation. Which eventually lead

Last night I slept well for the first time in weeks! What a relief that TEDxAmsterdam could live up to the (mega) high expectations. It was an amazing journey and a fantastic climax with warm words, splendid people and perfect ambiance.

Right now we’re releasing one talk each day (first one from Frans Timmermans, about ‘fear’) and I will give you my personal take-aways soon. But first a list of other people that have paid attention to our event:

Press coverage in English:

• Wired UK, 20 Nov 2009: Our man in Amsterdam: Wired at TEDx
• Wired UK, 20 Nov 2009: Wired US Visionary takes to the TEDx stage
• Wired UK, 24 Nov 2009: TEDx diary: Darwinian architecture and Slumdog design
• Conference Basics, 21 Nov 2009: TEDxAmsterdam was a blasting experience

Love this part of a Conan O’Brien interview with comedian Louis C.K. One quote to make you curious:

We’re living in an amazing world (with the world’s best technology) and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of all time.

This week I’ll be hanging out in “The Westerpark”. Not because I’m choosing a new career as a street musician or as a re-born fisherman. But because I’m attending one of the best conferences in the World: PicNic ‘09.

This 4-day conference started out under the name of “Cross Media Week”, but covers a lot more subjects than just media and creativity. I’ve been coming here for years and have blogged about it several times. Last year I even got the chance to give a talk on the main stage. This was my talk about “Virtual Happiness“, just two months before I went offline.

I’m particulary looking forward to the following speakers at PicNic’09:

• Peter Molyneux
• Nicholas Nagreponte
• Linda Stone
• Ben Cerveny
• and of course Philip Zimbardo who I shared the stage with during TED University, earlier this year

Deze hele week staat in het teken van de 400-jarige relatie tussen Nederland en New York. In september 2009 gaat het in en rondom New York om één man: Henry Hudson. Met tal van activiteiten herdenken de Amerikanen (en Nederlanders) dat 400 jaar geleden deze Engelse zeevaarder als eerste Europeaan de baai van New York binnenvoer en hiervan verslag uitbracht. Omdat Hudson onder Nederlandse vlag voer kan Nederland dit feest toevoegen aan de lijst van recente jubilea, waarvoor onze zeevarende voorouders verantwoordelijk zijn.

Zijn wij Nederlanders misschien iets teveel onszelf op de borst aan het kloppen? Dat New York zo’n fantastische stad is omdat wij er destijds iets mee vandoen hebben gehad? Dat klinkt niet echt logisch. Toch is de gedachte van een New York en een New Amsterdam een intrigerende.

Maar nog interessanter wordt het als je je indenkt hoe New York er destijds uitzag. In niets leek het op het huidige New York, laat staat het oude Amsterdam. Maar hoe zag New York er destijds dan uit? Wat zag Henry Hudson precies toen hij de baai naderde? Enter het “Mannahatta Project“, een fantastisch onderzoeksproject dat samen met “The Wildlife Conversation Society”  de oorspronkelijke staat van Manhattan heeft weten te visualiseren:

That’s right, the center of one of the world’s largest and most built-up cities was once a natural landscape of hills, valleys, forests, fields, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, beaches, springs, ponds and streams, supporting a rich and abundant community of wildlife and sustaining people for perhaps 5000 years before Europeans arrived on the scene in 1609.

It turns out that the concrete jungle of New York City was once a vast deciduous forest, home to bears, wolves, songbirds, and salamanders, with clear, clean waters jumping with fish. In fact, with over 55 different ecological communities, Mannahatta’s biodiversity per acre rivaled that of national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Great Smoky Mountains!

Many people think of the Internet as a part of nearly everything. You can’t turn on the radio without hearing a commercial that ends with “please visit WWW (anything) dot com”. It looks like the Internet has added an extra layer to our lifes.

Or, has it? Matthew More from The Telegraph wrote a fun article on 50 things that are killed by the Internet. Here are my 5 favorites:

• Letter writing/pen pals: Email is quicker, cheaper and more convenient; receiving a handwritten letter from a friend has become a rare, even nostalgic, pleasure. As a result, formal valedictions like “Yours faithfully” are being replaced by “Best” and “Thanks”.
• Memory: When almost any fact, no matter how obscure, can be dug up within seconds through Google and Wikipedia, there is less value attached to the “mere” storage and retrieval of knowledge. What becomes important is how you use it – the internet age rewards creativity.

• Dead time: When was the last time you spent an hour mulling the world out a window, or rereading a favourite book? The internet’s draw on our attention is relentless and increasingly difficult to resist.
• Delayed knowledge of sporting results: When was the last time you bought a newspaper to find out who won the match, rather than for comment and analysis? There’s no need to fall silent for James Alexander Gordon on the way home from the game when everyone in the car has an iPhone.
• The mystery of foreign languages: Sites like Babelfish offer instant, good-enough translations of dozens of languages – but kill their beauty and rhythm.
• Concentration: What with tabbing between Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Google News, it’s a wonder anyone gets their work done. A disturbing trend captured by the wonderful XKCD webcomic.

John Freeman has written a wonderful manifesto about slow communication. He talks about the blessings of the Internet age, but then changes the perspective and reallly makes you think differently.

He starts with a quote that might has well been taken from my book (same subject / anecdote):

“My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar.

In my book I point out that more isn’t the same as better. Just because Google has 3 billion results for your query, that doesn’t mean that you are obliged to look at all of them. Freeman poses the same question about email. Just because you can do 3 messages per minute, that doesn’t mean that you should.

It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them.

Freeman continues touching subjects of my book, stating that “The Physical World matters“. Visiting a cafe for coffee isn’t what it used to be. Instead of a pleasant place for conversation, these have turned into places where you hear the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing on keyboards.

Bobby McFerrin takes the audience at the World Science Festival 2009 on a nice little muscial trip. “A demonstration of expectations” is what he calls it.

Just giving them two tones of a pentatonic scale (that’s 5, indeed) and by jumping around he’s not only the conductor but also the solist.

Leaving the neuroscientist on stage with just one very scientific question… what the hell just happened here?