antti.vilpponen.net

I’m travelling about 100km an hour at the moment in a friend’s car and taking a break from cleaning my Google Reader to write this post. I’ve been thinking recently that there is little value added in being online in the real-time conversation tools such as twitter et al. compared to reading more thoughtful pieces of writing or watching properly done videos.

Twitter in its architecture is one that doesn’t attract me too much. Why? It totally lacks the possibility to have proper discussions. Jaiku had that, but as we all know Jaiku didn’t do too well in the jet streams of its founders flying off to work for the big G. Blogs on the other hand are one of the best platforms for good and thoughtful discussion. I’ve come to realise I miss that.

Hence, I’m trying to get back to blogging more and reading blogs. There’s more to the world than 140 characters and you certainly can’t grasp most of the situations you come across in those characters.

I finally managed to read through Joseph Jaffe’s Join The Conversation during the Easter holidays. The book is yet another solid show of Joseph Jaffe’s understanding of the internet and how it changes companies’ business models and marketing. Numerous examples of excellent ways of marketing and at least equally bad examples enable the reader to understand the small important issues in working online.

However, I really would have wanted to see slightly more academic writing from the author, because “Join the Conversation” is another “life after the 30-second spot” from the online world. There are a lot of examples that prove the points Jaffe is trying to make, but they usually are very light in context and could ultimately, in some cases, be used to prove the point from another point of view. My favorite learning I received from the book was the combination of the Long Tail theory together with Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations graphs. I’m sure there is more there to explore and write about.

Despite all this I enjoyed the book, it’s a solid good read. With slightly more depth it would have been a 5/5-star goodie. Then again, this could be me to whom most of the examples were relatively familiar. To the the regular marketing person in a large multinational, this is definitely and eye-opener.

My friend and partner, Hannu Ripatti, has been writing a blog for sometime now, called Garbage is an analog concept. He has a lot of good entries there already, but I especially like the “Dinner in the cave“.

He writes about his blog (which I agree with 100%):

I believe that the ongoing digital revolution is going to be one of the landmark moments in history. It will not only change the way we do business and communicate. It will change every aspect of society from education to privacy and beyond. There will be many challenges, both technical and intellectual, but in the end I truly believe that we will all benefit from the revolution.

I’ve been writing a blog with a friend, Miikka Kukkosuo, for a while now called Arctic Startup. We review Finnish startups and blog about various events and issues around them. To my suprise, I realised alarm:clock euro had done a nice review on our site. Just to let you know; we do have some cards up the sleeve for next year! :) We’ll definitely have a lot more blog posts coming up, a new design to some degree and possibly even video to spice things up a bit.

Thanks for the review!

That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams – two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.

It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of – I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.