The Killer Attitude

Social graphs - scary and beautiful

2012-02-16T13:14:00.003+01:00

If you are on Facebook you might have seen pictures from your friends where they post their "social graph"? These are indeed beautiful illustrations of your friend's network, and below I point to a few of the available "click and view" apps that will do this for you.

From all of these you will be able to quickly get an overview of your social network, and often you will be able to identify groups among your friends. As a bonus you will also find a tool that displays your social graph on LinkedIn.

But these are not only nice visualizations. They also invite to a moment of thought on how much a simple list of your friends, and how your friends know each other, can reveal. After presenting three visualization tools for Facebook I'll discuss a bit more about this. But first the tools:

myFnetwork
This visualization is the simplest of the tools. No interactivity, but you can zoom and pan around in the picture. Individual nodes are colour-coded based on some centrality measurement - the more yellow/white, the more connected to the surrounding nodes.

All nodes are placed in a circular patten, and you can identify some of the major clusters among your friends.

You can try myFnetwork here (link).

Social graph

This tool provides some interactivity, and includes the image of each friend in the visualization. The clusters of friends are more easily explorable, and some of the more obvious clusters are highlighted with pink circles.

You can hoover over a node to see the name of that specific friend. A click on a node will bring you to the corresponding Facebook profile. By clicking and holding down the mouse button you can grab a node and move it around to see which other nodes/friends that are connected.

Try Social graph here (link).

TouchGraph

The last Facebook tool to visualize you social graph is also the most advanced.

It does a nice job in colour-coding different clusters in your network and gives the nodes different sizes (which seems to be related to the number of friends in your network (degree)).

The graph is interactive, and can be configured and explored in a number of ways. Note that by default it also includes yourself as a node, but that can be changed in the advanced settings.

TouchGraph can be found here (link).

Some theory...
All of the graphs above are sometimes referred to as egocentric, level 1.5, social graphs. This means that the start form an ego (you) - but as you are obviously connected to all your friends it doesn't add any information to include yourself (rather, including yourself will in many cases make the network structure less obvious). 1.5 means that the network includes all of your friends (level 1), and how your friends are connected to each other (level 1.5). A level 2 would mean including all of your friend's friends, also those that not are connected to you. This has some further value, but on the other hand the Facebook API does not provide access to this information, and the number of nodes would quickly be very large.

It is quite obvious that by only looking at your friends, and how they know each other, you find some interesting patterns. Especially the groups (clusters) usually match very well to real life social groups.

The clusters are most often visualized by a combination of a layout algorithm, where groups will form, and by specific algorithms designed to calculate clusters.

With other tools you can take the analysis to the next level - there is a number of metrics that can be applied to these kind of graphs - but that is probably a topic for a future blog post.

...and the scary part!
Well, isn't the scary part clear by now?

Simply by looking at your friends, and how they are connected to each other, a lot can be seen. The relationship and context of a specific friend can be deducted in many cases. If you know one node that is in your family, you are likely to find the other family members in the same cluster.

Probably obvious to you, but as your social graph information is more or less openly available (on Facebook, but also on LinkedIn, Twitter and other networks) it is not that hard for anyone to have a closer look. And of course the network operator have a very nice picture of you - not only from what you "post and like", but especially from your social graph.

The bonus - a LinkedIn tool
Oh - yes - I promised you to also include a tool to visualize your social graph on LinkedIn. You can find the tool here (link). It is very similar to the other tools above, but instead looks at your LinkedIn social graph.

The main difference, besides the nodes and network as such, is that this tool include yourself as a node.

It does a good job in identifying clusters in your more professional network. (Note, you need at least 50 connections on LinkedIn to be able to use it).

Now it's your turn
Go ahead and try one or more of the social graph visualization tools I mention here. I'd love to hear your viewpoints, just leave a comment!

Also, if you know any other nice tool to visualize various social graphs I'd be interested.

Lunch, anyone?

2011-11-29T13:56:00.007+01:00

It's not often I get excited enough over a new web site to jump into the editor and write a blog post immediately. This is however one such occasion.

In my feeds today I noticed several references to a new web site: YouGuysShouldLunch.com (or LunchaIhop.se in Swedish). Give it a try!

I haven't looked elsewhere, and there might very well be similar services around (if so, let me know in the comments).

However, there's several reasons that make me think this is simply brilliant, besides that the man behind (Jonas Larsson, @byBalsam) is from Sweden:

The way it brings your online network of contacts into real world, physical meetings.
You can't include yourself in a lunch proposal. You need to think seriously around who of your contacts you want to put together, and not simply propose a lunch with you and a friend.
The use of LinkedIn indicates that "it's serious business" and provides both easy access to the professional background of a proposed lunch date. You are also likely to have some kind of professional relationship to the people you put together for a lunch date.
It is a nice usage of the LinkedIn API. Mashups are great...
The site has both a Swedish and an English version, with different domains. Nice detail.
The logo indicates it can be a simple lunch, doesn't need to be at a fancy restaurant.
...and the list goes on with many small details.

However, the really neat thing is that this service is also one of the best and creative "I'm looking for a new job"-pitches I have seen. Ever.

As Jonas writes on his blog, he will leave his current assignment at the end of the year. One of the options when you pair together lunch dates is to invite one of your contacts to lunch with Jonas himself. He even provides a wish-list of people he would like to have lunch with.

No doubt he will have his calendar full of lunches the next months, and a bunch of interesting new job opportunities.

(Unless he builds a business around this initiative. Already valuable and interesting with several potential new things to add: How to find a good time for lunch (integrate with calendars), Where to lunch (find a good, close, spot by integrating with restaurant guides and maps).)

So - what are you waiting for? Which of your LinkedIn contacts do you think should have lunch together? (And who do you think I should have lunch with?)

The Pareto (80/20) rule and time management - the fallacy

2011-03-04T10:56:00.003+01:00

The Pareto rule (or Pareto principle), also known as the 80/20 rule, is often used when discussing time management. However I do believe there's some flaws when applying the Pareto principle to time management, and I'll try to sort them out here.

The argument within time management often goes (after introducing the 80/20 rule):

"Thus, since 80% of you achievements comes from 20% of your work, you shall strive to focus more on you time and effort on those (current) 20%."

Right? Not!
At least I don't think so.

Don't get me wrong - time management is useful. But we shouldn't apply the Pareto rule here. Instead it all boils down to "do the important stuff first", but you should also be serendipitous.

There's a few potential and actual flaws that can be identified, but first - let's have a closer look at the Pareto principle.

The Pareto principle and power laws
The Pareto principle was named after Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

In a broader scope the Pareto principle is an effect of power law distributions, or more specifically - the 80/20 characteristics is a property of some classes of power law distributions.

Power laws are quite interesting, and well worth a deeper look (which I will spare you for the moment). For our purposes here we will note two things though:

Phenomena described by power law distributions are scale-free, ie shows scale invariance. This means that the phenomena will always show a power law distribution, regardless of how you "zoom in" when you look.
Power law distributions are an indication of a system in a critical state, or a system which shows self-organized criticality.

If you have looked into eg chaos theory, or read eg The Black Swan or Ubiquity, you will recognize that such systems are not predictable in the terms that we normally are used to with systems that shows a Gaussian random behavior. The changes are not distributed around an "average value". Instead the changes can be very large or very small, without any predictable size.

Now, let's have a look at the time management 80/20 fallacies...

False analogy (?)
The first objection - can you apply the knowledge from Italian land distribution to time management, or is this a false analogy?

To be honest; I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised if "how you spend your time" shows a power law distribution.

But I haven't seen any study proving this. Just because we "know that we spend a lot of time (80%?) on things that are not really productive (20%?)" it doesn't mean we have a Pareto distribution.

I would be happy if you can point me at studies that confirms that we do have a power law situation (or disproves...)!

But let's assume that we indeed have a Pareto distribution, and that the 80/20 rule do apply! What would this mean?

We will still have an 80/20 situation...
...even after we have done our "time management homework".

Remember that the Pareto distribution (and power laws in general) means that we have a scale-free behavior. Thus, after having cut of the "non-productive tail" of our efforts, the "productive head" (ie the 20% of our efforts that produces 80% of the value) will still have the 80/20 property!

What now? Should we iterate, and again cut of the tail (pony-tail?) of the head?

Also, how do we know that our initial 80/20 distribution isn't the result of a previous (unconscious) time management activity? Where should we start, and when should we end?

We don't know what will make up the "tail"
Another property of systems showing a Pareto/power law distribution is the unpredictability.

Yes, we should be able to analyze our past schedule, find the patterns and identify which part of our time was the unproductive tail.

However, if we do have a Pareto situation, it is not possible to foresee if any of the past "valuable time" eventually will be worthless, or if any of the potential "time wasters" will turn out to be the next big thing.

And it's all interconnected...
The last thing to note is that you activity that you'll trying to time manage consists of a number of smaller tasks. These tasks are not independent of each other, they all interrelate.

Going back to the theory, we can note that self-organized criticality is a property of some complex systems. "A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts"

Thus it would be impossible in most cases to filter out the less productive activity and foresee how the non-execution of that activity would affect your overall productivity, especially how it would affect your more productive time.

This might sound too theoretical, but it is easy to see the connection to eg the value of collaboration and networking.

Perhaps those 15 unproductive minutes you spend with a colleague drinking coffee and chatting will result in that a piece of information you picked up in the chat saved you two hours of work later?
Perhaps those 10 minutes you invested in helping a colleague solving a task not relevant for your performance will result in getting help later from that colleague, again saving you hours of work? (Not mentioning that those 10 minutes of your expertise you invested probably saved an hour of your companies overall time that your colleague would have spent on their own trying to find a solution).

The summary, and the common sense of time management
So, I don't think the 80/20 reasoning shall be applied to time management, at least not the way it is most commonly done today.

First, please prove to me that we do indeed have a Pareto distribution here.

Second, if we do have a Pareto distribution, whats' the implications of that?

But as I said in the beginning - time management is important, of course. But to me it all boils down to:

Focus on the important things...
And define what you mean by important. Most valuable? Most fun? Best investment for the future? Most urgent? Also, define "for whom". For you? For your stakeholder? (And who are they?) For the society?
Tricky questions perhaps, but to me this are the important time management questions to have in mind.
...and be serendipitous
Be open for new things, you'll never know when and how they will come in handy.
Remember that it is often in the intersection of different fields or activities that the really valuable new thoughts and insights emerge.
And you'll never know what the impact and future value of an activity that seems less valuable today might be tomorrow.

Where do all good ideas come from..?

2010-10-07T12:25:00.003+02:00

...turns out that coffee *is* a good source, for two reasons...

I just discovered two videos with Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) that are worth a few minutes. Also, he has recently published a book on the topic (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation), which I have added to my "to-read"-list.

First, here's an animated version of the story:

Next, here's a talk at TED by Steven Johnson. In here you will find out the two reasons coffee might be good for creating ideas (one was revealed in the video above).

Also, don't miss the story of how the embryo of GPS sprung out of the Sputnik launch in the 50's. This story is told at the end of the TED talk.

Four million Facebook users in Sweden - some statistics

2010-09-02T10:44:00.011+02:00

Yesterday Facebook reached four million users in Sweden.As I have looked into the statistics and demographics at the one, two and three million mark I'm continuing the tradition with this post.

In Sweden 44% of the population are active on Facebook. It is especially interesting to note that more and more of the Facebook users are 40+ old.

In the age group 15-64 we see that 61% of the Swedes are active on Facebook. If you had any doubt, Facebooking has for sure become a mainstream activity.

The evolution over time
The graph below show the number of Swedish users on Facebook since the 25th of October 2007:The one-million mark was passed on October 31st, 2007. Almost 71 weeks later (March 8th, 2009) the two-million mark was reached. It took 41 more weeks to reach three million users (on Dec. 21st, 2009). The latest million of users, up to four million, took 36 weeks and was reached yesterday (Sep. 1st, 2010).

The gender distribution
Overall in Sweden 48.6% of the Swedish Facebook users are female, 45.1% are male and 6.3% have not defined their gender.

A further breakdown of the gender distribution per age group is in this graph:

The age distribution
The penetration per age is displayed in this chart:

The 100+ percent penetration between 14 and 23 years of age probably have a number of reasons, including:

You have to be 13 to sign up for Facebook. If you are younger you'll probably fake your age. And once you have set your birth year you can't change it (you can change the date and month though...).
It might also be that people maintain two or more Facebook accounts.

What do you think?

...and not only the youth on Facebook...
It's clear from the graph above that Facebook is used across the whole population. The penetration does not fall below 50% until the age of 42, and all the way up to the age of 60 the penetration is over 20%.

It is interesting to compare the penetration per age group today with previous occations. The chart below shows the penetration per age group at the stage where the number of Swedish Facebook users passed 1, 2, 3 and 4 million users:

Another way to view the data is to look at the accumulated penetration as we go from the younger to the elderly:

Initially (at one million users, the blue line) 80% of the users where younger than 30 years. Now (4 million users, green line) we find that we have to move to the 40-44 years segment to cover 80 percent of the users.

That's it for the 4 million report. Now let's see if (or when..?) Sweden reaches 5 million users on Facebook.

Any thoughts? Will the growth continue? Or will another site start to replace Facebook as "the place to hang out".

(Note 1: the number of users is measured through the Facebook advertising tool. Although it is not clearly stated what criteria is used to classify users, the best guess is that A) the tool measures active users, which probably means users that have logged in the last month and B) The nationality is to a large degree decided by looking at the IP-address range of the user.

Note 2: The data on the age structure of the Swedish population I used to calculate the penetration is from SCB. However, the latest data on the age structure of Sweden available as of today is the structure for 31st of December 2009. After some consideration I took the liberty to use that data, but to add 1 to all ages. Clearly this is only an approximation of the current age structure, but as eight month has passed since Dec. 31st I believe that is to some extent a better approximation.)

Gothenburg and Facebook - what's up?

2010-06-09T12:16:00.004+02:00

I just had a quick look at the regional/local statistics for Facebook in Sweden. To my surprise Gothenburg seems really underrepresented.And yes - I also used Gothenburg (and even Goteburg) as search terms - all gave a similar figure.

As a comparison - the same search for Stockholm returns more than 2.6 million people (far more than the official population in the region?) and for Malmö it returns 234 000 people.

The official population of Gothenburg is just above 500 000 individuals (Gothenburg is the 2nd largest city in Sweden).

How come? Any ideas? Could it be that:

People in Gothenburg doesn't use Facebook and social networking sites to a large extent?
Perhaps there's another social networking site which is large in Gothenburg?
People in Gothenburg would rather not state that they live in Gothenburg?
A slightly more technical possibility - Facebook uses, among other things, the user's IP address to decide the geographical location. Perhaps the Internet connections in Gothenburg are routed through Stockholm or some other place?

I'm stumped and surprised. What do you say? Do you have any Facebook friends from Gothenburg to ask..?

Copyleft or copy-theft?

2010-04-01T13:06:00.000+02:00

Creative Commons and Noncommercial use - what does it really mean? Can you help me understand this?

Please take the time to answer this poll (link) - I will post a summary when I get sufficient number of replies.

You might be familiar with Creative Commons and how they:

provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily
mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can
use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some
Rights Reserved."

Creative Commons works with four basic attributes, which are combined into a specific license:

Now, it's the "Noncommercial" I need your help with. (Again, here's the poll where I would love your feedback!)

How shall "Noncommercial" vs. "Commercial" purposes be interpreted? Is there a clear definition?

It is pretty clear that you can't sell somewith which is licensed as "Noncommercial". Ie, you can not make a postcard or a T-shirt of a non-commercial picture and sell it.
On the other hand I guess you can make a T-shirt and wear it yourself, or make a postcard and send to you friends?
Can you make a postcard or T-shirt and give it away? To your personal friends? On behalf of your employeer? If a corporation gives something away, even for free, it is in many cases a commercial reason for this.

It is quite common to apply a copyright model that let people reuse and embed content from the Internet (eg video files) given certain conditions. In many cases this includes a condition that the content "may only be used for non-commercial purposes".

At a first glance the interpretation of this sounds obvious. But beware, the definition of "Non Commercial" might not be as obvious as you thought. The interpretation is not crystal clear, and the formal meaning is in many cases more narrow than you might intend - both as a content creator, granting a "Non Commercial" license and as publisher/user, using "Non Commercial" content.

Let's have a look at the topic, starting with Creative Commons and then moving to some examples.

Creative Commons
Have a look at Creative Commons and the set of licenses they offer for creators and contributors that are looking for a crisp and clear way to apply a copyleft approach (rather than copyright) to their works and creations. In essence, this allows creators to apply a "some rights reserved" license to their works.

One of the attributes that can be part of a Creative Commons license attribution is the Non Commercial (NC) tag. Three out of the six available CC licenses includes this tag.

Now, what is meant by the NC tag? It turns out that this is not as obvious and straight forward as you would wish.

The license attribute
The short version of the Noncommercial attribute reads:

You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

When you dig into the small print of the more legal version of a CC license including the NC attribute you find the text:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You [in Section 3 above] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

What does this mean?

The key phrase is "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation".

This phrase is not as clear as you would wish, and in many cases I believe the practical interpretation applied by individuals differs. Especially as many probably doesn't read the fine print, and instead relies on the even more open-ended phrasing "noncommercial purposes only" in the Noncommercial attribute.

The problematic word seems to boil down to "primarily".

Primarily or Secondarily?

How do you define what's primarily and what's secondarily..?

Consider a few examples:

Private use:

You have a blog where you post "funny things" just for the fun of it.
You have a blog where you post "funny things" just for the fun of it. Also, just for the fun of it, you included some ads on the blog.
You know that you'll probably not make any money from the ads (best case a few dollars a year). The reason you included ads are not to make money, but something else (like "I'd like cool ads on my blog" or "I'm trying to understand how ads work technically").
You have a blog where you post "funny things" just for the fun of it. The blog is hosted at a site that includes ads automatically (like eg. Facebook).
The reason the ads are there is to finance the (free) service that hosts your blog.
You have a blog where you post "funny and useful things". The aim is to make yourself more attractive to employ.

Corporate use:

You are posting to a corporate, external blog. The aim of the blog is to promote the "know-how" of the company and to attract new customers.
You are posting to a corporate, external blog. The aim of the blog is to build the perception and brand of the company. All sales goes through other channels.
You are posting to a blog on your company's intranet. The aim is to share knowledge, which in the end might make your company more efficient and competitive.
You are posting to a corporate, external blog. The company is a non-profit organization, but you still charge for your services in order to finance the activities you do to eg. support victims of various disasters. The aim of the blog is to promote the "know-how" of the company and to attract new customers.

In which of the above cases would it be OK to use content with the Non-commercial attribution? Have your say in this poll.

A study from Creative Commons
Creative Commons published a report September 2009 on this topic, looking into how the online community defines and perceives the term Noncommercial. Interesting and recommended reading - but no clear conclusion of the definition. Read the announcement here.

Conclusions?
So, what's your take on the definition of Noncommercial? A no-brainer or a can of worms?

How do you apply the definition, or don't you you see this as applicable to you?

Please drop a comment below, and contribute to the poll!

Source criticism criticism

2010-02-25T13:30:00.005+01:00

A few weeks ago the site Internetkunskap.se went live, with the aim to publish a number of videos to enhance the Internet knowledge and competence among school kids in Sweden.

A good initiative, which fills a need.

But, last week Internetkunskap.se published the second video about internet source evaluation (källkritik). Obviously an important topic in the context. However, the video has a major flaw.

"How to validate a search result..?"
About two minutes into the film a search is made to find out which city is the capital of Brazil. The first search result is from Wikipedia, and suggests that the capital is Brasilia. So far so good, but as the topic of the video is how to evaluate information found on Internet the film goes on. Next follows a discussion on that you can't trust a search result as such, but then..

"...click on the search result and read the page!"
About three minutes into the video we are ready to verify that Brasilia indeed is the capital city of Brazil. And the best way to do that is to click on the search result and read on the site that Brasilia is the capital. Right... (Not, of course...)

This small lapse hurts the overall impression in a number of ways.

It makes you look for other weaknesses in the video
And there are some to be found...
The most critical one is the lack of any discussion on the type of source (ie that Wikipedia is editable by anyone) or the need to identify the publisher and the intention of the publisher.
It makes you wonder about the overall project
Will the other films have similar flaws? What's the intention and target group? And who is really behind the site (source criticism...)?
Have a look at the first and third movie as well. And look for the upcoming ones.
It might be the takeaway for the target group
"I have done my "källkritik", I clicked in the search result and read it" (Not the sole message from the video, but an easy one to catch...)

The video discusses the need to provide references for information, and to get as close as the original source as possible. But it doesn't come anywhere near discussing "källkritik" as an academic/scientific method. (Or actually, the films shows this, but I feel the reference is misplaced in the overall context provided by the video).

I originally found it a bit humorous, and a nice touch, that the presenter of this specific topic is a PR consultant, who furthermore uses the alias "Doktor Spinn" (what is a spin doctor?). But with this major flaw it puts a (probably unintended) flavour to the overall video.

(Note: I have used the Swedish word "källkritik" in several places, instead of the term "source criticism", because I am not sure about the best translation.)

And here is the video:

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the coming videos. And tomorrow I plan to be at the Stockholm Social Media Lunch Club, where both @annika and @doktorspinn will attend. Let's see if they have read this by then...

But again, for the second video my suggestion is, as we say in Sweden - "Gör om, gör rätt".

(Minor update to the text 100305 - rewrote and moved the paragraph on spin doctors further down)

Facebook Ads goes social and useful (?)

2010-01-15T14:19:00.003+01:00

When I went into Facebook today I noticed this ad:

Two things struck me as interesting, which I hadn't noticed in Facebook ads before:

Govermental information related to society
The ad (for those who don't live in Sweden) tells you that you don't need a little sticker on your number plates from now on. (The sticker was a way to show that you had paid the taxes related to the vehicle).
This highlights the value of Facebook Ads for other messages than the pure commercial that have been the main part of the ads so far.
When you click on the ad you end up at the Swedish Transportstyrelsen.
Social recommendations
Notice the "like"-button, and that two of my friend have "liked" the ad.
I hadn't noticed this before, but apparently this was announced in August by Facebook.
(One reason I hadn't noticed might be because there wasn't any ads "liked" by my friend before?)
This is obviously a way to ensure that the ads as such become more personal relevant for you, in two ways: They are "filtered" by your friends, thus the content might be more likely to be relevant for you and they are "recommended" by your friend - you noticed your friends names and look twice.

That you start to see this type of "useful" information, rather than pure "spam ads", in Facebook leads me to some observations:

Facebook starts to be seen as a valuable platform for information spreading
As the Facebook penetration in Sweden continue to grow, now with more than three million users, it's becomming a mainstream channel that is useful not only for businesses.
A targetable information channel
With Facebook ads you can target the demographics of your receivers quite well, so local information, information for a specific gender and/or age group, information for specific interest groups etc can be effectively spread.
It adds further value to Facebook
I get more value out of this specific ad than most others than I have seen so far.
More natural placements than Google ads
My initial reaction was that this specific ad found a better placement through Facebook than it would have if included in the Google ad platform.

What do you think? Will we see more information spreading through Facebook ads, as opposed to commercial messages?

Three million Facebook users in Sweden - statistics and demographics

2009-12-21T12:02:00.003+01:00

The number of Facebook users in Sweden have now passed the three million mark.

This number have been close for a while, already in the end of October this blog mentioned the 3-million users in Sweden.
However, since October the number of Swedish Facebook users has oscillated around three million users and regulary gone back below the three million mark. But now it seems to be stable above.

Since I had a closer look at the statistics and demographics of Facebook users in Sweden when the number passed the one-million mark and the two-million mark I will once again drill down in the numbers. Enjoy.

The growth
The first million users in Sweden was reached in November 2007, the second million of users was reached in March 2009. Now, end of 2009, the third million users are reached in Sweden.

Based on the graph of the number of Facebook users in Sweden it doesn't look like the trend is flattening yet. Will the growth continue, or is the user base saturated?

When you look at the number of users per age you get the following distribution:

Most users are between 14 and 24 years old.

The genders
The Facebook users in Sweden is evenly distributed between male and female users: In all age groups there's a small surplus of female users (except for the 65+ group; perhaps male persons are more likely to fake their age?) The penetration
The current number of Facebook users in Sweden means that one third (33%) of the population are using Facebook. Out of the age group 15-64 years old nearly half of the population (47%) are on Facebook. In the group of people between 15 and 39 years old three out of four (73%) are on Facebook.

When you look at the penetration for each age you get this graph: Note that the 19-years-old have more than 100% penetration. Obviously there's some errors here (I discuss a few possible reasons in the end note).

It is also interesting to note that the reach is close to 10% even among the older part of the population. I'd say that there's plenty of room to grow towards four million users - as we have a notable part of all ages on Facebook it might continue to grow.

Compared with the one-million and two-million mark...
When you compare the age group penetration today with the previous distribution it is obvious that Facebook has got a foothold among the people above 35 years of age, and that this is where there has been a growth in the number of users. Note also that the highest penetration is in the age group of 15-19, which is a change from earlier this year. Facebook is no longer a place only for people in the early twenties, but a place where you'll find individuals of all ages.

Notes:
Are these numbers correct? What is meant by a Facebook user - someone with an account, or someone with an active account?

The numbers in this analysis is from the Facebook ad system and the Swedish demographics is from SCB.

There is definately some errors involved, but as an indication of the penetration and demographics these numbers might be used.

The age and gender is self-stated. Especially the age contains error sources. Eg. no doubt that the youngest Swedes, those below 13, also have found Facebook. (To a large degree this is probably driven by all the social games (eg Farmville) that can be played on Facebook.) But since the minimum age in order to register a Facebook account is 13 there is a number of kids who have stated an age of 13 or above. And the birth year can not be changed for an account, so this error might still be in place even when the user have passed the age of 13.

"Facebook Ads uses IP address and a user's profile information to determine a user's location." - it is not exactly clear how Facebook uses this combination to determine which users are Swedish. You might very well have individuals logging in through a Swedish IP, but who are not "part of the Swedish population".'

Further more, Facebook has the information of exact birth date, and the SCB numbers is an estimate of the age distribution for the year, not at the current date specifically. Thus the mapping of age information towards the Swedish demography from SCB have some errors.

Active users or not? - This is not clear, but my educated guess is that Facebook lists accounts which have been accessed in the last 30 days in the ads utility, thus the answer to this question is probably "Yes, active users".

CBO & CCO: Brands, Culture and a book

2009-11-26T16:08:00.003+01:00

CBOs and CCOs, interesting development!

Ericsson now has an appointed Chief Brand Officer. Read more at this blog, or have look at the Wikipedia article on the topic. Not the first one in the world, but a fairly new corporate title.

So, what's next? I just saw that there's a new book coming - "Chief Culture Officer"

With the subtitle "How to create a living, breathing, corporation" it looks interesting. Have a look at the table of contents, the pages available as preview and the reviews so far.

I will definately add this to my list of books to potentially get and read.

It is also interesting to notice that not only is it released on Kindle first, it is also more expensive to buy the Kindle version. Are we seeing willingness to pay a premium price for non-paper versions of books?

(D&D; Disclosure and Disclaimer: I work for Ericsson in my daily profession. However I do not blog on behalf of Ericsson; all opinions expressed here are my personal views)

Phone as PVR - learn from the kids

2009-04-02T15:06:00.003+02:00

The industry is pushing the TV experience out to the phones, and in general there is an interest in this use case. However, the next generation consumers are already defining how they will embrace TV and moving images on the phone.

I found my son watching the Simpsons, and at the same time recording it for later viewing. On his mobile phone.
As his phone usage budget is low, he and his friends doesn't use the mobile network that much. Yes - some phone calls and SMS's, but not connecting to the Internet. Mostly using the phone as a gaming platform, and also for various media consumption and creation.

In this case he uses the phone as a PVR, instead of a VCR or other more stationary solutions. By capturing the Simpsons episode the "analogue"way he solves the hazzle of later transfering the file to the phone. And he will be able to enjoy past episodes whenever and wherever he likes.

Oh yes, a bit cumbersome perhaps. But it definately solve the needs of my son. And with a 4 GB memory on he phone he can store a lot of shows...

The quality? Surprisingly good I'd say. And as long as he can keep his sieblings and parents quiet and out of the way the audio is acceptable also.

So - keep an eye on the kids, they define the future. Now.

What are your kids up to? Any stories to share?

Nokia and some "swiss army knife" applications for phones

2009-03-16T14:31:00.006+01:00

More and more functionality is moving into mobile phones. You make calls, SMS and browse the web. Phones are also your MP3 player and your camera. Not to forget your address book and your calendar. You name it...

I just noticed another functionality from Nokia Betalabs. Phones as your magnifying glass. Perhaps an obvious application, but I haven't heard of it before. Simple and potentially useful. When the cameras gets better and better, as well as the screens, this is yet another addition to the swiss-army-knife set of functionality. Have a look at the video:

When I browsed through the Nokia Accessability site I also noticed the text-to-speech (TTS) application. Neat.

The obvious (?) combination of these two applications would be to have the phone reading out text you view through the phone's camera. Just add a bit of OCR. Shouldn't take long before this application appears, or is it already available somewhere?

Two million Facebook users in Sweden - here's the demographics

2009-03-09T21:31:00.008+01:00

Sweden now has over two million Facebook users. That's a lot.

(Update December 2009 - now more than three million users, read more here)

It took Sweden around 16 months to go from one million users to two million users. This means that the overall penetration of Facebook currently is 22% in Sweden.
As you can see from the chart below the growth rate started to increase in August last year, and doesn't seem to decline yet.

Just a week before Sweden broke the one million mark that I looked into the demographics of the Swedish Facebook users. So - let's have another look at the demographics and see what have changed.

Age of Swedish facebook users
This is the age distribution from Facebook:

If you combine this with the population in Sweden for each age group you get a similiar curve indicating the relative number of users within each age span:

You can notice a very high penetration (over 80%) among the population between 19 and 24.

From the chart below you can see that the media age is around 25 years, you find the first 25% of the users below 20 years of age and 75% of the users below 32 years of age:

Gender of Swedish Facebook users
When we look at the gender distribution we see that there is more women than men on Facebook in Sweden:

The female users are in majority across all age groups:

Also, when you compare the similiar graph from 2007 you notice that the "undefined" gender group has gone down. I believe Facebook no longer allow the users not to state gender?

And while we are comparing with the numbers from 2007, let's have a look at the penetration per age group side by side:

You can note that the population age 35 and over still has room for growth, but percentage wise has grown more than the 20-24 age group since 2007.

That's enough of graphs for now. Let's wait for the 3 millionth user in Sweden for some more graphs...

As a last note - when Facebook hit one million users in Sweden I noted that Facebook was the second most visited site in Sweden according to Alexa. Now, when the number of Swedish users has doubled the same Alexa lookup only put Facebook as number 5:

Twixdagen and some Twitter videos

2009-03-05T17:09:00.005+01:00

It seems like the microblogging site Twitter has started to get some momentum in Sweden. Still not a mainstream usage, it will be interesting how far microblogging will spread in Sweden.

Twixdagen
In Sweden most political parties, and quite a few individual politicians, have started to use Twitter. No doubt they are influenced by Barrack Obama's Twitter account.

In the overall mashup tradition a site, Twixdagen.se, has created a feed of all Tweets from Swedish parties and politicians. I find this rather neat and interesting, as it definately increases the visibility and transparancy of the daily work inside politics (disclaimer - I haven't valued the quality and information value of the resulting strean ;-).

Twitter videos
Also recently, two videos with Evan Williams has surfaced.

The first video is from TED. Evan tells the story behind Twitter. I kind of like the statement "I learned to kind of follow hunches, even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're gonna go". Also, what takes place after Evans talk is a great example of the backchannel concept.

The second video is from the television show Charlie Rose. (The Twitter part starts a approx. 33 min 40 sec.)

So, what are you waiting for? If you are not on Twitter, join today. You'll find me at twitter.com/johan.

The past, present and future of Internet

2009-01-13T12:24:00.002+01:00

Time flies. It's almost two weeks into 2009. And it has been a while since I posted here.

I will not start of by summing up the past year of this blog, as I did last year. Instead let's have a look at the past, present and future of the Internet (OK, perhaps not that much of the present, but anyway...).

When I scanned my overloaded feedbox in Google Reader I found a post on the CommonCraft blog, highlighting a video about the history of connected computers up to the birth of Internet (or the Web as we know it today).

This reminded me about a video from TED, where Kevin Kelly reminds us that the Internet as we now take for granted is only 5000 days old (I haven't done the calculation, but you should add a few hundred days to that number by now). In the video Kevin Kelly goes on and looks into the next 5000 days. Some of the predictions feels very much "yes, that's what's happening now".

So, here are the two videos. A nice way to spend the next half hour of 2009:

First video: History of the Internet:

Second video: Predicting the next 5000 days of the web:

(And it's funny how you come across things multiple times when you look around. While thinking about this post I went into Jaiku for another reason, stumbled over a Jaiky-thread on .SE domains which lead me to Binero. Once there I looked at the Binero blog, and found two posts containing the same two videos...)

Rock´n´roll in Excel, or excel in rock´n´roll

2008-10-30T13:20:00.003+01:00

Although I think Excel shall be used with care, and though AC/DC might not be my favourite music, the combination somehow rocks.

AC/DC has released a music video. As an Excel file. You will find the details and download here. There is also a Youtube-video of this:

Even if I don't know the demographics of the AC/DC fan community it seems to make sense. AC/DC have been around for a while, and I suspect that a part of their original fans now are white-collar office workers, using Excel daily.

Anyone who are able to see how they achieved this in Excel?

I also notice that AC/DC both have a MySpace page and a Facebook page. And an RSS-feed. They are also promoting an AC/DC game for Playstation, Wii and Xbox. Didn't find them om Twitter though (twitter.com/acdc does not seem to be them...). But still, overall quite a good social media marketing approach.

Hello Turkey

2008-10-20T10:17:00.007+02:00

Last week I was approach via Facebook by Erdem from Turkey. He is about to write his master thesis on "public relations and promotion" and needed some statistics on Facebook usage in Turkey.

So Erdem, here is some numbers and further pointers. Always happy to be able to help out, and it will be nice to look at your thesis - even if you write in Turkish perhaps Google translate can help me understand...

The numbers
I created a spreadsheet with all usage statistics I have for Turkey. Enjoy.

The discussion
So, what does the numbers reflect? There's two sets of data - one is from the Facebook ad utility and one is from the Turkey network.

Facebook ad utility (see further down for more on how to use)
Although it is not fully clear what exactly is reflected in these numbers, a guess is that:
a) The country you belong to is fetched from your account settings. However, when I just checked this setting seems no longer available, so it might be that Facebook are rather using eg IP mapped to country? Any guesses?
b) The number indicates the number of user from the country logged in over the last 30 days (for an earlier discussion on this, please see this post, scroll down to the heading "What do we measure?")

Network
The implementation of country networks has changed a bit lately. Since mid September no numbers are available.
The country network membership is something you choose yourself. The numbers most likely indicates how many Facebook profiles (users) that are registered for a specific country network, regardless off last login.
As this is a separate action to register, it is fair to believe not all users will hook up to a regional network.

The nest step
If you are looking further into a specific country (as I did with Sweden here), the Facebook ad utility is a great tool for demographic breakdown. Just go here, create an ad and then select the target group.

Here you can dig into the demographics in detail. (As for the gender part, please note that a portion of the profiles does not have a gender specified!)

So, Erdem, good luck with your thesis. Hope this helped.

And if anyone is interested in a coordinated effort to map the detailed, global, demographics let me know...

Olympics is over. Now run for yourself, and set your own rules!

2008-08-28T17:51:00.011+02:00

Today I scanned my feeds and found a blog post that got me thinking. Read it (you need to scroll down "below the fold" after following the link to see the post).

The post is by an interesting person who's blog I have had in my feedreader for some time. Dr. Mani is "a heart surgeon using his Internet marketing business to fund heart surgery for under-privileged children in India". Quite an unusal and interesting combination...

The post is about not looking at your competitors. Run your own race. Compete with yourself.

There's a lot of insight to gain along these lines. Of course you shall have an idea and insight in what your competition is doing. But if you would like to be really good at what you do, and be a forerunner - you need to dare to run your own race. By this you will achive some specific values:

Do things, instead of looking at what others are doing
Too often we tend to spend too much time to watch the rest of the world. Both in a competitive situation, but also in non-competitive situations. As an example - I do have tons (1000+) of unread items in my feedreader. When I feel I have some time for a blog post, and a pretty good idea of what to write about, I still tend to just "peak at the feeds" for some additional inspiration, or to make not to miss something.
If I instead took the time to write those blog posts that have been cooking a while in my mind, and has a more or less complete outline ready, you would find new posts here more frequently.
This can be appleed in many areas. In other words, put just some extra affort on "execute", and things will start to roll a bit faster. I'm sure you will still have all the information and knowledge you need available.
And don't get me wrong, I value all the feeds I subscribe to. They are (more or less :-) carefully selected, and a great source of inspiration, knowledge and recreation.

Set your own rules, define the game
If you set the game rules yourself, you have all the possibility to define a game which you both enjoy and are very good at. Even the best!
Again, this applies to many areas. Again I will use my blogging experience as an example:

This is my blog. I set the rules.

Among the rules are that you are invited. Please leave a comment if you agree to what I write in a post. Even better, leave a comment if you disagree! You may comment on anything. You may wish for posts on a specific topic. Just leave a comment. Or contact me any other channel you find that seems to lead to me. Approach me in person. Look me up on Facebook or other social networks. Part of my rules is that you may influence me, interact with me and my blog. Part of my rules is that you can influence my set of rules.

Where does this put me and this blog?

Well, to you it might put the blog among tons of similiar ones. You might follow it regulary, drop by occationally or just happen to pass by. Doesn't matter to me, you are welcome whatever type of visitor you are. That's part of your game, it's your rules. It is your rules that decides if you will return or not. Your rules decides if you will comment or interact with me and this blog in any way. Your rules decides if you would like to influence my rules.

But to me it puts my blog, and my activity here, as best in class. My class.
And I have a number of other blogs. All with their own set of rules. No written rules in most cases (one excpetion is obviously the rules I just defined above :-)

Not all rules are mine...
...after all. Rules that you can argue are not my own. These are to a large degree defined by the context.
As an example I also have a blog on the intranet where I work, and clearly there is a set of applicable, written, guidelines and rules not set by me.
Another obvious set of rules are those of "common sense and good behaviour". These are to some extent set by my judgement, but to a very large extent set by the society as a whole.

And in some games you can't set all rules yourself, at least if you would like to participate. Going back to the Olympics - you can't invent the rules yourself.
But - you can influence them! Some of the Olympic rules are solely in the mindsets of the athletes (you did read Dr. Mani's post that I referred to in the beginning, or?).
And the rules of some sports do change over time. Often influenced by an individual athlete who in an innovative way bent the existing rules.
Finaly I believe the host country for each Olympic Game are allowed to add a sport of their choice (correct me if I'm wrong) - effectively influencing the overall rules of the game.

I strongly believe that this applies to most areas one way or another. I have used blogging, and this blog as an example. There's two reasons for this.
First - of course the context (and my rules ;-) - this is a blog, and to blog about blogging is a good blog topic for me as a blogger (on this blog at least :-)).
Secondly - today I participated in several good discussions around blogging. Much about why, how, what rules etc. But also about who. At one stage the question "who do you like to see blog?" was raised. My answer is simple. You.

Go out there and run for yourself. Set your own rules.
Start a blog. Start small. Start several times with different rules until you find a game that suits you.
And if I like the game I will gladly participate. On my rules.

Now, this post turned out a bit different that I intended when I started to write a few hours ago. Doesn't matter, my rules...

Finally, if I would take Dr.Mani's post litterally I would hit unsubscribe now in my feedreader. I haven't yet, again my rules apply, not the rules of Dr. Mani.

Now go out and set your rules. Run your own race. You don't have to, it's up you you. And your rules.
I bet we will meet in the race track one way or another, just as we just met here. But remember, blogging is not a competition (unless you decide to make it one). It's a social activity.

Randy Pausch: Time Management and The Last Lecture

2008-07-26T12:46:00.004+02:00

Have you heard about Randy Pausch? I hadn't, but this Friday I noticed some ripples on the Internet mentioning him. I ended up viewing two long lectures by Randy Pausch.

Good stuff, I highly recommend you to spend some time on them. The one on Time Management might be the best, but as the situation is you should probably watch The Last Lecture first.

And as an introduction to Randy Pausch you should watch the shortened, Oprah-version, of The Last Lecture. That will set the scene for you:

Here is the long version of The Last Lecture:

Now, over to the lecture on Time Management:

The slides from the lecture is available in PDF format.

I took home a few things from watching these videos, hope you found something for you as well.

I also found a version of the Time Management lecture from 1998. I haven't had time to look at the whole video yet, but it is fascinating to compare the same person giving the same lecture ten years apart.

The Alice software Randy Pausch mentioned can be found at http://www.alice.org/ - sounded like something that can be useful at some point in time.

Some more resources on Randy Pausch include Wikipedia, his homepage at Carnegie Mellon and this page which lists a number of other videos as well.

A few month ago The Last Lecture was published as a book.

And the ripples that reached me this Friday was the news that Randy Pausch passed away on July 25th.

Facebook statistics and Google Motion Chart

2008-06-04T17:45:00.006+02:00

Time again for an update of the statistics of Facebook usage, penetration and growth. What has happenend since I last wrote about this in February? (And here are all my posts about Facebook statistics, including this one.)

The news includes:

Statistics for more countries
During May Facebook added 26 countries to the SocialAd tool, bringing up the total to 81 countries.
New countries are: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Jamaica, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Morocco, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and finally Uruguay.
Facebook translated into more languages
Spanish was first out, followed by German and French. Now a total of 16 languages are supported, including all of the Nordic languages. See list to the right.
New numbers used for population and Internet usage
I updated the country population numbers used with the July 2008 estimate from the CIA Factbook. And also for the numbers on internet penetration I used the latest information from Internet World Stats.
Gapminder tool available as Google Motion Chart
Since I started collecting the Facebook statistics I have been waiting for this. You might recall my post about Statistical Storytelling, where I mentioned the Gapminder tool that was acquired by Google. Now this tool is available as a graph option inside Google Spreadsheets, and naturally that's what I now use to present the information.

So, on to the statistics! This time I only made a chart for a single date (March 30th, 2008), but naturally the next step is to take advantage of the Motion Chart capabilities by adding historical data, so we can see how the patterns changes over time.

Below you will find the interactive chart. (If you are reading the feed of this blog the embedded chart might not turn up, go here instead).

A larger version is available here. Play around with it and see what you find, to guide you I have made some screenshots further down. Also an explanation of the available indicators are below.

If you find something interesting, or have a suggestion for further data that might be interesting to add, let me know!

The chart should initially look like the screenshot below, except for the country names. You can get the country name for each bubble by hoovering over it, and by clicking on a bubble the name will stick.

This view has the number of Facebook users per country on the x-axis, and the Facebook penetration (of country population) on the y-axis. The size of the bubble is the population of the country, and the colour is simple which region the country belongs to.

US, UK and Canada are the top three countries when you look at numberof Facebook users. looking at the Facebook penetration among the population in a country the top three are Canada, Norway and UK. The two large blue bubbles bottom left are India and China.

Now, let's keep the data for the two axis (each country will keep its position) and change the colour to represent the relative growth the last two weeks, and the size to represent the absolute growth the same period.You see three rather big bubbles (Canada, UK and Chile), representing the countries which added more that 400 000 users since March 16th. And notice the red colour of Chile, indicating the highest relative growth (close to 60%) - the blueish colour of UK and Canada represents a relaive growth of only 4.4%

To dig further into where the Facebook growth is at the moment we keep all settings but for the x-axis, which we make represent the rank of the relative growth (each country get the position of its current relative growth, meaning the highest growth (#1) is the leftmost bubble). To further focus on the high growth countries we turn the scale of the x-axis into a log scale.

This makes it easy to see that the current high growth countries are Chile, Venezuela, Uruguay and Lebanon. Note that the US seems to be at the bottom (far right) - actually US ens up on position #79. Iceland and Jamaica have lower growth, but their bubbles (in this case) are too small to be visible.

This way you can visualize up to four parameters in the same graph and look for patterns and trends. It is easy to create scattered views that not really adds any value, so be careful.

You can also have a look at a single parameter only. Below we used the region as the colour and set the size to be the same for all bubbles. On the y-axis we map the penetration of Facebook users among the internet users in each country, and on the x-axis we simply used the rank of the same indicator (no log scale this time). This makes it easy to study this single parameter.

Here you see Panama and Trinidad and Tobago in top before Canada.

In a similar way you can view the two parameters we used initially (Facebook penetration per country population and the number of Facebook users) separately.

Notice that Sweden has lost one position when looking at the penetration (down to 5th place with Denmark closing in) and lost 3 positions when looking at the total number of Facebok users (down to 10th place with the high growth country of Chile ahead).

Now it's your turn. Play around and find some facts! There's more parameters available than the ones we used above. When you find something worth noticing leave a comment here. Also let me know if I shall add any further data to play around with.

And stay tuned for next post, adding the historical data will make this even more fun.

Here is an explanation of available parameters:

(As the tables will not get indexed I add this: Facebook statistics, usage, penetration for Turkey Israel France Malaysia Singapore China Switzerland Colombia Italy Germany India Spain Ireland Netherlands Australia Saudi Arabia New Zealand Mexico Egypt Lebanon United Arab Emirates UAE Pakistan Dominican Republic Japan Sweden South Korea, Republic of Korea United Kingdom UK Norway United States (US) South Africa Canada Philippines Indonesia Russian Federation (Russia) Greece Denmark Finland Chile Belgium Argentina Venezuela Austria Jordan Peru Kuwait Thailand Panama Brazil Croatia Hong Kong Nigeria Poland Serbia Taiwan Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Jamaica, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Morocco, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Tinidad and Tobago,Uruguay)

Social Media explained by CommonCraft

2008-06-01T04:05:00.002+02:00

Another video from CommonCraft, this time about Social Media. Or rather Social IceCream...

(Link to video as well)

Monoblogging

2008-05-27T21:11:00.003+02:00

One. Word. Is. Enough. Or?

I guess it was due to happen. Today I spotted adocu.com - a monoblog (thanks @technoweenie for the term).

An evolution of the microblogging concept which Twitter (that I like...) made popular. But now limiting the updates to one word instead of 140 characters. And by the way, there's no limit to he length of the word as it seems.

What's the next step on this road?

?

(And for the record, find and follow me at http://adocu.com/johan)

Ads, brand and brandy

2008-05-02T20:04:00.001+02:00

I was browsing a Swedish newspaper online the other week when I noticed this banner ad:

Now, what's special with this?

To the left you see the text "Ta bort alkoholmonopolet och se vad som händer!" (Take away the (state) monopoly on alcohol retail sales and see what happens!).

To the right there's a tab with the text "Dra i mig" (Pull me)

Note that behind the tab you see the logo of the the mobile operator 3.

I was a bit puzzled over this, so I pulled the tab in order to "remove the monopoly".

This revealed the text "Här börjar kalaset" (The party starts here). Right, makes some kind of sense I guess...

But was the intended message? No. This ad was actually two banner ads placed side by side.

The left one was from Systembolaget, "the Swedish Alcohol Retail Monopoly" which "exists for one reason only: To minimize alcohol-related problems by selling alcohol in a responsible way, without profit motive". If you clicked throug it the proper way you got to this campaign site. (Which is in Swedish, but a report is available in English)

And the right ad is from 3, obviously. The party advertised is their five year anniversary.

So, the way the combined message came out due to the placement was not the intended one.

For Systembolaget it was a totally loss, I'd say. The message came out the other way around.

For 3 you can discuss the value. In one way the combination enhanced the message. From another viewpoint the sum was perhaps not a politically correct standpoint.

What do you think? Was it a win or loss for 3? Was it perhaps even an intended placement of the ad..?

Silence...

2008-05-02T18:58:00.005+02:00

If you have looked for new posts the last couple of months - sorry for the silence.

I hope you have missed me, I have missed you...

I have been (and still am) out of town, and have not focused on the blog in a while. I still have a number of topics on my ToBlog list, waiting for a post to be written. And there's plenty of new stuff after that to discover and cover.

So, if you are a returning reader - stay on the line. If you are a new reader, why don't sign up for a subscription using RSS or email (look to the right on this page).

Now off to a new blog post...