Some minor issues

Click and stick: $5

So what’s the thing with monetization? For starters: this blog is my playground and my hobby. It’s not my work. I don’t need it to make money here. It hardly cost me anything (hosting is provided by my buddy Serge .. and I guess I still need to pay him some domain name fees ) except a decent amount of time. The things I learn is what I earn and so are the people I connect to. My reputation, I guess ..
On the other hand, I don’t feel dirty if I make some bucks with blogging. Working in advertising myself I’m quite interested in how blogs can spread your message. And there are many models to that. Paying bloggers is only one way of doing things, and then there’s a difference between display ads or commercial content creation.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t say no to anything .. by default. This means you can knock on my door as much as you like. I’ll listen. But I don’t guarantee I accept your offer anyway. There’s a big chance I might not.
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My attention was drawn to this little video

I was asked to post this, more about that here.

It shows a Microsoft Surface developer explaining some stuff he’s done, not too technical but quite passionate and understandable.
Well I absolutely love Surface and I’m quite fascinated every time I see it working on roadshows and stuff (last time on FOWA). I think it’s a truly innovative product, taking into account what technology can do for the user, and not for the sake of technology, so that’s great. In my mind, one of the best ways to innovate is this road: think about how good something could be, and then take little steps to make it happen, until it’s there.

At the end of the video you’ll find a link to www.ilivetocode.com. It’s a quite, well, dry website containing a bunch of links to similar video’s on youTube, and other project pages. It’s a Microsoft driven .. campaign (I guess I shall call it a campaign). They’re not trying to hide their identity, it’s there. You can participate yourself by mailing to a Microsoft email address and yes they even pay me indirectly to post the video.
I kind of like the approach, and see where this is going. They try to gain credibility to have developers explain in their words what they are doing and what it means for them. Microsoft is the company providing the tools, and yes they get criticized a lot, but on the other hand you have all these developers who just do what they love. And in the end that’s what its’ about. I try to avoid holy “what technology is better” wars myself. If you use what you love you’ll end up doing cooler things.

Here’s something from the ethos

Nuff said.

The only thing I’d like to see now is someone new, applying to the program with his/her project, and getting picked up. Al though it feels genuine to me this would prove the case it’s not clearly selected marketing talk, but an idea opened up (although initiated by Microsoft). Case 1 might be just good thinking, case 2 is definitely smart!
So if you got something, or know someone .. let me know.