Amateur = ♥, Professional = $, which would you rather be?

The websmurfs are running another blogging Saturday, this time on the theme of the etymology of the words amateur (amor, passion) and professional (profit). "Old media" as they are lovingly denoted at least in Sweden like to slap the label of "amateur" onto bloggers and everyone else voluntarily organized through the internet, and we'd simply want to say - fine, then we are, and we love being amateurs.

pro⋅fes⋅sion⋅al   [pruh-fesh-uh-nl]
1. following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain

am⋅a⋅teur   [am-uh-choor, -cher, -ter, am-uh-tur]
1. a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons.

I would by the way want to run a shameless plug for my favourite amateur come extremely professional photographer Graham Mitchell (Foto-Z). The quality of his work is amazing and he is available for photo jobs around Scandinavia.

A lot is likely to pop up during the day, so check this post for updates! You can of course follow us on twitter


I spent a significant part of my Saturday updating the Websmurf member list, and check out the pictures (also here, here, here and here), but the others were productive:

• Erik Starck - Älskade amatör ("Beloved amateur", translated here), Amatörmässigt? Amatören och Piraten ("Amateur? Amateurs and the Pirate", translated here) and Amatör betyder älskare ("Amateur means lover", translated here)
  
• Simon Winter - Hur långt räcker det med amatörer? ("How far is it sufficient with amateurs?", translated here)
  
• Henrik Ahlen - Amatör eller Proffs inom företagsvideo? ("Amateur or Professional in enterprise video?", translated here) and Creating impact with corporate video
  
• Christian Rudolf - Amatörernas lördag! ("Amateurs Saturday!", translated here)
  
• Peter Sandberg - Bloggare är amatörer! ("Bloggers are amateurs!", translated here)
  
• Martin Sandberg - Amatör eller proffs ("Amateur or professional", translated here)
  
• Jonas Lejon - Amatör ("Amateur", translated here)
  
• Judith Wolst - Amatörskap - ja tack! (Amateurism - yes please!", translated here) and Blogglördag! ("Blogging Saturday", translated here)
  
• Björn Falkevik - Amatörernas Blogglördag! ("Blog amateurs Saturday!", translated here), Då var det av mot blogglördag, Så är en blogglördag! and Mina tankar runt Amatör och proffs! Blogglördag! Tag 2
  
• Ted Valentin - Underbara amatörer ("Amazing amateurs", translated here)
  
• Walter Naeslund - I Never Want To Be Anything But An Amateur.

(Update: Björn Falkevik reported live here)

(Update 2: The Online Etymology Dictionary may have a different opinion about the origin of professional and amateur, but as they say, "never check a good story" :-) )

I won a Gorillapod!

Christian and Peter over at disruptive.nu made a little video on the topic of cooperation and for their production they had received two Joby Gorillapods of which they only needed one, so the other one they gave away to the first person to write a good post on what good they'd use it for!

Maybe it doesn't make sense in terms of time spent versus what a Gorillapod costs, but I'm very happy to be blogging side by side with Peter and Christian and I have wanted a gorillapod for a long time, so head over and read my blog post (translated here) and I hope you enjoy it!

Think of Magnus, Stop the Pirate Bay!

 



Recently I have been following the spectacle of the Pirate Bay trial . The Swedish pirate guys have been truly unique in that they have not gone to court burdened by shame, with regret and wanting to get away easy, but with heads held high and guns blazing, confronting and ridiculing the failing business of the media industry. See for yourself in Peter Sunde's blog (translated here), copyriot (translated here, copyriot was probably also involved in the ground-breaking Pirate Bureu Walpurgis ceremony) and torrentfreak.

Many things have been said about the spectrial, partly on bloggy (translated here) and twitter, and my small contribution (also available in higher resolution) is a mashup from a prosecution statement. The has-been artist Magnus Uggla is not selling well anymore, and the causality seems obvious between this and the existance of the Pirate Bay, right? Think of Magnus, stop the Pirate Bay!

This week's "I met Lassie" (celebrity spotting) is that I again attended the Swedes meetup at Hell Hunt and apart from an exciting debate about the Pirate Bay, I had the honor of discussing with a co-partner of the same law firm as plaintiffs Hollywood representative lawyer Monique Wadsted.

PS. Other Swedes in Estonia also react to SVT's Hasse Svens dishonest reporting

Two very nerdy jokes

If you understand both of these jokes right away I beg you to comment on this post! Let's start out with a control theory joke:

Q: Why do Eastern European airlines fly half empty?
A: There must be no poles in the right half-plane

Secondly, we have a hardware-optimized programming joke:

Adam and Eve were walking through the forest when they came across some snakes with chain saws cutting down trees and making rustic furniture. Adam asked, "what are you doing?"



One of the snakes hissed, "God told us to go forth and multiply ... but we're just adders, we can't multiply without log tables"

(Update: There are of course more excellent nerdy jokes. Go ahead, knock yourselves out)

Free things this week!

It's been an amazingly busy week just for covering cool stuff. This Wednesday the Media Evolution conference was held in Malmö, which seemed to promise to be a somewhat mediocre thing with international tech celebrity Chris Anderson of Wired and "the Long Tail" to attract attention. Turned out Chris held an excellent presentation on the topic of "free", but the following panel debates were very good as well! And everything you could follow online in realtime, and discuss in the backchannel (Whats Next got an interview):

Slides from a similar talk at Nokia World 2007:

View more presentations from inkeunsong. (tags: free_pricing)

Chris Anderson, who wrote about "the long tail", about building business not on the best sellers, but "all the rest" of the customers and products, spent most of his talk speaking about what curious things happens in the market when the price of some things continuously decrease, approaching zero.

I am really fascinated by how much you can get for free from people ("crowdsourcing" as it sometimes can be described) and find it a largely under-examined topic. There are several different distinguishable ways for something to be free, and pleading for everyone to pitch in (like how people contribute to wikipedia) is almost the most crude of them. More cleverly executed, I love how flickr allow people to geotag their own pictures, and it will become part of a great, huge, multi-purpose globally browsabe database of pictures. Last.fm music and concert databases is also not bad in its simplicity of contribution, there's no complex creative article-writing involved. Similarly, did you know that whenever you type in a reCAPTCHA you for free help digitize tricky parts for the New York Times and the Internet Archive archive? When you type in that review of your favourite sushi place, you for free help Ted Valentin build quite a valuable database he couldn't imagine paying editors to do for him. There are so many great ways to get something for free...

It by the way occured to me the other day that there are not only two meanings of the word "free", usually explained as "free as in speech" and "free as in beer". There's also "free as in parking spot" :-) . Let's break it down a bit:

English	Swedish	Estonian
free as in beer	gratis	tasuta
free as in speech	fri	vaba
free as in parking spot	ledig	vaba

... no wonder the humorous effect of my father asking my father-in-law whether he was "free" (as in vacation) now. "Of course I'm free (as in speech), I'm not in prison am I?!"

Speaking of free, the Pirate Bay case is stepping into court the next week. The guys have a blog of the court case which isn't updated since April last year though, and brokep's blog, and they seem pretty set on whipping up as much of a media storm as possible, and not letting themselves get convicted easily, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here

Then on Thursday morning it was time for OpenCoffee Club Tallinn (facebook group here) in Ülemiste City Mercado, where I didn't hear or participated much in any pitches, but met some great people! I will also hopefully soon write about my idea of "Compassionate BookCrossing" which I set loose there.

Friday evening it was time for the regular Swedish Tallinn meetup in Hell Hunt pub. Imagine I've lived here two years, and haven't found the time or opportunity to visit them before! Anyway it was a bit of a strange experience to hear such genuine Swedish guys ranting about sports and whatever, but there were some very cool people there and quite possibly some new friends!

Finally, this has been the week for TED 2009 (blog here and conference here), and the speaker list has been truly impressive! Bill Gates, Shai Agassi, Tim Berners-Lee, Oliver Sacks, I am exhausted just thinking about it. Bill Gates' talk was released already, the others will be one by one during the year. It will be so much fun, subscribe to the feed!