Tim Molendijk

As far as marketing is concerned, authenticity is the new black. But what exactly is authenticity? Why are some people perceived as authentic, while others aren’t? Many of us would answer these questions with variations on “being true to oneself” or “not pretending to be someone else”. Seth Godin takes an interesting and slightly different approach:

Authenticity, for me, is doing what you promise, not “being who you are”.

That’s because ‘being’ is too amorphous and we are notoriously bad at judging that. Internal vision is always blurry. Doing, on the other hand, is an act that can be seen by all.

Ever since I made the switch from Windows to Linux I’ve been a big fan of the Debian project, both for desktop and server usage. Its preference of quality releases over quick releases suits the job of building an operating system (plus it fits my character ). Its strict policy is a blessing in disguise and makes you feel in control of your own system. If you are anal like me and you cannot stand not being able to find out what any particular file is doing on your system, why it got there or who put it there, Debian GNU/Linux is going to be your friend.

This weekend the project reached a major milestone: version 5.0 — codename ‘lenny’ — has been released as stable! Awesome timing; just in time for a couple of fresh web servers I am planning on deploying next week.

Google launched Latitude. The Financial Times comments with an article focusing on privacy. David Petherick at The Next Web is very effective at pointing out exactly what’s wrong with the mindset behind that article.

The headline? ‘Google to track mobile users‘. Big brother anxiety is what has stopped ‘mobile social networking’ success. Well sorry, privacy is dead, in the same way that newspapers are dying - and for similar reasons. For those who fail to understand why Stephen Fry should have gained a following of over 100,000 on Twitter, here is the news. Personal publicity and personal engagement lets you talk, lets you share ideas, makes you friends, and lets you influence people. Always been that way, just now the tools are different - radically so - it’s people power - always scary for the status quo.

Via Atheist Bus Campaign.

Running in place and moving. Holy shit! Is that possible?

Via Neil Patel.

Version 2 of PromoBee, my company’s press relation management tool is coming to a computer screen near you soon. We are very excited about the improved concept, which will enable any business to manage, mail and monitor its press relations quickly and easily. More details to come…

But we are not there yet. My plans for the upcoming weeks can be compressed into one single word: work.

Gag via Reinout van Rees.

Django, the Python web framework for perfectionists with deadlines, finally released its 1.0 yesterday. This is great news for several reasons. First of all, well, it was about time after about three years. Secondly, for everyone who ever made the naive mistake of building on trunk, the greatness of this news is obvious. (Hint for everyone else: try checking out the trunk, working with it for a couple of months and then upgrading it. All human emotions guaranteed!)

Monday night I attended the seventh edition of Mobile Monday Amsterdam. Although I was only able to hear the last two speakers, I enjoyed my time at De Rode Hoed. It was especially nice to hear Yme Bosma of Hyves finally giving some openness about Hyves’ vision and upcoming plans for their mobile presence. After all, it is basically the only (sort of) ubiquitous platform we have here in the Netherlands, so they will most probably have a huge impact on what the near future of mobile will look like in this country.

Photo by Ralph Lemarechal. More photos here. Some other attendees who blogged about it are Kars Alfrink and Patrice Kerremans.