Tim Molendijk

Tonight I attended a Python Users Nederland meetup. The first one in a while I was told. It was great to hangout with some fellow Pythoneers, so I can recommend anyone who feels slightly affiliated with Python to join the mailinglist and show up at the next meetup in a few months. Big thanks to Remco Wendt for making this happen.

UPDATE: Reinout van Rees posted a nice summary of the speeches and some photos.

Just like I hardly ever remember jokes or movie scenes or song lyrics, I tend to forget about interesting quotes that I come by. For some reason this one is sticking with me for over a year now. It is from Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch’s well-known last lecture.

Today I discovered a quote by French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur lived over a century before Pausch did, nevertheless the two quotes are akin: “La chance ne sourit qu’aux esprits bien préparés” or “Chance favors the prepared mind” in English.

I don’t consider myself an early adopter. I am rarely the first to try-out new stuff, neither do I feel the urge to do so. I prefer to be part of the early majority over being an early adopter. Yet I pretend to be innovative when it comes to the web. Isn’t that a contradiction? I don’t think so.

My point is in a crucial difference between early adopters and majority. Early adopters will at least be moderately excited about anything new. This excitement can be very delusive. Most services need adoption by the majority before they can be truly successful. The majority doesn’t give a damn about something being new, as long as it’s not significantly adding value to their everyday lives and significantly worth the invested time and effort necessary to get that value. And I think they’re right. True innovation shouldn’t need the assumption of the web being at the very center of people’s lives. That’s because for most people it simply isn’t in that spot. Using the web is a relevant side note in their day to day life, similar to going to the supermarket, reading a magazine in the train to work or going for a stroll on Sunday afternoon. Nothing more—nothing less either.

An innovator should be very cautious for the innovators trap of overexcitement. Being too excited about new stuff to realize that most other people — people that you need to make your new stuff really work — do not share your excitement about the sheer fact that it is new stuff. To them it’s just stuff.

I don’t want to lose touch with this reality and cherish my membership of the early majority.

(…) researchers at Stanford and Caltech have demonstrated that people’s brains experience more pleasure when they think they are drinking a $45 wine instead of a $5 bottle - even when it’s the same stuff. The important aspect of these findings is that people aren’t rationalizing on a survey, i.e., reporting that a wine tastes better because they know it’s a lot more expensive. Rather, they are actually experiencing a tastier wine.

Via Neuromarketing. Photo by emurray.

For our latest project PromoBee I take great pleasure in working with Python on a daily basis. One tends to take its power and elegance for granted most of the time. A video like this makes you stop and appreciate the huge effort that has been put in to get the project at its current level. Awesome visualization.

Similar visualizations of other open source software projects can be found through code_swarm.

Via Robert Gaal.

After five months of hard work I am very proud to announce that tonight we released our latest product in beta. PromoBee (only Dutch for now, sorry) enables anyone who does PR for events to do his or her work more easily and with more overview. Make sure your events gain maximum publicity, while managing your relations optimally—a very rough and ugly translation of the one-sentence-pitch at the home page.

That’s it for now. Check back here soon for more on our latest baby.

And now it’s time to celebrate this huge milestone, cheers!

Main speaker Jeff Howe.

Surprise surprise, they caught me on camera.

Photos by SocialStrategyTalk.

Today started with a cup of OpenCoffee and ended with a talk on crowdsourcing at SocialStrategyTalk. I can definitely recommend both events to anyone interested in online media, technology or trends. Good mix of people and no entrance fee, so also suitable for poor bootstrapping entrepreneurs like me.

Social networks come and go, so I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to found a nice and humble outpost of my own. For now I don’t have any terribly big plans with this blog, but at the very least it can serve as the foundation for my online identity. In the upcoming months I will probably play around a bit here — we will see what it leads to. One thing is for sure; I just wrote my very first post .