NevOn

Getting up to speed in Holland

If you're planning a move to The Netherlands, an event next month will help you find out everything you need to know about life in a new country.

"Welcome to The Netherlands" is the biggest expat fair in the country, taking place in Amsterdam on 24 October.

It offers information from companies and agencies specialized in expatriate services, from banks, investment firms and insurance companies to schools and tax agencies. You'll find information on house hunting, immigration and permits, job hunting, staying long term, and much more.

Free admission if you sign up before 15 October. Thereafter, tickets are €5 at the door or €15 for families.

Welcome to The Netherlands

Carnival of The Capitalists

Evelyn Rodriguez at Crossroads Dispatches is hosting Carnival of The Capitalists, a weekly focus on interesting business-oriented posts on blogs around the blogosphere.

Evelyn has gathered a wide-ranging collection of topics with links to each post on the respective blogs so you can visit and contribute to discussions if you feel so inclined.

My recent post on Challenges and optimism for internal communication made this week's Carnival under the Management/Leadership topic.

Crossroads Dispatches | Carnival of the Capitalists

How American are you?

Spending 30 minutes clicking on things and I just came across a highly amusing site with a quiz to judge how American you are.

I guess I didn't do too badly for a Brit:

How would you do?

How F**king American Are You?

Internal communication wiki opens for business

Shel Holtz has started a wiki called "The Employee Communications Manifesto":

Internal communications seems to be performing less than brilliantly at achieving its goals of employee alignment and line of sight. One reason (and this is purely speculation on my part) is the lack of a common knowledge base for anyone starting out in an employee communications job. [...] It's my hope that The Employee Communications Manifesto can help fix that. It'll work if internal communications professionals engage the wiki and create its contents. I hope to see you there.

See Shel's full post.

The Employee Communications Manifesto

Ecto does support thumbnails

In my review of BlogJet and ecto that I posted this morning, I said that ecto does not support the creation and posting of thumbnail images to a TypePad blog.

Well, that isn't correct as ecto developer Alex Hung commented. Indeed, when I checked the options in ecto for Windows version 1.0.8.4 that I'm now using, the support for thumbnails is quite extensive.

So to set the record straight and demonstrate that you can do this in a TypePad blog, I'm posting a picture here with a thumbnail image, all done in ecto and published live.

I know you're not supposed to post pictures of cats in your blog, but what the heck - here's Jones my cat!

Click the thumbnail to see the bigger photo. Isn't she beautiful?

What makes a leader?

You often hear the phrase 'leaders are born, not made.' Yet you also see behaviours in so many organizations where those who are leaders just aren't the right people and haven't a clue what leadership is all about.

They seem to think that a "Being a Natural Leader for Dummies" book is all they need to be one. I have no idea whether the popular Dummies guide series includes such a book, by the way. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was one, though.

So I found it refreshing to read an article in the September issue of Fast Company on leadership, written by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam.

This is the key message:

If leadership can't be taught or transferred, how do you foster it? Where do you find leaders, and how do you create them? The truth is that in most fields, it's a natural process. Leaders are men and women who have chosen the right profession. They're good at it, and because they're good at it, they like it, and because they like it, they're even better at it. They're so good at it that they'd rather work than play. They're naturals, and excelling comes naturally as well. They've understood their field from the start, and they've studied it without even knowing they've studied it. They could look around from the day they joined an organization and understand the talents of those who went before them, understand the people around them, and know when and just how hard to push them.

Fast Company | The Greatness That Cannot Be Taught

Outlook and Hotmail to get a separation

A report on Bink.nu says that Microsoft is un-enabling access to Hotmail from within Outlook and Outlook Express:

Citing concerns about spammers abusing the service, Microsoft on Monday will announce that it is dropping a feature from its Hotmail service that currently allows non-paying customers to access their email from Outlook and Outlook Express. The feature is based on a technology called WebDAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning), an extension to the HTPP protocol on which the Web is based.

By 'non-paying customers', I guess this means the free Hotmail accounts. So the only way you'll be able to manage your Hotmail account through Outlook or Outlook Express is if you have a paid Hotmail Plus account.

Bummer!

Bink.nu | Microsoft Nixes Outlook, Outlook Express Access to Free Hotmail Accounts

BlogJet and Ecto reviewed

For the past ten days, I've been using BlogJet and ecto to create some of my posts. Both these applications are offline blog editing tools which let you manage your post content wholly offline, creating your content on your own computer and then publishing that content to your blog.

I'm going to focus my comments on my impressions from using both tools, not describing each one's functionality in any depth. You can find information about both apps on the respective websites, including detailed feature lists, and you can download trial versions. BlogJet runs on Windows only while ecto has versions for Windows and the Macintosh OS (it was originally developed as a Mac application). I've also included links to some other bloggers' reviews of these tools, listed at the end of this post.

Both these tools are excellent and are definitely worth considering, for good reasons like these:

• If you use a hosted blog service, you can use BlogJet or ecto to write your posts instead of having to log in to your account each time and write them online. If you have a dial-up internet connection, clearly that will save you money by not having to stay online all the time. Then, when you're ready, you connect to the net and publish your offline posts.
• You will have copies of all your posts on your own computer, not solely on your blog host's server. Especially useful for the time when you forgot to do that backup from your blog and the host server and/or your blog itself is unreachable :)
• Both BlogJet and ecto support a wide range of blog services including TypePad, Blogger, b2, BlogHarbor, Blogware, DasBlog, DeadJournal, LiveJournal, Lockergnome.net, MovableType, pMachine, Squarespace, .Text, WordPress, cocolog, Nucleus, Drupal, Blogger API and MetaWeblog API. So the chances are high that the service you use is supported.
• Full support for blogging RSS feeds from FeedDemon.
• Easily embed images and video and audio material into your posts.
• You can spell-check your posts before publishing. I find this useful as I can't do this with TypePad.
• WYSIWYG or code views: both tools give you the choice. BlogJet offers full WYSIWYG editing as the default, just like you're used to with productivity apps like Word or FrontPage, to make composing your posts extremely easy. You can also switch into code view. Ecto only has a code-based interface (ie, you're exposed to all the various HTML tags) although it does offer a preview browser-like popup window so you can see what your post will look like. For creating and editing posts, which approach you prefer will no doubt depend on what you're comfortable with.

I've been using the latest BlogJet version 1.1.0 build 20 and ecto for Windows version 1.0.8.1 (the latest version is 1.0.8.4 which I installed and used over the weekend.) Both are very easy to install and set up for access to your blog: after installation, answer a few questions about which service you use, enter your user ID and password, and you're set.

In actual use, both have their respective strengths and weaknesses. Here's my review of each one.

Plazes: Next generation social software

Following my post yesterday about metroblogging, I was discussing the concept with a friend last night and how we could get an Amsterdam city blog going. During our chat he told me about Plazes.

Plazes is a web service offering information on people and places based on your location. It is the first service of its kind, according to the people behind it (the website says they are Felix Petersen and Stefan Kellner in Cologne, Germany).

The Plazes website says the service is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. They say it's next-generation social software.

That's a good descriptor. I'd say it's a new kind of social network system, an enabler that gives you another means to develop your own social network. It's still in beta and you can see how things are going in the Plazes blog.

I can see potential privacy issues with such a service but there's lengthy commentary on Plazes' website about that.

Looks interesting.

(Written with ecto 1.0.8.4 and directly published live.)

Spanish speakers blogging in English

Spanish blogger José Luis Orihuela has posted a long list of bloggers from all over the Spanish-speaking world who blog in English.

His initial list is being added to with other names who leave comments to his post.

What a great way to open up contact with others without the barriers of language!

eCuarderno | Spanish Speaking Bloggers Blogging in English: un post abierto

(Via Boing Boing.)