As I said recently, I am no longer an operating business. Core as a company does not exist anymore, and I am not looking for inquiries or offers from designers, developers, Web companies or anything alike. Even when I was working for my own business, I could not hire employees permanently, only on a contract-assignment basis.

However, I am still looking for a partner to start with a side project, a Web application about collaboration and social intelligence. If you are interested to partnership with me and you think you have the resources to substantially support this project, or you have the funds to support it financially, please do not hesitate to contact me. I will reveal more about the plans to valid candidates.

Core is currently looking to team up with a developer, someone who can write proper XHTML, CSS 2 and 3, JavaScript and AJAX in his sleep.

There are a number of projects in the pipeline with which I’d like to start with rather soon. The concepts are there, what I need now is a reliable partner, someone who will start building a team with me, which we will expand on with growing amount of work and revenue.

I’m looking for a partner, because there is no way I can pre-finance the large amount of required work. Revenue will be shared in a business model that is fair for both of us, and on the long run core will be our mutual company, home to all our projects.

There are three project ideas to start with. They are highly innovative and fairly ambitious, but they can be handled with today’s technology. Not all of these ideas will evolve with the same amount of speed, so we will focus on the right steps at a time.

I’m specialized in marketing and branding, so once we get those concepts out there, there will also be a lot of response in the media and blogosphere.

If this sounds like something you have been looking for, send me an email. You can find my contact information in the connect-section of this website.

It’s been a long time since I was able to post a blog entry. Due to my job at namics, it has become increasingly difficult to get my head free for the things that matter to me. I am not the type of person who divides work and life that much anyway, so the things that matter to me now are the same things that matter to namics. I’m not just an employee, I am not just part of a company, I am the company, one atom of many, forming the being and shaping its destiny. Many who are working for this unusual company feel the same, and ther’es nothing mythical about this. It’s simply a great company to work for.

My personality is to fully engage for what I’m interested in, and right now that something is giving direction, or being part of it, of the company I’m working for. Historically I’ve not always been this loyal or trustful in a company. There’s a history of companies lining up in my career paths, who were all demanding, and they made me work plenty of overtime. While working for namics proves difficult at times, it also gives back a lot of learnings and insights, about clients, about projects and about collaboration. The company’s structure and its tools are far from being perfect, but that is precisely why it is challenging and worth working for this company.

I’m missing my blogger days, when I was able to spend two hours for a perfect article on core Theory. Meanwhile my situation has changed and I’ll have to figure out how to start writing again. There are a lot of things I want to vent about, so this is my platform and I just need to utilize it again.

With this post I’m starting a new series, named after a little piece of furniture you tend to forget once it is sitting aside of your bed. Independently of its looks or hidden qualities, a nightstand works best when it demurely serves its purpose without drawing a lot of attention. Which in itself is always a sign for great design. What makes a nightstand worth writing a paragraph about though, are the good books piling up on its surface.

I have to admit, at the moment I don’t even have a nightstand. But I do have books next to my bed, and that pile is in steady rotation. I read them all at once, sometimes no more than two paragraphs a night. Which is resulting in a very slow rotation.

There’s a certain quality you will see reflected. None of this writing is about science in a traditional sense, Harvard business tactics, modern management, or how to invest your money best. It is about humans and how they live with each other, in groups, societies, sometimes struggling with human nature, sometimes blindly following patterns we were not aware of, but we’re allowing them to rule our path of decisions. These books were written by brilliant minds, tinkerers about all things connected.

Not all of them are easy reads, and with some I’m really having a hard time biting my way through. In fact I’m sometimes tempted to put a book away. But then it does something to me, and this is probably the best reason why you may want to have a closer look: The influence of these books resembles the effect of drinking seawater. The more you drink, the thirstier you get.

One more thing. I hope you will enjoy this series and it might inspire you to read the books portrayed in it. But it would be boring if you only read about what I’m reading. Don’t be shy to tell me about your nightstand too. Throw a book in my direction and see if it will knock me out.

Coming up

The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda
Wir nennen es Arbeit, by Holm Friebe and Sascha Lobo
Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell
Emergence, by Steven Johnson
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks, by Mark Buchanan
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, by Albert László Barabási
Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, by William C. Taylor and Polly Labarre
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore
Failed States, by Noam Chomsky
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, by Philip Ball
The Meaning of the 21st Century, by James Martin
Who Are We?, by Samuel P. Huntington

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If you have followed this blog for some time, you may have wondered why it suddenly went quiet. Well, it didn’t stop really, it only got interrupted.

The reason why I haven’t been blogging lately is simple. In October 2007, I started a new job at namics in Zurich, and ever since then I have been working for its marketing division namicsrotweiss.

At the time it seemed a good opportunity, based on the experiences I had made when I was working freelance for namics for two weeks. We had been in talks about possible collaborations for about a month before that, and it had come to a point where it seemed reasonable to establish a firmer work relationship, also because namicsrotweiss had won the client pitch I had been involved with as a consultant.

Since February 2007 I have been a member of MyBlogLog, a Web service that offers simplistic user tracking. I had found MyBlogLog through one of the widgets posted on several websites, among them Stephanie Booth’s blog.

MyBlogLog looks a little bit 1999 design wise, and it doesn’t really offer substantially useful content. And it only works if you are a member too, otherwise it won’t track your visit. It also doesn’t provide the kind of data you get with Google Analytics, which is entirely for free. MyBlogLog reminds you to upgrade to a pay account in a rather pushy way, but given the basic functionality I like, I don’t plan to upgrade any time soon.

There is one big drawback though, which MyBlogLog has in common with a number of so called Web 2.0 services out there. We have 2007, so mentioning Web 2.0 in one sentence, I would assume that this includes a Web design that is following Web Standards. It’s not like CSS 2 was invented last week and we are first adopters of CSS based layouts.

Yet, MyBlogLog seems to think we need a nasty table as a widget. That alone wouldn’t make it bad, if there was a good way to replace the table and use XHTML and CSS make a useful and clean snippet of code. A lot of people are doing this all the time with widgets, like Flickr for an example. The Flickr bar you see on top of Theory applies the JavaScript from Flickr, sans any table or formatting, with a new set of CSS styling from my style sheet. Veerle has posted a good guide on her blog.

After spending the good half of one morning with trying to use MyBlogLog’s nasty widget code, I decided to pull the plug. No widget from MyBlogLog on my blog. I can’t have such a clunky 1999 styled box destroying the look and feel of the core experience, and if MyBlogLog doesn’t let me produce a simple, clean code snippet without a table and horrible styling, I won’t deal with their annoying code.

MyBlogLog, if you are reading this: Once you cleaned up your widget code crap, give me a call.

Watch out for my website core to be updated soon. I’m working on major changes which will include both, content and design. The layout will be shifted entirely from table to CSS layers and XHTML.

The new design will be extremely functional and focussed. It is a systematical scheme based design, utilitizing certain principles, allowing a maximum of flexibility. The goal is to let visitors experience the meaning of its content through its design. A special feature will explain how the design is built and how it works.

I’m in a prototype testing phase now and I will publish it here once it’s on.

Upgrading to Movabletype 3.2 was not easy, but I finally completed the migration process last night. Sure, I learned a lot about MySQL databases, about proper XHTML, and about how the engineers of Movabletype think. But I’m a usability expert, not a programmer. The question remains, why do I as a typical user have to learn all that stuff?

Despite Six Apart’s warm promises of the easiest upgrade ever, upgrading to Movabletype to version 3.2 is everything but painless. I’m not sure how well their strategy goes, leaving enough users out there without a clue, hoping they will be drawn to buy the most expensive upgrade version with included technical support.