People who will be missed

From time to time people I met using socia media announce that for a period of time, they will take a break away from the keyboard - it could be due to vacation, business trips or simply that they need a break.
And in that situation it is often seen that they are met with the obligatory greeting that "we are going to miss you."
And that's all very good and polite, but sometimes it is difficult not to think: how many of these people would you actually miss, actually and for real, if they all of a sudden disappeared from your screen due to a decision to go sheepfarming in the Outer Hebrides?
I am of the firm conviction that it is not 20000 followers on Twitter that will make me a happy social media user. No - what makes me a happy Twitter user who feels that he gets something out of his online presence are the approximately 20 people that I follow, and who follow me, who are engaged in two-way communication, where we are able to inspire each other.
These are the people to whom I would any day write that I am going to miss them. They constitute only a fraction - very few percent - of my Twitter followers, but they make a difference far beyond average and prove that quality is preferable to quantity any time. Because we are able to inspire each other.
(Translated from Noget om savn)

The Tribe

Recently, it dawned on me that in my digital universe, something best described as synergy has suddenly emerged; a synergy between an old idea that I have been toying with for years and a phenomenon that is just on the brink of emerging.
After a long time, I started looking into what Twitter basically is and what can be used to, and I have become aware that on Twitter, there's a potential to find some interesting people. People, whose creativity one could appeal to and ask them to come up with their wild thoughts. People, who would be able to inspire each other with their posts and to develop each other's wild ideas with constructive comments.
I am well aware that maybe one out of 100 Twitter followers might be interested in participating in such a project. Might be ready to enter into such a tribal community, to stay in the jargon that surrounds the medium. But it is also not a project that will initially need dozens of people - so actually, it may just work. Once the critical mass is reached - and initially, it just needs to be a couple of people or so doing ping-pong with each other's ideas - it is "just" to set up a forum for communication and get going - and eventually, the snowball effect might just do the trick.
(Translated from Stammen, eller: The Invitationals, part 6, originally published October 12, 2017)

When towers lean a little

In a fascinating way, the people we meet can naturally be divided into circles: I may have a couple of hundreds of followers on Twitter, a part of whom engage in my tweets, some come so close that they actually go beyond Twitter and start reading here, and a few go so far as to actively react on what I have written.
Thus I was inspired to write this post by Bojosi Gamontle, who had come to the innermost of these circles, and after reading the post about the tower that did not lean at Osborg asked whether there is room in our daily lives though to say, "maybe the tower can lean a little today"?
Such a question is a bit too complex to respond to via Twitter - even after we have been given twice as many characters per tweet - but on the other hand it's too good a question not to be answered. And therefore it ended up as a post here instead.
Funny enough, it's a question that I have also debated (in a slightly different disguise, though) with a close colleague: should we be afraid to fail as a result of trying to do things in a new way? My good colleague thinks we should be afraid. If the things we create are released to the customers and malfunction, people could get physically hurt. Period. I am however of the opinion that there is a time to fail and a time to be careful: the things that are released to the customers must of course be okay - but on the way towards the finished, tested and functioning result we should allow ourselves to be as innovative as possible and fail as quickly as possible, otherwise we will never become smarter and better.
The same applies to the master builder of Osborg. I have no doubt that he had been in situations along his way, where the things he tried to build had crumbled to pieces in spectacular ways - that is what it takes to eventually be able to stand tall as a master builder. And in the same way, we must also allow ourselves to be imperfect, embrace our failures, admit to our vulnerability and be able to assess where it is necessary that we deliver our best. We, too, need to try things that fail in order to learn what works and what doesn't - and in the end we may in certain ways be like the builder who stood impassive when he was accused of having made mistakes, while we know very well that we have many other things to polish when we return to our studies. So yes, there are plenty of times when the tower may lean a little. We may even say that there are times when the tower by all means should lean - because otherwise, we have not challenged ourselves and have not escaped far enough from our comfort zone to build even higher towers of the future without fear of having them crash to the ground.
(Translated from Når tårne hælder en smule)

What's that about pings?

(Translated from: Hvad er der med det dér ping-pong?)
There must be readers who have not been around from the start and who do not quite get what the blog's title - and the title of the blog it's translated from, and the name of the Twitter profile - is really about.
It all started a long time ago - before blogging became publicly available, which was why the project had to be hosted on a "regular" homepage, which in turn decreased the release frequency significantly - as an attempt to create mutual inspiration (you could call it a kind of ping pong) - while at the same time being a place for me to record my thoughts that otherwise ended up noting on loose scraps of paper.
Since then, a lot has happened - I've begun to translate selected posts, and occasionally spread some of them on Twitter, but the purpose is still the same as originally: mutual inspiration. Comments are still more than welcome, and the amount of comments I get enables me to still be able to relate to all of them individually. The reader may feel free to take this as an invitation.

A welcome challenge

If I look back upon my life, I have to admit that I have not always been the most adventurous person - to be honest, especially in my younger years I used to be very happy to stay well rooted within my comfort zone.
But even if I had still been like that, even if I had not discovered that there is more to be found outside the comfort zone than within it, I still think that I would have been attracted to the challenge that I am now venturing into.
The only person I challenge happens to be myself: I have visited Twitter and found inspiration with Philip Clark, who has introduced November as a "30-day challenge on learning and sharing from TED talk videos".
So it is my plan every day in November to follow the inspiration from Philip Clark to connect through knowledge, network, learn to learn and solidify knowledge by reserving time to see a video from TED.com every day of the month. And if anyone wants to join - well, then all you have to do is to go to Twitter and behold the fun with #30dayTEDchallenge.
(Translated from En velkommen udfordring)

On the topic of compressed complexity

I was part of a fascinating discussion taking part on Twitter the other day - regarding whether it was possible to agree with the following quote or not.

Remember this: It is not nearly so important how well a message is received as how well it was sent.

Most of the involved did not agree with it - but it is difficult to express the reasoning behind one's opinion in 140 characters, so it inspired me to write the following:
I think the problem is that the meaning of "well received" is ambiguous - as there's a possibility to understand "the message is well received" as both "the audience likes the message" or "the audience understands the message". And if substituting these two interpretations into the quote, we get two very different messages.
One of them: "Remember this: It is not nearly so important how well the audience likes the message, as how well it was sent" there is some truth to - there are some messages that it is basically impossible to deliver in a way that causes the audience to like it - most notably messages that affect the receivers' personal lives in a bad manner.
The other one: "Remember this: It is not nearly so important how well the audience understands the message, as how well it was sent" on the other hand, is very difficult to defend. Because it is difficult to deny that if the audience does not understand the message, then the message per definition has not been well sent. The sender simply cannot claim to have delivered a message well sent if no one gets it, and the only one able to do anything about it is the sender, who can try to understand the receivers better and adjust the message accordingly.
In short: It's more important that the message is clear than the message is appealing to the audience.
But I think the underlying problem is is another point on communication: it's difficult to deliver a complex message in a tweet (or a simple image). So basically, it is fair to say that the message created by whoever put the quote out on Twitter in the first place was not very well received - and not very well sent either. So in a strange negative way, the quote at least partially underlined its point.
(Translated from Noget om komprimeret kompleksitet)

Fishing and followers

After spending some time on Twitter, I have now started to notice a regularly repeating pattern. Followers coming out of the blue - without me really understanding why I should be of interest to them - following me for a couple of days and then disappearing again.
I have gradually come to the conclusion that they just come by to fish for followers - and since I'm not interested in following them, they simply disappear again.
It is probably very good that it is this way. Because I'm not the type who mindlessly follows people because they follow me. I follow people whose tweets can inspire me when they appear in my Twitter feed. Just like I hope people follow me because I can give them inspiration when I appear in their Twitter feed.
In particular, I appreciate people with whom I can engage in two-way communication - be it on Twitter or elsewhere - so that it can provide inspiration, food for thought and value to both parties. I would rather have five such followers than I would have 5000, who just come around fishing for me to follow them.
(Translated from Fiskeri og følgere)

An appeal to normal, moderate people

As the reader might know, I have a habit to collect quotes from people expressing wise things. This post is a part of this tradition - I found it in a tweet from media and tech analyst Benedict Evans who observed that as soon as a topic is outside the boundaries of what normal, moderate people will discuss, the people who have the extreme points of view towards the topic will fill the void where the above mentioned normal moderate people should have been heard.
So this should be seen as an appeal to all of us, who consider ourselves normal, moderate people - to keep letting our voices be heard, even though the extreme points of view do their best to monopolize the bandwidth.
(Translated from Et opråb til normale, moderate mennesker, originally published December 17th, 2015)