…for the pictures (>_<)V

These pictures were taken during my first presentation round in Seoul during an international symposium where I was invited as a speaker.

A friend of mine recently asked me what type of personality I am according to the MBTI indicator. This Index is assessing your personality based on four categories:

• Extrovert/Introvert (externally oriented/internally oriented)

• iNtuitive/Sensing (abstract intuitive/concrete sensory)

• Thinking/Feeling (logically oriented/emotionally oriented)

• Perceiving/Judging (open-ended/closure oriented)

He was right when guessing that I am an ENTP…at least it comes kind of close…

- Qu’est-ce que tu fais ?
- J’écris une lettre.
- A qui ?
- A moi.
- Et qu’est ce que tu racontes ?
- Je ne sais pas. Je ne l’ai pas encore reçue.

I laughed about it so I thought I will post it.

If you think about it it must be obvious. Western culture is pretty much different from asian culture and behavior. That said, I was curious about the way how people would digitally communicate in asia. I remember reading a message from one of my cousins in which she would add a smiley to the end of the text I had never seen before. It was something like (>_<) which reminded me of japanese anime cartoons somehow. Now I have compiled a little collection for you guys to spice up the asian/western communication ways...lol

(-_o) wink
(^_^)V victory
(=_=) boring
(o_O) incredible
(p_q) confused
(n_n) smile
(@_@) dizzy
(!_!) sad
(?_?) what?
(=>_<=) cat, kittie
(U_U) I’m sorry
(z_z) sleepy
\(^o\) (/o^)/ dancing
(#_#) beaten up
(o_o) amazed
m(__)m bowing - very important indeed
p(^o^)q good luck
p(-_-)p thumbs down
d-(^_^)-b thumbs up
-^_^- blushing
d-_-b listening to music

This is definetly one of my current favorite dishes. It’s very easy and simple and tastes just great. The perfect dish for a romantic candle light dinner

Ingredients
1 Young rooster/chicken
Red wine (1 bottle) -> burgundy preferably. A good Merlot will do too
Cognac (10 big spoons)
Bacon lard de poitrine (250 g = 1/2 lbs)
Butter (4 tablespoons)
Small red onions (1kg = 2 lbs)
2-3 bay leaves
A few fresh thyme sprigs
A few fresh parsley sprigs
2 small spoons of sugar
500g (=1 lbs) button mushrooms

The cooking part
1. Cut the coq/rooster into pieces.
2. Stir fry the lardon in a big pan
3. Add the red onions in whole and the thyme sprigs - set the whole aside
4. Now melt the butter and brown the coq on all sides.
Once this is done add the initial mixture with the onions and lardon to it.
5. Now add the cognac and the red wine together with the bay leaves and the sugar and cover the pan.
6. Cook it under medium heat for ~ 30 minutes
7. Before you finish add the chunked and trimmed mushrooms to it and cook for another 10-15 minutes. Now garnish with the fresh parsley and enjoy your meal.

This dish goes well with noodles, potatoes or rice

Some of you have approached me asking me to give an overview about different tools how to sell actual content and increase the awareness of your blog. So I have listed for you some of the most popular services out there that help you in getting your content sold or actually help increase the polularity of your blog.

Feedvertiser

Feedvertiser is a plugin for Wordpress users that allows you to run text link ads in your RSS feed. Ad’s can be generated either by you or any third party that you work with. Problogger and Techcrunch are using this tool too. Just sign up, download the plugin, activate it in Wordpress and you are set!

Scoopt

Scoopt is a service for those hobby photographers and journalists among you who are making great pictures but just don’t have the guts of driving their sales forward and calling up newspapers and magazines Scoopt is filling this hole. The Membership is free. The submission of the pictures is free of charge too. Scoopt will take care of the actual sales for you. While working with newspapers, magazines, news organisations and other publishers they will try to sell your pictures. For each generated sale they will split (50:50) the amount with you.

JPG Magazine

JPG Magazine has recently started with a new business concept. People can upload their best photographic showcases. The community will vote for the best shots who will make it into their print magazine. The winner will receive $100 plus a free one-year subscription. The founders have initially started out to print on demand via Lulu before they have gone into offset printing.

So what’s behind Lulu?

Lulu.com offers since 2002 as a web’s premier independent publishing company to anybody the possibility of publishing pretty much about anything and everything. Be it CDs, books, paperbacks, hardcover books, brochures.. The print will be done on demand. Lulu.com will participate on each sale generated. You can set your own price, there is no set-up fee. It’s easy as that. Pretty cool

Feel free to suggest any other tools that I may have left out in the comment section

Since I have travelled quite a bit through Asia this year I was wondering how little in Europe we knew about Web 2.0 developments coming from Asia .So I did a little bit of research to figure out some sites that would give a bit more of an insight. And there it was: the first site I stumbled across was koreacrunch.com which was created in honor to techcrunch.com run by Channy Yun. A friend of him Chang had just recently set-up web20asia.com another site mainly focussed on tracking Korean Web 2.0 companies . Next Generation web companies coming from China are currently tracked by China Web 2.0 Review. Quihoo, a search engine and supposedly competitor of Google in China has received US$20M in VC funding from Sequoia Capital, CDH Investment and IDG Ventures back in march according to news of the EMPEA. China Web 2.0 Review reported another series B funding of Quihoo back in November raising $45M in funding in only 8 months.

To complete the post below Mercer has also published a ranking in regard to the quality of living worldwide. There are many western european cities within the top positions. Further information about the ranking and the results can be obtained here