I am not really reactivating this blog, but its name, Social Blus Hamburg, has become, surprisingly, more relevant than ever in the last few weeks.
I am back in Hamburg, where I am working and this work has a lot to do with internet and social media, but from a new point of view. More on that later, when the time is right.
I just have to work on the blues side of things, since the Mobile Blues Club is closed for the winter. But now, living close to the Hauptbahnhof, I guess I will be able to go a bit more out for some live music.
By the way, on the 4th of February there will be the Blues Celebration at the Fabrik, with Steve Baker, Abi Wallenstein and Martin Roettger as Blues Culture plus friends. I'll be there.
For the mean time, here a great video I found from Dave Matthews Band's concert in Rio last year, with Gabriel Grossi doing a great solo on chromatic harmonica around the 8th minute.
I spent hours on Saturday checking the arts installations in the empty buildings of the Gängeviertel in downtown Hamburg. Those buildings are awaiting demolishment for 7 yeras now and a community of artists proposes that the buildings be refurbished and offered as affordable living and work quarters for creatives in Hamburg.
Unfortunately my battery went dry when I was about half way through my visit, there was so much I wanted to photograph. But I ended up jamming and busking with some musicians I had met at the Mobile Blues Club before, so I wasn't too disappointed.
More info at www.gaengeviertel.info.
This time the Social Media Club Hamburg meeting took place at the Hamburg offices of the Public Relations firm Weber Shandwick. Today is said to have been the hottest day in Hamburg this summer (the temperature in my room is still 28°C) so the idea of holding the get-together on the building's terrace was a good one. The view was certainly very nice, looking towards the city from the harbour.Jörg and Mark from Weber Shandwick told us about their experience in using social media for the promotion of the first Android phone in the German market, T-Mobile's G1. I forgot to ask them if they had any for testing available, still ;)
From my perspective, the most interesting aspect of the presentation and the questions at the end was the insights into the relationship between a PR firm and its client and how actors at both sides act.
I made notes of the presentation using my Livescribe Pulse Smartpen and hope that the audio quality is good enough to publish it as a pencast. Let's see if the experiment works out, I have preliminary permission to do so.After the presentation we enjoyed more of the summer evening on the patio with drinks and barbeque German style: sausages.
I left the event with Jan and Alex from Atenta and we ended up discussing how people will be using their mobile devices in 5 to 10 years. An interesting discussion involving Pokens, near field communication, interfaces, the increasing availability of computing power and storage, different stereotypical technology user profiles, Open Office and open source software in start-ups.
A warm day brings, usually, heavy rains; and I got caught in it, arriving pretty wet home. Nevertheless, it was a great evening meeting interesting people and getting to know acquaintances better.
Oh, by the way, have you checked the 2 posts in the blog series I am writing at the Wollmilchsau blog about my job search? Part 1 and 2. In German, I hope you enjoy.
On the patio, before the presentation
Jörg and Mark presenting in old-school style.
Very good attendance, as usual
More patio, this time with food
Well, almost.
I was showing my cousin around in Hamburg doing a walking tour with www.newhamburgtours.com on Monday and I saw the curious vehicle in the picture.
I like bikes and new bike designs. Foldable bikes, recumbent bikes, trikes, tandem, the red Stadträder, etc. If possible, I will try to live without a car and Hamburg, being flat and having good bike paths, seems the place to try this out. That is, weather permitting ;)
But back to BioBob, this was the first time I saw them and it was pretty obvious that they were delivering fruits. As it often is, you need a second reminder to look something up. I was checking the Hamburg@Work website and saw that BioBob is one of their partners. And BioBob is just what it seems: a bio delivery service of fruits (and coffee, and snacks) for offices, focusing on bio and fair trade products and delivering mostly by bike. Nothing fancy, but nice initiative.
Their page at HH@W sums it up pretty well, but they have their own website also, of course.
http://www.biobob.com/
BTW: New Hamburg (Europe) Tours is also an interesting business model focused on green: walking tours instead of big, expensive and polluting buses and a tips based revenue model, you pay what you think the tour was worth.
What I like about the system is that they took the effort to make it as painless as possible for you to start using it.
1) You can register on the spot, in the terminals or over the web or phone. I registered at one of the terminals.
2) Registration fee is low at €5,00 and it is reverted back to you in credits, so, basically, it is free.
3) The first 30 minutes riding are free. That covers most of the trips people have to do here in Hamburg.
4) Even when trips take more than 30 minutes, the prices are affordable: 4 or 3 cents for the next 30 minutes and 6 or 8 cents after the 60th minute, with a cap of €12,00 a day.
5) The terminals work very well and are easy to use.
6) The bicycles are attractive and good quality.
Hamburg is a great city to cycle. It is mostly flat and has very good bike paths. Furthermore, the subway system, even though it is great, is expensive, at €2,70 for the usual trip. It is summer, so the weather also helps at the moment.
I want to see how things develop in the winter. It won't certainly be as nice as now, wet and cold. Also, I am curious to see if the bikes will hold up. The second bike I rented already had problems with the gears (after less than a month!) and the third bike had a broken bell.
The station closest to my home is 10 minutes on foot away, so it is not an alternative I will take too often, if I can use my own bike. But it is great for when you get back on train from somewhere else and don't feel like taking the metro.
I have two points of critique to the system, though:
1) There is no way to see where other stations are on the terminals. You see the stations close to you, but you cannot check where the stations are in your area of destination. It prevented me from taking a bike at least once.
2) You get a very strange ID number to login to their website, composed of your birth date and some more digits. First, it is difficult to remember. Second, my birth date is the kind of information I don't usually give away to others.
But those are simply solved with a bit of code, so let's hope the system works well also in the future.
Tonight it was the night of Titus, a multi-instrumentalist from Munich. He played different guitars, lap steel, ukulele (as seen on the video), banjo, Stroh violin and accompanied himself on bass pedals and a foot snare. Curiosly enough, he has a Swan bass harmonica on a rack built especially for it. I played a song with him and a singer/guitar player called Benjamin in an impromptu jam while Titus was playing the lap steel, bass pedals and bass harmonica on the rack. Very cool.
I have had several blogs over the past 6 years. Or, better said, different versions of the same blog with different aims at different times in different places and languages.
All started as a personal diary on the internet, in Portuguese, for myself and as an experiment. It later evolved as a link to my family and friends while I was abroad, semi-public (robots.txt: no follow).
The third step was to join an online collective of Brazilian creatives, www.nightripping.com. That was eventually closed down and refurbished to something else by Nix. It was the move from semi-private to 100% public, from a circle of insiders to a general public. Until this point, I was still writing in Portuguese.
The next big change came with my decision to do an MBA. The blog would continue to be an important communication channel with family and friends, but it was clear to me that my audience would change dramatically as soon as I started to connect with MBA colleagues from all over the world. I changed the language to English and focused more on my experience on the 3 different campi I visited: Warwick in England, Kingston in Canada and Mannheim here in Germany. I also set as a goal to publish information I hadn't found on the internet while researching for my MBA, so that I could help prospective MBA students with their choice and daily life. It is cool to see that already the third class of Mannheim MBAs is using some of the info I put together.
After the MBA my blog lost a bit of its purpose. I could write about my job search or my new employers, but writing about what you do in your job is more critical. I was still new at DHL and, later, at the consulting company. After that, my job search took a lot of energy and I spent weeks without posting.
But I want to change that now. I arrived in Hamburg on the first of July and know exactly what I want to post about. Hamburg is such a great city that it is not difficult to come up with ideas and texts. I renamed the blog, changed its skin and believe that the name says it all. I will write mainly about Hamburg.
I will write about Social Hamburg. And, for me, Social has two meanings. First, as a new in town guy, getting to know people and understanding the social dynamics of the city. Second, Social stands for communication, for social media, which is a field which interests me greatly and which is very important to me during this job search, as it is the main channel for me to find vacancies and also an area I want to work in.
And I will also write about Blues Hamburg, in the musical sense. As a blues harp player music is very important to me, especially music in the North American tradition: soul, funk, rock, jam bands, country, southern rock, blue grass, rock 'n' roll, jazz and, of course blues.
Let's see how this goes.
