We had an apero this afternoon and I presented one idea of Seth Godin to the team. The main idea developped is that a small unit and big unit could benefit from each other, a kind of symbiosis.

RULE 9: OBSERVE THOSE LITTLE BIRDS THAT CLEAN THE TEETH OF VERY BIG HIPPOS

There’s a giant rhino, bigger than a Volvo, with its mouth open. And there, in the mouth of the beast, are a bunch of little birds.

The birds eat the bugs the rhino can’t get to. The birds are happy because they get an easy meal. And the rhino is happily bug-free.

There’s a lot a bootstrapper can learn from these little birds. By creating a mutually beneficial relationship with a hippo, you can make a lot of money, generate credibility, and avoid being eaten.

Find bigger, richer, more stable organizations. Partner with them. It gives you credibility and access and sometimes, cash flow.

Most big-company founders hate what their companies have become. They rail against the slowness, the bureaucracy, the inability to get anything done anymore.

Reminder: you can download the pdf version of the Seth Godin’s book – The Bootstrapper’s Bible.

As I am not using any “public” statistics tools like SiteMeter, I would like to give some information about my weblog/website statistics. Both sites (didierbeck.com and didierbeck.net) are hosted by OVH and I have a full-access to my raw-logs (apache logs). To analyse them, I am using the same utility as the one for my professional job, i.e. urchin, which is definitely very powerful and extremely efficient. With my laptop for example (hp nx7000 with 1GB RAM), I can generate full reports of websites with hundreds of thousands of pageviews monthly in….minutes!! For those you use WebTrends, have a look at urchin (the license is very cheap for this kind of powerful tool, $895 for 100 websites!).

OVH had some problems in September with the filers where the logs were copied, so that I put a forecast in the following statistics for this month, as for the December, to be able to close the year. The period of analyse is March to December 2004.

For the first two December’s weeks:

• 660 pageviews daily (min: 404, max: 890)
• 317 sessions daily (min: 166, max: 407)
• 79% of the traffic is generated by my blog, 11% by my website, 7% by the robots and 3% by the Seth Godin‘s book (!), the Bootstrappers Bible, about 300 downloads in 5 days!
• So, 79% of traffic is coming from the weblog, and 54% from the atom.xml, which is my Syndicated Newsfeed. This part is increasing quite rapidly.
• Interesting also to note that the browsers and feed readers structure accessing my blog and website is changing massively. In the last two weeks, 25% of the accesses are coming from IE, 22% from Firefox/Mozilla, 23% from Newsgator (!), the rest – 30% – from a *lot* of other feed readers (Bloglines, SauceReader, etc.)

To have a comparison, I took the liberty to have a look at two weblogs I am reading very regularly, the one of Rodrigo Sepulveda and the one of Loic le Meur, who are giving their statistics openly with SiteMeter here and here (Rodrigo, Loic, if you have a problem with my comparison, let me know ;-):

Loic (period=last week)

• Pageviews daily: 543
• Number of visits daily: 362

Rodrigo (period=last week)

• Pageviews daily: 243
• Number of visits daily: 183

As usual in this field, it is just an indication, specially for the number of visits which is always defined in different ways by the different tools. The number of pages should be representative on the other side. I am wondering if SiteMeter can integrate the traffic generated by the newsfeed (atom or RSS). I don’t think so, which is quite a problem, if you know that this part is generating more than 50% of my traffic…

As already mentionned in October, the Mozilla Foundation has called on its supporters to chip in on a full-page advertisement in The New York Times for the launch of its Firefox 1.0 browser.

It’s out!

MOZILLA FOUNDATION PLACES TWO-PAGE ADVOCACY AD IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15th, 2004 – The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that it has placed a two-page ad in the December 16th edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation’s fundraising campaign to support last month’s highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

[pdf]

As I said, I participated to this program. Need an evidence?

Where are YOU??

[via Seth Godin]

Seth wants to add the following 10:

1. Basic understanding of electricity.
2. How to drive a nail, drive a screw, cut a board, build a box.
3. How to drive a car in the winter, how to pull a car out of a skid.
4. How to ask for help.
5. How to read a table and a chart
6. How to read the media for spin and for insight
7. The importance of doing things for other people (yes, this one among others is mostly a parenting job, but yes, it can be taught)
8. How to work really really hard, sometimes on things that aren’t fun.
9. What it’s like to be in jail.
10. How to create an internal dialogue that makes you happy.

[via Seth Godin]

So what are they? What are the one thousand teachable things that every third grader ought to start learning so she’ll know them all before before she graduates from high school?

Here are twenty to get us started.

1. How to type.
2. How to speak in front of a group.
3. How to write clear prose that other people actually want to read.
4. How to manage a project.
5. The most important lessons from American history.
6. What the world’s religions have in common.
7. Evolution.
8. Formal logic.
9. The 15,000 most common English words.
10. Conversational Spanish.
11. How to handle big changes, with grace.
12. How to run a small business.
13. Basic chemistry.
14. Not arithmetic, but algebra.
15. A little geometry, a little calculus.
16. The most important lessons from ten other world cultures and their history.
17. Speed reading with comprehension.
18. How to sell.
19. Pick one: how to paint, write a poem, compose a song or juggle really well.
20. Understanding the biographies of 500 important historical figures and 200 fictional ones.

I’ve started to read very conscientiously the new e-book of Seth Godin for a while. This book is really great. I will surely publish some insights in the coming days. What’s also great is that The Bootstrapper’s Bible was available online for free during 2 weeks. The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivs license. And, Seth gives an explicite authorization to spread his work electronically!

You are given the unlimited right to print this manifesto and to distribute it electronically (via email, your website, or any other means). You can print out pages and put them in your favorite coffee shopʼs windows or your doctorʼs waiting room. You can transcribe the authorʼs words onto the sidewalk, or you can hand out copies to everyone you meet. You may not alter this manifesto in any way, though, and you may not charge for it.

So, you can find a PDF copy of The Bootstrapper’s Bible of Seth Godin here.

Who is Seth Godin?

Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. In Free Prize Inside, his follow up to the best selling marketing book of 2003, Purple Cow, Seth helps you make your product remarkable with soft innovations. You need to make each of your employees idea champions so they can find the Free Prize. Godin is author of six books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. Seth is a renowned speaker as well. He was recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses. He holds an MBA from Stanford and was called “the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age” by BusinessWeek.

As the weather was again awful – the fog is blocking the nice sunny weather since days, we decided to proceed further and to make a tour in the mountains, over this annoying clouds. That was definitely a good idea :-)

-4°C at home when we left (altitude: 230m) and +8°C when we arrived at “Le Grand Ballon” (altitude: about 1’300m!). Have a look!

Frozen trees

Sea of clouds

[via vowe]

Have a look at the Norio Matsumoto Gallery about Nature:

• The Alaskan range
• Northern lights
• Whales of Southeast Alaska
• Alaskan Forest

Really *marvelous*!! I would like to publish three of them (it was difficult to choose…), just to convince you (if I’m damaging any copyright, let me know, I will put them back)

PS: for a time, an interesting use of the Flash technology on the Norio’s website.

This evening, we visited the Christmas Market of Mulhouse with our little son. Really nice!

And, no, I don’t agree with the Christmas Resistance Movement ;-)

One of the renowned shop downtown is organizing very nice windows for Christmas.