A month’s honeymoon with a gadget of this type has given a new perspective to what web centered communication can be: mail, social media, web-based hobbies, part-time selling via the web and now even the blogging can be done anywhere, even though traffic flows better through a WLAN than with the web-enabled SIM card. I have to congratulate the engineers and designers of Samsung Corporation who have done such a great design that Apple has felt it their responsibility to accuse their Korean competitor of being a copycat. The software inside though is  different; this one is working on the Android platform, a Google product. What does it indicate when market wars are led by lawyers? At least a considerable value added in these gadgets by intelligent software and hardware design, but in addition a fear for losing market share; this seems to happen at a surprising speed, if entering competitors have the abilitty to convince the consumer of the superiority of their new products.

California, South Korea, Taiwan and still at least to a certain extent Finland are today the places where mobile electronic gadgets are designed and produced. What if any features of these four regions have create such excellence in technology? South Korea and Finland share partly a similar   history of rapid change from a fairly poor to a well-educated country, although Finland lived through the change about a quarter of a century earlier than South Korea. California has a longer high tech history, and Taiwan… Well, I don’t actually know much about that island republic’s recent history.

In any case,the profound changes brought by Internet continue. Completing this text, I’m able to attach earphones to my Tab and start enjoying the some 700 tracks of digitalised music which I have found from Spotify, a web-based streaming radio service, which is turning more and more popular everywhere. Paying ten euros a month for such a service is a very moderate investment, but it has brought the music industry’s older channels into increasing difficulties. Would I give digital files to my near ones as Christmas presents? No, the presents should continue to be real objects with cover art and relevant information. But for my own use – why not?

But never mind! i installed nothing and have direct access to this mobile WordPress environment. I guesss WordPress is to be thanked for this opportunity. The browser is Opera Mini 5.

The next train is departing in 15 minutes, so I’ll get myself some licorice before going to track 7.

This looks very simple and easy to use. No formatting, just typing in the box. Practical for posting something in a moment.

This would be great, because we do need the ease of mobile blogging – with a gadget that fits into your pocket! I’m typing this from the sauna dressing room. Now is the time for an after-sauna beer!

But now I’m on the same phone, using Opera Mini 5, and typing seems to be quite like writing an email. But tnis is not email, I am actually in a WordPress mobile environment.

Google tool lovers who communicate from their mobile phones, were given good news today. It will be possible to use your Google docs from the cloud even with your mobile phone – provided it is an Android phone or an iPhone. No Symbian, no Nokia… The day seems to come nearer, when I have to forget my mobile history with Nokia, soon 20 years, and switch to a platform which Nokia is not using. Why is Nokia doing this to me…?

These are gloomy thoughts of a Finn who wanted to appreciate his home country’s superstar company, a company that today seems to lose its leadership position as a provider of mobile phones and related services. Can you help us get our excellent Nokia back, Mr Elop?

But perhaps the web would only be the starting place for an increasing interest in poetry? This seems to be the idea on which some poetry websites have been created. Here’s a listing of some sites – I’ve not surfed enough to say that they are the best, but at least they are worth having a look. If you have interesting poetry websites to recommend, please submit your comment!

Poetry Foundation of America

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/index.html

Poetry Bookshop Online of the Poetry Book Society (United Kingdom)

http://www.poetrybookshoponline.com/

The Poetry Bookshop (Hay-on-Wye, United Kingdom)

http://www.poetrybookshop.com/

Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo

http://epc.buffalo.edu/

EPC List of Poetry Bookstores

http://epc.buffalo.edu/connects/bookstores.html

e-Poetry Festival 2009, Barcelona

http://www.e-poetry2009.com/

Poetry Bestsellers at Amazon.Com

http://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Literature-Fiction-Books/b/qid=1230806966/ref=sr_tc_img_2_0?ie=UTF8&node=10248

It would also be nice to show you some book covers from our home library, but – being a new WordPress blogger, I’ve not yet learnt how to paste in some html code, which would then link to random booklists from our home library catalogue at LibraryThing.

Is there any use of cataloguing your books in an internet site? Definitely, because these data can be accessed e.g. with your smartphone when you’re in a bookstore and start wondering whether we already had this or that book by Jaan Kross (this Estonian author is one of the greatest novelists in Europe, but unfortunately his books are less well known in the English-speaking world) or Saul Bellow. I bought a paperback version of his Herzog over forty years ago during my exchange student year in the United States- but haven’t still read the book! Well, fortunately our female booklover has, so I can ask for her comments…

Congratulations to all readers of this blog in the United States – you now have a president-elect who is even an able book-writer.  I’ve now got Barack Obama’s second book The Audacity of Hope on my night table. It looks more political than his first book, but perhaps now that he will be the 44th president of the United States, it would not be wasted time to read about his political views. Does he now have the audacity to choose Hillary Clinton to be the Secretary of State – that we shall see in a few weeks.  It would be a fitting continuation of female secretaries of state – for a person whose talent would match the post. Should we get acquianted even with her writing skills?

In three days we will see the exciting results of the U.S. presidential election.  Judged by the results of the unofficial voting arranged outside the U.S. by The Economist at www.economist.com Barack Obama seems to have much, much more friends outside the United States than John McCain.  Of course the choice has to be made by American citizens.  Both candidates would make able presidents, but many appear to have doubts of Sarah Palin’s competence, which may be a risk, should she need to take responsibility for the presidency. I cannot but join Colin Powell’s comments about why Obama would be the better choice for the U.S. right now.

[An additional comment on Tuesday evening 4th November: The voting is right now taking place in America, people are lining up in the polling stations, and we Europeans already look forward to watching our morning news - will we hear the result in the 6 am news, or are the West Coast votes needed to ensure the result...?  Let's hope we won't need even a little help from the friends in the Supreme Court - remember the scandal eight years ago?  In any case, The Economist's global voting was closed today, and Obama collected 9,115 electoral votes (97,8 per cent of all) while McCain only got 203!  Are the readers of The Economist much too young, much too educated, much too liberal - or are they perhaps on the right track...?  This result is even more surprising than the recently broadcasted 15-6 for Obama at Dixville Notch, New Hampshire.]

My appreciation for Barack Obama grew considerably by reading his autobiography Dreams from My Father, published already fourteen years ago. It is written very well by an intelligent and emphatic person.  Similar positive qualities of Barack’s personality were referred to in the recent TV documentary Obama vs. McCain, where some people he worked with during his Harvard days were interviewed.

It is also a choice between two generations – Barack could be John’s son.  It is a fact that people above 70 may have not only wisdom of experience but also considerable energy – I am between 50 and 60 and have known many high-energy persons older than 75 – but is the U.S. presidency really the kind of job in which a man of McCain’s age would thrive?  His supporters will probably say that reference to his age is discrimination (“age racism”), or that Obama has too little experience for the position, but in fact we have lots of excellent examples of persons who have entered key leadership positions in his age and been extremely successful.

Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning for even us Europeans will in any case be an exciting moment.  The President of the United States is a powerful figure who affects even the future of countless people outside his own country. If you are entitled to vote, consider what you are doing for the world.

As an HR professional who has participated in quite a few recruitment & selection projects, I have lately started to wonder how employees and managers develop – often without any planned effort – their own reputation in organizations. I am not referring to reputations that depend on different opinions, views and other issues causing disagreements, and also not to performance problems.

Some of us have developed an excellent reputation, others a less admirable one, but (so it seems to me) the reputation and the true character of the person do not always match. And if a mismatch occurs, the case in which neither the person nor her/his employer wins is when someone has a reputation essentially worse than what s/he is like in reality.

In work communities, important sources of reputation can be found by observing how people behave and interact. Social skills are a valuable source of reputation-building and should never be under-estimated.

But what about a person’s relative difference from others or from the most frequent kinds of personalities in the organization? Does for instance a person with a strongly “academic” communication style have any chances for thriving in a manufacturing organization – or the frank and pragmatic production expert at the Research Lab? Does the extreme Extravert or the Extreme Introvert suffer from being such a rare and extreme type? Do people closer to the centre of any behavioural dimensions enjoy better reputations simply because they are closer to the majority of their colleagues?

Did you ever experience that your own reputation changed, when your environment or your own responsibilities changed? As this has probably happened to many, our reputations are context-dependent, not caused only by our own actions, even though they are important as well.

Reputation is related to success. This is evident at organization level; there is even an international consulting network, The Reputation Institute (see www.reputationinstitute.com), which wants to “advance knowledge about corporate reputations and help companies create economic value by implementing coherent reputing strategies”.

There is also plenty of more or less valuable self-help literature available on impression management and personal branding, for those of us who want to start a conscious improvement effort, but do we actually have valid, research-based knowledge on the formation process of personal reputations?