A-Listers : éloge de la transdisciplinarité et de l’action

Ce qui fascine chez les A-Listers, ces bloggers incontournables de la blogosphère anglophone : le caractère multiple de leurs compétences et le fait qu’il s’agit de personnalités qui, au delà de la réflexion, sont en permanence dans l’action.

La richesse de leur parcours improbable leur donne une perspective originale et une meilleure appréhension des choses électroniques. Et cette compréhension intime des changements sociaux que nous vivons  leur confère une plasticité professionnelle et une aisance naturelle pour ré-inventer continuellement leur vie avec des activités où s’entremêlent recherche, écriture, business, consulting, art et technologies. La vie 2.0, quoi.

Cela nous change un peu du classique bipartisme de la pensée-2.0.fr : d’un côté les universitaires qui refont le monde depuis leur chaire d’ivoire, de l’autre les entreprenautes ramenant la société electronique à une guirlande de buzzwords pour vendre du vaporware.

Heavy Mental l’avait énoncé dans sa profession de foi : nous ne retrouvons pas cette pertinence dans la blogosphère.fr, et le sentiment est qu’indépendamment des raisons évoquées alors, un motif supplémentaire est ce manque de compétence transdisciplinaire au service de l’action.

Lifehacking your way to rock’n'roll stardom

Derek Sivers is a cool bloke. A questionable haircut but still : a great guy.

Graduated from Berklee school of music, likewise some obscure producers such as Quincy Jones or immense jazz guitarists (Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and John Scofield), he does know a tad about music.

He set up CDBaby, online store selling albums by independent music artist, and now offers consulting services for wannabe musician artists. Incidentally he also happens to be a great blogger often referred to by some Heavy Mental heroes like 37Signals. Being at the exact intersection between music industry, lifehacking and attention economy it was just a matter of time before I start waxing lyrical about his work.

He offers on his web page a free book : How to call attention to your music : you just need to register (you’ll then get a nice personal e-mail from Derek himself).

Five things to keep myself mentally well

Meme from Mindapples (via Euan Semple). The five things that keep me mentally well :

• Make sense : read/listen/watch, think, talk/write/act
• Love
• Music : listen to, play guitar, sing, write songs, read about, write about
• Exercise
• Be enthusiastic and grateful

Help yourself and give me five.

Happy new year to the whole world.

Gaping Void : creativity on business cards

Mind the gap

Okay I know you guys gonna think I am a bit of a late adopter.

You web2.0ers may have known Hugh for ages, have your own dedicated GV business card, or even the gaping void widget on your blog. Well, that’s not my case.

I’ve landed on Gaping Voids a few times before but I didn’t really notice until today while I was reading this How To be creative post. This is one of the most inspirational posts (okay it’s a pretty big one) I have ever read.

So if, just like me, you’ve one of the last human beings on this planet ignoring what Gaping Void is and who this Hugh McLeod can be, just do yourself a favor and check it out.

Missing : Kathy Sierra

I used to be a Professional working in airline distribution system business. Man, life was great : I was making good money in the countries I wanted (I even managed to reject an offer from Qantas, stupid me) being international consultant in this niche market with old techs. Then came September 11.

Within half a day my professional skills were made obsolete (okay there were worth things around, but still : it was still bad). I then decided then to switch to new techs in general and Java Programming language in particular. I started this self-training to prepare for the Java programmer certification.

This is when Kathy Sierra came into my professional life (messiah image dressed in white surrounded with a halo of dazzling light).

Respect to the AlphaGeeks

Common + Technical

In the early 90s when I started my carreer as an IT professionnal, there was in France this very popular stand-up comedy trio called Les Inconnus (the Unknown – wish they actually were). They had this rather stupid story about software engineers (in-gé-nieur in-for-ma-ti-cieeeeen) which had the whole country laughing. People was laughing with this story because :

• IT job is very common and technical, both adjectives being abuse in France
• the IT professional character was depicted as an autistic guy looking clumsy and uncomfortable about everywhere but in front of a PC : uncool as hell.