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Read a great 'manifesto' by Kevin Kelly last week on the plane on my way to Travel BlogCamp in London about how everything online is so easily copied, in turn resulting in 'over abundance', and thus decreasing the value to (near) zero. Or as he puts it:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff that can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things that can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

He's then come up with 8 categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that we could get for free. Several of the points kept coming back to mind during the discussions of that evening in London, and it's really inspired me to keep these 8 points in mind when looking at how you differentiate yourself from your competition. Not just with products that are free mind you, there's absolutely no reason you shouldn't try and consider these when looking at products that everyone is happy to pay for (booking a hotel, buying a flight, insurance. Whatever).

So without further ado:

1. Immediacy
2. Personalization
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Accessibility
6. Embodiment
7. Patronage
8. Findability

I'm not going to go into each one and explain them, as I wouldn't be able to do it justice here in in a short blog entry and you really should read the entire thing (it's a 15 minutes read). Suffice to say, you can download the entire manifesto free of charge via the most excellent ChangeThis website. I'd also like to quote one sentence that in my opinion sums up the very essence of why understanding social media is so important to business today, on- or offline.

Money in this networked economy follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuit

Food for thought as you go into the weekend. Enjoy it.

Nice church/chapel in Riga.

I was kicking back this evening with a good cup of tea (did you know even tea can be bought online these days!?!) and sorting through photos when this beaut came up. For the uninitiated, the sturdy little fellow is me, hehe. The elderly woman lived in the village we lived in on Rennell in the Solomons. Poor woman; looks like I might be slightly weighing her down here

For those of you that want a few more pics like this, there's an 'unofficial history of Travellerspoint' that I wrote up a few years ago which includes a few hilarious shots!

You can almost hear the slurping on this shot of Malia having an ice cream in the park!

Took Malia to see a dance act in a big tent in the park. Act was called "Sofie's garden" and was what they called "modern dance". Malia loved it in any case, so a successful afternoon

Late spring and the tulips are in full bloom. We're off to the playground whilst the tourists make their way to the famous statues.

About 1 am here in Oslo now and I've just uploaded some changes to our blog commenting system. I needed a post that was less than 30 days old to test the system, so here it is. Isn't it great when you have a deadline like a trip to the other side of the world to really get things done you've been meaning to do for 4 or 5 months?!

This has got to be one of the whitest winters in a long time in Oslo. Just as everyone thought it was starting to thaw a bit, today sees a whole new pile of fresh snow and it's still snowing outside as I type this. Two quick photos taken on my way to work. The first is the library and the second is just some trees. I love how fresh snow sits on the branches like this.

Deichmans library in Grünerløkka

Trees and some garbage bins