Oliviero Toscani's details at Petra's wine cellar

Japaning

The best of Japan? No doubt, Japanese people: never met friendlier, gentler and more helpful people in my travels.

8 ways to boost your creativty

Difficult times often lead to great innovations - after all, necessity is the mother of invention.


Be inspired by these 8 recommendations written by the New Scientist

1. Embrace your inner grouch
2. Let your mind wonder
3. Play the piano
4. Colour your world blue
5. Seek out creative company
6. Live abroad
7. Be more playful
8. Rise a glass

You can read the enrtire article, written on the New Scientist, here

European search for break

This is not JWT anxiety index, that you can find here,
but just a quick review of the word "break" in some European countries,
through the service offered by Google Insight

Who is more concerned by "break? Who looks more for it? And when?
Crisis amplified that search? Is there any relevant seasonality? Latin countries perform differently from anglosaxon ones? How does Italians score?
Here we go.

Portuguese probably lead the chart



followed by French and Italian





United States, United Kingdom, and Germany trends are quite flat...



It's quite curious to notice that US is the only country showing a sort of seasonality... first quarter is the harder one, and during the summer the search decrease.
It is intuitive, considering that summer is holyday time, and also a low-internet period, but... why don't we observe the same performances in other countries?





Another surprise is Spain, a latin country like Italy, France an Portugal, but reporting negative trend.



Are they generally less stressed than other countries?
Or are they constantly increasing their commitment?
I'll go deeper into it.

Behaviour and online activity

"A Stanford Study has revealed a strong negative correlation between time spent on line and time spent interacting with family and friends."





via: John Adams

The five eras of social web

How will Social Web evolve?

Here is a forecast by Forrester



The Five Eras of the Social Web: 1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

An here the predicted timing



But don't forget to read the entire post from Jeremiah's blog, here

Social media future: an enriching experience

Imagine to bring the social experience everywhere.

For every website you visit will be able to see who visited it (friends... or not)
You will be able to read their comment about the products or services...
And also leave comments or messages for those who will visit that site.

Glue 4.2 Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

And why not on TV? I remember when at school we used to speak about the movie seen the evening before (we had only 6 channels and it was extremely likely that one of friend saw the same program...) it was quite usual to start a conversation asking: what did you watch last evening?

Well, in the future, we will probably have the possibility to see "who is on air", and share comments or rate programs...

Social will not be a place, but an enriching experience.