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Looking for heaven on earth? You might find it in Alta Badia, Italy.

I always look forward to that time of year when I finally get to go snowboarding. To the mountains, to the snow, to the Alps. One week packed with winter sport activities. For the past few years, this meant traveling 900 km from Slovenia to France. Even though I've been skiing pretty much in all Alpine countries - Austria, France, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland, France simply has the best ski slopes, and the French really know how to do tourism. I've been to four different places in France (Val Thorens, Les 2 Alpes, Alpe d'Huez and Tignes), and there's a pattern they all seem to follow. These ski resorts are usually somewhere at the end of a valley (on an altitude of around 2.000 meters), with ski lifts in all directions from there, going up to around 3.500 meters. The towns are probably artificially made, with shops and bars both over and underground. Everything works in such a way that you are living in a big isolated community with thousands of other tourists, but still have 20 meters to the nearest ski trail. As good as it gets.

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written 27.1.2013 8:07 CET on chronolog
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I believe Firefox OS may be on to something

A few days ago, during the Mobile World Congress, Firefox announced its mobile OS, which will be available soon. Teaming up with 18 carriers and 4 announced manufacturers (plus Sony), the release was probably bigger than expected. A few high-profile web services, including AirBnb, Disney, Facebook, SoundCloud and Twitter, also joined the hype by including their apps to the new marketplace. Analysts quickly put down their bets, some supporting the effort, while others denying the possibility of its success. One of the most fascinating things about the new OS is that it's going to be entirely web based, the operating system itself, the apps, everything. Unlocking the power of the web, as they put it. And to be honest, I can buy that.

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written 2.3.2013 23:27 CET on chronolog
5212 views   •   6 comments  •   Like   •   
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Reinventing the blog, part 1: Dissecting the most innovative and best-designed blogs

The blog is getting mature. Ever since Gawker did its eccentric redesign a few years ago, we've seen a lot of other blog (networks) doing similar things, trying to reinvent how the blog should look like in 2013. After the initial hiccup, Gawker managed to fortify its position and attract new users, showing others that people do like to see different things, things that are imitating the experience of reading electronic magazines on mobile devices. Today, there are many great cases of how a modern blog should feel, and since I'm thinking about doing something similar myself (it's been almost 4 years since I did this!), I decided to dissect a few of the most innovative ones, hoping to get a picture of what works and what not. Here are my picks of the most creative and best designed (mainstream) blogs on the Web, those that are standing out from the crowd and are unique in what they offer to their readers.

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written 29.3.2013 16:23 CET on chronolog
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Be an apprentice. Evolve as a manager.

Being a manager is not something that's in my DNA. I'm primarily an engineer, a scientist, a software developer. I find it hard to spend time on governing activities that have no direct output, and prefer doing things rather than guiding and supervising how things are done. Some people are natural organizers, others need to somehow learn and adopt that specific set of technical and social skills that help teams operate smoothly and efficiently. While I may have the technical skills of understanding how things should be done, my problems lie elsewhere.

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written 16.4.2013 9:22 CET on chronolog
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Reinventing the blog, part 2: The challenges, the opportunies

After the initial dissection of the most innovative and well designed blogs, it's time to go behind the scenes. We've seen how some of these blogs look like, but there's even more value in understanding why they look like they do. Every good user experience analysis needs to have a clear overview of the goals and good insight into the problems of the situation, and I will try to outline these by using my blog as an example. A lot can be deducted by monitoring the basic Google Analytics reports.

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written 9.5.2013 13:42 CET on chronolog
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5 reasons why Star Wars 7 will become the highest-grossing movie of all time

We’ve finally seen it! And by we I mean everybody. It turns out the thing that can really break the Internet are not a few pictures of a big ass, but a movie trailer that's been anticipated like none before it. And it came with a bang! Even though a lot of people watched the trailer on iTunes (where statistics are undisclosed), the movie already managed to attract more than 40 million views in less than a week on YouTube, beating the previous record holder by miles. This time, it’s all in, Star Wars - The Force Awakens began its journey to become the greatest movie ever. You don’t believe me? Here are five reasons why this will happen.

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written 4.12.2014 14:51 CET on chronolog
4970 views   •   3 likes   •   197 comments  •   Like   •   
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The deflation of words - from SMS to Twitter

The information age brought us another interesting shock - the deflation of words. Most of the people surfing the web don't have the time to stick around and read novels. They want information and they want information fast. Sometimes I even lose hope in multimedia, when I don't feel I should watch a 2 minute long video, because 2 minutes is far too much to get to the point. The point should be straight forward and the point should be reachable in ten seconds.

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written 26.9.2009 19:52 CET on chronolog
2688 views   •   3 likes   •   6 comments  •   Like   •   
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Twitfluence application basic technical specifications

Twitfluence is a registered Twitter application for calculating the "weight" and influence of your Twitter account, and is already accessible for beta users. It uses read and write permissions on your Twitter account. Perhaps it will be upgraded with write permissions one day too, so it will be able to post the results to your timeline on request, but for now, read permission is all it needs. The original idea was to have it done without Twitter authentication (by simply entering a user name), but then you're not able to access mentions and retweets, which are obviously a big thing in measuring someone's Twitter influence.

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written 1.8.2010 12:53 CET on chronolog
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Why an actual Facebook phone could kick ass (with mockups)

The question if Facebook will start producing it's own mobile OS on top of Android made a huge buzz a few months ago. Technology authorities such as TechCrunch and Mashable gave us diametrical coverage about it, the first claiming the rumor is true, and the second denying it. Needless to say the mobile market is one of the fastest evolving. Since 2007, when Apple supposedly revolutionized the mobile telephone by introducing the first popular tablet smartphone without a keyboard with an app market, things didn't change much, but in 2011, Facebook has a great chance to reinvent the phone again.

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written 9.1.2011 20:28 CET on chronolog
3093 views   •   3 likes   •   5 comments  •   Like   •   
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Reinventing SEO: The social media effect

Looks like the time for classic search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is slowly running out, waiting to be replaced by more advanced and efficient algorithms than mathematical - human powered. The Facebook Like button, the Twitter retweet button and other social share widgets are on the uprise, and Google is fighting back with all its might. For now, their business model relies heavily on search (other project like Android and Chrome too), but their future social success was named the number one priority by the new old CEO Larry Page.

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written 19.4.2011 10:00 CET on chronolog
4007 views   •   3 likes   •   9 comments  •   Like   •   
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The art of internal hyperlinking

Everybody wants traffic on their blog or website. Direct traffic. Referring traffic. Search traffic. All good in their own way. Direct traffic means having a strong brand. Referring traffic means having a strong network. Search traffic means having a strong team. The first two are hard to influence, but search - that's the one you can influence the most. And even if search technology has changed a lot in the past few years, with mathematical algorithms slowly getting replaced by social ones, old school search engine optimization can still make a difference.

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written 4.9.2011 22:00 CET on chronolog
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Impressions from my first guest blogging experience

Nick Taylor is probably the person who has the most to do with me starting blogging in the first place. That's why it makes even more sense my first guest blog post was on his blog, thetwohalves.com. Luckily, he was interested in guest blogging too, since these types of exchange can bring additional exposure and new readers. But we wanted to make something special, something a bit more interesting, so we've agreed on writing a mutual post on the same topic, both publishing on each other's blog. After looking for a proper theme for months, we've finally decided on Occupy Wall Street, something that's very actual these days.

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written 12.12.2011 11:47 CET on chronolog
3146 views   •   2 likes   •   2 comments  •   Like   •   
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I got another scent of going viral on social media. And I'm loving every bit of it.

I can't believe how much has happened since I first wrote about going viral on social media. I also can't believe what I wrote then, talking mostly about how virality has the most to do with luck. Well, it does, but any proper RPG character can fully understand luck can be influenced one way or another. As you evolve as a blogger, you learn a lot about writing good headlines, best times to publish, using various platforms to promote content and other general best practices, all adding a bit to the chance of going big. Of course, you're still competing in your own league, but a few hundred posts more, and you might do something extraordinary like swizec did. Get noticed and amplified by a heavy influencer.

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written 22.1.2012 20:58 CET on chronolog
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Zakaj blogam v angleščini [In Slovene]

Dragi prijatelj, znanec, bralec, naj se ti najprej opravičim. Pred leti, ko sem se loteval tega projekta, sem se soočil z eno izmed težjih odločitev v svoji spletni karieri: ali naj svoj spletni dnevnik pišem v slovenščini ali v angleščni.

Takrat sem se odločil za slednje, kljub temu da sem vedel, da bo na ta način težje začeti. Podobno, kot na Twitterju, se mi zdi, da je na kratek rok v materinem jeziku lažje dobiti tisto osnovno občinstvo, vprašanje pa je, kaj je bolj učinkovito na dolgi rok. Z angleščino je enostavneje doseči več ljudi, kar sem tudi pričakoval, da se bo enkrat zgodilo. Danes, skoraj tri leta kasneje, lahko rečem, da mi je kar uspelo.

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written 23.2.2012 9:14 CET on chronolog
2041 views   •   1 like   •   10 comments  •   Like   •   
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Putting 'people who look at you' to your Facebook profile would be the smartest thing to do

Are you one of those people who are wondering how Facebook decides which friends they put on your profile? I admit I am, both out of programmer's curiosity and of course, there have been rumors that those individuals are the ones who look at your profile. While LinkedIn offers this "who looks at your profile" insight to its (premium) users, Facebook is still very mysterious about it, denying this is how this particular algorithm works. But there is a simple reason I don't believe them: if I would be Facebook, I would design it exactly like this.

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written 2.6.2012 11:50 CET on chronolog
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