30^th - 31^st May 2008 (Friday-Saturday), World Trade Center Bucharest, Romania

Following the huge public success the first edition of eLiberatica gained in 2007, the second edition will continue in the same tradition: to gather community and business leaders around the world to talk about the hottest Open and Free Technologies topics.

eLiberatica has its unique spirit and identity; you will learn and discover new things, meet international IT personalities, business people, high-tech professionals, you will make new friends, new partners, celebrate and truly enjoy a live event.

eLiberatica 2008 is intended to focus on these main concepts:

• Business adoption - how to make/save money and gain profit using Open and Free Technologies;
• Government, administration and public schools - the importance of Open and Free Technologies;
• Professional growth participating in the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) community;
• Break the code - tips and tricks, things you will not find in IT books.

High profile keynote speakers from:

• Google Inc.
• MySQL AB
• Mozilla Messaging (the latest Mozilla Foundation subsidiary)
• European Commission
• Python Software Foundation
• Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology
• eZ Systems AS
• One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Project
• Mozilla Foundation
• Navarik Corp.
• ActiveState Software Inc.
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• APTI Romania (The Association for Internet and Technology)
• Mozdev Community Organization

and more… check here.

For more information you can check eliberatica.ro website.

The presentation I held at GeekMeet #2 in Cluj Napoca on March 1st 2008. It’s a brief history of SEO from the beginning of the WWW all the way to RDF, Microformats and SPARQL.

Here’s the Romanian version of SEO and the Semantic Web presentation.

After announcing softicator yesterday, I am once again proud to present you another Romanian web2.0 startup.

HartaBrasovului.ro is a directory of Google-mapped tourist attractions and companies in Brasov, Romania. (”harta” translates “map”)

A current beta, we promise a great service for anyone who wishes to search a location in Brasov, no matter what their target would be.

Amongst its cool features:

• Google Maps interaction
• high-quality map of Brasov (sorry, but the Google ones lack detail)
• street search in Brasov
• RSS feed with latest locations added
• visitor comments and impressions for any location
• a custom search engine plugin for Firefox (currently alpha)

And future:

• youtube & flickr mashup
• tagging locations
• social bookmarking features
• map widgets for the take

We currently offer companies who want to get listed a:

• FREE basic subscription plan,
• Standard plan including your extra description, logo & contact info,
• Gold plan wich dedicates a custom subdomain and page with a photo gallery and video presentation.

HartaBrasovului.ro is part of a larger network of websites including Harta-Bucurestiului.ro (sorry for the dash, but the non-dash domain was taken) all of them to be found on HartaFirmelor.ro (translates “map of companies”).

Cosmin and I are working on it and you’ll find out more on our blog. Till then, go explore!

I am proud to announce the pre-launch of Softicator.com (soon to be a .ro), Romanian software directory like no other.

Softicator will promote romanian software - be it desktop application, webapp, script, of all categories - from currency converters to ERPs, and under all licensing models - from commercial to open source.

It will be web2.0 all the way, with

• tags
• user comments
• user ratings
• rss feeds from all over the place
• free basic service
• not to mention gradients and an arial rounded logo :)

We plan on doing big things for the Romanian software market, including a secret weapon we’ll launch once we’re all settled. With an initial ad-generated revenue model, we wish to improve our karma and drag out into the light all the geeks writing apps and scripts in their lairs. Oh, and we’ll target corporate people with CRMs also…

I say “we”, since I’m the initiator and co-founder of the project along with a gang of cool geeks you’ll meet on the softicator blog. Till then, keep in touch with our capture tool on www.softicator.com

My SEO Cheat Sheet is finished, after undergoing some hundred retouches. Free for download and usage, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please feedback on any of it’s aspects you can think of.

I tried to keep it short, but I guess it turned into more of a “short manual” or best practice guide. I recommend you print it and use it as a checklist; it’s currently an A4, but shoot me an email and I’ll export a letter also.

Download my Free SEO Cheat Sheet PDF

Later edit: I deleted the TOC from this post, as it lead people into thinking “this is it”.

Vladimir recently announced the launch of WebIQ, an SEO/Mkting diagnostic tool any webmaster or website owner should bookmark and use regularly.

Explicit, idiot-proof functionality, I know I’ll share it with my future clients. I expect this to advocate the importance of SEO and Internet marketing with the mainstream business owners building their websites with high-school kids, wondering why it won’t bring them sales.

A great free service from Metromind, again.

Recently launched, jobber.ro is an excellent initiative from Filip Chereches-Tosa. Clean, simple interface, remarkable logo, offers all the functionality one might need for publishing IT jobs.

Designed for the user, provides an RSS feed and even a widget. Only thing I kinda miss are tags, but, hey, the world can do without folksonomy for a while.

Currently a free service, perhaps a Flickr/Basecamp revenue model?

transaction makes a customer - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
“I’d say nearly 80% of our business comes from people who start on free plans and then upgrade to paying plans. The bigger your free userbase, the more likely you are to get people to throw their chips in.”

Filip is already planning for widgets with all major engines. This is a website to stay.

Good luck Filip!

The sixth format is “benefit causes story.” You conceive the ad back-to-front, by imagining a trail of events that might be caused by the product’s benefit. In the example Gunn uses, a man on a safari screams when a lion charges him. It’s then revealed, to the amusement of the man’s friends (and also the viewer), that he’s been looking through the powerful zoom lens of his Olympus camera. The lion is, in fact, hundreds of yards away.

Excellent walkthrough from slate.com

The 12 Kinds of Ads

TechCrunch buzz reports both Google and Yahoo are working on a new generation of SNCs.

Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user’s online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.

Here’s a Socialstream Usage Scenario.

Hype from TechCrunch says Y! is building up a new SNC that will replace the unsuccessful Y360. Mosh can be accessed only from Y! internal offices.

But the even more interesting fact is that it seems Nokia’s also cooking up a Mosh.

It’s about time they did something social. It will probably depend on their new MobileWebServer, a better, friendlier (only-available-for-s60-3rd-generation) version of Raccoon, the experimental Python port of Apache for mobile devices.