On Monday I officially started my new job at local.ch, the search engine for every village in Switzerland. We currently offer access to the phone book but will add other services in the future. I’ll keep you posted of course! There is also the local.ch Team Blog where I’ll contribute to. I’ll mainly be working in system administration (we run a small server farm mainly on Linux) and programming (starting with PHP frontend work). I’ll also be responsible for the community part of local.ch. We have a few ideas about contributing back to the Swiss blogosphere and that will be my job. Thanks to the local.ch team for the great reception. I’m very excited to work on this project, especially knowing it since its first days. ...

Yesterday was my first day at local.ch. Two full days of meetings to boot.

The results are coming just about now. I won’t blog them as they’ll certainly be made available on the official site by other people. I guess I’m finishing my reporting now as my battery won’t stand much more time with me today. I liked the event because I was able to talk to some people I have long known online before (Chregu for example). Now I also know them personally. And I was able to meet some old contacts. ...

The votations at the Swiss Blog Awards are now going to be held. Two Virus moderators are moderating. bloggrrr was introduced and is disappointing. Or Leu has to explain it better to me. It’s really not more than evaluating which weblog is the most popular one.

The second and last panel discussion is currently taking place. Bruno Giussani, Jean-Christophe Liechti, Julika Hartmann and Martin Haslebacher talk about blogs as a media and media with blogs. Martin Haslebacher considers blogs as an important part in today’s life. He talked about how they can also serve as sources but they will want a second source to confirm the weblog. I assume that’s the standard approach with any source in journalism. Also they want to use (existing) blogs in their area to enrich the escpace platform as an additional value for their readers. Bruno Giussani asked if the person was a blogger who filmed the waves of the Tsunami in Asia arriving at the coast and sent that movie to the media. Julika Hartmann countered that she might define him as a blogger if he’d do that regularly. Nick Lüthi, the moderator of the discussion, asked Martin Haslebacher what their business model was about adding blogging to their services. They currently don’t have a business model but their existing business model is under pressure by new media. An example he used was craigslist. Martin Haslebacher said, that they’d have to develop some model to pay bloggers for their contributions. They don’t seem to have anything finished yet, but they are aware of the issue. I tried very hard to understand the French contributions by Bruno Giussani and Jean-Christophe Liechti. To same extent I succeeded but it was hard and I definitely have to learn French again. I lost it by learning Spanish in Peru. Lots of photographers. And the room is really too dark. ...

So I did make it after all to the blog awards. When I saw what time I’ll get back and how much a ticket costs (I’ll only have my GA starting Monday) I thought twice about it. But in the end, I made it here. Currently Roger Fischer, Christian Stocker and Hannes Gassert are talking about earning money with blogs. For Bitflux it’s not a priority to earn money with freeflux.net but it’s more thought of as a promotional tool. For Mediagonal it’s something that they do for customers if necessary or possible. Kaywa is the only of the companies here, that really wants to earn money from weblogs. That’s also why they focus on media companies somewhat. If you want to meet me here, I’m that guy. ...

Beim Bahnhof St.Gallen

Thanks to a private WLAN we're able to share files.

Joseph Deiss steps down as a cabinet minister. There are seven of these ministers and they are the executive power of Switzerland. Personally I have just about no feelings for Deiss, neither good nor bad ones. He just isn’t the colorful politician. That doesn’t mean that his work is bad, actually it probably means that he has done a good job. It will be interesting to see who will succeed Deiss. There will certainly be daily news stories about that topic. Currently people seem to talk about Doris Leuthard a lot. She is the president of Deiss’ party, the Christian Democratic People’s Party. ...

Finally I’m connected again at home. Today marks the start of a new experiment: I’m going to use Skype and my mobile phone exclusively from now on. I had Cablecom digital phone before but was very unsatisfied with the quality. And I am not willing to pay the monopoly tax to Swisscom, because it’s too expensive for the rare cases where I actually use fixnet telephony. So now I’m using SkypeIn (as purchased in November when it became available in Switzerland) and of course the ever wonderful SkypeOut. The advantages are quite a few. First, I have a mobile “fixnet” phone line. Whether I’m at home or on my office, you can reach me at that number. Also the phone calls are forwarded to my mobile phone if I’m unable to accept the call (not tested yet). So in theory I should be reachable very easily under my “fixnet” number. Second, I have cheap rates (see also my comparison of last year - though in German and almost certainly outdated now). Both to Switzerland and Peru, the two countries that currently matter to me. And to about any other country on this planet. There are currently two disadvantages. One is that SkypeOut does not pass on my number when I call somebody. On my cell phone it shows up as “no number” while on a fixnet phone where we tested, it shows up as 044 586 00 00 (044 586 87 83 is my number). The second disadvantage has to do with my current headset. It’s a bluetooth headset which turns off after a few seconds of not using it. When I accept an incoming call it takes a few seconds for the headset to get activated again. That one is easy to fix, I’ll just buy a better headset. I’m excited about this change and very interested in how it turns out. Is anyone else using Skype exclusively? Or maybe there is even somebody in my readership who tried it ans switched to traditional phones again? ...