30

In less than an hour (I was born on the 8th of April) I’ll be 30. Let me say it one more time: 30; believe me when I say that in my mind I’m still 24. Am I an adult now? Not sure or – better – I don’t think I’ll ever be an adult :-) .

A lot of things happened in the last year (both in my professional and – most of all – in my personal life) and, from my current position looking down to the time yet to come, I see a lot of things’re going become reality in the next year.

I’ll be in Mantova with my family for the w.e. (+ Friday): a lot of Flickr/Mobup photos’re coming.

Happy birthday.

Trofie and Pesto alla Genovese for the bloggers

My pesto packI think this is one of the first experiments of this kind in Italy; It’s indeed the first I participate in: a gourmet gift for Italian bloggers consisting in 500gr of Trofie pasta and a small jar of pesto alla genovese.

(note: my RSS subscribers might have already read this coming out from the Flickr feed, I apologize with them)

This package is part of an interesting marketing campaign organized by the Italian typical food maker “San Lorenzo” focused on the blogosphera word of mouth power: they’re sending some packages to the italian bloggers that make request of (and, as a side note, without any explicit request of advertising via their blogs).

My personal opinion is that this is a cuttin edge guerrilla marketing tecnique for the Italian Market, were everything in the digital marketing arena is stuck at the 468×60 gif animated banner (more or less, I’d say :-) )

After a little bit of research and link following I found that one of the heads behind this lovely initiative is Antonio Tombolini, one of the brightest Italian new technology entrepreneurs (he was the man behind the Esperya firm).

Even if I see a nearly complete frozen innovation market in Italy, something is slowly moving. And whether you’d want to test the effectivness of this campaign just take a look at the list of blogs that featured the product.

Update: the initiative has been upgraded to “permanent edition“. If you have a nearly 6 months old blog, subscribe to receive the free pack on your blog half year birthday. (I’d say this decision is kinda brave since most of such young blogs in Italy could be far from being well-known).

Farewell matteopenzo/blog welcome Yellow Line

After something more than 3 years on Blogger I’ve now finally made THE decision.

The switching to the english language expanded my user base on one side (BTW since this is going to be an English blog, I’ve imported just the posts written in English), and my blogging activity on the other side. I also needed something that could automatically track my asides such as Flickr and could easily handle tags; something with a great WYSIWYG editor and a great free template base: I’m not a designer anymore, I’m not a CSS guru, I don’t have time to fine tune the Xhtml. That’s why I moved to WordPress for the CMS/engine side and to Squibble for the template (something on the frontend side will probably change as the time goes by).

I’m still a WP virgin, I certainly need sometime to browse/play with themes and plugins, for the moment there’s some AJAX magic on the comments and search engine thanks to Squibble.

The blog name also changed: you’re now enjoing Yellow Line (you can find more info on the name here). If you already subscribed to the feed just sit down and relax, I already managed Feedburner to point ot the new feed; if you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now.

The content receipt won’t change too much: just a little of personal life, Eyetracking, Innovation and Mobup.

Enjoy.

P.S. Thankyou Simone for the WordPress installing and initial configuration and the FTP permission settings.