nowEurope

Hungarian attendees seemed more pessimistic than I did about what we saw this week at BarCamp Budapest, at least according to my random sample of conversation. I enjoyed thoroughly being one of the only foreigners at hand, along with TechCrunch Europe editor, Mike Butcher and a handful of presenters. The best English-language tweet of the day came from Julia Krysztofiak-Szopa (AdTaily).

with all due respect for the #barcamp #budapest speakers – powerpoint presentation suicide & u don’t have to speak magyarul to notice it.

The truth is I hardly watched any of the presentations, except to occasionally poke my head in the door. I had been lead to believe that at BarCamp, the audience is the content, and so I used this as my excuse to largely ignore the prepared program and talk with people about what’s currently happening in the Hungarian online market.

Everybody’s heard about Jeremie, and several people I met had a business idea in their back pocket. The ad recession hit hard last year, and revenues are down across the board. One local media agency, Arcus, recently imploded. I have the impression that a good number of talented people are knocking around for opportunities.

Continue reading ‘What I learned by ignoring the presentations at BarCamp Budapest and talking to the audience’

We read several posts here in nowEurope about the latest social media services. You can also see these fancy tools around this site.

However, I personally still keep myself away from Facebook, Twitter etc. My biggest doubt is how to separate the different aspects of my real and virtual life from each other. What are these aspects?

1. I work on several projects with interesting people, but basically they don’t care about my sport or hobby activities.
2. I do different sports. In one of my sport activities, most of the team don’t know each others’ business background. It is simply not important, we are there to enjoy the same sport.
3. I’m a member of an online community. We are there for a certain hobby, but don’t care about others’ business or sport activities.

Continue reading ‘How to keep privacy in social media?’

Search engine optimization (SEO) has always seemed to me like voodoo. Webmasters (and businesses) obsess over their position on the search page, while the search engines regularly adjust their algorithms to weed out cheaters – those who use technical tricks to inflate their ranking. In the middle of all these are a legion of dodgy SEO consultants promising the moon for a monthly retainer.

You still don’t see too many of these types in Central Europe. I know a handful of local SEO consultants, but the bigger web agencies avoid the whole topic. (Somebody correct me if I’m wrong on that.) My view has always been that as long as your website follows best practices (relevant title tags, URL slugs, etc) it’s best to focus on creating quality content which is relevant to your target audience and forget SEO altogether.

Now, according to US blogger and tech evangelist, Robert Scoble, SEO is about to become irrelevant:

Continue reading ‘Good news: Central Europe can skip SEO (according to Scoble)’

I have been following the nowEurope blog for a while now after my colleagues at VITE directed my attention towards it and want to take the opportunity to thank Steve for welcoming me to the community. It is very interesting to see how opinions are shaped and also can change in just a few months of time. In March this year, a discussion about Twitter took place in this blog. Back then, my colleagues from VITE both had the oppinion that Twitter is an interesting phenomenon but they didn’t believe in its full potential yet.

Now it is November and VITE has it’s own Twitter and Facebook accounts that are being constantly updated and utilised to be in regular contact with the IT community in Vienna and beyond it’s national borders. Being hesitant about the usefulness of Twitter at first, we at VITE have received very positive feedback for offering this additional source of information to our members and to everyone who is interested in the Viennese IT community.

Continue reading ‘Twitter revisited’

Thank you, Steve, for welcoming me to nowEurope. Steve and I work together at Howdy Group building and running social networking websites. Two of the projects I work most closely with are Howdy’s Hungarian-language entertainment website, Hali.hu, as well as our Romani language site, Kaskosan.com.

I’ve had quite a lot of experience working with publicly-funded ICT projects, but for the last two years I’ve been working on the commercial side of things. Today I would like to present you with a Hungarian view of the web – specifically, I’d like to introduce some of some of our notable local language bloggers. (The following links are in Hungarian.)

Continue reading ‘Greetings from the Hungarian blogosphere’