Flavio about Business 2.0

Mit der Wahl der grünliberalen Verena Diener in den Ständerat haben die Zürcher Liberalen ein klares Zeichen gesetzt: einen anti-wirtschaftlichen und erzkonservativen Ueli Maurer möchten sie nicht als Vertreter im Ständerat haben. Ueli Maurer ist zum Beispiel gegen die Erweiterung der Personenfreizügigkeit und gegen Parallel Importe - wünscht hingegen, dass die öffentliche Hand Verträge an Schweizer Firmen abgibt, auch wenn diese teurer sind. (Quelle: Smartvote).

Dass dies mit Liberalismus wenig zu tun hat, ist klar. Deshalb ist es umso stärker zu begrüssen, dass die Niederlage der FDP Führung jetzt Bewegung bringt. Die Zürcher Freisinnigen unterstützen die weitere Allianz mit der SVP nicht und möchten einen eigenständigen Kurs. Dies wird auch sofort die FDP viel attraktiver für liberalere und moderatere Wähler machen - nach rechts wird man kaum Wähler verlieren, das Potential der SVP dürfte langsam ausgeschöpft sein.

In den Kommentaren zu den Artikeln auf NZZ Online ist eine Aufbruchsstimmung von Zürcher Freisinnigen zu verspüren, die nichts mehr mit dem SVP Kurs der Führung zu tun haben möchten.

Bald wird sich zeigen, ob dies auch personelle Konsequenzen hat. Doris Fiala hat bereits bekannt gemacht, dass sie Rücktrittsgedanken hegt. Ob Fiala bleibt oder ein neuer Präsident kommt - auf jeden Fall muss jetzt Schluss sein mit jeglicher SVP Anlehnung. Nur eine unabhängige, liberale, wirtschaftsfreundliche und gesellschaftlich progressive Führung vermag in Zukunft Wählerstimmen zu holen und auf kantonaler und nationaler Ebene die Schweiz vorwärts zu bringen.

Welche Kandidaten kämen denn für ein Präsidium in Frage?

Lena Schneller, die ein gutes Resultat im NR Wahlkampf (von Listenplatz 15 zur 11. besten FDP Kandidatin) gemacht hat und viel Tatendrang aufweist sowie eine frische, liberale Kraft für den Kanton Zürich wäre.

Auf der anderen Seite ist der liberale Beat Walti als Fraktionspräsident der FDP im Kantonsrat sicherlich auch jemand, der die FDP mit neuer Kraft zu Wahlsiegen verhelfen könnte.

With the new pages and social ad system that facebook has created it is now possible to see how many people of a certain country are members of facebook. This number differs significantly from the number of people having joined the Switzerland network. Currently, there are 152′900 people from Switzerland that are members while only 106′000 have joined the Switzerland network. The ratio of joining the social network is thus 69% (my estimate earlier was 50%).

If you divide this number by the total population of Switzerland the ratio is 152′900 / 7′507′300 =  2%! In other words every 50th person in Switzerland is on facebook. It’s pretty amazin at which rate facebook has grown in Switzerland. In the beginning of the year when I joined, there were a mere 3′000 users in the Switzerland network and this number has now multiplied itsself by 30. And the number can still multiply by 14, as shown by the facebook demographics of canada and norway.

Interestingly there are more women who use facebook in almost every country (except the arab world). This is also the case in Switzerland where 51.7 % of the users are female.

When will we use facebook as a tool to vote in elections? Which other platform can boast as many members from Switzerland?

As NZZ is reporting, millions of French functionaries are protesting against their presidents reform initiative. Sarkozy has announced to augment working hours and cut 150′000 jobs in the government sector. He has also announced that France’s Universities should be more autonomous and more competitive and wants to deregulate employment law. (Remember that in France regular employees are not allowed to work more than 35 hours even if they want to)

These and other initiatives would greatly improve the catastrophic lethargy that perpetuates through the whole country.

But it seems that the left who clearly lost the elections past May is doing everything in their powers to prevent the progressive president to make change happen. Trains not running, airplanes being hours late and empty schools are all the result of functionaries carrying out their strike because they are going to lose some of their highly desirable priviliges of government employees.

I am sure there are 100′000’s of people who would gladly change position with the functionaries even if it meant dealing with reforms - still much better than to be unemployed, a group that is currently representing 8% of the French workforce.

The left needs to realize it can only help the unemployed by being ready to give up some of their privileges. Because what they are currently defending is not social at all, it’s defending their own interest - a trend that can also be recognized in Switzerland: Electors of the SP are mostly teachers, functionaries and health care employees.

I salute Sarkozy on his strength to pull through the much needed reforms and him not being impressed by the demonstrations that are causing quite a turmoil in France. He was elected by France’s population to carry out reforms and that’s what he will do now. Go Sarkozy!

Disclaimer: This is a paid posting, powered by trigami.

After finally having received some invitations to blog for trigami, I decided to give it a try with a new Web 2.0 service. The product is called Netvoting and is basically a polling service, with widgets that you can implement in your blogs - a product that has been existing for years. What they added now is a social network layer to the voting, hoping this would create additional value and convince bloggers and other pollsters to use their service.

The registration proved difficult because gmail classified the confirmation email as spam and had to be found in the spam folder. And gmail normally has a very good spam recognition rate, so I wonder why it failed this time.

After having registered, the use of the platform is pretty straightforward. You create your poll by:

1. Entering the question
2. Entering the possible answers
3. Choosing some settings

and off you go!

I must say that the product is great when it comes to settings, it let’s you choose between fraud detection over cookies or cookies and IP and correctly warns you that if you use IP some people sitting behind the same NAT Router might not be able to vote correctly, so it suggests that you use cookies:

After creating your poll you can let people on netvoting vote and you should also be able to embed a widget using javascript, which did simply not work. I had to resort to the code for the working power widget of another blogger to make it work:

This Power Widget seems to be working fine and is definitely a handy way to include a poll into your blog. But the fact that I couldn’t make it work proves that quite a lot of work still needs to be done.Another feature that I really like about netvoting is its statistics visualization of demographics. Here’s a look:

Small but very interesting features are the following:

• rss feed of your voting in order to stay updated of the votes cast (for your netvibes page, for example).

• publish to mainstream blog hosters and also to major social networks including facebook and myspace with just one click

I took a look at the social networking functionality and it really is exactly the same as on every other social network: profile, friends, groups etc. And I frankly don’t see the connection between voting and social networking. On a social network, you might want do polling from time to time, but would you want to do social networking around polling?

Overall, the amount of features are great, I especially like the social network and rss integration. On the other hand, I see no need to create yet another social network around polling. And it is definitely not stable yet, as a couple of things didn’t work out properly. But if they can fix that, it is a useful quick poll creation service with extensive publishing functionality.