TGIF Fo' Real

It has been a loooooong week. Monday through Wednesday was the second session of the Bonnier Publishing Program 3.0 and we cranked out a pretty unbelievable amount of work. For those who didn't read my post about this a month ago (I'm flattering myself with the idea that you're all regular readers), BPP is a gathering of 20 Web people from around the Bonnier world, and it's sort of an entrepreneurship bootcamp. The idea is that we will come up with four solid ideas for new Web sites and pitch our business cases to the company management for potential launches in 2009. I'm not gonna spill the beans on my group's idea, but I think it's really innovative. We got surprisingly far into the project in 3 days, and the evenings involved dinners and socializing, which always adds up to a fairly sleep-free arrangement. I'm a social person, but this on the heels of CES had me wanting to just crawl into bed without talking to anyone.

In other exciting news, there seems to be a "change" movement blowing through Bonnier's tech department as well as through the U.S. government. In fact, I'm thinking of making a forum page at change.bonnier.com just for the hell of it. But don't click that yet—it doesn't exist right now. I'm really excited about the prospect of connecting employees all over the world through our new global social network. The idea is that people will be able to collaborate on projects and share code, which will be a huge breakthrough for us. This project is basically the whole reason why I went to Sweden, and it's finally about to launch in a few weeks. Thus, I've been working some pretty long days trying to knock a ton of tasks off the list. Next week I'm going to start pretty much camping out at the office of the development team so I can produce content and answer questions on the spot. I am pretty much the ideal client, if I do say so myself. But I've set an insane schedule for this project, so the least I can do is get down in the trenches.

Our office is fairly buzzing with brain power these days, as two really interesting new people have joined the R&D team. One is Web whiz kid Bjorn Jefferey, who's not really "new," but has moved from Malmo to Stockholm and is now in the office contributing ideas a whole lot more. The other is a former Nokia bigshot named Erich Hugo, who will be in charge of Bonnier's mobile strategy. He is really smart and funny and I'm looking forward to seeing what ideas he comes up with—it's quite a coup to bring him from the tech world over to publishing. There's also four other R&D people all working on digital strategies, new site launches and market research, which means a huge portion of the energy at Bonnier HQ is going into digital matters. And THAT means that Jonas can't help but turn his attention toward the Web and mobile markets in 2009. He's headed to the U.S. next week for a series of interviews with company leaders to get a "helicopter view" (I love this Swedish expression) of our Web program. We've got a new VP of digital media in place in the U.S., and he seems to be very smart and open to new ideas, so it'll be interesting to see what the new year yields. I chose a sunshiney shot from last weekend to, um, symbolize my optimism for 2009. (Really I just couldn't decide on an image, but ssssh.)

And on the personal front, I think I mastered the kettlebell snatch this week. Well, okay, maybe not "mastered" it. Surely there's more I could learn. But something clicked and my form suddenly got a whole lot better. Also, a shout-out to my friend Robin Bunker, who decided to take up kettlebells and sought out a trainer in Colorado. I'm looking forward to seeing how she likes it!

Now I have to decide whether to take a bath and crawl into bed with a book, or go to a cocktail party with a bunch of Web entrepreneurs. The latter would probably be a good move, but I'm not sure I can swing it tonight. Hmmmm.....