FabianPattberg.com

I have started using iGoogle over the past weeks and I am really amazed what you can do with it. This post is about how you could use iGoogle to better organize your day.

The general purpose of iGoogle is to provide you with one or more pages to combine many gadgets as they call that can make your life easier.  Gadgets can either be RSS feeds, blogs and applications. Everything is customizable and really a pleasure to work with.

Here are my favourite gadgets for raising your productivity and for the better organisation of your day through iGoogle:

• A simple but highly useful To-Do list: To-Do List
• The best “Date and Time” gadget in my opinion: Date And Time
• Important when going out and you are thinking about taking the umbrella. The Weather Gadget
• A great and easy to use currency converter: Currency Converter
• If you using Twitter then BeTwittered is indispensible: Twitter on iGoogle
• For all the website owners this Adsense gadget is extremely useful: Adsense
• For directions is the Google Map Search the ideal companion: Google Maps
• Translation anyone: The Babelfish translation gadget: Translation Gadget
• Facebook for iGoogle. Access your Facebook account through the interface: Facebook

And finally when you look at your iGoogle page and think that it is a mess then take a look at this gadget. The compound gadget is a great tool to organize your gadgets into tabs in a compound gadget to give you a cleaner and easier usage of the page.

This is rounds up our look at iGoogle today so let me know whether I missed any good gadgets. All gadgets can be found here: All iGoogle Gadgets

All the best,
Fabian

Today I am starting a new topic area called „Social Media“. I have also added a new category with the same title. The term and concept of social media is becoming more and more popular month by month it seems and I have been caught by the bug I guess as well.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about social media: “Social Media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio”.
Social media can take many different forms. The most known I guess are forums, blogs, wikis, pictures, videos and podcasts. These are all very important but different communication tools for an individual and organisations.

Today I would like to provide with a little bit more information on the so called microblogs.

I have only used microblogs  or did microblogging for 3 months now but I am really fascinated by it. Here are the microblogging websites I have come across so far (There are more so please fell free to suggest others):

Twitter – The current market leader in microblogging
Jaiku – Bought by Goggle and will make a big impact once registrations are open again.
Pownce – Similar to Twitter but with the main difference that you are able to show your other profiles from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and can upload files as attachments.
Plurk - The new kid on the block. We will see how it develops.

I just signed up for Pownce and currently testing it whether this is a useful application or not. My experience so far has clearly favoured Twitter due to its simplicity, overfriendliness and ability to easily connect with likeminded people from across the globe.

I will keep everyone updated on the Pownce adventure.

Fabian

This week has been an amazing week so far. Of course there is the weekend still to come.

These are the highlights of what happened this week:

• The Sustainability Writers Network (TSWN) is taking shape and I was able to recruit 10 more great writers. I will write more about this network next week.
• I have been to two great MeetUps here in London and connected to many great people.
• Connected to Kevin Long the COO of JustMeans. Great guy.
• Got another call with a request for a consulting pitch next week.
• The SustainabilityForum.com got over 60 new members in only a week with the best ever week in terms of traffic.
• My cooperation with AccountAbility21 kicked off.
• Bought a new domain with great potential: SustainableChina.com.
• Sold a domain after weeks of negotiation.
• My new design for this blog was finished and went live.

All in all has this been a very productive week and thank you to everyone that I met or that visited my websites.
Next week I am off to Germany for three days and back in the UK on Wednesday evening. I am going to the Entrepreneur Meetup on Thursday morning and have important meetings on Tuesday and Friday. Keep the fingers crossed for another successful week next week everyone.

I will provide an update when I am back from Germany.

All the best,
Fabian

Earlier then expected has the new Wordpress theme gone live today and I hope you like it.

Now everyone will be able to see who is behind this blog from the first moment you click on the page. Scary? Well you will get used to it once you have revisited my site for a couple of times.

Thanks to Christian at GoYippi for the quick and great work.

All the best,
Fabian

Yesterday Anne and I came back from our holiday. 12 days without the noise and traffic of the London area. What a pleasant experience.

We had a great time and did not really want to leave. We went to the lovely little island of Fanoe on the west cost of Denmark. Wikipedia on Fanoe

It was pure relaxation in a nice summer house with direct views of the beach. Much better then the Caribbean in my opinion and less travel hassle of course.

I even had a very fast internet connection which I only used 30 minutes every day (otherwise you could not consider it a holiday in my opinion).

Anyway back to business. No time to waste.
There have been some interesting developments on CorporateResponsibility.Net in that I am now looking for people that are interested in writing blog posts, articles or news items on the topic of Corporate Responsibility. So if you are interested or you anyone that is please get in touch. More information can be found here:  Write for us

All the best,
Fabian

I am just now sitting on my desk in Krefeld/ Germany. I am not really here very often but my business is based here because a good friend of mine offered me this desk, IT access and the business address free of charge. He is a very kind person and I owe it to him that I was able to establish PB Consulting GmbH in the first instance. Without him I would gotten nowhere.
Anyway I got a little sidetracked there!
I am in Germany (as said) the days of this week and fly back to London tomorrow late in the evening.
Today has been a very hectic day here. First I send 4 hours with my accountant, then had a lunch appointment and then discussed future business opportunities with this friend mentioned in the first paragraph.
Everyone has left the office for the day and I just turned on some music (James Blunt – 1973) to finally sit down and write some blog posts and catch up on my emails. This is the first, one on the SustainabilityBlog.org will follow.

Useful links of the day:
TubeMogul.com - TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. - TubeMogul.com
The Sustainability Dictionary: The Dictionary of Sustainable Management is an open dictionary for business leaders and students of sustainability and business-related terms. - SustainabilityDictionary.com

All the best,
Fabian
Follow me on twitter and see what I am doing everyday: twitter.com/FabianPattberg

The first meeting with members of the SustainabilityForum.com was very nice and productive Thursday.
The only thing was the venue. It was a little bit too noisy. So next time I will find a venue that is less crowded and where we have a better possibility to actually hear what the other person is saying and not have to shout in response.
I have also written several new blog posts.
The first is on stakeholder engagement and energy companies. That is a hot topic at the moment.
Here is the post:
Stakeholder Engagement and Energy companies

And the other one is on my top 5 environmental blogs on the web at the moment. These are my personal favourites and I usually visit these blogs regularly over the course of the week.
My top 5 environmental blogs

So have a good weekend everyone. Here in the UK we have a long weekend. Yippie!

Until then,
Fabian

I have uploaded two new pictures today. Thy are showing my lovely wife and myself. I just realized yesterday that I did not really have any pictures of myself on my blog. Silly me! 

Here they are:

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I am also going to go into London today to do two things.

Look at a MacBook. Yes, I am tempted to switch from a normal laptop to a MacBook. Just take a look. Isn’t it beautiful? MacBook. I will go into the Apple Shop and be really sceptic and see whether I still can not resist buying one. I won’t buy one today but maybe in a few months time. Who knows.
I will be staying in London for the evening because we have our first ever members meeting of people that are living in the London area and are registered on the SustainabilityForum.com. We will see how many people will turn up.

That’s all for now but I will keep you posted.

All the best,
Fabian

I have had interesting two days and got a lot of work done.

Here is a quick wrap up.

Yesterday I have started using Twitter just out of curiosity and to my surprise found it really fun and a great way to connect with people in my network and to share news and ideas. So I decided to stick to Twitter and start building my network there, engage with global environmental/Sustainability twitter community and add my bit to the discussion. I found that there are a lot of people I know from somewhere on the internet already which makes it easier to start. I have also integrated my twitter dialog box on the top right hand corner of the blog for everyone to see what I doing at the moment. This is called twittering! I know weird expression.
This is my direct Twitter URL if you would like to join my Twitter network as a ‘follower’ i.e. read and get updates on what I am doing.

On my business side is it quite likely that I am getting my first job shortly. This might involve some consulting work on Corporate Responsibility. Lets hope it works out I will keep everyone informed.
I have also rewritten a lot of the PB Consulting website so why not take a look. My business concept has finally reached a stage where everything seems to fall in place and makes it easy to communicate what PB Consulting is all about.

Today has been really been a good day until I found out that Feedburner is having problems delivering blog updates to email subscribers over the last two days. I was starting wonder why my subscriber levels dropped by 50% yesterday on Sustainability.org and over 70% on CorporateResponsibility.net.
It seems that I am not the only one though and Feedburner is aware of it trying to fix it. Hopefully everyone will be able to receive blog updates starting from tomorrow again. Apologies for the inconvenience everyone.

At last the weekend is near and I am really looking forward to spend the time with my lovely wife Anne after she has been travelling non stop for the last two weeks.

All the best,
Fabian

I have written a post on SustainabilityBlog.org about the current discussion on whether to call Corporate Responsibility now Business Sustainability instead.

A ridicules discussion in my opinion and that is the message really of that post. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Corporate Responsibility or Business Sustainability?

Oh yes and I bought the domain GreenTalk.org yesterday. Sounds like a great discussion forum name in my opinion.

Take care.

Fabian