Featuring Kaj Arnö and 'The Kaj Korner' – SIME's very own guest blogger

Jim Morrisson, the frontman of the American band Doors was once quoted as saying

O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives

Its with great pleasure and happiness that we welcome Kaj Arnö as SIME’s guest blogger. Kaj, a digital explorer, more of a digital renaissance artist if I may will, enjoys a body painting art work as much as an elegant piece of python code and, at the SIME blog we have made a nice cosy corner for Kaj to talk; we plan to call it the “The Kaj Korner“. Featuring Kaj’s musings, The Kaj Korner promises to take an interesting personal twist on various aspects of the digital ecosystem – from art and coding to aesthetics and humanity, all around the digital ecosystem presenting a diverse mix of the flavors of the man.

Who is Kaj Arnö?

Kaj has a day job as VP MySQL Community at Sun Microsystems GmbH, currently being merged into Oracle. Aside from his day job his list of passion work runs quite deep. Founder of a running religion called “Runnism”, believer in the concept of Everyday Aesthete which has a digital / Internet / technology / communication core, while at the same time being fundamentally humanistic, he is a culmination of various interesting ideas, theories and concepts all layered around the digital realm making a fascinating personality to have around. And to add some more proof to the pudding, check his following footprints out (mostly Swedish)

Kaj’s Home Page
Kaj’s MySQL Musings
One of Kaj’s talks on social media

SIME caught up with Kaj over Skype to do a quick interview to introduce him to you, and check what he plans to write on at the Kaj Korner. Below is an audio embed of the interview, and a summarized text of the interview (6.18 minutes in total).

Very welcome Kaj. The stage is yours to inspire us, and as Jim Morrisson said, we hope SIME can add that extra layer for all of us to perfect our online personas.

Audio Interview

Introduction and What keeps me busy

I’m one of the MySQL AB oldtimers, joining the company in 2001 as VP Training. I had various other positions, VP Consulting, VP Engineering, VP Services, CIO, until I settled for VP Community in 2005. That means keeping the non-paying MySQL users happy — and MySQL has over 10 million of them. When Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL in 2008, I got the additional task of being MySQL Ambassador to Sun, meaning travelling over 200.000 km in one year meeting with customers, community and colleagues.

Now, with the process of Oracle acquiring Sun taking so long, I’m still with the Sun Germany legal entity and don’t ask me how things will work with Oracle, as the dust hasn’t settled yet. So you asked me what keeps me busy. With the year of uncertainty regarding the Oracle/Sun acquisition, I had some additional time to think. My thoughts went quite far away from managing the MySQL database user community, but are inside the realm of coping with today’s digital world, and combining its fast pace with some timeless values.

Tell us little about Running and Aesthetics

Running: I’m founding a new world religion, Runnism, the religion of running. I’m doing it tongue in cheek, with the Seven Steps of Runnism defining the credo a bit like the Ten Commandments. But I also seriously believe that running is good for you and that it’s good to worship physical well-being.

Aesthetics: That’s not religious to me, but I think we should surround ourselves with more beauty. That’s why I’m starting a website called “The Everyday Aesthete”, not just discussing how to put our many digital pictures to use, but developing some thinking on design, order, and being fooled by commercial interests.

What will be the focus of your writings?

So SIME, I think, is about the love of technology and of making business out of it. It’s also about communication and strategy. My writing will not be general buzzword dropping, but personal reflections on how to apply technology and social media for a better life, and not just for its own geeky sake. I attempt at building communities around my own reflections in two areas, Running and Aesthetics. That involves many digital and Web 2.0 aspects, branding, people, content production. And while my subjects may seem highly specialised, I hope to help my readers draw general conclusions on how to view digital life and how to make business in it.

If 2009 was the year of the recovery, what do you think 2010 holds?

Well this year I’ve already spent 4 days stranded on the wrong continent due to volcanic activities. And you talk about bad economics, that’s not just Iceland and it won’t end with Greece. But I don’t believe in doomsday 2010. The digital world is full of business opportunities, and we’ve still just seen the beginning of how to apply technology to our daily lives.

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