My keynote talk “Attention, please! Glow, Show and Flow” at O’Reilly’s EuroOSCON – European Open Source Convention – in Bruxelles in September 2006 has now been posted as an audio file by O’Reilly Networks Weekly Podcast “Distributing the Future”. The title is “Spirituality and Altruism”.

So that was what I was talking about! I have wondered why people were so enthustiastic about the presentation and turned up in such numbers the next day when I gave another presentation on the related theme “Dare, Care and Share”.

This second talk was not a keynote but part of one of several parallel tracks, yet it attracted a fine audience, indeed. My own explanation for the interest was that I was talking about sex. But it turns out that I talked about spirituality – well, at least according to the title of the podcast.

But, OK, it turns out that the spirituality part of the podcast is actually covered by an interview with Craig Warren Smith from University of Washington. I am only involved in the altruism part of the podcast. But still, altruism seems more noble than sex. Or does it?

That, really, is the point of the talk … (and the book on which it is based, “The Generous Man: How Helping Others is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do“). A brief summary of the book is available here.

It was recently out in paperback in the US. The also recent paperback-edition in Germany is curiously published under a different title than the hardback. The the original and more expensive hardback edition of the book in German is called “Homo generosus”:

while the less costly paperback version is called “Über die Entstehung von Sex durch generöses Verhalten”:

The German subtitle is probably the best of all the translations (and better than the original Danish one): “Warum wie Scönes lieben und Gutes tun”.
Why we love the beautiful and do the good.