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From a New York Times article.
"Reuters is going a step further. It told its editorial employees in an electronic posting late last week that it planned to hire six journalists in Bangalore, India, to do basic financial reporting on 3,000 small to medium-size American companies."
Via TJ Via [techjournalism News (Rebecca)]
I have borrowed to Joi a wiki page to try to help with logistics, so if you are interested in getting together in Germany, please add your name and comments to the wiki page and blog it if you like to get more blogger friends around the table...
Thanks !
(please be nice with me it will be my first wiki organized dinner, but we had so much fun in San Francisco that I wanted to try it here too !)
I was recently pointing to corporate blogging at its best from Rob Scoble, now Ross has an excellent pointer on a Business 2.0 article on why you should use blogs in your professional life or seriously start having troubles. I agree... of course, but it will take some time. John Battelle's collumn at Business2.0 suggests that blogs will become a staple of business (reg. req.):
Here is what Ross says about it:
So here's my prediction: Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious businessperson, not because it's cool to read them, but because those who don't read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business decisions...
Until recently, blogs have proven to be an incredibly lousy source of information for most businesspeople. Finding and keeping up with the relevant ones is far too time-consuming. But I've recently started using a newsreader, and after spending hours setting the damn thing up, my business life has changed forever.
He is right for two reasons: first exposure to blogs is as a reader and like all great disruptive technologies they provide competitive advantage to individual early adopters.
Same dynamics drive team leaders to bring blogs and wikis inside to create advantage for workgroups. Some team members initially participate as readers, but gradually shift to being contributors and collaborators.
[via Stowe]
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog (Social Text)]I know this is old stuff to most of you (and apologize when it is the case) but I just started playing with it.
Here is a nice visual tool that lets you compare results from Google and Yahoo searches. For example I am #1 in Google for "create a company" but not at all in Yahoo. Looks like Google likes blogs better than Yahoo, too bad. 
Thanks JY for the link.
More info here. Looks like the blogging scene gets hotter with M&A starting and I bet this is just the beginning.
After my saying that blogging was like open sourcing myself, I of course shared my network in Linked In and reached another level today by creating and sharing my public diary thanks to Apple ical and .mac here. The diary is quite empty for the time being but I will continue to update it.
It is really cool, you just create another diary then share it and each time I update it, it updates the web page, really cool. Mac users can even just subscribe to it. I wish Apple would add sharing with only selected people for private diaries and also I selected "share my to do list" but for some reason cannot find it on-line.
Anyway, my agenda for my week in Germany gets clearer, Munchen March 8, Frankfurt March 9, Hamburg march 11, don't know yet for wednesday and friday but I will update my public diary ;=)
I you want to have drinks and/or dinner there please continue to let me know, I will try to put it on a wiki as an experiment, I would love if you helped me organize dinners with German bloggers there but I will need your help !
Thanks !
Was it the airplane going into the truck or the opposite ? Pointed by Philippe Agulhon who launched a blog on aviation parts (in French)... Here is his French blog.
Picture from Airliners.net.
Miha Pogacnik is one of the most extraordinary person I have ever met. Miha is a musician and he teaches creativity to corporations through music. Here is what you can find about Miha: "Miha Pogacnik is a diplomat, violinist, business advisor, visionary and genius."
We had a very intense session at the World Economic Forum's GLT event in Geneva last year where he took us through the creation process in music.
Miha is one of the few people I know who wants to change the world (me too !) and one of the even fewer people that actually do it. So I am extremely happy and honored that Miha asked me to join the Euro Identity Caravan.
With all the team helping him, Miha has done something incredible: they "rented" a train that will go throughout the 10 countries who will join the EU on May 1st. Each carriage will carry a group of 20 persons (friends), who are developing one topic in creative conversation:
European Leadership, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I will be in this one !), Sustainability and Ecology, Polyphonic Media, Education and Learning, Democracy and Constitution, Interdisciplinary Role of the Art: cultural Wealth of the Regions, The Future of Universities and Science, Social Responsibility, Corporate Strategies in the enlarged Europe
The goal as Miha writes it: Europe needs to define its identity. By inviting the brains of all different areas of Europe: culture, business, science, politics to a one week structured brain-storm we will compose a valuable basement for all of those who want to change Europe in a constructive way.
Therefore the goal of the EICC is to define clear guidelines for the fields of arts, business, politics, academia, media etc. with the focus on a stronger interdisciplinary, polyphonic approach than this is currently done. The guidelines will be published by the end of the week not only in book-format, but as well as inlays for the media partners who will serve the EICC as a soundboard to get these messages above the awareness threshold.
By travelling through some of the new partner countries EICC wants to make its contribution of bridging Europe. It is to be understood as a strong welcome to those joining few weeks later as well as to those who have lost the spirit throughout the last decades or those who are still waiting.
The results of the multicultural mix will result in a book and be presented to the EU Commission in Brussels.
You can participate by joining any carriage of the train, contribute to it and probably spend one of the most interesting week you could ever spend.
I will be blogging the trip, of course, it is April 4th to 11th and I will be joining it as of Tuesday 6th.
Here is the trip:
April 5th - Ljubljana (Slovenia)
April 6th - Budapest (Hungary)
April 7th - Bratislava (Slovakia)
April 8th - Krakow (Poland)
April 9th - Warszawa (Poland)
April 10th - Riga (Latvia) (for the 3 Baltic states)
April 11th - Praha (Czech Republic)
Join us or help us on building the identity of Europe ! What do you think the identity of Europe should be ?
I will be in Germany for a full week from March 8 to 12 and plan to visit as many cities as my appointments get me to in Germany.
Just wanted to thank you all for all the emails and help you provided me with, please continue ! I have not answered all the emails yet but I will in the next days, sorry about that. I cannot wait to meet you there.
I will soon be posting more about a detailed agenda on the cities I will go to and hope we can organize dinners meeting as many bloggers as possible.
Thanks again, see you there.
You will be able to surf the net an place phone calls via any Wi-Fi network on the future Nokia phones, incredible, no need for a phone operator anymore when in range of a Wi-Fi network, I guess the telcos will love that.
Congratulations, Christian !
As seen today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):
"Nokia Takes Leap
Into Wi-Fi Arena
With New Phone
By DAVID PRINGLE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Nokia Corp., in a move that could loosen mobile-phone operators' grip on the wireless market, unveiled Monday its first handset capable of surfing the Internet using short-range wireless technology known as Wi-Fi.
Nokia's Communicator 9500 will be able to bypass conventional mobile-phone networks, but still access the Web and even make phone calls using a Wi-Fi network. Key to its operation are "hot spots" springing up in offices, homes, coffee shops, hotels and other areas within 300 feet of a Wi-Fi base station connected to the Internet via a fixed line. Consumers now need a specially equipped laptop or personal organizer to use these hot spots."
Via [The Scobleizer Weblog], (Rob how much time a day do you spend blogging by the way ?!):
This is something I want to check out. Anyone get to play with one yet? It's the Roku Soundbridge which lets you play your Mac or PC digital music files anywhere in the house.
I cannot wait to order one too:
Let's think of a new kind of media"
says Christopher Lydon in The Guardian, the "Audible Revolution"
Excellent comments on blog comments by [megnut]
I've thought a lot about comments on weblogs over the years, and for a mailing list I'm on, I finally summarized some of my thoughts. Since it might be useful for others, I'm reposting them here. They're a few questions I ask myself related to enabling comments on weblogs posts I make. With the proliferation of commenting-ability in today's weblog tools, it might make sense for people to think a bit before blindly turning on comments, whether for an individual or group blog. 1. Do I want feedback on what I'm writing? 2. Do I have time to manage a conversation right now? 3. Is this conversation over?
Rather than just having a blanket rule -- whether that's "comments on" or
"comments off" -- it would be nice if we could consider these questions
before posting. Turning on comments is an opportunity and a responsibility.
I never turn on comments on megnut unless I specifically want feedback, and
I'd encourage people to think about this when they're posting to their sites as well. Are you writing about something that can engender a discussion? And
do you want to have a discussion about it? Not everything needs a
discussion, and if it doesn't, think about disabling comments for
a post, if only to avoid spammers and trolls.
It's easy to turn on comments, it takes work to host a discussion.
Especially when the post is controversial or inflammatory, the poster needs
to be prepared to stay on top of the thread. Do you have the time to nurture
that discussion and keep on top of it, delete the trolls, refocus the
discussion when it gets derailed, etc.? If not, perhaps posting, or turning
on comments, isn't such a good idea. I know I try and help out if I see a
thread going awry but I believe it's the poster's responsibility to make sure
her thread stays on target and remains as civil as possible.
There comes a point in every thread when the conversation is done, either
because posts have petered out or because it's gotten so out of control and
unpleasant that it needs to end. Either way, the poster should go back in
and set comments to "Closed." This will prevent people/spammers/trolls from
posting in old threads, and keep the discussions alive and active on
"current" posts.
Here is what happened a few days ago (I know this is old stuff already) but it clearly shows how chat is catching up. I have about 50 AIM or ICQ buddies in my contact list and now I start to feel bad when somebody works closely with me or is a close friend does not use it at all.
I work for example with my lawyer mostly via IM, and chat with my 8 years old kid via IM each time I am not home (which is often).
Here is what ADO says about it:
[The Tokyo side] — [see the San Francisco Side]
Jonas comes storming into #joiito asking if anyone's seen Joi. Jonas, it turns out, has left his car keys in Joi's car. Nobody has seen Joi, though, but phone-numbers are recalled and dialed. All in vain. Joi, the most wired man on the planet, cannot be reached. Oh, the irony. I'm private messaging Jonas and trying to find out where Joi could be. I work for Joi, so I should know how to reach him. I think. We think he may be at Lessig's, but I could not find out a phone number, and even asked Dave and Loic. So was getting out of ideas. In the meantime, Jonas was pretty much panicking. In the middle of San Francisco, next to his car, but unable to utilize it. Then he tells me, Joi was meeting danah when he left. danah, it turns out, was active in my iChat list. So I rush to IM her and, bingo, Joi was indeed with her, and the keys were indeed in Joi's car.
The uniqueness of this situation is that one guy in SF is without car keys, and it takes IRC and IM via Japan to make the connections that will lead Jonas to his treasure. Unreal.
Excellent post from Ross on blogs ans social software for the next-next generation of kids. Unfortunately my three boys do not speak english yet I cannot see them try it !
The coming influence of Net-Gens (14-24 year olds) with their multi-modal and connected ways is well expected and studied. But what about 7-14 year olds, the Next Next Generation?
The problem with Children and Social Software is the balance between letting them express themselves and privacy. In California, well intended regulations make it almost impossible to have children use, let alone create something on the Internet.
So where do the kids blog? Either from home under supervision or Think.com. Under an Oracle grant, any K-12 school in the US & UK can provide kids blogs, email, social networking and group collaboration for free. All password protected, available in three languages and with pilots underway in Chile, Thailand, New Zealand and China. Its a pretty great project attempting to balance significant stakeholder issues to let kids learn socially:
Think.com - version 3 new features include a "Parent Page" and buddy lists. Using the "Parent Page" teachers can now post homework assignments, class calendars, permission slips and much more for parents to easily access. Buddy lists let kids see when their friends are on line and allow them to quickly send email or navigate to their "buddy's" web page. Email functionality has been enhanced, giving schools the choice to block all attachments, turn off external email, and monitor messages for bad language.
Perhaps the only perk my 7-year old daughter gets from being the CEO's daughter (aside from being dragged to conferences while being told its a vacation), is her own workspace to blog privately. Of course, if I'm sitting around with my laptop, her first question is "Daddy, can I post to my weblog." She is pretty excited about it, maybe thinks she has more than one reader and her posts may be a treasure for her one day. I would open it up, but I also get Google traffic for distrubing queries like "pictures of my daughter."
Great to see social software for kids through schools, but sitting down with them to let them explore can't be beat.
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog (Social Text)]Corporate blogging grows fast. The companies who do not understand blogging should better watch it fast or their secrets will be out soon.
Andrew Watt asks how he should deal with the wave of information coming because there are now 346 Microsoft employees blogging, with new ones coming every day. I'd do search terms on Feedster. Find the bloggers you care about most. Subscribe to them. Ignore the rest. You'll probably hear of the important stuff anyway. I watch all these feeds for you. You can read me, which admittedly, does take some time when I shove a bunch of stuff down the RSS pipe at your news aggregator, but it's only going to get worse. When I started working at Microsoft there were, what, 50 bloggers? There are 12,000 new blogs PER DAY being added to Technorati. By the way, MSDN is working on ways to split up the blogs.msdn.com feed. How would you split it up (er, categorize it)?
Via [The Scobleizer Weblog]:
Inspired by all my friends who where deeply involved in the emergent democracy (special thanks
to David, Britt, Doc, Joi, Dan, Howard and many other bloggers for inviting me to join your fantastic discussions on the new democracy and for inspiring me that much).
I have passion with the way citizens can now express themselves.
So I started trying to help politicians in France to understand the blogs (regardless of their political ideas) and spent some time with Dominique Strauss-Kahn's team. DSK as we call him in France will probably be one of main candidate for the next presidential elections and I am very happy that DSK opened his blog this morning.
Of course I am also helping other politicians with different ideas, my point is to see the emerging democracy appear in France and in Europe as fast as possible. I have never been very interested in politics, and I should say it is the first time I am getting very interested in it and hope many other politicians will start as well.
I will need your help to help them get the best tools such as meet-up and others. I regret meet-up was not interested by Europe when I met them last week.
Can you tell me which other leading european politicians have already their blogs online if you know some of them ?
This week there was an air traffic controllers strike in France, that just ended today. Of course strikes are not surprising for any French man, they are part of our lives and we got use to them. I am in London right now and heard a lot about the strike from British friends who got their flights cancelled on account of the strikes. France got again some good advertising today.
Usually people complain about their work conditions and salary.
This time is different. There are two main airports and therefore two ATC in Paris, Orly and Charles de Gaulle. The Orly controllers were on strike most of the week not because of their salary but because their management just wants to move them to Charles de Gaulle, which is very far, it is an half an hour drive !
So French. 12 people I heard cause 60% of the flights cancelled or delayed this week just because they do not want to move to another office. Nobody outside France can understand that. Actually the French start not understanding it either.
These people never learnt what a client is. They have clients, the travellers indirectly and the airlines directly, but they do not understand that they are clients I guess. This is our French term "usager", "user" that replaces client, you should thank them for their service even though you pay it anyway, there is no competition so you have to go through them. In the US, ATC is free. In Europe, it is very expensive. I am not sure the US controllers go on strike but they could as their service is not invoiced to anybody (as far as I know). In Europe they have clients and they do not care.
Also this as to do with general respect of other people. How can they dare to create such a mess for just not accepting to change their office location ?! Ask them, they will probably say it is normal and it is their right to go on strike. They actually got what they wanted as the project was cancelled.
This is about autonomy and ambition. If you are unhappy about your job and are good at it you can probably find another one easily, or better, create your own business. And I am not talking about creating a big company here, I am talking about launching a shop, a very small business, anything. You are right, not all of us are "made" to create businesses. I am just saying that if people are not happy about their jobs or something new to their job like changing location, they should probably try to find the solution themselves rather than cancelling 60% of flights to/from France and disturb so many other people.
This is also about freedom. No boss either in public or private service forces anybody to take a job and stay in it. So rather than go on strike just try to influence the management with other means, why not be that successful in your team so that you could even take your manager's job to change the company or public service you work for yourself, or leave your job and find something else, or go and create your own job in a small business.
I guess this is a question of education. Kids are not enough taught to be ambitious at school, they do not learn what is a client or what is a company. Last time I talked about this issue to somebody or on my blog and I heard this was fixed because at "Lycée" 14-18 years old people were now asked to go one week as a trainee in a company to learn it. One week. Is this a joke ? It is better than nothing but how can a young person really understand how business works in one week ?
Education is key and is the solution. Of course many people would argue with me that most people that go on strike have no other choice than to do so. It may be true when people who have worked tens of years in the same type of job just cannot imagine how they could do something else. It may be true that it is too late for them (which I actually still disagree), but what about their children ? Is there anybody doing something to change how their children will behave, their view of the world, their view of ambition and entrepreneurship ?
As far as the people who go on strike themselves are concerned, I really think there could be training given to them on how they can change their jobs, learn another one, learn to open a shop, produce wine, anything. They just do not realize they could do it.
I had several meetings in the past with French Union leaders. I always ask the same question: "what is it exactly to be a union leader or active member". Most of the time the answer and definition I am given is "Being a unionist is complaining".
I spent an entire week three years ago at the occasion of a TV show with a French union leader. It was very interesting and I will be blogging more about it but basically we kind of agreed at the end of the week that if all the time spent complaining was invested in creating value, trying to find other jobs or even to create their own jobs, much better results would be achieved without having to cause trouble to other people during strikes. The person I spent the week with was a Paris metro driver and he told me he spent half of his time "unioning" that he described as "complaining". At the end of the week he was much less agressive against entrepreneurs I guess and was open to invest more time to create value for his own life and that of his children.
What is your opinion ? How can we improve that issue ?
Ibiza ?
Another excellent post this morning from Robert Scoble of Microsoft teaching us how to blog for/from a corporation.
Here are some quotes:
-watch your market
-help webloggers talk about you
-use webloggers to improve your products
-treat other webloggers with respect
-and much more
"Whenever I write something I imagine seeing what I write on the front cover of USA Today"
Robert has also an excellent Corporate Weblog Manifesto
-tell the truth
-post fast on good news or bad
-use a human voice
-and much more
Here is how most conferences will look in the very near feature even if it will take time and the social experience may happen outside of computers, I think for non-geek people it will actually happen mostly on phones.
File... Open... YOUR MIND. Well my mind could not be more open during the entire week and I got such a strong experience, a different experience. I have never had that networking experience in a conference. Usually a conference is like a mass media, you sit down and listen with few or no interaction. This time was different at E-tech, there were more messages coming from the audience than from the panels.
Here is the secret sauce of the explosive cocktail:
-Prepare the sauce ingredients on a wiki and let it grow during the conference
The wiki of the conference was started about two months before the conference, the participants started to subscribe their blog address and other information about them on it, things like a walk in San Diego were self-organized the day before the conference on the wiki. To have a better idea of what happened on the wiki before, during and even after the conference, have a look at the wiki updates list.
-Make wifi and juice available everywhere
Wifi was everywhere in the hotel and the conference rooms. Free of charge, of course. But do not forget juice, make power plugs available under the seats in all conference rooms so that everybody can focus on participating not on when their laptop battery is going to die.
-Gather some of the most authoritative bloggers and mix them with baby bloggers
Q "How many of you are bloggers"
A 98% of the audience, and the 2 other % are fixing it during the conference, it was like if you said "do you have email ?" ten years ago. Stupid question. Of course we all blog, how could it be different ?
That was just fantastic, many people were blogging the conference during the conference so everybody who missed the conference could know what happens there in real time, and most of the time the first comments arrived on their blogs before the end of the presentation of the panelists. Some questions were actually asked as a result of discussions started on blogs during the sessions.
-Add a lot of Apple juice
Never seen that many macs. Clearly not representative of the computer market. I actually switched only 6 months ago and I love it, I even did some shopping after the conference...
What I discovered during the conference was the power of Rendez Vous thanks to Felix. You could see in real time everybody who had Macs in the conference, chat them, drag and drop their ims from RDV to your own IM, listen to the itunes they share, see a list of websites or weblogs they host on their own macs... Totally cool.
Here is one of he more strange experience I had thanks to Rendez Vous: I was sitting close to Dan Brickley during a conference and I really wanted to meet him as I knew he started FOAF. I started talking to him very quietly in order not to make noise and Dan immediately without a word pointed his finger to my Mac. On his Mac, he opened Rendez Vous, found in two seconds my im and started a chat by saying "this is a much better way to chat during a conference".
The speech was a little boring so we chatted most of the time during the sessions even though we were sitting close to each other. Of course we could have get out of the room and discuss there but that would have been rude to the speaker and disturbed their session.
After an hour of chat, pasting interesting urls to each other of what we do or of our interests, we got a lot to know each other. When the session ended, we talked to each other briefly and we were friends "Are U a friend YES or NO" (TM).
-Add a conference moblog
-Open a conference chat room
This was just amazing how many people interacted in the chat room #etech while the speakers were talking. It was totally out of control and either extremely interesting ("I have a question to ask what do you think of it") or totally useless ("I need to go to the restrooms"). But the bottom line is that I was logged in irc very often as I thought extremely useful to understand what the room and the Internet users thought of the presentation in real time.
Many "Fact check my ass" happened as each time people had a question or a doubt about what was said they were either asking precisions in the chat room or googling what the speaker just said. Some speakers got many "that is bullshit" or "this is only a sales presentation" seconds only after they said something that was not adding value.
People used also the chat room to physically meet during or after the conference, organize the lunch, the dinner, joke etc.
-Project the chat room when the panel talks
Simply total transparence. Everybody could just see what everybody would think about the speaker, the topic, the questions to be asked, the urls concerning the talk, etc. Quite weird but totally entertaining !
The hardcore version of that is the hecklebot that was used during Joi's panel, people could directly post comments to the screen below, that speakers could see. It was totally uncontrolled but an interesting experience...
-Create a trackback link for all conference sessions so that people can find quickly what bloggers think and say about the sessions
-Technoratize the sessions
so that people can also see what bloggers say about the conference.
-Manage the side effects
Have a rescue force available for people chatting while they walk, have dinner, people non invited getting in or protesting at the lobby, people crashing because they chat and blog too much, people advertising brands on their heads.
Be also careful that the speakers speak loud enough as with that many bloggers the keyboard noise is quite high and surprising the first time you hear it. Just imagine say 100 bloggers in one room typing on their keyboard at the same time.
Here is what I expect in the future to happen in addition:
-The participants will create even the programme of the conference
-The participants will self organize conferences, using tools such as meet-up
Would you like to see this way of managing conferences in the future or would you hate it ?
Apple's iLife applications iPhoto and iTunes allow you to rate the items in your library. Rating songs in iTunes has been a feature for a while, but it's new for the recent iPhoto version. But what's the appeal in rating your own stuff? For the music that you have cataloged in iTunes, I can see how ratings may help sort the songs to how often you would like to listen to them or how you can use it as an excuse for having a Mariah Carey song. "Well, look, I give it a one-star rating, you know?" Still, though, the fact that you find a song worthy enough to store locally in your iTunes library kind of defeats the concept of rating.
How should you even rate pictures in iPhoto? I think most pictures I make are crap and if they're really bad, I delete it. I fail to see how I could rate one picture as 4 and another as 5. What are the guidelines and criteria for assessing one's picture's aesthetic or even emotional value? Rating should be done by others and the result should consequently be visible to anyone. That's the idea behind rating: "I got this picture I think is pretty neat and I'd love to know how others value it." It is not like: "I made this picture, man, this is so good, I'll rate it a 5... Dude, I'm Annie Leibowitz." Of course, even when rated by others, there are still no written rules on how to objectively determine a picture's worth. Most likely pictures are rated in reference of one another. The rating of the first picture determines how a second picture will be rated. It couldn't be more pointless and subjective.
(From Ado's blog)Each time I come back from the US the jet lag makes me wake up at 3 or 4 AM for several days and I have excellent work sessions from 3 AM to 8 AM, with great concentration.
Each time I try to keep the pace of waking up around 5 or 6 AM to continue this but I fail miserably...
After discussing with many friends at E-tech I discovered that most of us tend to have the same kind of schedule, work during the day and read blogs and blog at night.
There is also absolutely no difference now between my working time and my home time, I am online most of the time and every time I have 5 minutes or there is a break either in business or in personal life, I start reading blogs, blogging and only then reading and answering my email which I like less and less but still do of course...
I do think that blogging helps my mind be more open and stimulates it. Of course it is my job to run a blogging company so I am lucky to be able to devote time to it as part of my job.
Work time does not exist anymore, it is all mixed. Time counts less and less as well, I have just said hi to Ado who is in Tokyo and Doc in the US, we all work on totally different time and that does not matter. Blogging is 24hrs a day...
I love it, I feel distances count less and less and we can keep in close touch & work with friends around the world.
Still, I try to keep as much time as I can to play with my three kids, most of it off-line...
How did blogging enter your own life and schedule ? Do you feel the same as I do ?
Just back from E-tech in San Diego, I am starting a European tour to launch Ublog throughout Europe. I will post regularly my schedule here, I would be glad to meet you if you are close to a destination we travel to, just let me know.
Based on our successful launch in France (close to 10 000 blogs and high growth), my goals are
-to spread Ublog as a white label technology for portals, telcos, ISPs or high audience websites. Basically any company can include its own blog offering under their brand name powered by us.
-find help to localize Ublog (translation) and help to meet key ISPs, telcos etc.
-to hire a business development person in Germany and the UK as a start
-to meet addicted bloggers and meet people I read / make new blogger friends
-any other reason you would like us to meet please drop me a line !
Netherlands & Belgium already covered by my team last week but we will come back soon.
Monday 16: Paris
Tuesday 17: Paris
Wed 18: London
Thursday 19: London
Friday 20: Brussels
Feb 25 & 26: Spain Madrid & Barcelona (to be confirmed)
March 8 to 12: Germany (to be confirmed)
Italy & Nordic countries to come soon too,
Thanks for your help !
Thanks Rob for the pointer, I just subscribed to this new social software demoed at E-tech. Should you want to link me or contact me in Flickr, my id is loiclemeur...
Stewart Butterfield is giving me a demo of flickr. Real-time media sharing. Collaborative drawing. Real-time Photoshop contests. Uploading samples. Playing with the media we all generate.
Free, ad-based. Expected to see "pro" accounts. Stewart wrote the user interaction/UI for it. This is impressive.
It was turned on on Tuesday. Already a couple thousand users. Real launch is next week.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
"I got flamed hard because I did not have altitude information in the mix at the beginning"
Great presentation of Joshua Schachter, of GeoURL.
I like it and try to hook up Joshua with Maporama.
Johsua showed also NYC bloggers
One of the most well known VC in the Valley, William H. Janeway, Vice Chairman, Warburg Pincus at Etech:
Comparing railroads and electrification with the Internet revolution
"We are going to do everything differently, there is going to be a new economy"
Amazon, Dell, Ebay are existence proofs. Ebay yesterday: "We would be the 10th country in the world if we were one (based on Ebay transactions)".
I highly recommend those of you who missed the presentation to listen to it thanks to IT Conversations audio reports.
William's presentation was really great.
Donald Norman at Etech, who just wrote Emotional Design"why we love or hate everyday things ?"
"If everybody loves or hates something, it is a proof of bad design. Good design always touches
your emotional senses: hate and love."
About the Orange Juice maker on the front page of Donald's book: "this is not about orange juice, this is about conversations"
Great FOAF session today. Dan Brickley who created FOAF, gave a good overview of what it is and how it is used.
I enjoyed the idea of dating on phones via bluetooth and FOAF.
This way you can date somebody who is in the same room, same restaurant, immediately, with the same interests as you... Great stuff.
Marc and Eric also OF COURSE showed People Aggregator. I really like the idea of linking the friends I have in Orkut with the friends I have in Linked In, with the friends I have in ...
I am not sure these networks will agree to share their databases with you (or anybody else), Marc, but let's see what happens. I agree on the fact that if we all own our own identity on a FOAF file, it is better than having to fill-it in in 10 different networks...
Also saw a demo of NewsMonster, it is an RSS reader that supports FOAF. Nice work, John.
"There is too many social networks. You do not own my data, I do. "
John is also working on "Exportster", which is a plugin that should be ready within a month. Its goal is to be able to export the data from the different networks and sync them.
"We export the data from social networks and sync them all, so that there is one macro level FOAF file, in order to have a unified data model."
Tribe also announced that they support FOAF.
Greg Elin showed fotonotes.net that is coordinating a semantic photo project which is exploring the issues combining FOAF and RDF for photos, impressive.
Marc Powell talked briefly about Indyvoter.org, "injecting the virus of political dialogue into online social networks", also supporting FOAF.
If there is still anybody on earth (unlikely but...) who has not heard of Howard Rheingold and his latest book Smart Mobs, go run and read it, it will have some effect on you.
And by the way, I also love your shirt today
and also your world famous painted shoes !. The below ones have never been seen in public, it is an E-tech exclusive.
wake-up Justin !
Just wanted to share with those of you not physically present here the official E-Tech 2004 joke I heard 30 times today, coming from Orkut's way of accepting friends invitations.
Just not quite right like a "0" or "1" choice, right ?
So are you a friend, YES or NO ?
Most of my friends here at E-tech are saying they always answer YES to that question in Orkut as it is too rude to say NO to somebody even if you do not know him or her.
I guess we should maybe define better our definition of friend ? Will you go for Joi's or Marc's definition of a friend ?
I should be careful, now I cannot even cheat like at school to help my blogging with David's blogging which is better and faster...
No, Joi, I am not checking if David writes about me there are much more interesting topics to blog about here ;=)
Thank you Tempus Creativ for the pointer
"Is he writing about me?"
Here is a post from Ross Mayfield about the use of blogs and wikis at Disney, a very interesting presentation we just had (Ross your blogging about this is much better than mine, thanks).
Disney has hundreds of users on weblogs and wikis internally (authors and readers), replacing their current Intranet tools. They use movable type.
I asked the following question: "how do you see the difference between the use of wikis and weblogs after more than a year of experience internally ?"
Elisabeth Freeman answered very clearly, I like it: "Blogs are for news, project management, basically all the information that is fresh and moves, wikis are here to stay and when we need to build information that will become permanent".
Here is what Ross has to say about it:
Disney Enterprise Weblogs and Wikis
Mike Pusateri, Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman at Disney shares their enterprise blogging initative:
Using RSS for content distribution
Using RSS Enclosures to deliver video to 2 million broadband users. Some argue that enclosures don't scale and their not enough bandwidth, but >500M videos have been delivered in less than one year an dhav been able to scale bandwidth to demand, now moving towards caching at the edge. Most of the delivery is off-peak hours, especially from them to the cable head end, so bandwidth cost is nominal. P2P like Bittorrent and others may broaden this.
Enterprise Blogging
In ops/engineering there are 100 people that log into the 6 weblogs. In DIG, 1 blog and 50 users, the wiki has been over 1.5 year 200 users and lots of groups.
Mike works where coordination is king. Info flow between programming, marketing, traffic and operations, etc. Consistent flow is critical, constant change occured and must be communicated, catch up must happen easily or problems result, archives. People don't like loggingm dont know whats new and difficult to forward.
Shift Logs
* 24 hour positions necessitate the creation of a shiftr log to report information to coworkers and management about what occured on the shift
*Previous solution was specialized FoxPro database with minimal features, mot even search
* Now a MT-based group blog
Distribution
* New weblog styel were popularm but requests for email of entries began
* Instead of email notification, used RSS
* Newsgator chosen as aggregator because of the outlook plugin
Discrepancy Reports
*Detailed info on mistakes, problems or opther events that affect the broadcast
*RSS feed reduced use of email
Ratings Information
* Daily need for overnight ratings information
* Generating RSS feed that encloses a styled table
Furture
*News Clopping Service (currentl web app)
* Playdate Memor changes (currently email
*Addition of RSS feeds to existing intranet portal modules
* Use of ATOM to replace RSS (when 1.0 arrives) and compliant tools for simple publishing. Because it is inherently 2-directional, for interaction
* Syndication of some media content for review
Conclusions
*RSS feeds and Weblog software are useful for multitude of business need where information flow is critical. Its not about opinion its about information flow
* RSS feeds are for much more than weblog sndication
*Use of RSS feeds is inexpensive comparatively
*RSS aggregation into Outlook integration was critical.
*Client side aggregation needs to move toward server side aggregation
*Need for authentication is immeadiate
They also use wikis inside. Disney Internet Group is also using wikis and blogs
*Wide variety of areas of expertise within our group
* Each person can contribute research and articles of interest to the entire group
* Best shared through a system that will notify, Notifications have had an impact -- email and RSS
* Did some stylizing per group
* Repurpose internal datafeeds
*Had training sessions to get it going.
Reuters uses wikis instead of blogs as it was harder to adopt.
BBC problem: security and authentication. Disney has restricted write access, but not read access. They don't have Socialtext's ability to manage and work with lots of workspaces.
Dave Sifry rocks today
And the room is packed
Some Inforporn
1.6 M blogs tracked
11 000 new blogs a day
A new link appears in your technorati cosmos in 7 minutes !
Peoples' buying habits in real time in Technorati: people talking about Amaron books for example
Here is a Technorati Amazon experiment. Dave asked the room to blog the link to see when our blog posts appear in the cosmos of that page.
So we are all trying to get the first link and Marc asked if there was a prize for the winner.
Update: the first link appeared only few minutes after Dave asked us to blog it !
Who found Salam Pax ? It started from some links and then it propagated throughout the blogosphere. Epidemilogical prospective of the blogosphere can be followed in the Technorati Cosmos.
A demo of the blog power in blog rankings, and how many inbound links you have charted.
A demo about bloglinks, and the fact that even the people who do not have that many links count.
You can get your RSS subscriptions by importing your opml and get your updated blogs list you read ordered by who updated them."This is a prelude to making the blog reading experience much more enjoyable"
Technorati application directions:
-open reviews
subscribe to a set of keyword and Cosmos filters
-Provide discovery and filtering of subscriptions lists
-vote links
-geographic search and filtering (11 000 blogs with geo data in DB)
The Breaking news
My time is the most important resource people have. We have too many news sources. Editors and professional people have a role in this space. What if I took all the news professional media sources (5000 of them) and we look at what are people blogging about it.
You are my collaborative filter on the news. What are the most authoritative people blogging about the news and what do they say about it ?
"You are using the bloggers as your editors"
"There is stuff out of here that I would have never heard about without breaking news
.
Think of breaking news as a blog. Let's now look at it by popularity in current events.
Dave took the example of the American Airlines pilot article"raise your hand if you're a Christian" that was so much commented
I am listening to Helen Greiner at Etech to a presentation of irobot and a demo of their robot vacuum. for homes.
I am very interested by the live comments of people attending the conference in the irc channel, reacting in real time... An also by who is going to create the first post about irobot and Helen's presentation on their blogs so I am also following live irobot's technorati cosmos. For the time being there are no posts yet, let's see.
The new Technorati engine only takes 7 minutes to report a link.
Anyway, the military robot demo really rocks, too bad I could not find the movie Helen showed us.
I was very impressed by the small robots self organizing, in real time.... I guess what we have seen in certain movies may happen some time, robots self organizing against us...
Ethan just pointed us to Voices Without Votes 2004 which allows you to write a letter to America even if you don't vote there.
There are letters from all around the world. If you cannot vote there, write a quick letter !
Halley has a great post on "Ten Trends of Political Blogging"
"There is only one platform to allow us to take our government back,
THE INTERNET"
applause in the room on mention of "Internet"
"you've (the Internet) have done
you've done something amazing
it MUST SURVIVE regardless of what happens
we are YOU ARE the internet is the most powerful tool ever put into the hands of the avg american
what the system has taught them is that they don't count
that their check is a waste
that their work is a waste
that's what they said about prohibition"
Joi has much better quality pictures than me.
A live transcript is provided by burtonator on the irc chat. When somebody asked how much Joe Trippy made during the campaign in 2003, he answered $165K, which was immediately commented in the chat room.
Excellent links to follow the conference on the Etech wiki.
people in the line to ask questions
Some participants even blog on the floor
Greetings from San Diego !
The blogging station of Joi
After Friendster and Linked In and so many others, let me introduce you to Rumba, Alex's dog, who has become one of the most connected dogs in the social software Dogster... Congratulations Alex !
Where will all that lead us ? Will we check dogs online reputation too ?
If you have 5 minutes, check out the original Superbowl Pepsi Ad (click on "Pepsi: Busted Music Downloaders") against digital music downloads
and just after, check the parody (mpeg).
"The recording industry cheat artists, screws customers, who is the REAL criminal ?"
Both of them are incredible.

The website "What a Crappy Present" shows what is in our kids heads and that you SHOULD NOT offer them CDs (who still would ?), and what to do if your family still offered you CDs as presents.
Having three kids, fortunately I still feel very close to them by not offering them CDs.
The majors have still hard times ahead of them.
Thanks, Joi, for the pointer.
