Loïc Le Meur blog

The wiki preparing a chapter on European Emergent Democracy in the book

I really thank:

Stuart Mudie
Tobias Schwarz
Scott Hanson
George N. Dafermos
Allan Engelhardt
Phil Wolff
Brieux-Yves Cadat
Ludovic Dubost

for their contributions to the wiki page (and other people that contributed without leaving their name on the wiki, please do so if you like). I understand we have another 10 days to write the chapter on Europe on the book coordinated by Jon.

So now I will work more on it and try to shift from a bookmark list mode to a more written chapter and there is some work... Especially for languages I cannot read (basically all of them but English and French) if some of you could write a short summary of nice stories which happened with these blogs in your respective countries it would be great.

And, oh, some asked (hehe some French people actually who criticized me saying I would ask people to help me for free and then get money, so French !), I am really doing that for fun and to help the emergent democracy appear in Europe so I am not getting paid in any way to do that (I am still unsure the quality/timing of the chapter will be enough to join the book anyway but we would still have some work done on the topic).

Thanks again for all your help, and like George did for Greece and others, it would really help if some of you could now actually write some ideas too in addition to the links.

I like this collaborative work a lot, thanks again, a great experience, now I need to work myself more on it too !

Should anybody new want to add something to the Europe Emergent Democracy page, please feel free...

#&!§$* - lost email while synching email on two macs

I just lost all my email rules, some folders and some emails on my mac. I use a Powerbook G4 and at home a G5 and tried to use Synchronize to be able to use my email on the G5 and then put the modifications back on the G4 but he, no, it does not work well...

I used Lotus Notes on a PC years ago and the sync works perfectly well you can have exactly the same information on different PCs or Macs...

I use imap of course but I have too many emails in folders to keep everything on my .mac account, even with the 100Mb option.

Do you know any good tool I could use apart from Notes to have exactly the same offline email folders and email on my two macs and sync them ?

Thanks in advance... !

The Iraq War Reader

Micah Sifry (yes, brother of Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati), published a book, "The Iraq War Reader" and builds a discussion around political blogging and emergent democracy on his blog.

He is looking for examples of lively online political communities, examples of leaders of institutions blogging in their own voice and responding to comments and of bottom-up communities that are using the web to challenge hierarchical institutions that their members belong to.

Help Micah if you can !

Mena started a new blog

Mena's corner is Mena & Ben Trott new weblog, in addition to their personal weblogs and Six Log, the company weblog.

Mena has decided to have three ways of public communication, her personal blog, a corporate personal blog, and a multi-authored Six Apart blog. It is a great thing to have Mena express Six Apart's vision with her own voice.

I am more focusing only on this weblog as I find it difficult to express myself in different places, so it is more a mix of business and personal and can be confusing sometimes.

Kissing my Treo in Capital and Japanese toilets

Eric Tenin blogging for the French monthly "Capital" blogged me in this month's edition with my Treo (first and second page).
Some people told me I looked ridiculous on this picture, I actually think it is quite funny.

Eric Tenin talks in his article about new mobile uses and how chat can be used, I use chatter with any IM, but also Palm IRC to login to #joiito (not often enough) and HandRSS to get RSS on the Treo. The only drawback is the quality of the digital camera. These pictures having nice "Vongole" after great Bruschette and some Chianti in Milan last Friday were moblogged directly from the Treo.

Eric was also impressed by the moblogging of advanced toilets in Japan, I had to ask Joi how to use them (before using them, fortunately ;=). However the picture was not taken with the Treo.

The Daily Cartoon for March 28

Hehe, My wife wishes I forget my laptop more and more...

Daily Cartoons by Hugh Macleod

[via Ben Hammersley.com]

One year ago today

"[Weblogs] are an interesting phenomenon, but I don't think they will be as talked about in a year's time."

A quote attributed to Mike Smartt, editor of BBC News Online, and published a year ago today.

It's not quite as good as some of these, but such dismissive talk - like decent wine - always matures with age...

[via Neil McIntosh]

Excellent article of Howard Rheingold on e-Politics

Howard Rheingold talks about the Internet's effect on politics in an excellent Businessweek interview.... [via Loose Democracy]

Wearing black in protest

Glutter

CHINA HAS FURTHER CURBED FREE SPEECH AMONG ITS CITIZENS

THE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT HAS BANNED ALL TYPEPAD SITES WITHIN CHINA. ANOTHER BLOW TO FREESPEECH AND FREEDOM OF INFORMATION WITHIN THE COUNTRY.

THIS IS A SAD DAY.

GLUTTER TURNS BLACK AS A MEANS TO PROTEST AND BRING ATTENTION TO THIS ISSUE

If I could so much ask, I would like to suggest others who own typepad sites and other blogs to put a note on theirs as a means to spread the word.

So until TypePad blogs are unblocked, you will all have to bear with this ugly black border around my blog.

Pass it on.

Via North Korea zone and Joi Ito's Web

Off to Italy

Let's see what the Italian blogosphere and the pasta in Milan look like.

No blogger dinner there, too bad, I'm just going for the day for a quick meeting. Anybody interested in helping us translate Typepad in Italian ?

I am patched again because smoking sucks

When we signed our deal, I promised Barak I would stop smoking again. So I patched myself again. Nicotine patches help me more by sending a signal to my brain that "I cannot smoke" than by the Nicotine dose they send me.

I stopped smoking many times with patches, unfortunately often after 4 to 6 months I start again. You could say I have no will and that would be true.

When Joi quit drinking at the beginning of this year, I had already promised I would stop smoking at the same time and the stress of launching Ublog and Six Apart in Europe made me start again. I guess smoking stimulates my brain, like coffee. It gets me even more excited but the short term side effects (headaches, being a little tired) and the long term side effects (cancer) are enough reasons to stop again.

This time I will try hard not to smoke again. Prices of cigarets have gone very high recently in Europe but it does not really affect me as I can afford it. Each time I fly to California the fact that it is banned to smoke everywhere is really good and pushes me stopping immediately. If it was only me I would ask the EU just to ban it from all restaurants and public places and apply severe fines for people still smoking there.

We had a law years ago in France that smoking is prohibited in public places and restaurants should create special areas to respect non smokers. I really regret nobody really applies that law, because the fact that you cannot smoke at all in restaurants is a serious motivation to stop, because smokers really like to smoke in restaurants.

Anyway, let's see if I make it more than 3 months this time... I guess making it public on my blog may help me have more will to respect I promised I quit smoking.

Anybody with similar experiences and thoughts ?

Scoble helping Microsoft go from an institutional communication to human voices

Rob Scoble was mostly hired at Microsoft because of his influence through his blog. I like his explanation on how he hated Microsoft and then finally accepted to join them. I also like that his voice (and apparently that of 400 Microsoft bloggers) is not filtered by Microsoft.

I hope many companies let bloggers express themselves this way.

"So, Scoble, why do you work at Microsoft then? Doesn't sound like a good place to work, does it?

Well, some things got me excited. " Some things, only Rob ?

Rob is also a "Link-to Whore" !

Why politicians should be blogging ?

I have just updated the Europe Emergent Democracy wiki page I am writing with a text on why politicians should be blogging.

Of course, my examples are all from France, so I see many european friends have already started adding links to political blogs, if some of you could actually write some details about the experiences of these politicians/citizens in their respective countries or enrich my text with local examples or new ideas, it would be really great.

Thanks in advance.

Loic

A cool blog news diffusion index from Jarrod Trainque

I am probably the last one to discover it, but I have just found Jarrod Trainque's Blogdex vs. Popdex vs. Daypop aggregated page.

I like it, you get all the popularity indexes of these three on one page and the cool feature that would be a nice add-on to Technorati is that when you read one, it gets scratched (mmm not sure about my english here sorry) so you know if you have already read it.

Of course, I love Technorati, so maybe Dave there are some good ideas to take here which is put the old breaking news more concentrated in one page and the possibility for Technorati users to know if they have read something on the news too ?

I have even set this page as my default browser page for a few days to see if I continue to like it after a while...

European Political blogging & Emergent democracy please help !

I have started a new wiki page (thanks Joi) to try to gather most European experiences on political blogging and emergent democracy as Britt and Jon asked me if I could write as an emergency a european contribution for an O'Reilly book on Emergent Democracy.

There is a high chance I do not meet the date to give back my work but this could serve anyway as a basis to gather information on European political blogging and emergent democracy.

I have had few time to work on it up to now so these are just links for the time being but I will write a summary of some experiences from main politicians such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jean-François Copé and André Santini in France and write my thoughts on European political blogging on the wiki.

If you have some time to add what's happening in your country of Europe, I really appreciate your help !

Thoughts from any of the 10 countries joining the EU in May would also be a great feedback.

Germany: Typepad ranked best weblogs application by C'T mag

Typepad was ranked best Weblogs application by c't mag even though it is not available in German yet. We should have a German version available before the end of April.

Here is the pdf of the article (I hope it is OK for me to post this pdf, I could not find it online to link into it, if not, let me know and I will take out the file).

Technorati redesign

Dave Sifry and his team redesigned Technorati and added new features. Check it out !

Here is what Dave says about it:

I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:

1. Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.



2. Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.



3. Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.



4. Better explanations and interfaces for Current Events and NewsTalk (formerly called Breaking News). Click on the arrows to expand or compress blogger commentary, to allow a "quick view" or a more context-rich, deeper view into the data.



5. BookTalk (formerly called Hot Products), a listing of the most talked-about books, DVDs, and other products in the blogosphere in the last 24 hours.



6. Improved features for weblog authors: First, a more robust, reliable "Claim Your Blog" codebase. Once you, as an author, have claimed your weblog, you get a bunch of new features, including the blog rank for your blog. (Find out how far off of the top 100 you are...) We're also working on a number of other "Author Dashboard" type features coming soon.



7. Caching, speedups, and bug fixes. Almost too many to mention.

A few points to note:

1. Response time of the searches is still not reliably fast enough. Some searches are fast, some take a long time. We know this is unacceptable, and we are working on this. Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.



2. We're working on providing RSS and email watchlists for keyword searches as well, but it wasn't ready for the cut, so it'll go out as soon as it is ready, which should be quite soon. In the meantime, you can do keyword searches on the site, but can't get RSS or email subscriptions yet.

Send us feedback! Use feedback@technorati.com to send feedback to the Technorati team, or send comments directly to me at david-blog@sifry.com. Your thoughts and comments are extremely important to us.

Thanks again for all your support.

[Technorati: Sifry's Alerts]

Six Apart and Ublog SA sign an exclusive representation agreement in Europe

Mena, Ben & me

Mena, Ben, Barak and myself have been already working on this agreement for many weeks, I am very glad and honored to announce that Six Apart and my company Ublog SA have signed yesterday an exclusive representation agreement.

Ublog SA becomes the exclusive agent of Six Apart in Europe, Middle-East and Africa and has started distributing its leading weblogs publishing products, Typepad and Movable Type.

Typepad is already available in French and Spanish and will also be available in the next weeks in German and Dutch. Most European languages will follow shortly. Local Typepad and Movable Type websites will be launched very soon.

Asia, Europe and the USA gathered in California

As Six Apart launched successful partnerships in the USA and Asia such as NTT and Nifty's Cocolog (one of the main ISPs in Japan), Ublog's team in Europe is already offering Typepad and Movable Type products to European ISPs, Telcos, Portals and Media Companies.

Current Ublog platform users will be able to upgrade to Typepad accounts and seamlessly import their Ublog weblogs if they like. Ublog will maintain its popular free offering with more than 11 000 weblogs in France and make similar products available in Europe.

Part of the team @work

Our European team is very proud to join forces with Six Apart's visionary team that now has global representation in the USA, Asia and Europe.

Thank you Mena, Ben, Barak and of course Joi for your trust !

In France blogs (and politicians blogs) go on mainstream TV tomorrow

The France 2 TV team managed by Laura Tenoudji


Following my meeting in Davos with Jean-Paul Chapel of France 2 and the short broadcast he already made, we had a TV interview yesterday for one of the main public TV channel in France, France 2.



Thanks Christie (/maviesansmoi), Jules (/simpoulpement), David et Thomas of the DSK blog (Dominique Strauss-Kahn is one of the most popular politician in France and may be a candidate for the next Presidential elections), Jean-Charles blogmaster of the Jean-François Copé weblog, (the French Government Spokesperson and candidate for the upcoming regional elections) and Mathieu (/boonty) for having participated to the broadcast. I am trying to get as many politicians with any political ideas blogging.



It will be broadcasted tomorrow on France 2, Thursday 17 at 6h45 on "Télématin", the highest audience news broadcast in the morning. In the meantime, here are some pictures of the making-of. Very impressive to see a crew of 4 people during 2 hours for a 3 minutes show.




Thanks again Laura !

China shutting down blogs

Isaac Mao

The biggest ever block on blog in China

Blogbus.com, one of the biggest blogging service in China, has been ordered to shut down it's service from noon today.

[Joi Ito's Web]

China shutting down blogs

...

[Dominique Strauss-Kahn]

...

Meet the Düsseldorf and Cologne bloggers

More pictures of the dinner here.

Mario Sixtus is a journalist blogger (or a blogger journalist ?) and also an entrepreneur as he had a web agency before. Now he is an entrepreneur journalist as he blogs and writes as a Freelancer. Mario regrets there are few blogs for the time being in Germany and what he thinks is that regarding Internet services Germans usually start slowly but when they start they catch up very fast (Ebay in Germany is huge for example, even though it took some time to start).

Mario also thinks the traditional media will be in trouble if they do not get the blogs and become blog friendly (free content, use of permalinks, syndication, blogs as media sources, etc) in the future and totally facts check his ass before he writes something.

Oliver Thylmann is a very cool German Entrepreneur currently doing an MBA and he blogs all the notes from his lessons. Imagine if all students started to do this ?! All the knowledge of the universities would be out and available. We could probably create live rankings of universities based on the quality of their lessons. Not sure the teachers will appreciate ? What do you think ?



Oliver also explained us that he was getting 75 to 100 € a month from Google Ads and the click through was very high and especially when he decided to put the ads between the text of a blog post and the comments.


Olivier is addicted to his Nokia 6600 as he showed us all his cool applications on it (IM, etc). Did you know you could also blog to your Typepad blog directly from the phone ?

Like Lyssa, Ingmar Bornholz asked me to call him by his weblog pseudo, Fred and his currently very busy by the launch of two companies at the same time.



Very nice also to meet the bloggers behind Mehrzweckbeutel.de even though unfortunately I cannot read it and the other bloggers or future bloggers.



Thanks again Mario and Oliver for organizing the dinner and sorry for leaving a little early (1AM...) as I had to crash in my hotel as an emergency.



I am back home, exhausted, but I had such a good time in Germany, thank you all for your help organizing it.

Breakfast with Torsten Jacobi in Hamburg

Very interesting breakfast with TJ as everybody calls him even though I had only 3h30 of sleep following our dinner with Jörg and Heiko I managed to have good discussions with TJ on entrepreneurship, the main focus of his weblog and also about the 12 weblogs he launched in English and German (such as the Universities Weblog, the Parenting weblog, etc) on his new project, Creative Weblogging.







TJ's Creative Weblogging gathers good bloggers and launches vertical weblogs, pretty much like WeblogsInc and Always-on are doing. Even though TJ is based in Hamburg, he operates as a virtual company and most of the weblogs are in English.



I think Creative Webloggging, Weblogsinc and Always-on have good times ahead by producing excellent content at very low cost and we will see more and more of these blog-based vertical content on-line media.



Good luck TJ !

Meet the Hamburg bloggers

We had an incredible evening yesterday with the Hamburg bloggers and so many discussions around political blogging, Hamburg blogging, European and German blogging of course and even erotic blogging (mmm?) with Lyssa.




Jimm (did I spell it correctly ? I could not find your blog on the wiki sorry if I made a mistake) is a serial entrepreneur and Lyssa is one of the most famous blogger girls in Germany, she started her Diaryland blog two years ago and is both happy and depressed to launch her new movable type blog I heard today. From her blog, she discovered her passion about writing and she got so successful (Lyssa blogs in German but there is a hope she starts in english too !) that Lyssa was contacted by a major editor in Germany and has almost published her first book.





Lyssa is happy and also depressed by the idea of moving from one platform to another, losing all Lyssa's Technorati cosmos so maybe you can help when she moves by linking it...



Lyssa is not her real name, but so many people call her Lyssa now that she considers asking the German government to add Lyssa to her passport in addition to her real name !





I met so many great people I cannot blog it all but Nico gave me a lot of feedback on the German blogosphere that is really starting to grow fast, he launched blogg.de and I enjoyed meeting him. We even said we would launch the European Blog Platforms Association as we both like talking to our competitors and share ideas.



You will find many blogs from the people who came on the wiki. (feel free to add your blog of course).



I also uploaded my pictures on this photo album.


Thank you all again for the fun and Heiko and Nico, -you are definitely the "Hamburg nodes"- for organizing the party !



Of course Tarik and I enjoyed very much our late red hot district walk in Hamburg with Heiko and Lyssa but I am not going to blog it ;=)



Please ping me all when you go to Paris and we'll organize a party there too for you.

Great arts & blogging dinner in Hamburg

Thanks again Heiko and Jörg for the dinner and the great discussions yesterday.



What's really amazing is how much we had in common and how much I felt we already knew each other by reading our blogs before meeting in person. Heiko, Jörg and I really feel so strong blogs are changing the way we think, behave, make business, network... We were already old friends before meeting each other and of course meeting in person is something we had to do.



We had great discussions about old europe and how we believe the european blogger generation can become influential in the near future and hopefully do something so that Europe does not get even older. Let's bridge together the european blogosphere and change Europe so that India and China do not eat us very fast in the global agenda.



Jörg has taken us deep into his thoughts about arts. Jörg Heikhaus is the former CEO of the German branch of one of the past (or present still I don't know) leading web agency in Europe, Icon Media Lab and recently decided he would spend most of his time on his passion, arts.



Jörg has launched a new generation arts gallery. Jörg is doing with arts the same as what happens in the music industry with the Internet. Now that he has the physical place, Jörg is using the Internet and will also start a blog to make everybody discover artists who are not known yet and would not be selected by traditional galleries. We had great discussions on how blogging and the Internet could help these artists get known and sell their work without or with fewer intermediaries. The major difference as Jörg describes it very well with digital music and arts is that most arts work must be seen in reality and its digital form does not have the same effect. This is why Jörg needed to start to have a physical exhibition place before using the Internet.



I liked very much the work of Ki Yoon Ko currently presented and especially this women face:







Jörg his also an artist himself and showed us a preview of his own work that he will be presenting next month. I will really try to come back to Hamburg to see the exhibit.

Thank you very much Heiko and Jörg again, this was a fantastic evening, I am now really looking forward to following Jörg's thoughts on his future blog.

Here is what Heiko said about our evening on his blog this morning:

I know Loic will be reading this as soon as he gets his Wi-Fi hooked up so I should just post a picture and leave it there. But I just can't refrain from telling everyone to be at Marktstube tonight (Wednesday) to meet Mr. Enthusiasm in person. You won't regret it.

From left to right: Loic le Meur, Jörg Heikhaus, Tarik Joniot and me, at Jörg's heliumcowboy artspace.

Fun in Frankfurt, bridging the european blogosphere

Thank you all for your warm welcome and the great dinner discussions and food yesterday in the basements of Frankfurt ! We talked about the classics: fun in Germany, blogging, bridging the European blogosphere, emergent democracy in Europe, blogs and journalism, corporate blogging and of course beer and german food !







You will find more pictures of the dinner here, with Robert, Stephan, Tobias, Jacques and Ulrich ! I guess Jacques and Ulrich will start their own blog today ;=)



Tarik, who works also at Ublog apparently had a lot of fun too.











Thanks again Robert for organizing everything !

Low blogging currently, big deal soon to be announced

Sorry about my very low blogging currently, I have been preparing a major deal for my company Ublog that I should announce very soon (maybe tomorrow), I am really sorry about that, hope to be back soon !

Final schedule and some help needed for next week in Germany

Thanks for all your interest, I am really impressed and looking forward to meet you all next week.



The final schedule is on the wiki page.


I would really appreciate some final help (but maybe I am abusing your hospitality ;=) for:

- a restaurant in Frankfurt for monday where we can have dinner so that we can make a reservation and update the wiki

- possibly a hotel in Frankfurt nearby with Wi-Fi/DSL ?

- a restaurant in Düsseldorf for thursday to make reservations

- possibly a hotel nearby there with Wi-Fr/DSL too ?



Let's have fun ! Thank you all again.

Change in the German bloggers dinners for tuesday, sorry

Sorry about the fact that I have to stay two days in Hamburg so I had to cancel the Cologne Dinner on tuesday night, if you were in this dinner could you join us in Düsseldorf on thursday ?


If anybody wants to join us for dinner on tuesday night in Hamburg, welcome, we'll have two dinners in Hamburg and thanks again for having the blogger meeting organised on wednesday at Marktstube, Marktstr. 10, at 19:30, I am looking forward to meeting you there !


Let's bring the european bloggers mafia together and change Europe ;=)


I updated the schedule.

Back from Madrid

Thank you for all the tapas, they were great, and the appointments to launch Ublog Spain excellent too, thanks again.


I discover the size of the disaster resulting from being off-line for two days, if you sent me email, comments, cosmos, etc I apologize for being late !