Loïc Le Meur blog

Just changed my blog banner, what do you think ?

Cool & funny or egocentric again & it sucks and I have to replace it immediately ?

(For those of you who may be wondering, I am crazy about Kite Surfing)

Thanks for the banner, Boris

First ISP in Europe launched on TypePad

Jean-Michel Gobet, Mena Trott, me, Xavier Gandillot.

Neuf Telecom, one of the fastest growing Telco & ISP in France with about one million clients just launched Neufblog.

We are very proud to announce that we launched our first ISP partnership in Europe on TypePad, after the launch of NTT and Nifty in Japan.

Neuf Telecom has chosen TypePad to offer a free blog to all their clients as well as the complete high end TypePad paying blogging solutions, the detailed offer is here [FR].

Here is the (French) press release.

Thank you Neuf Telecom for your trust !

Looking for a Perl software Engineer

We are looking for a Perl software Engineer to join Six Apart Europe, to work on TypePad and Movable Type. Based in Paris. Job description follows, thanks for your interest.

The death of a blogger

Sorry to hear this via Heiko: The death of a blogger

A German blogger committed suicide. Peter Praschl provides some emotional context.

Terrible.

A case study of a good use of blogs in Corporate Communications and how we all care about Yogurt

In this Wired article about Blogon [via Robert], Six Apart and Microsoft, "The Empire Blogs Back", Anil talks about the 230 employee yogurt maker Stonfield Farm, which competes against dairy (French!) giant Dannon.

It is really interesting to see how they use blogs and Movable Type for their corporate communication, they opened a blogs section on their corporate home page to explain to people what it is and then they have five different types of weblogs:

The Dairy Planet that talks about how they try to nurture and sustain the environment
Strong Women Daily News which presents fitness and health tips to Women (they even have a Strong Women Summit)
The Bovine Bugle is a report directly from one of their farms and gives the inside story to all customers
The daily Scoop tells about everything happening in the company, in a funny way
Creating Healthy Kids gives updates on their Menu for Change healthy food in schools program

I used to run a Web Agency and I remember how difficult it was to find content and creative ideas for our consumer brands clients as usually their marketing is limited to heavy TV advertising, and on-line, you need content. Well, the way they use blogs there is just excellent and I guess could be a showcase for what could become many small businesses or well known brands dead corporate sites.

Of course, they commit to regular updates which they seem to be doing fine, involving many employees in the Company who blog themselves.

Start a business - 7: Entrepreneurs do make mistakes, learn from them and react. PR and blogs and how your Company should deal with them

I take the recent events I have been going through as an opportunity to continue my series "Create a company" which I will just call now "Start a Business" as many people suggested me I should.

Good entrepreneurs are not the ones that never make mistakes, they are the ones that learn the most and react the best to their mistakes.
I don't know if I am a good entrepreneur, but I know I make a lot of mistakes.

I hear a lot about people who talk about my mistakes as an Entrepreneur in 8 years of business, usually they talk about them criticizing me sometimes strongly.

I make mistakes all the time, every day. I learn much more from my mistakes than my right decisions and people who want to become entrepreneurs often do not launch their projects because they fear making wrong decisions. I believe they should just take it as a normal entrepreneurial behavior.

Same with people who laugh at entrepreneurs who make mistakes, they clearly do not understand it is in the exact definition of an entrepreneur do make mistakes all the time. The people who do not take risks make fewer mistakes.

One of the last mistakes I have made is to disclose [FR] the information of my company Ublog being acquired by Six Apart to the French press before releasing it on my own blog and to Ublog users.

I read many people writing about my mistake who say "How can he make such mistakes having graduated from the business school that he did? Didn’t they teach him communications and marketing there?". Well precisely this is not the type of thing people learn at business schools -or at least the type of thing "I" learnt-.

How do you get PR ?

You learn PR by experimenting it. When I graduated from the business school, I did not even know that a PR agency even existed and I was wondering how my competitors or other companies got the press they got. Since the launch of Ublog as a company, we got a lot of press [FR] in France about Blogging, Ublog and Typepad. Now I see many bloggers in general or bloggers from competition who wonder how and why we got so much press, why does the journalists only talk about our solutions and not theirs, and they even laughed at the journalists on their blogs calling the articles advertising.

Well, as I commented on some blogs talking about this, getting press is not rocket science for most people and for most journalists, the subject must be interesting for the journalists, you have to prepare their work as much as you can if you want to speed the process by writing notes about what you may want the press to talk about (so that their articles are easier to write), and finally, you have to get the message to them.

For this, if you have had relationships with journalists for years -like me, but I started with none-, it helps, but also a good PR agency helps. The agency will write a press release if you are not capable of doing it yourself, send it to their journalist database if you don't have your own and call them back to possibly get their interest if you are lazy, don't have the time, or don't simply don't want to do it yourself.

Obviously, my above remarks cannot be generalized and good journalists do not wait for Press Releases or calls from PR agencies to arrive, they choose a subject, make an exhaustive research on it, verify their sources and in that process may finally integrate information coming from PR agencies, but not always.

How may you even get more PR ?

So there is something I learnt over the years is that when you have something important to announce for your company, your PR agency will always ask you to give the exclusivity of the information to some influential titles to try to get a better article. What they call "exclusivity of the release" is actually just giving the information to some journalists before others. When I was running a Web Agency back in 1996, we kept using this as we kept being asked by journalists the exclusivity of the new competitions we won (usually large brands such as Chanel -the site design is still mostly the same graphical charter we designed in 1998 or 99- would always make agencies compete to win the business).

So when I announced the acquisition of my Company by Six Apart, my PR agency and myself called a few journalists, some of them were interested by the news, and some of them asked us for exclusivity. I thought a lot about it as I know how PR is changing with blogging and I hesitated a lot this time, because not only did I think about the consequences with the bloggers, but I also actually hate this because when you give exclusivity to some journalists, the other ones are upset.

Discussing with some of them, I finally decided to give only a few hours advantage to Le Journal du Net (article [FR]), one of the most known online source in France for Internet business, and in print to Les Echos (article [FR]) which is one of the first financial daily in France, it belongs to the Financial Times. I apologize to other French journalists who may be reading this, but both journalists who wrote these articles insisted on the exclusivity and I accepted. Actually, Le Journal du Net did not benefit much of the advantage, although the article was ready quickly, they only uploaded it on their servers hours after some of their competitors. This I would say was not a mistake PR wise, it was a mistake blogging World wise.

The old rules have already changed, blogging changes the deal

Obviously I had thought of sending a special email or releasing the information on the Ublog home page before or at the same time as the press and honestly I had decided to do so. Discussing with my team, we talked about the impact it could have on the few angry Ublog users (on 22 000 blogs created even though not all are active) as we already had a lot of discussions months ago when we disclosed the fact that Ublog became exclusive representative of Six Apart in Europe, which this time we disclosed first on my blog (on my Ublog blog [FR] and my brand new TypePad blog [FR]).

The fact that we released it first on my blog before the press did not change anything to the fact that some Ublog users were not happy about the news and we launched a discussion immediately [FR] about it to try to solve the issue. So back to the decision about informing our users first, we had learnt from the past experience that some users were unsatisfied by us offering them to switch to TypePad (if they wanted to) and we knew these users will react strongly to any news anyway.

We also believed most of the Ublog users did not care at all about the news of Ublog being acquired by Six Apart as our product offering would not change at all (TypePad was already offered to them for a long time). As we expected the strong critics and insults from the users that we knew would react, we decided not to send anything to anybody. Having seen the reactions we had recently, this proved to be true in most cases and we saw many comments that showed that people do not care much about the company being acquired but more about the product offer, and that is normal. However this still was a mistake as it gave an additional argument to the angry users to say how poorly we communicate with them and gave some people interested by the story such as Stephanie (note) strong arguments too to explain why we don't talk well to our users.

So yes, it was a mistake, the articles we got in the press were clearly not worth all this.

Now if you look at it in a more detailed way, I think again about people who tell me that I should have learnt at my business school not to make mistakes like this one. What they do not take into account is that generally the rules of anything in business change all the time and Entrepreneurs learn more by experience than by what they are taught at school (actually many do not have business education and the business school I graduated from trains many managers and very few Entrepreneurs).

This time is special though, I have been reading and blogging a lot about Journalism & Blogging. My three main sources on this topic are obviously Joi, Dan and his new blog about his book, and the excellent PR Blog I can only advise you to read (check this interview of Dan on it). PR are changing completely with blogging, not only because the journalists do not have the exclusivity of writing the news anymore, not only because they want the Companies and the PR agencies to talk to them in a different way, but more importantly the clients of all products and services of all companies start to write their thoughts about them every day.

How did we react to the angry U-blog users ?

Immediately at the time of the launch of Typepad on Ublog, back in May 2004, we started a discussion on my post [FR] about the test Ublog users were doing with TypePad and I tried to listen as much as I could. There are tens of comments on these posts, with many satisfied bloggers comments too, and we also answered many emails. What people wanted mainly to hear is that we were not of course asking them to switch to TypePad by force, it was only an option, that the Ublog service as they knew it would stay if they chose not to shift. Also, to thank them for their trust since the beginning, we offered our paying users to have a TypePad pro account, a 15 euros per month value, for 4 euros, which is what they were paying. TypePad Pro has many more features than the old Ublog paid product, even though it lacks integration in the Ublog community. Many understood and either shifted or stayed on Ublog, which is fine too. The most angry people asked me to organize a chat, which I gladly accepted, and they unfortunately never joined it.

What was very difficult for us as well, is that there was no common voice, no common grouped request from them, even though they form a community. After this failed chat, the comments stopped on my blog and the complaints stopped for months. In the meantime, about 10 000 new Ublog blogs were created, not all of them being still active today of course.

When we announced the acquisition two weeks ago, I started a discussion [FR] again on my French blog (even though I started it too late) and it is going on now. As I have the same frustration as last time about the fact that a grouped angry users request does not exist, I have put together a proposal [FR] for them. In short, I reassured them again that
-if they do not want to switch to TypePad, they can stay on Ublog, we will maintain the service as long as we can
-we will make TypePad blogs ping the Ublog homepage so that the TypePad bloggers feel as still being part of the Ublog community if they like
-we will make the old paying Ublog product become free for its current users at the subscription renewal date, but we will leave them with all the current product features they have

One day after having posted this proposal, it seems that people came down and that we are solving as best as we can the issue. I continue to listen and to talk.

Now be careful, what happened to us will happen to you, too

We are a blogging company. What we wake up for every morning is to provide our clients the best tools to express themselves and build an audience (be it only their friends & family or a wider one). So no, we are not surprised that our clients use our own tools to say that they are not happy about our own services, this is absolutely normal. It just changes completely the way a Company interacts with its clients in general, it is happening to us first because we provide the tools (all our competitors, too).

This is why I think it is not fair and fair at the same time to say that all blogging companies communicate poorly with their users (see the comments: "Every blogging company whose services I have used has had an awful record for communicating with their customers"). Now when it comes to people wonder if I have tried to hide this issue to Six Apart, which is obviously not true, I am glad that Stephanie quickly updated her post.

We are all learning how to communicate in this new world. I am learning everyday and I learnt a lot in the last week alone. Don't think it will be only limited to blogging tools providers, expect your clients to "seem to feel that it is them who actually own the company" as well anytime soon. It is already happening to many companies such as Netflix, with the unofficial Netflix blog, hacking Netflix that the corporate communications department is ignoring so much right now (for how long with 30 000 customers reading and posting on it ?). I agree with the main author of the blog, "I think most companies don't get blogs yet".

This is going to spread to all businesses and we will all have to deal with it. As far as mistakes are concerned, expect me to do many, many, many more mistakes, and I will always try to listen, learn and react the best way I can, such as this time with close to a hundred comments on my French post that addresses the issue with the angry Ublog customers. I also address the issue in english too, to respond to this post, as not only your customers take part in the debate but also anybody interested in the issue.

As Didier says, "we see here clearly a side effect of using the blogs as a base for business communication. a few unsatisfied people can have a huge impact on the overall customer community and its feeling. some posts are acting as "unguided missiles" in the blogosphere. on the other hand, is the propagation of information really working in another way in the "real" world?"

I like this new World a lot, even though it is sometimes very hard to learn how to deal with it and it is clearly not the last time it will happen. This will just become business as usual. All Companies will have to listen to their clients and people interested in their products much more than they are used to, and they will have to talk to them in a different way, not through the standard "official story", which is dead.

I really hope the issue with our angry Ubloggers will be solved soon even though I have no doubts it is impossible to please everybody when you have thousands of users of any product.

New Technorati design

Congrats !

MT3 plugin contest

We have released the names of the Movable Type plugin contest winners. Sorry to blog a bit late about it.

Congratulations to all the winners.

"U-Blog, Six Apart, and Their Angry Bloggers": first answer.

As some of you may have read, Stéphanie has posted a note about a few French U-bloggers being angry about the way we introduced TypePad to them. I will write a longer note on this subject but I would like to share with you the comment I have posted today on Stephanie's note and Jeff's blog as a start.

"Hi Stéphanie, thank you for the last update on your post that takes out any doubt readers of Jeff’s note may have about me hiding the issue to Six Apart which would be quite stupid from me, here are some notes about the story that I have also posted on Jeff Jarvis’ blog.

About the fact that there are only a few angry U-blog users on 22000 I agree that they should be taken care of and that is what I believe I have been doing since it started and I also spend hours answering comments on my last post in French.

The problem has started to happen as early as we announced the Typepad exclusive representation partnership in Europe, months ago.

Six Apart US has known about it since the very first day (and even before as we all thought there were risks that it would happen and difficult to avoid it by introducing Typepad on Ublog) and therefore months before the acquisition of Ublog, it is not really my style in business to hide anything to my partners, Stephanie may check that with any partner I have worked with in the last 8 years of business.

I had written a post immediately about it in French here [FR] and discussed with the angry Ubloggers immediately, with tens of comments on this post and a discussion that started with my clients.

Some users offered me to organize a chat with me which I gladly accepted and just before the hour chosen for the chat, nobody showed up, so I also think we tried to discuss as much as we could with our users.

Anyway, this has been an issue for a while, limited to a few number of U-blog users as most of them are obviously happy, some moved obviously to Typepad too. The number of blogs created on Ublog went from 2000 when I acquired it to more than 22 000 with a strong growth, I think this shows that we have a few happy users too…

I have posted again [FR] about it on my French blog and there are tens of comments so the discussion is going on again and I am trying to understand the issue better and solve it as much as I can with my team.

If you are interested in this issue, stay tuned for a post on my side soon. Thanks."

Thanks Oliver

Thanks to your post Oliver, I now have some new really interesting Google juice.

Well did I have to re-post all your note with NetNewsWire ? Oops, do I want this traffic ?

The founder of Oh My News says "blogging is quite different"

"Blogging is quite different," says Min. "One reason why people write for us is that they can get huge numbers of eyeballs, sometimes 100,000 clicks for a single story, if it makes the top [of the page]. If you want to make your name, this is the place!"

I disagree. I think bloggers can get the same type of audience on one single story too, if they just get a link from a highly visited blog. Nanopublishing will help.

Dan points us to this interview of the founder of Oh My News.

I just started reading the new "We the media" blog about Dan's book. Thanks for choosing MT, Dan.

"Indians Go Home, but Don't Leave U.S. Behind", is globalization good for India ?

This interesting NY Times article about Indians going back home makes me think about globalization, of course.

"Drawn by a booming economy, in which outsourcing is playing a crucial role, and the money to buy the lifestyle they had in America, Indians are returning in large numbers, many to this high-technology hub.

What began as a trickle in the late 1990's is now substantial enough to be talked about as a "reverse brain drain.'' By one estimate, there are 35,000 "returned nonresident Indians'' in Bangalore, with many more scattered across India.

For this still developing country, the implications of the reverse migration are potentially vast. "

Obviously we all know how high is the Indian growth, and I am convinced that Indians having learnt in the US coming back plays a major role.

"This impulse is not universally welcomed by some Indians who never left and who see a globalized elite - many of whom now carry American passports, not Indian - importing a Western culture as distorting in its way as British colonialism.

Still, returned reformers are already sparking change. Srikanth Nadhamuni, who helped design the Intel Pentium chip, is now applying his formidable skills to designing a software platform that could revolutionize the administration of India's local governments. "

I remember having heard a US head of a company at the World Economic Forum say "soon our kids will take their MBAs in India", which was a pretty tough comment of course.

It is a tough question but I actually think globalization has been good for India in the sense that it restores growth. It is good that India grows so fast, it pushes us to react to it, and Old Europe and France have troubles ahead if they do not restore their own growth. The raise of India and China may help it.

What is your opinion on this effect of globalization ?

Welcome, Typepad Germany

We are glad and proud to announce that we have just launched Typepad Germany. A thousand thanks to all our team whose hard work made this launch possible and special congratulations to Heiko, Jean-Yves and Victor whose blogs have just been changed into a German interface as well as mine to celebrate !

Joi, you have been faster than me to announce it this is not fair you are playing on your time difference advantage :=)

See you later Barcelona and the Forum Barcelona 2004

Lots of great talks about entrepreneurship, lots of great people, lots of fun today in Barcelona.

I am too tired to blog my day there, but here are many pictures I took at the Forum Barcelona 2004, some of them are really weird !

Anyway, thanks for all the "pan con tomate" and special thanks to Angel Cabrera for having invited me to talk there today and see you tomorrow.

Interesting survey of blog readers by Blogads

eMarketer

Are Blogs Ready for Prime-Time?

June 16, 2004

...A partial profile of blog readers reveals:

* 54% of their news consumption is online
* 21% are bloggers themselves
* 46% describe themselves as opinion makers

...As Henry Copeland, author of the report and CEO of Blogads, summed up: "86% say that blogs are either useful or extremely useful as sources of news or opinion. 80% say they read blogs for news they can't find elsewhere. 78% read because the perspective is better. 66% value the faster news. 61% say that blogs are more honest. Divided on so much else, blog readers appear united in their dissatisfaction with conventional media and their rabid love of blogs."

Interesting statistics derived from a survey of of over 10,000 blog readers. Also asserts that blog readers are older, smarter and spend more money that most people think.

via Joi, Smart Mobs

What Iraqi bloggers are saying

"You will be surprised of the number of bright and intelligent young people in Iraq who are willing to start their own blogs and express their ideas and opinions freely, especially that they have nothing to fear from doing so any more..."

A good article in the Daily Star, by William Fisher, on blogs in Irak

Thanks, Eric.

Off to Barcelona for the Forum 2004, Speech on the role of corporations in the 21st Century

I am going to Barcelona, to speak at the Forum Barcelona 2004 about entrepreneurship during the day partly about the role of corporations in the 21st Century.

The contents of this conference day is in pdf if you are interested, I will try to blog from the panel...

Testing Google Ads

I am testing Google Ads, sorry for the pollution !

Yes, I know there are competitors on my blog, and I know, there is a filter I can use :=)

Google News in RSS

I have been looking for this for a long time, most Google News feeds in RSS, thanks to Googlemania and via RSSReporter which is a French directory of RSS feeds.

Confronting change and Entrepreneurship in Europe

I like Andrew's blog that I just discovered, Alteraxion. Here are two very good posts if you are interested in entrepreneurship:

Confronting change
Good news and bad news for European entrepreneurs

This last post mentions how worse Entrepreneurs in Europe are in the Internet sector compared to US startups who are used to kill us or buy us. Too bad I don't have much time to comment this one now, of course having just sold my company to Six Apart, I have some comments to make on this post !

The Killer App

The Killer App

[Frank via Jim via Ross Mayfield's Weblog ]

Where PR is Going and How to Make sure You Get There First

I like this article of the Global PR Blog Week giving you good advice on how to get better results in PR.

Is blogging the ultimate social networking tool ?

Blogging is definitely an excellent social networking tool, I agree with Peter Caputa's post: "blogging is the Ultimate Social Software"

However, when I was that enthusiastic with Reid Hoffman, head of Linked In, I remember Reid very clearly asking me: "Do you think everybody will blog ?" I wish, but no, not everybody will blog, and for a long time, that is what will make blogs a social software for bloggers between bloggers only.

PR, Journalists and blogs, make sure you read this

If you are a PR professional, a journalist or a blogger, you may want to read this Conversation with Dan Gillmor

14 Million page views for a few blogs, congrats Nick...

Nick Denton, who is the publisher of Gawker, Gizmodo, Fleshbot and other vertical weblogs publishes a graph of the stats growth of the weblogs. Amazing. 14 Million page views a month.

Nick reports lots of traffic coming to see the story about a Cameron Diaz soft S&M video...

Mena received flowers from a French guy to apologize !

When Mena announced the acquisition of Ublog on her weblog, Mena got trackbacked by Sam, a French guy saying Mena was not welcome in France. He apologized and sent her flowers.

Do you have any good professional experiences with Linked In and other Social Software ?

The Wall Street Journal is preparing an article about Professional Social Software such as Linked In .

If you have experiences with professional contacts made via Linked In or other Social Networks or if you have hired or have been hired via these networks, please let me know I will either talk about it or suggest the journalist to call you if you are interested.

Ublog acquired by Six Apart and joining its new management team

I am very proud to announce that my company Ublog becomes Six Apart Europe and I will be Executive VP of Six Apart, joining forces with of course Ben and Mena and their team and Barak -who was just officially named CEO of Six Apart but I have been working with Barak for already more than six months- and Andrew, just officialized too.

A good time for me to thank Mena, Ben and Barak for their trust, my team in Europe for their work and Joi for having introduced me to Six Apart .

Today is my birthday, I am pretty sure this is the best birthday I have ever had !

I will write more about this partnership when I have finished this unusual day and enjoyed the July 14th Fireworks in France.

An excellent coverage of the European Blog Talk 2.0

I have just browsed through The Guardian's excellent coverage of Blog Talk 2.0, that I missed.

Fahrenheit 911 factchecks

Boing Boing

Fahrenheit 911 factchecks

Here are Michael Moore's extensive factchecking notes on Fahrenheit 911. Link (via Kottke via Joi)

Let's fact check everything.

FCC Boss Chairman Powell started his weblog

Read today in Wired News (thanks Marco !): "WASHINGTON -- U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell has started his own Web log to reach out to the high-tech community and bypass the scores of Washington lobbyists who typically skulk around his office.

Powell, who wants to avoid regulating new technologies like Web-based telephone service for fear of stifling innovation, said he started the blog to encourage the high-tech industry to get involved because its past practice of flying under the radar to avoid regulations would no longer work. "

If you like wine

If you like wine, you could read this blog about wine.

Happy birthday, GSM

Jim blogs about GSM being 13 years. If you think about it, it is amazing the penetration rate in such a small period of time...

Ten years of life less for smokers

A survey over 50 years (in French) (woaw) shows that smokers die ten years before non-smokers in average.

This year, I have stopped smoking ten times in the last six months, and the last time is yesterday morning, I have put another Nicotine patch on that woke me up at 5 this morning and let me blog early !

Fortunately I will be 32 within two days (yeah I was born on Bastille day July 14th, don't laugh) and the survey says that if you stop around 30th your life duration remains normal.

Come-on Loïc, smoking is stupid and childish, you will make it this time :=)

Checked into a Habbo Hotel Lately?

I hear a lot of buzz everywhere about Habbo Hotel (via The Social Software Weblog). The concept is far from being new but this one seems to catch up. Checked into a Habbo Hotel Lately?

Canadian Press writer Angela Pacienza, in The Winnipeg Sun, calls Habbo Hotel a—Vibrant vitual hangout. Habbos have made it to Canadian shores. Other Habbo Hotels can be found in England, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain.

Mix in a little chat, instant messaging, and social networking along with an avatar body of your choice and you have Habbo Hotel.

This virtual hangout is free lest you find yourself desirous of additional furniture for your room or fancy a video game or two—and those can be purchased for pennies a piece. Heavily moderated and profanity free (all conversations are filtered before being posted to your screen), Habbos are designed for 13-20 year olds and have about 2 million ‘unique’ users already checked in to Habbo Hotels worldwide.

Anyone checked in to a Habbo Hotel lately?

Performance improvements

I find both Typepad and Technorati very fast recently, both teams have done major performance improvements, do you feel the same ?

Great and exhausting week with Ben & Mena

Sorry for not having blogged more this week but I spend the week with Ben & Mena in Europe and we went from meetings to meetings in Munich, Frankfurt, London and finally Paris (just after they went to Blog Talk in Austria...). I do apologize for those of you who wanted to meet them but could not, we had a very busy schedule.

I moblogged a bit (and will continue to) on my moblog (Mena says "Vive les US", in the London Underground Mena was upset, Mena presenting the weather at the BBC (better pictures taken by Tom), we met Euan and Tom, we had an interview in a London pub, and took the train just after Ben woke up and met Allan. The day before we had a blogger dinner in Munich.

Here are some pictures of part of the team in Paris

JY, Ben, Mena, me and Olivier

We had some fun in a hip bar in Paris

Even some dancing and Mena trying to start a new way of smoking

There are some more pictures we took meeting partners that are under heavy embargo :=)

Ah before I forget, here is one with Chryde in Paris:

And a last one with Richard:

Congrats Dave for tracking one new weblog every 5.8 seconds in the World

I know this is already 24 hours old news but the growth is amazing, congrats Dave !

Turn any website into an RSS feed for $2

via Boing Boing Blog: Turn any website into an RSS feed for $2

Bootleg RSS, a service for scraping websites and turning them into RSS, is taking requests. If there's a site you'd like RSS-ified, ping Carlo and he'll make it into a feed for $2.

Now, I've thought about the how. Hosting feeds costs money, scraping feeds is taking time, and maintaining a feed can take some time as well. So, I'm offering you the following service. First read the list of things you get, then see whether you'd be willing to shell out a small one-time fee of $2.

Link

Off to Munich, Frankfurt, London and Paris

Traveling all around this week, sorry I missed Blog Talk but I heard many people had fun and interesting time there, next year...

I am all around in meetings in Munich, Frankfurt, London and Paris this week, I'll try to blog a bit tonight :=)

Blog Talk 2.0 in Vienna

Too bad I could not go there today, too much to do in Paris. I am planning to join Vienna tomorrow morning. For those of you interested, Heiko is blogging it.

Sex Bed

another bed I liked on Oliver Thylmann's Blog (too bad, I just bought a new bed, I would have definitely chosen this one!):

I just found m a x - l o n g i n . c o m via Gizmodo. It's a Bed designed by Max Longin and it kind of hangs in the air, movable, only attached via 4 strings. To translate the german page: "This progressive sleepingplace doesn't inhibit the movements of lying or loving, but balances them out, leading them peace." The bed costs almost 4000 EURs.

So for 4000 EURs you can have the earth moving whenever you turn arround in your sleep. And then you have the "loving" bit, which might be a lot more interesting.

COO Blogging

Via Oliver Thylmann's Blog:

Some time ago Sun added a blogging policy for all employees and started a hosted blogging service for all of them. This in itself is very cool and probably at least partly due to Tim Bray working there now. Top top it off, now Jonathan Schwartz, their COO, is started his blog. To be watched.

Azeem makes money with his blog

Nice chart, Azeem, too bad you took out the figures from your blog !

Movable Kite

I had one of the best day of my three years of Kite Surfing today, 4 hours non-stop. I finally tried my brand new F-One M3 14 m2 which was perfect with 20 knots today (I am heavy so I always have 2 m2 more than everybody). The vertical power of that new kite is just amazing, I don't know how high I managed to fly but I could count to 10 from take off to landing on the sea and I don't remember having experienced jumps that high, really cool. The speed it provides is excellent as well. I need to practice my back rotations again, it has been a long time since I practiced so the basic stuff and the jumps were fine but when rotations come I could feel how rusty I was...

Next time I am in San Francisco, I take my Kite Surfing gear, I am dreaming about Kite Surfing on the SF Bay...

Pirate my film, no problem

Fahrenheit 9/11 director backs illegal no-for-profit downloads. I will download mine tonight.
Via WordPressTic

Thanks Hugh !

Hugh says that I have the best blog in Europe, thanks, Hugh, but really I am not sure I deserve that much, there are so many great blogs in Europe, I think about Tom Coates for example and so many other bloggers.

Anyway, you made my day, now I have to blog more and better, thanks again.

This illustrates how difficult it is anyway in Europe with 25 countries and 21 languages, fortunately, Technorati will launch one day a top 100 Europe, when they have finished solving their growing issues and when it is the case, the number of links will tell the most popular blogs in Europe and I know there are many many more more popular than mine.

Great photos of first private space craft flight

Great photos of first private space craft flight

Awesome pictures of Space Ship One.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

A Robosapien videoblogged

Here is the RoboSapien, a small toy robot I bought at Fries in California fo $99, my kids love it. (video taken with a Sony Cybershot T1)

update: Andrew showed me his RoboSapien at the Office and even made it to the NY Times with it...

VoIP to plain old phone system is available on Skype

Cool, I just got a Vonage, I would stop my subscription if only they could launch their Mac version of Skype... Via Rodrigo : VoIP to plain old phone system is available on Skype

Done! Predicted a few months ago, Skype launched last week their SkypeOut service allowing you to call from your PC or PDA (running windows or linux), to a normal phone number in many countries for a ridiculously cheap price.
The price list to all available countries is available. (from the Jeff Pulver blog - a great ressource on VoIP).

By the way, Skype folks really need to work on a mailing list for breaking news like this, instead of us checking upon their web site all the time. 15m downloads already ... Not bad for a marketing blitz!
and, version Skype 0.98 (0.98.0.42) was released yesterday.

Finally, Fast Company has blogged about recent comments from Skype's CEO at Supernova 2004. Extracts:
"What I want to talk about is when telephony becomes software, which is what's really happening right now. We're going to see a transition. What does that mean? One key factor is that when telephony becomes a software application, it will live on the edges of a network. There will be no centralized control. Telephony development cycles are still very long. But their carriers' services are very much commodities, and there isn't much differentiation.

When we can change telephony to an application, we'll be able to change the economics of it. That will increase software innovation, new products, services, features. And that will be in the hand of small, nimble, software development companies. There will be higher competition, and the services will live on the Internet."

Discovering Notetaker and blogging with it

I discovered a weblog about blogging into Typepad with NoteTaker and Ecto. I did not know Notetaker, so I am downloading it and giving it a try. There is a note taking app in the new Office version, not sure what the difference is. Anyway, the fact that it has a script that allows blogging into Typepad is really nice.

Typepad Japan launched

Welcome online and congrats to the team in Japan, Typepad Japan.