Loïc Le Meur blog

Shall we buy a Scoble Phone ?

Robert Scoble, has such an audience now that bloggers start to call the Microsoft Windows powered mobiles the "scoble phones". If products start to get the name of their famous company bloggers now...

TypePad and Movable Type moblogs

I have started a wiki list of TypePad and Movable Type powered moblogs to follow how people use them, if you have one, please add it to the wiki page.

An interview of Nick Denton in the Independent

Nick Denton:

"The one common theme is to take an obsession, say a gadget obsession, and feed it - produce more content than the people could ever dream of having or consuming."

Interview. Thanks, Chryde.

My first Google Adwords check

A little bit more than $100 for the few commercial links on the right side. Not much but pretty cool, don't you think ?

Blogs and journalism: Le Monde case study

moblogged from the panel

Last Friday in Lisbon, at the World Association of Newspapers Conference, Stéphane Mazzorato (LeMonde.fr) and myself have presented our thoughts on blogs and journalism and the Le Monde case study

LeMonde.fr has not only launched blogs for many journalists, but also blogs for their readers.

Here are the journalists blogs online today:

Big Picture, par Corine Lesnes
La république des Livres, par Pierre Assouline
Do not fold, par Virginie Luc
Technochroniques, par Tariq Krim
Transnets, par Francis Pisani
Langue sauce piquante
Copier - Décoller
Europe : pour ou contre la Constitution ?

A few blogs of Le Monde readers started even before the official launch next week:
James
Skildy
Pierre Bachy
trblt (ressources pédagogiques)

I will post a real case study when I have time but in the meantime should you be interested I have podcasted our presentation and uploaded the slides.

Slide on differences between journalists and bloggers

Our presentation in pdf (7704.1K)
Sound file of presentations in mp3 (21651.8K) (mine is in english, Le Monde is in French)
the sound file of the Q&A in mp3 (11479.5K) (in english)

Thanks again Bertrand Pecquerie and Yann Mauchamp of the World Association of Newspapers for having invited us and thanks Monde.fr for having presented the case study even before the official launch. I strongly advise you to also read their blog written for the Editors community, the Editorsweblog. Of course, at the end of the presentation I also encouraged everybody to read Dan Gillmor's book "We the Media".

Joi complains about service in Paris

Joi spent the week-end in Paris and complains about service in France. I told Joi a story that just happened to me. I am quite tall and I asked politely to a Paris taxi driver if he would move a bit the seat in front of me to give me more room. He said: "if you take the Metro, you don't ask to move the chair in front of you". Well, I was not in a metro. Service in Paris Taxis is just generally very bad. There is actually even a fashion about being rude with customers.

For example, if you go to the restaurant of the Hotel Costes (nice web site by the way, congrats !) you will probably wait and be treated badly, that is part of the athmosphere of a hip restaurant in Paris.

What is your experience ?

[photo, supergrass]

The Ukraine revolution in Kiev in pictures

The Ukraine revolution blog covers it also with many pictures in real time. As Dan Gillmor says, "News by the people, for the people", and live.

Adrien gives us feedback of why he chose TypePad

Thanks Adrien for this feedback on your TypePad testing. Adrien is a trainee at the ISG Business School and a trainee at Unilever.

A Ukraine Revolution blog follows the events

Ukraine events can be followed on this Ukraine Revolution weblog, written from there.

Lost in Lisbon amongst 500 Editors in Chief of World Newspapers

Just arrived in Lisbon, finishing my rant at the World Association of Newspapers conference that gathers 500 managers of World Newspapers. Our partner Le Monde and myself are presenting the first results of our work: blogs for journalists and to my knowledge a European premiere, blogs for readers of Le Monde.

Classic discussions about blogs with or against newspapers already started tonight.

Anyway, great evening in Lisbon, lots to say, great fun and amazing food. More tomorrow.

Creative Commons launches in France

Creative Commons France has launched a few days ago. Great news.

A passion for Pizza

A Passion for Pizza:
"Pizza is a lot like sex. When it's good, it's really good. When it's bad, it's still pretty good."

Dan Rather resigns

Dan Rather announced today that he will leave The CBS Evening News in March. I guess the scandal around the false information on Bush's military services revealed by bloggers played a role. Dan Rather had many comments on the quality of his journalism on blogs, even some dedicated blogs such as Ratherbiaised.

A Paris Top Model Moblog

Unfortunately I have nothing to do with the new blog of Anina, a Paris top model who moblogs (even videos) with her Nokia and Lifeblog)...

Video blogging from my phone to my TypePad account

Works nicely. Even with Olivier.

Feedburner launches a Mobile RSS Reader

I have just tried FeedBurner Mobile Feed Reader. Cool, now I have my favorite blogs on my Nokia 7610, in RSS. Here is the link for series 60.

Let's moblog together for 48 hours

24 people have shared their lives during 24 hours on the same moblog. What for ? You guess.
Via Smartmobs.

Your color printer is a spy

Boing Boing sez

"Colour laser printer manufacturers encode each printout with the printer's serial number so they can trace it back to you if you are counterfitting bills. They can trace it back to you for anything else as well."

Podcasting is getting bigger

I like Wikipedia's definition of Podcasting. I got equipped during last week-end.

Wikipedia:

"Podcasting is different than broadcasting and webcasting in that it "casts" audio not by a mechanism of centrally pushing audio out to listeners, but by the mechanism of the (distributed) listeners pulling (downloading) the audio files automatically. Podcasters publish (or "podcast") audio files, even in the likeness of radio shows, but it is the individual listener who initiates the "cast" through their subscription and automatic download of the audio program."

Who is Who in Spanish ?

Fun, find who's blogger is who, in Spanish.

The French focus on preserving what they are

Hugh sez:

"I am not dissing The French. I just think they're more concerned with preserving what they've got, rather than finding new things to get excited about"

That's exactly what I feel, there must be a French miracle though, as we actually do pretty well on preserving our way of living.

A long interview on VNUNet today

Thank you Philippe Guerrier, for this interview on VNUNet today (in French).

Rent your body for advertising

It is not new but still so successful, for $20 you can rent Chris Pirillo's chest for your brand or your blog. Very fashionable these days, you can also get a tattoo and get paid for it, or have a bluetooth logo painted on your head (here Robert Kaye). Excellent viral marketing I guess. This is perfect it has been a long time I wanted to change my look.

Apart from the brands I am representing currently that do not count for this, which brands do you think would fit me best ? :-)

Amazing

I woke up my kids laughing at these pictures. Update: this link works.
Via Joi.

Jupiter Analyst Offers Corporate Blogging Advice

Business Blog Consulting sez:

In his Computerworld column Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg tells businesses there are three things they must consider when thinking about corporate blogs...

1. Know what's being said about your company on other people's weblogs.
2. Go slowly when creating official corporate blogs.
3. Establish guidelines for workers who identify themselves as company employees while doing personal blogging.

Alvaro found cool games for your Nokia

Alvaro, you can be sure I will try these too on my 7610. Alvaro says:

One of the interesting aspects of the Nokia 6600 is that it's highly hackeable. It runs the Symbian operative system, so you can download lots of applications and games. Today I was hacking a little to see if you could actually play Galaxian and... it seems you can.

You have to download MAME for Series 60 (stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and then some ROMs from a place like ROM-World [look for the Galaxian ROM, 9 KB]. The emulator can be installed with the Nokia PC Suite for 6600 software on your PC, using a serial cable or via Bluetooth. With that software you can also transfer the ROMs containing the games (directly on .zip files) to the folder labeled C:\Mame\Roms or E:Mame\Roms (depending if you have installed it on the telephone memory C: or the memory card E:)... and then you are ready.

Of course, it's more fun doing all this than actually playing the games -- in fact MAME is a little bit slow and it only emulates the oldest games (and downloading the ROMs seems to be illegal anyway).

Galaxian is a Namco game dating back to 1979, so it's 25 years old right now. On that era year it seemed to run on a Z80 3 MHz processor and a 256 x 224 screen. The software itself was 8.192 bytes in lenght. Today, as you can see, it runs on a 125 grams Nokia 6600 mobile phone on a 176 x 208 screen, equipped with 32+6 MB memory (5.000 times more) and you can take it on your pocket.

Never say GAME OVER.

Update: I also installed the really mythical C-64 emulator for 6600, a variant of Frodo named E32Frodo. Basically you have to install the .sis file,then download some games from C64.com, storing everything in the \documents\E32Frodo\ folder. Really impressive. Here you can see the emulator running M.U.L.E. or Realm of Impossibility in the phone.

Statcounter is a good stats tool I started using

Up to now I was using SiteMeter, but I am using more and more Statcounter, it is really good, does not show any logo on your blog if you don't want and very complete.

Smash my phone

Today let's discover a new fetish in mobility, a site that sells pictures of women crushing and smashing mobile phones. Via Boing Boing again, more and more creative every day.

Another employee relations problem with a blog (from Scoble)

Neville Hobson:

First, Friendster. Then, Delta Airlines. Now, Electronic Arts.

These are three high-profile examples in as many months of matters concerning employee/employer relationships that would likely never have seen the public light of day if it were not for blogs. The latest case, with Electronic Arts, has already expanded into a legal issue with the company being sued for allegedly failing to pay overtime wages.

The wife of an unnamed Electronic Arts employee posted highly-critical commentary on her personal blog about the company's working practices and the effects they have on the lives of her husband and her family. That post on 10 November quickly attracted nearly 2,000 critical comments on the blog so far, as well as plenty of coverage by other blogs and media.

David wants an IP Phone

Designed by Apple.

Can you please pack your brain properly ?

Here is how to pack your brain properly, which is important. I thank you in advance for sending me a good brain, I will go multi-processor. Via Boing Boing

If you like London...

You should probably have a look at the Londonist.

Azeem launches two vertical blogs

I was recently talking about it, nanopublishing is growing. Azeem Azhar, a former manager/consultant for 20Six, has launched two vertical blogs, on Movable Type:

• Honourable Friend, focusing on UK politics
• Wanda Lust, on tourism

Many other blog launches in 2005 planned. Bravo, Azeem !

The best CV in the World

JY has found the best CV in the World. It is easy to get noticed, just be creative and different.

One day with Thunderbird

I used Thunderbird all day today to test it and I just love it. It is much faster than Entourage or Mail, hopefully they will sync the contacts with the OSX address book soon, too.

Ecommerce site Pixmania launches five blogs in Europe

European brands start to use blogs as well, the ecommerce store Pixmania has just launched five blogs in France, Italy, Spain, U.K. and Germany.

McDonals is much nicer in Japan

Did they fire Ronald McDonalds in Japan ? It is much nicer to watch than anything I saw in Europe (wait a few secs for the video to load). No, I will not tell you from which blog I got this link. Don't ask me again if my wife reads my blog, I think she does not.

The three big Jewish brands

Joi has a cool quote from Yossi Vardi:

Yossi Vardi

There are three big brands that we have created which are well known enough to have approximately 20 million or so links on Google. They are The Bible, Jesus Christ and ICQ. The first one took 3500 years, the second one 2000 years and ICQ only 8 years as of next week. As you can see, they all spread virally.

CBS says blogging is no journalism

For CBS, blogging is typing, not journalism. Of course their journalism is always perfect. Thanks, Marie !

Open sourcing myself in Germany

Thank you Mario Sixtus for this article (in German) where I explained blogging for me was like open sourcing myself. Unfortunately I have not enough time for blogging these days...

I met Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linked In yesterday, lots to say I will find the time to blog our dinner this week. We had amazing sushi.

Talking about starting businesses at this year's Cefi

It will be a pleasure to talk at this year's Corporations, Entrepreneurs, Funds & Investors Summit in Paris, with fellow Entrepreneurs Charles Beigbeder, Marc Simoncini, Mihai Crasneanu and Philippe Pouletti at the session on Serial Entrepreneurs (what a title !).

Microsoft France also has employees blogs

Microsoft France has launched blogs for its employees (via the French Journal du Net).

In San Francisco this week

Just arrived yesterday in San Francisco, for a busy week with the US team to prepare 2005. There is so much going on...

I had already forgotten the pleasure to wake up at 2 AM and then wake up every hour...

Burn a DVD to read it on your Nokia phone

I am going to try this software to burn a DVD and read it on my Nokia 7610, pretty nice.

Improved Technorati

Glad to hear that Technorati has improved performance, key word search and many other features. I just tested it, it works great. Congrats, Dave.

Asshole

CNN is creative with the elections results !

TypePad 1.5 launched

We have just launched TypePad 1.5:

-Rich text editing, WYSIWYG (you can even drag and drop pictures from a browser into a post, resize them, without having to see any code or saving the picture to your hard drive).
-Integrated spell checker

Learn more.

Thank you for your help for my radio interview

Thank you for all the links and emails you sent me to help me prepare the interview I had ten minutes ago on the French radio BFM, I have written a post about it in French on my French blog, no time to translate it right now, but I will do it.