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"Bloggers without Borders is dedictated to raising awareness for charities and charitable events around the world. We use the tools and exposure of modern citizen journalism as a means to lend a hand in the solicitation of donations and outbound information management."
Incredible Kite Boarder jump in Cabarete, on top of the road, on top of the trees, and finally the kite surfer lands OK.
What's cool with Kite Boarding is that it is not dangerous at all if you manage to choose the right cloud.
An excellent article on the blogs phenomenon in Fortune. via Joi.
In 2014, The New York Times disappears. and the press as we know it does not exist anymore.
This prediction (flash, 8 minutes) is worth giving some time but I disagree. Large press organisations have already started to adapt themselves. Le Monde in France provides blogs to journalists and puts its brand on Le Monde reader content. It enlarges the online reach of its brand by hosting citizen originated content, not only professional.
Concerning the Google leadership on information, I can only agree.
(via Manu, via Olivier Rafal, journalist at Le Monde Informatique, in French.)
Marco tells me that Italian TV gathers SMSs from Italians in Tsunami Zones and shows them on TV so that people can inform their families and friends they are OK.
Already 30 bloggers around the world and especially from Sri Lanka and India post around the clock on Tsunamihelp.
It provides news and useful information to the families of the casualties and anybody trying to help. You can help, too, by linking this blog, by sending them useful information you know about the disaster, or if you are a blogger, by blogging with them on how to help and taking the shifts.
Philsland (in French) is a subscriber to an earthquake prevention alert: USGS earthquake. He was warned about the earthquake three hours before the waves touched the coasts:
"A great earthquake occurred at 00:58:49 (UTC) on Sunday, December 26, 2004. The magnitude 9.0 event has been located OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA. (This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.)"
How amazing is this ? In three hours thousands of casualties could have been avoided if they were warned earlier. Now Internet is everywhere and especially where the tourists were staying, we could have avoided many deaths. What do you think, Robert ?
Update:
The Hindustantimes says India was not alerted by warning systems
"Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, scientists running the tsunami warning system for the Pacific had issued a cautionary from their Honolulu hub, to 26 participating countries. India was not among them."
"The irony could not have been sharper. One of the people who helped set up the Pacific Tsunami Warning System and the Canadian Tsunami Warning System three decades ago was a Canada-based Indian, Tad Murty."
" in spite of speeds of 400-500 miles per hour, it is possible to make warnings practicable."
"Now attached to the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Murty says key equipment and computer models could have helped save thousands in southeast Asia on Sunday. He has personally taken up the issue of setting up a 24-hour tsunami warning system with the Indian government."
I fly to Cabarete for a few days of Kite Surfing and guess who I discover ? Max, a French speaking TypePad blogger who likes Kite Surf too. Now this is real social software... Photo Photosmax.
We have organized an evening on Corporate Blogging in Paris on January 18th and 116 people already added their name to the wiki. If you are interested, please add your name, you are welcome to join us, an occasion for you to come to Paris !
Six Apart Europe now organizes one evening per month around a theme, last time in December we were also 100 people around blogs and journalism. We all listened to the Le Monde, Liberation and other blogs cases in France. The conferences have been podcasted too.
I hope we can extend this event to other European cities very soon.
Thanks Jimmiz for telling me in the comments and blogger friends if you want to help, circulate this blog url to help. I am sure Robert, who was wondering how to help will like this one too.
Restaurants on Bang Tao islands (Phuket, Thailand), a picture taken by Maurice de Jong, a BBC reader.
An 8.9 magnitude earthquake created massive tidal waves today in SE Asia, a wall of water that sped across thousands of kilometers of sea. The strongest quake in the world for 40 years.
More than 3000 dead people. The Maldives Islands which is only one meter above the sea had its Capital two thirds under water.
The BBC fears for 750 000 British tourists in Thailand:
"Mary Picking, a British tourist in Phuket, told BBC News about the moment disaster struck.
She said: "We saw this enormous tidal wave approaching the beach and people started to run. "
Massive waves suddenly appeared. The BBC explains how the tsunami happened.
"This earthquake been one of the largest ever, one of the great earthquakes. There has been a rupture along a fault about 1,000km long, and that has generated a vertical displacement of about 10m. The displacement in the sea floor has generated this huge tsunami."
What's amazing is our inability to predict these terrifying events.
Coverage:
BBC: sea surges kill thousands in Asia
BBC Pictures
on CNN
The long tail has a blog (via Joi, and you should read the article if you haven't)
A little break, gone Kite Surfing... Happy Christmas to all of you !
Our founders, Ben & Mena Trott, named as People of the Year by PC Magazine. We're so proud to work with you, Ben and Mena.
23:45 We have just launched official versions of Movable Type 3.14 in French, German, Dutch and Spanish and the European team and part of the US team are in chat right now to monitor the launch
We hope you like these local versions of Movable Type, with local support.
A *huge* congrats and thanks to the whole European and US team for this launch. Anil has just announced it here.
Update: 23:53 it is also official on movabletype.org
Interesting Best of the Web 2004 and thanks for including TypePad, Jonah.
The Guardian recommends TypePad:
" Blogs
Typepad has unseated Blogger.com as our favourite personal publishing tool. Like Blogger, it will also host your site - although you have to pay - but it will let you transfer your own domain name over too. A high level of control over content and layout, plus decent default templates top it off. Statcounter shows who's visiting your site, and helps you understand why they're there. Technorati lets you see who's linking to you. Blogdex shows what the blog community is obsessing about. Once you've mastered writing a blog, start the radio version with iPodder.org."
I have to think about taking the time to read the suggestions of iPodder.org
Rachelle Waterman is a 16 years old small city of Alaska inhabitant. The high schooler had recruited two former boyfriends to kill her mother. Cops realized that when reading the teen's weblog. All details chez Emmanuelle.
Thanks, Patrice, for pointing me to this excellent article about bloggers who write books or books written about blogs.
According to News.com, Ana Marie Cox, editor of Wonkette.com has received a $275,000 advance for her book, "Dog Days"
Impressive. Good luck !
According to today's WSJ (content available for subscribers only):
"just as China's industrial might is integrating the country into the global economy, its pollution is also becoming a global concern. Among the biggest worries: the impact of China's vast and growing power industry, mostly fueled by coal, on the buildup of mercury in the world's water and food supply."
"One reason China's power industry spews out so much pollution is that under the nation's rules, many plants have the option of paying the government annual fees rather than installing antipollution equipment."
"Some scientists now say 30% or more of the mercury settling into U.S. ground soil and waterways comes from other countries -- in particular, China."
I am not an environmentalist, but looks like this is one of the aspects of globalization we can't do anything about and which is quite frightening for our children, don't you think ?
The BigBlogCompany, fully dedicated to blogging organizes training sessions in London. Great idea.
Following a comment on this note (In French - merci Marc !) I discover a very interesting interview by Ohmynews founder, Yeon Ho, (that I had already talked about: "the end of 20th Century journalism").
Alain Juppé, former French Prime Minister has a blog (comments are filtered though) and makes the news in the UK Times (article only available for free for a week).
We all know the great newsgator to subscribe to blogs directly in Outlook, now you can also directly post to your TypePad and Movable Type blogs from Outlook thanks to these plugins.
A fantastic geek evening organized by Fanny yesterday night. It was a real pleasure to feel an athmosphere and excitement I ususally only find in San Francisco. Why should you all join Fanny (that moblogged me too) ? To meet all the cool geeks around and discover the new gadgets everybody had to show such as the new PSP gaming machine, which is amazing, the new mp3 Oakley glasses, and many other weird toys. Many bloggers such as blographic were there too.
It was a pleasure for me to meet Olivier Chouraki, who founded Mobiluck. If you don't know this app, go on his site and download it now, it installs on your Nokia, your PDA or your java phone and lets you detect other bluetooth phones around. You can then send them messages for example. It is very funny to have it on when you drive, it detects all the phones around in a trafic jam.
You can also choose a profile, for example you can select "I want to fuck meet cool people now" (oops) and your phone will immediately tell you if there is anybody around with a compatible profile.
This app is amazing and will spread like fire I think. Actually Olivier has already 200 000 users worldwide and growing. I asked Olivier if I could invest and he told me in a very nice way that I could dream about it :-)
I guess David, Jeff, Marc should talk to him fast.
Here are some cool people and gadgets from my moblog. My Nokia 7610 looked like old stuff with everybody playing with their latest 3G videoconferencing mobiles...
Millau, south of France. The world's tallest bridge. If only we could also have the world's fastest growing economy, too.
Cost: only 394m euros.
woaw - 5 million weblogs watched by Technorati.
"Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web."
All started on blogs and spreading fast. Rebecca McKinnon:
" 1) we believe in free speech – and act to defend it and extend it
2) we believe in direct connection between people in ways which allow us to consider ourselves part of a bigger here and wider us – and we act to bring flows of tools, money and attention to bear on creating channels for those connections to develop
3) we believe in planetary citizenship along international norms – and we act to empower campaigns to make the world fairer, freer, more prosperous and more sustainable."
Check the Global Voices blog.
Cover page of one of the largest newspaper daily in France Liberation. It is becoming tough to find a newspapers that has *not* talked about blogs several times.
Eric has a very good post on Academic Blogging.
A classic, but very well written blogging manifesto by Marie-Chantale. (updated)
Ah, this looks like what I need to do to claim my feedster feed.
I just understood why I had free boys and no girls, too much laptops on my legs. My sperm is still agile enough for boys but not for boys.
Remember that story about mobile phones being a threat to your brain's activity ? No brain, no sperm, I love gadgets, still.
OK, now that we know the cause, what should we do to fix it, put the laptop on top of ice cubes on top of our legs ?
Boing Boing says it is the result of Dioxin poisoning. What we can do with poison today is really frightening, that is one of our big threats ahead, imagine a substance like this spread in the underground...
(also via CNN).
An interesting discussion about who will own the rights about the blog-written Scoble book The Red Couch.
OK this is old stuff already, but I wanted to wish good luck to Dan for his new citizen journalism project as he announced he leaves his current job.
Sometimes it is "do what I say not what I do", for Dan it is "do what I say and now also what I do"...
Yann has gathered the cool apps he started using after his switch (in French). I can't live without Desktop Manager anymore, my desktop is the size of the wall in front of me.
After the funding of Technorati (amount remained confidential), it is Feedster's turn, with an investment of Pierre Omidyar, the Ebay founder. Via Rodrigo.
Try your name in the new Google suggest, it will probably know you already...
Via Heiko.
Wonder why I have been blogging so many quotes from Dan's book in my previous posts ? That's easy, I am preparing a panel Six Apart has organized in Paris tomorrow.
All launched from my French blog, close to 100 journalists and media people are gathering tomorrow in Paris to discuss blogging and journalism and study the cases of
Le Monde blogs
Liberation blogs
VNU
L'express, Pierre Yves Lautrou
Bertrand Pecquerie (of WAN)
Chryde (blogger journalist)
Cyril Fievet (blogger journalist)
Soon, France will not only be known for its wine and cheese, it will also be known in the World for its blogging, I promise !
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Journalists are beginning to get it." [...] "However, I'm still not convinced that Big Media is doing the most important thing: listening. We are still in a top-down mode and don't realize that the conversation is more important than our pronouncements. I see progress, but not enough".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Hollywood tried to kill off the home video recorder. Only by the narrowest margin in the Supreme Court, in a crucial 1984 decision, did Americans preserve the right to tape a TV show and play it back later"
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, explained Dan: "The only way you can write something that survive is that someone who's your diametrical opposite can agree with it".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
Rich Gordon, of Northwestern Univiersity's Medill School of Journalism, told Dan:
..."In all those classes I talk about the unique capabilities of new media. And clearly one of the most powerful is the way in which it changes the relationship between the journalist and what we've historically called the audience. I point them to interesting examples of this kind of journalism, including Weblogs, discussion forums, ohmynews, photo blogs, etc. And I raise the question of why more traditional journalists and media companies are not seizing the opportunity to change their relationships with the audience".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Some of the most important photos and videos in recent news history were the product of amateurs; we can scarcely imagine the second half of the 20th century without the grue-some Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination. More recently, as video cameras have become popular, we have seen what happens when average people captured important events such as police beatings of suspects and approaching tornados. And it was amateurs who caught the most horrific images of the United Airlines 767 fireball as it crashed into the second World Trade Center tower on September 11, 2001".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"The most web-like activity is linking: pointing to other people's content. Newspapers and other journalism organizations have been learning to do a better job of this on their sites, offering pointers to articles and data that reside outside their sites. We need to do more than that"
"On my blog, I frequently point at other news organizations' stories, including a local competitor, the San Francisco Chronicle. If I have the choice of pointing to an equally good story on my newspaper's own site, I'll naturally do so. But when the competition had done a better job than we have on a topic I care about, I'd be shortchanging my readers if I didn't take them to the best coverage"
Check out the CyberJournalist list if you don't know it, an excellent list of journalists blogging, or blogs about journalists. Via We, the media.
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"That's one reason why my blog has been so helpful. It's sparked deeper conversations with my sources and my readers, who are always telling me things I don't know. This is interactive journalism."
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Readers (or viewers or listeners) collectively know more than media professionals do. This is true by definition: they are many, and we are often just one."
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
About the coverage of politics in the US: "Big Media, and the candidates, also started to realize that some of the best political journalism was coming outside their ranks. Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Moulitsas' Daily Kos, among many others, offered better context than just about anything the wire services were delivering."
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
Joe Trippi: "Broadcast politics tells people they don't count".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
About Ben Chandler, an American Democrat. Chandlers "took out advertisements on the Daily Kos and 10 other popular political blogs, most of which had a left-leaning stance. A $2,000 investment, using the then nascent Blogads online ad agency, had turned into some $80,000 in contributions, mostly in small (around $20) amounts, from around the nation."
Another quote from Dan's book.
Azeem Azhar: "blogging is the eBay-ization of media - everyone can be a buyer and a seller".
Another quote from Dan's book.
About Companies who need to follow blogs to understand what their customers have to say, Dan is quoting Buzz Bruggeman, a lawyer.
"I immediately scan it, read it and figure out what to do, i.e. respond, comment, thank, forward to our team, etc. When I respond to a blogger, he/she is thrilled, and typically writes more about us, and tells his/her readers that we are great people, responding to users and customers and the net leverages all the time. It there are user problems, we solve them quickly; on balance it is brilliant stuff.""
"If you assume that bloggers really are "intelligent human agents", then this model is sensational as you don't have to go look for anyone or anything; it comes to you".
Dan again: "At one time, this kind of service cost a bundle. Now anyone can get it at almost no cost.
Another quote from Dan's book.
"We are not accustomed to being scrutinized the way we scrutinize others, however healthy it is that we are"
Dan quoting Jay Rosen's Press Think:
"I like the idea that people are watching what I say and correcting me if I get things wrong -or challenging my conclusions, based on the same facts (or facts I hadn't known about when I wrote the piece)".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"It's worth reflecting how events of the past would have looked had tomorrow's technology been available at the time. Let's apply that to the terrific events of September 11, 2001. Our memories of that awful day stem largely from television: videos of airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center, the fireballs that erupted, people falling and jumping from the towers, the crumbling to earth of the structures. Individuals with video cameras captured parts of this story, and their work ended up on network TV as well. The big networks stopped showing most graphic videos fairly quickly. But those pictures are still on the Net for anyone who wants to see them."
I have been reading again Dan's book and I wrote some quotes I really liked, I thought I could share them here.
Talking about Justin Hall launching one of the first weblogs:
"What had happened? Communications had completed a transformation. The printing press and broadcasting are a one-to-many medium. The telephone is one-to-one. Now we had a medium that was anything we wanted it to be: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many."
Jason Calacanis goes shopping for 500 000 + page views a month bloggers.
There as been so much blogging about this that I hesitate to blog about it myself, so I'll be very short. Just in case you missed it, Sony threatens a blogger, Jason Kottke.
Read:
A good summary of the story by Ellis Conroy
Ken Jennings explaining his financial problems to face the issue
Dan Gillmor's note about boycotting Sony
A Washington Post article (not sued by Sony)
Jason Calacanis comments
I am blogging a lot about it these days but I keep being surprised by the launch of the Le Monde blogs
Le Monde is one of the first newspaper in the World to offer blogs to their readers, under the Le Monde brand. They have also published a ranking of the 10 top blogs, mixing their journalists blogs and their readers blogs, showing them at the same level, based on blog readers recommendations.
After only two days after launch, 4 reader blogs make it in the top ten, that is lead by journalists, the blog of the language correction team of Le Monde (1st) that everybody talks about here (five people at Le Monde do nothing but correcting the French language of the journalists to be perfect French and they blog in a very humoristic way) and that of Francis Pisani (2nd) who reports on technologies from California.
Here are the blogs of the readers that made it in the top 10:
6 - Y a des questions que...
7 - Bostella
8 - James Blog
10 - Vous avez aimé le Liban
Looks like a competition between professional journalists blogs and amateurs blogs... This has been on for a long time on Technorati, but here it is under the Le Monde brand...
The daily Le Monde has just launched blogs for their readers, after having launched many journalists blogs. The last updated blogs of both readers and journalists (mixed !) is on this Le Monde blogs page.
Having Google Ads on my blog allows me to follow what blog solution is advertising on blog keywords easily. Google AdSense has a function to filter url of advertisers you don't want on your site. I have been adding new blog solutions to the filter regularly for a few weeks and now I have 25 filtered... The raise of the blog (and related) keywords price and the number of advertisers keep growing, interesting, lots of competition that stimulate this market.
Wired article. Via Chryde.
"Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines."
"John Athayde, also 27, a web designer who works in Washington, D.C., buys a newspaper once every "two to three months," usually "because someone I know has a picture in the events section or something." Instead, he views news as "packets of distributed information," and uses NetNewsWire to aggregate about 70 news sources, including several blogs. "I typically will read entire stories within the news aggregator, bypassing all design (and) advertising" to get "to the content."
Europe discovers blogs when the US moved to the next stage, they discover theart of female blogging. Don't be surprise it is a pdf. Via Doc Searls who says pdf sucks.
