Loïc Le Meur blog

Exhausting afternoon in Amsterdam

I talked yesterday at blognomics 06, thanks, Guido. As you can see it was incredibly hard to concentrate on my speech. Was cool to see you all there. Thanks, Maarten for the pictures.

Technorati blocked in China ?

Seems that Technorati is censored in China, thanks Tariq for the ping.

Chinese blogger kidnapped, two months without news

Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders / Internet Freedom desk:

"Reporters Without Borders today said it considered Chinese blogger Hao Wu to be the victim of state abduction as more than two months have gone by since his arrest by the National Security Bureau in Beijing without his family getting any news about him. His lawyer has not been allowed to see him, but has been told his client is under house arrest.

"This case shows the Chinese security services operate without any control by the courts," Reporters Without Borders said. "Hao is the victim of an arbitrary system that interprets the law as it sees fit. We call on European and American diplomats to raised his case at their meetings with the Chinese authorities. We are curious know how they will justify the National Security Bureau's procedures."

In a message posted yesterday on her blog (http://spaces.msn.com/wuhaofamily/blog/), Hao's sister, Na Wu, said she had hired a lawyer who asked three questions during an interview with the National Security Bureau on 21 April: why his client is being held longer than allowed by the law, why the authorities refuse to inform his client's family, and why they refuse to let him see his client, which they should have done within the first 48 hours of his arrest.

The National Security Bureau replied that these were just "misunderstandings." Hao was no longer in detention, he was under "house arrest," the bureau said. At the same time, the case was "classified," which explained why no information had been given about the charges against Hao and where he was being held. Finally, neither Hao's family or his lawyer had been allowed to see him because they had not formally requested it, the bureau added."

Blog and podcast revenues

Roland has two good posts I encourage you to read, the ad market for blogs and what is the future of podcasts ?

Off to Amsterdam on April 27th for Blognomics 06

I'll be speaking at Blognomics 06 in Amsterdam this thursday, thanks Guido for inviting me again. Right now I'm planning to stay there on the 27th and back in Paris on the 28th. My full 2006 speaking agenda is here.

Back from Half Moon Bay

Just back in Paris after a few days in California, we just had an off-site with Six Apart's management team which was very productive. I also ran a lot, every day, about an hour. It was an amazing place to run, I took a lot of pleasure to run with Scott and David who have run 2 and 50 marathons, they gave me a lot of advise and helped me not feel that bad being such a beginner. Here is the view from the conference room we had, straight on the surf spot. We ran on the beach and then on the coast, with all kinds of animals around such as rabbits and a few small snakes.

It was the first time I went through a 360 evaluation, you know the principle I guess, you are evaluated by peers, employees and your management (in my case I have just one), we went through the below process reading the results as described by David, our coach during the training course (click to enlarge, it's quite fun).

Technorati Tags: podcast, podcasting

Some stats on this blog

<egosurfing> Sometimes I check how many comments there are on this blog, today I took a more detailed view. On loiclemeur.com there is a total of 5810 posts, 24342 comments, 3653 trackbacks, 265 000 monthly page views, 4663 Technorati links from 1735 sites, 6070 Google incoming links and a page rank of 7. Most of the comments are on my french blog, see a split below. </egosurfing>

More podcasts than radios in the world

Some figures announced by Rick Klau, le VP Bizdev of Feedburner via PodcastingNews. "FeedBurner recently surpassed a major milestone of 44,000 podcast feeds under management, which, according to the CIA World Factbook, exceeds the total number of radio stations worldwide," notes Klau. FeedBurner's numbers show podcast circulation growing at bubble-blowing 20% per month.

Podcast Adoption Rate Makes it a Successful Technology. Podcasting's adoption rate makes it a success, according to Klau. "Back in 2000, the DVD format, just 3 years old at the time, was declared the most successful product launch in consumer electronics history, outselling the VCR five to one. Using these statistics as a benchmark, in less than two years, the number of podcasts available online is tenfold that of DVD titles in nearly half the time."

Non Zero

I have read Robert Wrights' book NONZERO. It is a great book where the authors wonders and then tries to prove that history has a direction, that it is heading one way, and a good one. Wright even finds a sense to wars in uniting countries together. It is an amazing trip throughout human history and progress. Below a few notes I took as I have read it. I really advise you to read it if you have not.

-there is no better metaphor for a non-zero sum relationship than being "in the same boat". Wright claims that human history is a non zero sum game, a "win win" game, different from zero sum games, where there are parties that lose and other that win, such as tennis, or poker...

-the business partnership and one of the basic elements of capitalism coalesced in Europe during the late Middle Ages, notably the justly celebrated "contratto di commenda" used to pool capital for trade, as ships required too much capital for its owner to take the risk. But the idea of the commenda may well have come from the Islamic world. Before the commenda appeared in Italy in the tench century, the very same tool, under another name, was used by Muslims as they turned Baghdad and Basra into centers of world commerce, trading goods ranging from paper and ink to panther skins and ostrinches. At about the same time as the commenda was created, checks drafted in Baghdad could be cashed in Morocco, a convenience not offered by European banks until centuries later.

-China's technological base during the Middle Ages was a harbinger of modernity: printing, the magnetic compass and the first bombs were invented in China.

-In Mathematics, India gave Europe, among other things, the concept of zero and the decimal number system, including the numerals that are misleadingly called "Arabic".

-The invention of the printing press (1450), more than any other factor, rendered vast multilingual empires unwieldly to the point of being unworkable. The printing press also helped overhaul religious thought and ushered in both the scientific and industrial revolutions. "In 1450, most Europeans would have laughed at the notion of a single, intricately woven global civilization (and perhaps at the notion of a globe). Yet already they possessed the basic machinery for creating this world".

-[the printing press] The source of history's directionality is intellectual advance, scientific, technical, political, moral. Over time, people build better machines, better governements, better societies, better moral codes, they rationally discern the good and rationally achieve it.

-the press paradox: it helped break up arbitrary empires but also helped fuse small polities. A single Serb, vuk Karadzic, developed a Serb alphabet, published a Serbian grammar book, translated the New Testament, and compiled Popular Songs and Epics of the Serbs, paving the way for a Serbian nationalism that, for better or worse, would prove durable.

-Secular rulers, from the early modern era onward, tried to control the press. In the late sixteenth century, Britain's Star Chamber confined printing rights to two universities and twenty one London print shops, hoping to rein in the "great enormities and abuses" caused by "diverse, contentious and disorderly persons professing the art or mystery of printing or selling of books". In France, before the Bastille was stormed in 1789, more than eight hundred authors, printers, and book sellers had been imprisoned there.

-When the printing press showed up, and threatened the jobs of French copyists, the copyists mobilized to thwart it. This was good for the copyists -for a while at least- and bad for book buyers, papermakers, and would-be printers.

-printing press and other information technologies reinforced pluralism, dividing power among a larger array of groups that could now mobilize effectively.

-the locomotive, along with other rapid data carriers, accented the truth highlighted by the printing press: the more easily data can move, the larger and denser a social brain can be. The vast, fast collaboration allowed by information technologies slowly turned the multinational technical community into an almost unified consciousness.

-Historians differ over when it becomes fair to speak of a single world economy. [...] progress toward a global web of interdependence was so long and relentless that pinpointing a threshold is hard.

-New world order. In 1500 B.C. there were around 600 000 autonomous polities on the planet. Today, after many mergers and acquisitions, there are 193 autonomous polities. At this rate, the planet should have a single government any day now.

-The EU example. To be sure, European integration was, from the beginning, not a strictly economic project. it was conceived as a way of "waging peace" - reuniting a war-torn continent with economic bonds that would make war unthinkable.

-Even if murderous extraterrestrials aren't a strict prerequisite for global governance, they would be a big time saver. Even if sheerly economic forces could in theory get people to put aside their petty differences (a big if), nothing does the trick quite like the common threat of death.

-If ninety, sixty years ago, you had predicted that someday France and Germany would have the same currency, the reply would have been: "Oh, really? Which nation will have conquered which ?"

Technorati Tags: books, human history

Photos of malfing fire-retardant foam filling a hangar to one storey

Cory Doctorow: A test of a foam fire-retardant at a hangar at South Dakota's Ellsworth AFB was supposed to run for 15 seconds, but something went wrong and it ran and ran, until more than a storey of foam filled the hangar, spilling out onto the runway and environs. The photos of this are stupendous -- imagine an airplane hangar filled, filled, FILLED with shaving cream. Even better are the looks of confused hilarity on the faces of the air force personnel in the shots. Link (via JWZ)

Via Boing Boing Photos of malfing fire-retardant foam filling a hangar to one storey