Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
[fr] Mon ibook semblant sur le point de me lâcher, ne vous inquiétez pas outre mesure si je disparais ces prochains jour: j'ai pris un plan de protection AppleCare 🙂
My ibook seems to be giving signs of imminent logical board failure. If I go off the radar, you’ll know I’m really glad I paid Apple Tax (AppleCare) and that they are fixing my computer for free.
[fr] Quand est-ce que Technorati atteindra 1'000'000'000 de liens indexés? Dans 48 environ 24 heures, d'après moi.
Well, here is my guess (I’ll tell you later how I reached it): roughly two days from now, which means March 31st, 23:36 San Fransisco time.
Update, 09:52 Of course, I messed up in my calculations. Instead of taking two days from my first measurement, I took two days from now — so actually, if I had thought a bit, my entry would have said March 31st, 01:36… Too bad! Will teach me to post in a hurry 😉
Petite critique du sujet sur les blogs au Journal de 20h de TF1 ce soir.
[en] French TV briefly talked about weblogs tonight, following the incidents with teenagers insulting teachers on their skyblogs and getting evicted from school as a result.
Now we all know that blogs are personal diaries with lots of photos and racist comments. Cool.
Un très bref sujet sur les blogs au journal de 20h sur TF1 ce soir. Ça commençait assez bien avec Delphine — dommage (d’où le “assez”) qu’ils aient eu sous la main une commentatrice si pertinente de la blogosphère et qu’ils se soient contentés de lui faire jouer le rôle de “personne jeune qui a un blog”. (Bon, c’est vrai, face à Cyril dans le rôle du spécialiste ès blogs, on fait pas le poids…)
Prétexte du sujet: les ados expulsés de l’école pour avoir insulté leurs profs sur leurs skyblogs.
Ce qu’on en retient:
Soit dit en passant, la TSR s’y est intéressée avant TF1 (et na!), dans le reportage de Philippe Grand qui a précédé mon interview. (Désolée de ne pas vous donner le lien direct, le site de la TSR semble avoir un petit problème…. Est-ce que vous pensez que je leur ai envoyé trop de visiteurs?)
I’ve installed MediaWiki. Explanation and solution of a bug I bumped into while installing (because of UTF-8 in MySQL 4.1.x) and comments on the method for interface translation.
[fr] J'ai installé MediaWiki pour récussiter le moribond SpiroLattic, tombé sous les coups du wiki-spam. Voici la solution à un problème que j'ai rencontré durant l'installation (dû au fait que j'utilise MySQL 4.1.x avec UTF-8), et aussi une description de la façon dont est faite la localisation par utilisateur de l'interface. Très intéressant!
I recently managed to install MediaWiki to replace PhpWiki for SpiroLattic, which I took offline some time ago because the only activity it had become home to was the promotion of various ringtone, viagra, and poker sites.
MediaWiki is the wiki engine behind Wikipedia. It is PHP/MySQL (good for me, maybe not for the server) and has a strong multilingual community.
I bumped into one small problem installing MediaWiki 1.4: the install aborted while creating the tables. Unfortunately, I don’t have the error message anymore, but it was very close to the one given for this bug.
If I understood correctly, when you’re running MySQL 4.1.x in UTF-8, the index key becomes too big, and MySQL balks. The solution is to edit maintenance/tables.sql and to change the length of the index key MySQL was complaining about. In my case, the guilty part of the query was KEY cl_sortkey(cl_to,cl_sortkey(128)) — I replaced 128 by 50 and it went fine. (Don’t forget to clean out the partially built database before reloading the install page — like that you don’t have to fill it all in again.)
MediaWiki allows each user to choose his or her language of choice for the interface. That is absolutely great, particularly for a multilingual wiki! Even better than that, they let users tweak the interface translation strings directly on the wiki.
There is a page named “Special:Allmessages” which lists all the localized strings. If you’re not happy with one of the translations, just click on the string, and the wiki will create a new blank page where you can enter your translation for it, which will override the initial translation. How cool is that?
Something like that for WordPress would be great, in my opinion!
[en] Piano for sale in Lausanne, please pass the word around!
Le piano est toujours à vendre, maintenant pour le prix de 1500.- CHF.
Parlez-en autour de vous, merci!
Teenagers are getting in trouble in France for saying insulting things about their teachers on their blogs.
[fr] Un article dans Le Monde et un passage sur France 3 pour les ados virés de l'école à cause de leur skyblog. Cet article fait un peu le tour de la mauvaise presse de Skyblog, et de la problèmatique générale des ados et des blogs telle que je la vois.
As I mentioned yesterday, the French press is talking about the fact that more and more school kids are being chucked out of school for having insulted their teachers on their skyblogs. After the article in Libération on Tuesday, today we have another (very similar) article in Le Monde, and coverage on French national TV midday news.
No big surprise for me. First of all, despite employing three full-time moderators (my sources will remain confidential), Skyblog’s prime interest remains money, and is in no way trying to provide a service where teenagers can be constructive, learn, and be protected.
This isn’t the first nasty blogging story they are involved with: a few months ago, two teenagers reportedly commited suicide after having announced it on their skyblog. A few weeks later, when the documentary for Mise au Point was being prepared, the journalist was investigating an episode in Geneva where racist statements on skyblogs leading to real fights made a youth centre decide to forbid access to the platform from their computers. Skyblog refused to comment, when he contacted them to enquire about their moderation policy. As I stated in my interview after that, moderation is technically possible. You only need to decide to attribute sufficient ressources to do it properly, which means it must be pretty high up on your company’s priority list. 🙂
The two incidents I’ve had first-hand accounts of in local schools involved skyblogs, too.
The second reason I’m not too surprised this kind of issue is coming up is that teens are left to explore the internet and blogging on their own, for the most part. Parents don’t know much about what is going on online, though they probably do know about e-mails and search engines. I remember an article (unavailable now, thanks to paying archives) which stated that many consumers of child porn are in fact teenagers. Teachers don’t know much more. Of course, schools do the usualy prevention stuff (don’t talk to strangers, don’t give your name, beware of porn and pedophiles), which is good — but it is not sufficient.
Teenagers are content providers on the internet. They are putting loads of their photographs online. (I’ve noticed that the representation teens around here have of a weblog is in fact a “skyblog”, meaning an online photo album where friends can comment.) They are talking about themselves. For them, blogs are an extension of recess talks, text messages, and MSN messenger.
As I’ve said before and will keep saying, blogging is good, teens need to “learn” it, but they need guidance — and for that, they need to come in contact with adults who know what they are talking about. And we need people amongst those designing the “internet prevention” modules who are experienced bloggers.
The nature of the internet is tricky when it comes to privacy (I mean, we as adults have a hard enough time dealing with some of these issues!) and teens tend to consider that what they put online is personal, in a sense that school shouldn’t meddle with it. They don’t realise they can be held accountable by their school or justice for silly things they write on the net, even when it is done outside school hours.
Un joli petit article sur le blogs à lire absolument (c’est assez clair?)
[en] A good article on weblogs by a pretty well-known franco-blogger who happens to work undercover for the weekly journal Biel-Bienne. PDF available, bilingual: German and French.
Notre ami Flippy, qui travaille également à ses heures perdues sous couverture pour le journal hebdomadaire biennois Biel-Bienne, nous fait le plaisir et l’honneur du fameux article sur les blogs dont il nous parle (enfin, à moi, en tous cas) depuis si longtemps. Diantre, c’est même, selon certaines sources pas trop mal informées, le désir d’écrire un article sur ce sujet qui l’aurait poussé à sauter à pieds joints dans la blogosphère, il y a bien des lunes de cela!
Trève de plaisanteries. L’article n’a pas de version en ligne, mais un courrier anonyme déposé devant ma porte me l’a fourni en format PDF. A lire en français et en allemand (c’est le moment de se dérouiller) avant de faire quoi que ce soit d’autre: A coeur ouvert sur la toile. On attend feedback, courrier des lecteurs, et messages de fans en délire pour le journaliste qui ne va pas tarder à aller chatouiller le nez de Cléopâtre (comprenne qui pourra).
En résumé: l’article qu’il est très bien, que ça fait longtemps qu’on en attendait un comme ça, et que vous allez tous en parler sur vos blogs. Allez, zou.
Some thoughts on podcasting, and audio vs. text. A failed attempt at beercasting last Saturday, with link to the (very crappy) audio files.
[fr] Quelques réflexions sur le contenu audio (podcasting) dans les blogs, en particulier sur le fait qu'on ne peut pas "écouter en diagonale" et que cela impose donc une exigence de qualité plus grande pour le contenu audio que le contenu textuel. Première tentative d'enregistrement de conversation (beercasting au jus de pomme) lors de la rencontre de bloguers à Bâle, samedi passé.
During the Basel Blogmeet, somebody mentioned podcasting.
I’ve got my thoughts and theories on audioblogging (of which podcasting is one form). I think it’s great to hear people talking. I’ve got some audio content on my site (whether provided by me, or by third parties) and if I wasn’t in want for a mike and sound editing skills, I’d be providing more. However, audio blogging will never kill text blogging (if anybody out there was having such a preposterous thought).
The great disadvantage of audio content is that you cannot skim it. You can fast-forward, of course, and jump sections, but you can’t go quickly through the content and resume a normal speed if something catches your ear, as you do with written content. Audio is a “fixed speed” medium (ok, you can accelerate it slightly, but it becomes unintelligible quickly). It takes longer to listen to something than to read it.
The big advantage of audio, however, is that it doesn’t use your eyes. Audiobooks haven’t taken over the market share of normal books, but one might find it nice to listen to an audiobook in the car (where one cannot read whilst driving). If you’re sight-impaired, of course, the issue takes a different colour, if I may say.
Transcripts and indexes of audio content are precious… but what a huge amount of work!
This means, in my opinion, that your audio content must be good from start to finish, if you want to keep people hooked.
If I start reading a blog post and it doesn’t catch my attention after a few lines, I’ll skip to the next paragraph, skim a bit, and maybe decide that it is worth reading after all. If I’m listening to audio content and it gets boring, I might fast-forward a bit, but I’ll land blind. The index will help me sort through the topics that may interest me, but it won’t help me deal with intermittence or absence of quality. If I listen to your podcast and it’s lousy, am I going to keep listening in hope that it gets better? Will I try again if I’ve listened to 30 minutes of it and it wasn’t worth it? I think that if you want a podcast to be successful, you have to be much more strict on quality than with written material.
Anyway, back to beercasting. When Suw and I met in London last summer, we talked about audioblogging (one word or two?), and agreed on the fact that one of the departments in which audio could shine was in reproducing conversations. We had a half-hearted plan to call each other and record the conversation, but we never did it, of course. We’ve got a more serious plan now to do it on Skype (less technical difficulties). Have you realised how talking with somebody helps shapes ideas and thoughts, and express them clearly? There is something about being more than one that cannot be duplicated when one is alone. It introduces a dynamic.
Well, that’s what beercasting is about. Get together, have a conversation, and stick it on the web. So when we started talking about podcasting on Saturday evening, I suddenly remembered beercasting, and must have said something about it, because Ben whipped out his phone, switched on the recording function, and set it on the table. He had been provoked by my statement that podcasting (and beercasting) was done with an iPod 🙂
Well, a few audio files are now online one Ben’s site. If you’re interested in loud static and café background noise, and in hearing me yelling my head off to try to communicate with my fellow bloggers (with bonus German content), I recommend you start with Recording2. It’s bad, remember. Don’t say you weren’t warned. We’ll do better next time!
SwissBlogs is putting together a team of motivated people to improve it drastically.
[fr] Je cherche à monter une équipe de personnes motivées pour faire vivre SwissBlogs, un des répertoires de blogs suisses les plus en vue. Au programme, entre autres:
Si vous voulez faire partie de l'équipe, contactez-moi! Je cherche aussi des modérateurs, pour approuver les nouveaux sites ajoutés à la liste. Le site est en PHP/MySQL pas trop propre 🙂
SwissBlogs, one of the best-known Swiss blog directories, has become too much for one person (me) to maintain, even with a little help (Matt). Plus, you all know by now, that if I’m pretty good at having ideas and launching stuff, I’m much less good at keeping them going. I guess that’s just who I am.
I am therefore looking for motivated (and multilingual!) people to help me keep this directory going, and improve it (it has hardly changed since I quickly threw a few lines of dirty code together over 18 months ago).
I would like to put together a team of 5-6 people. Here is a quick list of what I’m thinking about for the coming developments of the directory:
Of course, we also need moderators — people who will check new blogs before inclusion in the directory.
Please get in touch if you would like to be on the team, or be a moderator.
Have I posted about this already? It rings familiar but my memory and site search are failing me.
A week-end in Basel, and a blogmeet there. Thoughts, links, and comments.
[fr] Compte-rendu de la rencontre de blogueurs suisse-allemands à Bâle. C'était chouette!
Matthias calls it the biggest blogmeet in Switzerland
, but one of the journalists who were there counted 14 bloggers. Only fourteen?! Hey, we were 14 last month in Lausanne! (A long year ago, we were only 13 to meet in Vevey…)
Anyway, leaving numbers aside, I spent a nice week-end in Basel and a nice Saturday evening meeting some Swiss-German bloggers. I’d been wanting to do that for some time (you know how important languages and language barrier issues are to me), and the occasion seemed perfect, as it was during the school holidays.
My first impression was that the webloggers present were on the whole older than the bunch of us who meet up in Lausanne. I think it’s a good thing. (I felt like a “young ‘un” there.) Maybe it’s because I couldn’t follow all the conversations (my German is way too rusty), but I got the feeling that the atmosphere was less confrontational and more collaborative-cosy than what I’d experienced until then.
Three journalists were present, and although I don’t mind speaking to journalists, I did find that they stole the show somewhat (I plead guilty, by the way). The focus shifts way too easily from “meeting other bloggers and talking with them” to “talking with the journalists”. It’s normal, nothing wrong about it, but it makes me think it would be wiser to keep journalists out of blogmeets (especially when they are small blogmeets), and maybe organise “bloggers meet journalists” events, if there is need for such a thing.
While I’m at it, this is an official request for a Matt-meet. I know Heather and Ben were looking forward to meeting him. As for me… heck, I’ve been trying to meet the guy for years!
So, Matt — suggest a date?
