Category: Stuff that doesn’t fit

Stuff that doesn’t fit in any category, or leftover posts from the big category revolution of 2009.

J'aime les portraits [fr]

[en] I'm really quite happy about the article about me in the paper today. I like these "portrait" articles. The journalist has the time to talk, and it's (until now) a very nice experience.

Je crois que le portrait d’aujourd’hui dans 24heures et la TDG est le troisième que l’on fait de moi dans la presse écrite. Le premier dans Migros Magazine, fin 2004 (voir billet)et le deuxième dans 24heures il y a un peu plus d’un an (malheureusement plus en ligne, mais voici une photo de l’article papier et le billet de l’époque).

Whole Page Article

J’aime bien les portraits. En général, le/la journaliste a le temps, alors on parle, on parle, on parle. Sans vouloir passer pour outre-mesure égocentrique, je trouve intéressant de parler de moi dans ce genre de contexte — essayer de se raconter, c’est un peu, aussi, essayer de savoir qui l’on est. La quête de l’identité, celle qui durera toute une vie…

Comme toujours, il y a certaines choses dans l’article que je voudrais expliquer, développer, nuancer. (Je l’ai relu avant parution, on a corrigé certaines choses, mais parfois, à cause du format, on est obligés de laisser passer certaines choses.) Juste là, pas le courage — mais n’hésitez pas à poser des questions dans les commentaires si le coeur vous en dit, ça m’aidera peut-être à me lancer (je vous répondrai, à moins que ce ne soit personnel, bien entendu, mais essayez toujours).

Edit: oh, je viens de voir qu’un morceau de la vidéo était également en ligne. J’ai beaucoup aimé cette petite opération multimédia improvisée. J’espère qu’on aura l’occasion de voir la vidéo en entier lundi!

Death Threats in the Blogosphere [en]

[fr] Kathy Sierra, blogueuse réputée, fait l'objet de menaces de mort (et d'autres menaces à caractères sexuel) laissées sur son blog et sur un ou deux autres blogs gérés par d'autres personnalités connues de la blogosphère anglo-saxonne.

A bout, elle a annulé ses conférences prévues aujourd'hui à ETech et est enfermée chez elle. Une enquête de police est en cours.

Kathy Sierra is somebody whose blog posts I never miss, because they’re always really really good material, and very though-provoking. I was about to head to bed when I saw a new one of her pop up in Google Reader. Just a quick nice read before I go to bed, I thought.

Not so.

In her latest post, Kathy Sierra reports that she has been receiving increasingly disturbing threats (death threats, and of sexual nature), to the point that she has cancelled her appearance at ETech and has locked herself up at home.

Many, many years ago, during my first year of discovering the internet, I received an e-mail containing quite graphicly described rape threats. I received two e-mails in total. The e-mails were anonymous, but it seemed clear from the wording that the person sending them knew at least something about who I was. They were for me, not a random send.

I started suspecting all my online friends, wondering which one of them was the nasty e-mail sender. I wasn’t too worried as I had been very secretive about my name and exact location at the time, but still — it was not a nice feeling at all. A few days, later, through an abuse complaint to Hotmail and a little sleuthing on my part, I managed to find out who it was. I played dead, nothing else happened, I left it at that and life went on, with no particularly averse consequences for me.

In this case, the threats Kathy has been getting have been left in the comments of her blog, or even published on other blogs managed by known names in the blogosphere.

For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of.

Kathy, being her smart self, perfectly understands how threats like those she received do their damage.

Most of all, I now fully understand the impact of death threats. It really doesn’t make much difference whether the person intends to act on the threat… it’s the threat itself that inflicts the damage. It’s the threat that makes you question whether that “anonymous” person is as disturbed as their comments and pictures suggest.

It’s the threat that causes fear.

It’s the threat that leads you to a psychiatrist and tranquilizers just so you can sleep without repeating the endless loop of your death by:

  • throat slitting
  • hanging
  • suffocation
    and don’t forget the sexual part…

I have cancelled all speaking engagements.

I am afraid to leave my yard.

I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.

Unfortunately, understanding how it works is not helping her alleviate the damaging effects of those horrible threats.

Was all this intentional? Was this somebody (or a group-effect) taking “play” too far without realising they had crossed a line into (a) illegal and (b) really damaging behaviour?

I don’t know the people involved here — neither directly, nor really indirectly. I’m not sure who sides with who, who hates or despises who, or what the history is. Reading Kathy’s post gives some ideas, but no real answers. I sincerely hope the person/people behind this are found out. What’s going on here is utterly unacceptable.

And Kathy, hang in there. We want to see you back amongst us.

Selected posts on the topic (updated as comes):

Update: a little information about the background to meankids and unclebob can be found on the blog linked to in this comment (look through the February archive too).

Update, 28 March 2007: please read my second post on this topic too — Disturbed About Reactions to Kathy Sierra’s Post.

Update, 30 March 2007: for various reasons, I need to take a little distance from this whole sad affair (reasons like: not letting issues that do not concern me directly eat me up — and don’t make me say what I haven’t said with this, thanks). If I do bump into interesting links, I’ll keep adding them here, but please don’t expect this to be a complete list. It never was intended to. And it’s going to get spottier.

  • audio interview of Kathy Sierra about the whole mess
  • Kathy Sierra—When Blogs Attack — with a poll
  • Not looking for sympathy or anything by Dave Winer: Everyone played a role in this, the people who stopped blogging, the people who threatened their friends, the people who called it a gang rape, and yes indeed, the mean kids. But they’ve paid enough. It’s time to welcome them back into the blogging world, and in a few weeks, ask them to reflect on what they learned. These are all intelligent and creative people, who have acted badly. But they didn’t deserve what they got.
  • In the Matter of Kathy Sierra by Ronni Bennett
  • It’s all about Control by Shelley Powers
  • I Own my Own Words, indeed by Tara Hunt (apology re here)
  • Kathy Sierra, Meet Chris Locke. This is CNN. by Joey deVilla (Monday 6-9 Eastern)
  • Just a Few Words by Jeneane Sessum
  • Coordinated Statements on the Recent Events by Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke: Kathy Sierra and I (Chris Locke) agreed to publish these statements in advance of the story which will appear tomorrow (Monday 2 April 2007) on CNN, sometime between 6 and 9am on “CNN American Morning.” As used in the somewhat Victorian title slug, above, “coordinated” is meant to signal our joint effort to get this stuff online, not that we co-wrote the material you see here, or had any hand in prompting or editing each other’s words. We hope something new comes through in these statements, and that they will perhaps suggest more creative ways of approaching the kind of debate that has been generated around “the recent events” they relate to.

Brainstorm/Discussion — The Future of Blogging Technology (Gabor Cselle) [en]

[fr] Le futur du blog... discussion.

blogcamp.ch notes, may be inaccurate

with Gabor Cselle

Barcamp: talk about stuff. Where is blogging technology going to go? What are the trends?

Future of blogging conversation/brainstorm

Blogging software is about adding features, growing ecosystem (technorati, digg etc. steph-note: god am I sick of those popularity things), pseudo-blogging things (Twitter etc. steph-note: I don’t agree with Twitter being called a “microblogging” platform.)

Who writes for who? (Twitter: an individual writing for a small bunch of friends.)

Getting paid for blogging? Ads… or indirect revenue. Micropayments (indiekarma — looks interesting).

steph-note: this is going to be more about my ideas following the discussion more than an account of what is said

Where I see blogging technology going: ajaxy flickr-like interfaces (the death of the admin panel for posting and editing), smarter privacy management (à la Facebook: blog tool knows who you are and shows you stuff you are allowed to see based on your relationship as defined by the blog author), of course, smarter language stuff. Maybe smart internal linking: post something, and have the blog tool dig through old posts, offer you possible related material to link to (yes, there are already related posts plugins).

Wiki and blog technology will not merge, because blogs are about the person behind it, and wikis are about diluting authorship and crowd-voice.

Dannie Jost — Blogging is not about blogging [en]

[fr] Bloguer, c'est une histoire d'expression personnelle. Une discussion lors de la rencontre BlogCamp à Zürich.

Notes from blogcamp.ch presentation. May be inaccurate.

(steph-note: it’s a discussion, so a bit hard for me to blog — particularly as I’m participating.)

Dannie Jost -- Blogging is not about blogging

Why do people blog? Different reasons. Asking the audience. Blogging isn’t about blogging, it’s about expressing yourself. It’s about personal expression.

Blogging is about communication.

It’s a evolution (from a communication point of view, the biggest since the printing press): instantaneous access to a global readership. Being heard is a different bag of beans.

Another element of revolution: community. A single blogger with hot news means nothing and achieves nothing, before the network comes into play to make the news float to the top.

Blogging: technology (easy!!) and culture (more complicated) steph-note: exactly what I try to explain to my clients…

Shift of power. For Dannie, it hasn’t really happened yet, except some small cases. cf. phase transformations in chem/physics. My comment: the shift has already started happening, it’s not because it hasn’t impacted events the mainstream press reports on much that it doesn’t mean it’s having much impact.

Ideas//crystals.

Self-organisation.

BlogCamp: Bruno Giussani — Bondy Blog Story [en]

[fr] Bruno Giussani nous raconte l'histoire du Bondy Blog. Naissance d'un média qui est devenu national, mais de la perspective des banlieues.

notes from blogcamp.ch presentation. may be inaccurate.

Bruno Giussani: special projects for l’Hebdo => involved in Bondy Blog thing.

Bruno Giussani speaking about Bondy Blog

The Story

Riots for 3 weeks. 9000 cars burned. 2921 people arrested. Outskirts (suburbs).

Special reporters flocking there from everywhere, and then disappeared (as soon as the curve of violence started going down).

Suburbs: journalists stay in a nice hotel in Paris, eat there, go out reporting during the day, then back to nice hotel. Don’t actually stay there.

L’Hebdo did things differently: chose Bondy, one town in France, to do old-fashioned reporting. They sent their 20 reporters there (weekly rotations). Set up an office in the local football warehouse thing, slept there, with a DSL connection.

Objectives:

  • write about the situation in that city for the magazine
  • blog between magazine issues

What happened?

  • journalists used to a weekly rythm started reporting on stuff on the blog they would never have talked about. “Smaller things” which are part of Real Life and never ends up in the press. Or big things (“Les filles de Bondy parlent”) which fired national controversy.
  • journalists would come back completely enthusiastic (journalistic freedom recovered) when they left because they “had to”

Everybody wrote about this story. Old media. Curious about what is going on in the blogosphere but don’t know how to handle it. And suddenly this small magazine does something and everybody wants to copy/learn/understand. (Here, being “Swiss” had an advantage.)

Once the newsroom ran out of journalists, what to do? Successful blog, tons of comments… can’t let it die. Instead of sending people again, reached out to young people in Bondy to see if they would take over.

Brought them all to Lausanne for a week of blog/journalism training, then were given the password to the blog and were sent back. Midway between classical blogging and journalism. Have a weekly meeting, etc.

About a dozen bloggers now, covering their life. For the first time, this 50’000 person town has a local publication. Telling their story in their own voice.

Started doing reverse reporting (sending their people to rich neighbourhoods in Paris, for example).

Financed by turning part of the content of the first year of blogging into a book.

Important consequence: the banlieue had a voice at the beginning of the presidential compaign! Dec. 15, Bondy Blog guy asks Sarkozy for his phone number at a press conference, and actually gets it!

Sponsored by Yahoo France now. Have been building a network of correspondants in 15 different banlieues in France. A national media from the banlieue perspective!

Journalism in the P2P world is not about antagonism (old vs. new, professionals vs. amateurs, paying vs. free, controlled vs. open) but it’s hybrid, being complementary.

Discussion

Roughly 6000 visitors a day when they switched to Yahoo.

Background: where did the idea come from? came up during a news meeting, but the year before they had a kind of blogcamp for the newsroom.

New projects in this direction? L’Hebdo launched 8 blogs since then. Has influenced how the journal thinks.

Bruno is a little more radical about how magazines should do things (steph-note: hope I understood this right): shouldn’t have a traditional website (but journalists should blog, of course, and put the magazine content online for free), but should invest heavily in this kind of operation, including training. (Throwing blogs at people doesn’t work, we’re starting to know it.) Big problem in the newsroom: publication brand vs. personal (journalist) brand.

Bondy blog (network) become a sort of training ground for banlieue people to become recognised as contributors, and Bruno guesses that probably some of them will be hired by “old media” once the elections are over.

Bruno: l’Hebdo never planned for all that. It just happened, organically.

Kitty Pic Caption Contest [en]

[fr] Photos de chats cherchent légendes.

It’s no secret for anybody that I have a thing for cats, and from what one can see on the internet, I’m not alone. Twitter loves cats, for example. My friend Sarah and I nearly laughed till we cried looking through The Cat Page last night. Oh, and don’t forget Dunecat, Pursecat or Bedcat.

Anyway, I took a couple of pictures of Bagha yesterday which clearly deserve captions.

Pillowcat

Traycat

Inspired? Post your captions in the comments, and let’s have a laugh.

PS: a couple of these (like the DVD one) probably deserve captions too… take your pick!

LIFT'07 Swiss TV Coverage [en]

[fr] LIFT à la TSR.

Here’s a short piece on LIFT’07 that was on the Swiss News last Thursday, and another one with an interview of Laurent. Beware. Window resizing and RealStuff to be expected. (More videos here, click on “Vidéo”.).

Je passe à Orange Maxima [en]

[fr] I've switched to a flat fee mobile phone subscription. A good investment for the money saved by cancelling my land line.

Voilà, c’est fait. Hier, j’ai appelé Orange (et on m’a répondu sans que je doive attendre) pour passer au nouveau plan tarifaire Optima avec les trois numéros gratuits. Du coup, je suis allée jeter un oeil sur le site, et j’ai vu les conditions pour le plan tarifaire Maxima. En résumé:

  • 89CHF/mois
  • appels gratuits vers fixes et mobiles Orange, -.30/min pour les autres mobiles
  • 0.15/sms, MMS option, option Travel Pro pour le roaming international
  • remplacement du téléphone à tarif avantageux en cas de perte (en 24h en Suisse)
  • 2Mb de données gratuites par mois (WAP, GPRS, UMTS), 2.50/Mb pour la suite.

Je trouve que c’est une bonne utilisation des 25CHF/mois économisés suite à la résiliation de mon téléphone fixe.

Si je décide de retourner à Optima, je peux le faire pour la fin de n’importe quel mois une fois les six premiers mois de mon contrat passés. Par contre, pour avoir droit à une offre pour un téléphone, je dois attendre juillet 2008… On dirait que je suis coincée avec mon Nokia 6280 pour encore un moment. Quoique, d’ici là, on aura tous des iPhones!

Technological Overload Panel [en]

Technological overload (oh, I hadn’t realised this was a panel!) — again, Bruno has some nicely-written notes to share.

Fun crackberry video from YouTube.

The moderator loves his crackberry, but he’s an addict.

The panelists don’t blog! What a shame! Not much IM either… (that was a steph-note)

steph-note: We’re asked to close laptops for Nada Kakabadse’s presentation. Reminds me of “Le Test du Moi” where they wanted to take my laptop away for a week — not realistic given my line of work. In my case, I’m using the computer to take notes because my handwritten notes are illegible because of my RSI. => no notes on the first part of the presentation, but I took photographs of the slides.

Internet Addiction Slides 1

Internet Addiction Slides 2

Internet Addiction Slides 3

Internet Addiction Slides 3

Internet Addiction Slides 5

Panelists seem to agree that one can’t assume people are “addicted” because they resist closing their laptops in a given situation (I resisted, saying I was using it to take notes, but was asked to close it).

Stefana has seen the private come into the workplace much more than the opposite, carried by technology (e-mail, IM, etc). Keeping our social network alive at work too.

Trick question: how many of you use e-mail for personal use during work? Trick, because the line between personal and private is not clear. steph-note: agreed — I didn’t raise my hand. In my situation, it’s worse, because my “private life” and “work” have merged to a great extent.

Suffering.

Information overload, burn-out, addiction: are we mixing things up here?

Sharing: burn-outs? addiction? “My name is … and I’m an internet addict.” steph-note: is this turning into an AA session?

Robert Scoble: too many feeds, too many e-mails. Solution? Maybe addiction, but also allows him to do his work, and happy about that. steph-note: if I got that correctly, Robert…

Risk in curing addiction: reduction of productivity. (Stefana)

“poorer” channels actually have something that allows more than “richer” channels like VoIP (people have Skype, but continue to chat hours a day). (Stefana)

Bruno Giussani: where exactly is the addiction? not to the Blackberry.

Stefana: average number of contacts for non-social-networking person is around 20. The digital channels actually allow people to maintain this high number of contacts. steph-note: wow, technology actually allows us to handle more relationships…

Quality of online/offline relationships? Stefana: there is anyway a multiplicity of qualities of relationships.

Question: can we really multitask? (cf. continuous partial attention, etc steph-note: done to death imho)

Stefana: with routine, things that seem to require attention actually have become only monitoring.

steph-note: wow, all this talk about addiction. Looking forward to my talk at the Centre for Addictions in Geneva very soon.

Stefana: real issue = what is the acceptable response time for an e-mail (20 minutes, half a day, a day, a week?) The pressure comes from what we consider an acceptable response time. For IM? steph-note: you can not respond, cf. Stowe

Wrap-up: how do you unplug?

Stefana: what is the cost of unplugging? it can be compared to “stop talking to everyone!” steph-note: totally agree

Fred Mast: no need to switch off, we can be addicted and happy steph-note: don’t agree, “addicted” contains unhappy — if you’re not unhappy, you’re not addicted

Nada Kakabadse: upto each and every one.

steph-note: “quality-time” can also happen online, folks. This session is getting me slightly worked up.

Stefana: keep in mind the overload issue is touching a tiny amount of people, most people would be thrilled to have 7 instead of 5 e-mails a day!

No Notes Today… [en]

No notes today, my love has gone away…

Well, not really “love”, but my brain is even too fried to find an adequate replacement. No energy today to take notes and blog them, I’m afraid. Just a few photos, and trying trying to listen and understand.

You’ll have to make do with Bruno’s notes — but they’re better than mine, anyway!