On Being Wiped Out [en]

[fr] Epuisée mais contente. Si je ne vous reconnais pas, si je vous demande trois fois votre nom, si j'essaie de vous donner des cartes de visite trois fois... soyez indulgents. Je suis hyper contente de la réception de mon discours sur l'histoire de Going Solo.

My poor brain can’t follow anymore. I’m loosing track of who I speak to, who I’ve met, who I’ve given Going Solo moo cards too (even to my friends). I’m delighted with the reception of my speech about Going Solo — swept off my feet, even.

Many people have come to tell me they liked my speech, that it was inspiring, that they are going to come to Going Solo, that they want to interview me (I’ve lost track of the number of interviews I’ve given today, honestly), or talk about partnerships or possible synergies.

I’m feeling bad, because I was invited as one of the electronic media crowd to live-blog the event, and I think I’ve done a really crappy job of it. I hope to earn my pass tomorrow.

I’m not feeling overwhelmed as I was at FoWA, because I’m happy rather than frustrated and anxious. But I can’t keep up. Don’t get me wrong, I want to speak to you, and I’m going to. I also know that this is important for my event 🙂 — but if I look a little exhausted, if I ask you your name three times, try to give you Moo cards twice, or forget what you just told me… please be indulgent!

LIFT08: Eric Favre [en]

*Live notes that don’t really do justice to the talk — I had trouble keeping up.*

LIFT08 088 Eric Favre

Passion is a necessary ingredient to invention (hence the presence of his wife here). Eckert is one of the first inventors, for Eric Favre. He invented a 20-ton, 18’000-light machine: the first “computer”. Modern maths.

How to make the best coffee: put the coffee in a little bag. Found a place where they made the best coffee in Italy. His wife befriended the guy who made the best coffee and asked him the right questions. Each time he lifted the “piston” he inserted air in the coffee — that was the trick. Air + water + coffee = expresso.

Role of women in marketing a product.

*steph-note: sorry, I’m having trouble following this coffee stuff. I don’t drink coffee…*

Innovation and invention are not the same thing.

Eric’s father was an inventor (lived his whole life off the invention he made when he was 18). In the genes? Maybe more contact with inventors.

LIFT08: Rafi Haladjian [en]

*Note: live notes, probably incomplete, possibly misunderstood. Please post comments, links to photos, videos, or other coverage in the comments. Rafi founded Minitel start-ups, and now makes wifi rabbits.*

LIFT08 087 Rafi Haladjian

Calm technologies. Attention economy: screens require an exclusive attention span — putting more things on the screen is maybe not a solution. Why not provide information through other channels?

In the beginning, chips were expensive. 1 computer for several users. Then chips became more affordable, and today, so cheap you can stick them everywhere. 1 user, several computers.

Why do teddy-bears speak? They used to be pure plush, and now they have a chip and sing stupid songs.

All home appliances networked: never happened. Why?

– not that appealing, no fun
– expensive and not that sexy (too much effort)
– proprietary tech, complex to set up
– loss of control

Violet’s strategy:

– affordable products
– not too useful, because too useful is boring
– expanding the internet, not something radically new
– user in the middle, control
– don’t think you can do everything: open standards, let the community in

Nabaztag

LIFT08 086 Nabaztag

– proof of concept
– “If you can connect a rabbit, you can connect anything.”
– somewhat absurd
– rabbits are cute and have ears
– there is a life after the PC
– light, speaks, music, reads, moves ears, hears, RFID reader — does all sorts of things
– use? short reports, read RSS feeds…
– emotional messenger, physical avatar of your friends
– rabbit marriage — very stupid but people love it (ear movement sync)
– sold with Gallimard RFID-enabled children book (can read it — a step back from the idea that the future of books is electronic)

LIFT08: My Going Solo Open Stage Speech [en]

[fr] J'ai fait une présentation très courte de ce qui m'a inspiré à organiser Going Solo tout à l'heure, lors de LIFT. Voici le texte sur la base duquel j'ai préparé ma présentation, et des liens (quand je les aurai trouvés) vers vidéos ou articles.

For the first time in my life, I actually rehearsed a speech. Ironically, my three-hour workshop yesterday required all of 5 minutes preparation time on the train in the morning (in my defense, I given similar workshop/classes before), but my 5-minute open stage speech had me preparing and rehearsing for at least three hours. My friend Sarah probably got sick of hearing it over and over again last night as she timed me.

It went well. Thanks again to all who voted to see me speak on stage, and for your kind and encouraging comments after my speech.

You could probably see I was a bit stressed — quite a bit more than when I usually speak: you can’t really make any mistakes when you only have 5 minutes. It’s there, it’s gone.

I left a bit out, I’m afraid. Blame it on stress. The part I left out is about how important this “business” aspect of freelancing is — because it’s actually what’s going to determine how successful you’ll be as a freelancer. You can be the best at what you do, if you don’t know how to set your rates or find clients, you’ll starve.

So, here’s the text I wrote last night and I based my preparation upon. It isn’t a word-by-word transcript of what I said (I didn’t learn it by heart!), but it’s pretty close. Enjoy the insight into how I prepared this speech!

If I find videos and links later on, I’ll add them to the end of this post.

I’m going to tell you a tale of inspiration, of a personal journey which led me to do things I never would have thought possible, like organising an event for freelancers from all over Europe — which I’ll tell you more about at the end of this speech. It’s not just my journey, it’s the journey of all those who have turned a passion into a living.

Are there any freelancers or small business owners in the room? Keep those hands up. Any ex-freelancers? Aspiring freelancers, or people who’ve thought about the idea? This is about you.

Two years ago I was sitting in this same hall. I was a middle school teacher, and I dreamed of being able to make a living out of my passion, the web — but I couldn’t see how. After LIFT in 2006, something clicked, and I saw how it could be possible. A few months later at the end of the school year, I quit my job as a teacher to be a full-time freelancer.

It was easy at first. The phone kept ringing, and people actually wanted to pay me for stuff that didn’t feel like work. My biggest challenge was that I felt bad because I had the impression I was on holiday all the time.

After a few weeks or months though, things became more complicated and less fun. I was charging too little, how should I set my rates? I was drowning in paperwork, I hired an accountant. I was contacted by clients I didn’t expect, like Intel who wanted to fly me all the way to the US, or a rather prominent local politician. I realised I wasn’t good at negociating and closing deals.

Luckily I had friends in the business. I asked for their advice, and realised they had faced or were still facing the same issues. They were willing to share. I found support and learned useful things:

  • how to set a daily rate, for example. Decide how much you want to make in a month. Divide that by the number of days you have available for paid work — 10 maximum, maybe — you have your daily rate.
  • I also learnt to stop being uncomfortable about how much I was charging for talks — people were paying for my expertise, not for my time

I started learning that there is way more to freelancing than just doing the things you’re being paid for. There is a whole business aspect to freelancing which is not what draws people to become soloists — they go solo because they’re good at doing something and can get paid for it — but this business stuff is actually really important, because it’s going to determine how successful you are as a freelancer.

When I decided to organize events, it was pretty obvious that the first one would be for freelancers. That’s Going Solo — it’s going to take place on May 16th, in Lausanne, just 30 minutes away from here by train.

Going Solo is an occasion to gather freelancers from all over the web industry, from all over Europe and even elsewhere, and take a day off “working” to think about these business issues in depth. Seasoned freelancers like Stowe Boyd, Suw Charman, Martin Roell — and also Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting, which I’m announcing right now as my fourth confirmed speaker — will share their experience and dig into topics like setting your rates, negotiating and closing deals, finding clients, or better, helping clients find you, and even choosing how to work so that you actually have a work-life balance — something I’m personally struggling with these days.

If you want to know more about Going Solo, come and talk to me or visit the website — going-solo.net, with a hyphen. If you have speakers to suggest, or partnerships to talk about, make yourself known. Otherwise, see you on the 16th of May!

LIFT08: Pierre Bellanger (Skyrock) [en]

[fr] Conférence de Pierre Bellanger, patron de Skyrock (skyblog), à la conférence LIFT08.

*Note: live notes, probably incomplete, possibly misunderstood. Intro: SkyBlog is the biggest blogging platform in Europe / SkyRock radio.*

LIFT08 022

Is going to speak about the future. Founder and CEO of Skyrock.com — will speak about their vision of social networking, and why it’s the future.

Skyrock started as a pirate radio station. Became a national radio network after a few years. 13-24 year olds.

Blogging platform. Very basic, easy to use. Profiles. 2nd French site in page views. 1st French-speaking social network in the world.

Started the SN in 2002. Thinking about the next stages. Numbers:

LIFT08 025 Skyrock Numbers (Pierre Bellanger)

Goal: be the world teenager social network. For that, need to change constantly. Netamorphosis. Where do we go from now?

Understand what we are better. Need to go back to what we were, e-mail — the mother of all social networks. E-mail and the web gave birth to meta information. Search and social network.

SN is to mail what search is to the web. A new level of metadata, information about people.

Teenagers are extremely productive. Lots of contacts. The blog is a revolution, because it becomes your new e-mail address, your new digital identity. The centre of electronic exchanges. The social network is the future of telecommunications.

The value is shifting from bandwidth to programming code. Changing internet providers is much easier than changing your e-mail client. Same with social networks. Skyrock wants the social network to be at the core of all exchanges.

For that, important to think mobile. Go for IM rather than trying to stick poor web pages on that tiny screen. Merge the SN and the IM.

Social operating system.

*steph-note: snipping a bunch of technical stuff — too stressed by my upcoming Open Stage speech!*

LIFT08: Bruce Sterling [en]

[fr] Notes prises lors de la conférence LIFT08.

Note: live notes, probably incomplete, possibly misunderstood.

What’s the punchiest thing one can say about the past year? That’s the way it was, now get out!

Europeans: historical sense.

LIFT08 017 Bruce Sterling

2008 is not going to be the total revolutionary year (no year is, we always thing it’s going to be, but it doesn’t happen).

Economic downturn. China under piles of dirty laundry. India surrounded by crazy mujahidins (spelling?).

Global warming is a slow, 200-year-old problem. Is it really exciting to watch Microsoft eat Yahoo?

Bruce would like to offer us a piece of futuristic insight, a nice prophecy.

Carla Bruni. Sarkozy who wants to civilize the Internet from a French perspective, by repressing P2P on French soil.

Carla isn’t here at LIFT. She has a whole lot of reasons to be here. She’s a Black Swan. But Black Swans can be beautiful — Carla is gorgeous! steph-note: snip some comments about Black Swans, positive and negative.

There isn’t a single journalist around who can’t write a Carla Bruni story.

Two driving purposes (Carla and Sarkozy): ambition and publicity. First Diva de France. She’s certainly never been a politician. steph-note: follow scenarios of Nicolas and Carla etc.

Carla is a pop star with the power of state behind her.

Predict the future: Carla and Nicolas don’t know the future any more than you do.

Empress of Europe: 35% (fantastic success is a much better story — Bruce is a journalist!)

The Internet is a Black Swan too.

Cours d'initiation aux blogs le 26 février [fr]

[en] On February 26th I will be holding my first public blogging class (beginners) at the ISL.

The workshop I am holding tomorrow morning at LIFT covers the same material, but in English.

Mise à jour, 13.02.2008: ce cours est repoussé car la préparation de Going Solo ne me permet pas d’en faire la promotion correctement. Si vous êtes intéressé par ce genre de séminaire, contactez-moi et je vous ferai signe dès qu’un nouveau séminaire sera mis sur pied. Des cours pour particuliers sont également possibles.

J’organise un cours d’initiation aux blogs mardi 26 février 2008 dans les locaux de l’ISL à Lausanne.

  • Quand: mardi 26.02.08, 18h30-21h30 (3h avec une petite pause)
  • Où: ISL, Chemin de la Grangette 2 – 1052 Le Mont-sur-Lausanne (Clochatte)
  • Accès: en bus, prendre le 16 jusqu’au terminus, et c’est en face; en voiture, sortir à Epalinges ou à la Blécherette si vous venez par l’autoroute — il y a des places de parc à disposition devant l’école.
  • Qui: non-blogueurs (si vous avez déjà un blog, vous allez vous ennuyer ferme), pas de prérequis technique autre qu’être capable d’aller vérifier son e-mail via le web.
  • Combien: 150 CHF pour les 3 heures de cours, à payer une fois le nombre de préinscriptions suffisantes (5 personnes)
  • Comment: préinscription en envoyant un e-mail à Stephanie Booth, précisant nom, adresse, et nombre de personnes s’intéressant au cours.

Ce cours s’adresse à toute personne désireuse de découvrir ce qu’est un blog, pour son usage personnel. Pour plus d’informations, voir directement la page dédiée à ces ateliers pratiques.

Comme les lecteurs de ce blog ne sont a priori pas les personnes qui seront intéressées par ce genre de cours, je vous remercie infiniment de faire passer le mot auprès de votre entourage!

Busy! [en]

[fr] Je cours, je cours! Pas mal de nouveau sur le site de Going Solo. J'espère mettre les billets en vente dès mercredi!

Gosh, have I been busy these last weeks. My “one post a day minimum” resolution kind of evaporated when I started running all around town looking at venues for Going Solo.

Well, we have a venue now, and today I spent a fair amount of time playing with Expectnation to try and get it ready to open registration less than two days from now (fingers crossed).

We also have
badges to display in your sidebar (thanks, Carlos!) and more content on the Going Solo site. [Pulled the badges after some feedback. New ones soon!]

I also seem to have found our fourth speaker, which I’m quite excited about (no, not telling — both parties are going to chew on it a little before we make it offical).

Now, I just need to sleep, prepare my workshop, rehearse my Open Stage speech, announce the Lausanne blogging seminar for 26th February and figure out how to market it.

Uh-oh! Night night everybody.

Thanks! See You at LIFT08 :-) [en]

A heartfelt thanks to those of you who following blogged about Going Solo or voted for my Open Stage presentation. I’m actually going to be the first Open Stage talk, Thursday morning before the break. Exciting and scary!

My workshop also got enough registrations to be provided with a room, which is nice. I can still accommodate a few more people (up to 15 as far as I’m concerned, but I’m trying to make sure the room is big enough). I’d like to insist again on the fact that this is a workshop for people who are not yet blogging — you’ll find it frighteningly basic if you’re already a blogger. Also, you will have to bring your own laptop as we do not have a computer lab. So, if you’re coming to LIFT08, aren’t blogging yet, but would like to get going, sign up for the workshop.

I’ve been asked by a couple of people if they could come to the workshop although they don’t have a ticket for LIFT. That is unfortunately impossible, as the workshops are reserved to LIFT attendees (you should come to LIFT, it’s really worth it). (The Venture Night and Sustainable Development Sessions are open to non-LIFT public, however.) For those who might be interested, I’m planning to organize similar Get Started Blogging workshops in Lausanne (or elsewhere if there is enough interest). The first should take place on Feb. 26th (details to follow), in French. Again, if enough English-speakers are interested (say 6 people minimum) then I can also organize a workshop in English.

My discussion session on multilingualism online thankfully didn’t make the cut (remember I’ll also be live-blogging LIFT08!!), but I’ll set up an informal meeting for people who are interested in chatting about this.

See you at LIFT!

Blog Host Ugliness [en]

[fr] Une amie Serbe s'est vu poser un ultimatum par son hébergeur de blogs: 24 heures pour supprimer commentaires d'un autre blogueur et liens vers ses sites, ou voir son blog disparaître.

L'hébergeur en question (qui utilise WordPress multi-utilisateurs, comme WordPress.com) avait en outre désactivé la fonction d'exportation de blog.

On s'en est sortis comme on a pu (voir ici).

Mis à part le côté technique de l'affaire, il est absolument scandaleux qu'un hébergeur de blogs se permette d'agir ainsi. Certes, tout hébergeur est libre de "virer" des clients -- mais déactiver au préalable la fonction d'exportation des blogs, cela atteint des sommets de mesquinerie. A bon entendeur.

Edit: sur Seesmic, l'histoire en français et en vidéo.

Note: I’ve updated this post as I gathered information allowing me to see more clearly in this whole mess. Please read the comment if you’re going to jump in the conversation or blog about this.

Wednesday night, my friend Sanja from BlogOpen (she was my very kind and competent hostess) pinged me on IM. She had less than 24 hours to export her blog before her blog host shut it down.

It was a blog hosted by WordPress multi-user [Edit: not WPMU]. Easy enough, I thought. There is an export function. Unfortunately, when I logged in (the interface was in Serbian, but I can find my way through WordPress with my eyes closed), this is what I found:

WordPress (MU?) with no Export

Even if you don’t understand Serbian, you can see there is a missing tab. I tried calling /wp-admin/export.php directly, but the file had been removed.

Well, after a bit of poking, prodding and thinking, this is what I came up with (reminder: WPMU means that you can’t there was no possibility to install plugins and no direct access to the server):

Last Hope Export of WordPress MU Blog

I went into Options > Reading. I set the feeds to “entire post”. As there were 110 posts in this blog, I set the home page to display all of them, with a little margin for error. There were more than 1400 comments, so I set the maximum number of items in a feed to 1500.

Then I did three things:

  • saved /feed (an RSS dump of the blog posts)
  • saved /comments/feed (an RSS dump of the comments)
  • scraped the blog (with single blog post pages) as an extra backup by running wget -r -l1 -w1 BLOGURL (thanks, John) from my server (also to save the images).

The blog was saved. I couldn’t import the RSS dump of blog posts into WordPress.com, where I told Sanja to open a new blog account, so I quickly set up a regular WordPress install on my server, imported it there, and exported it in WXR format. Great.

Comments, however, are another story. If you’re in a hackish mood, any help would be appreciated.

We’ll probably have to deal with the images too once the blog has been completely wiped off the 381.com server — for the moment it seems like it was disabled, but the images are still there (see this one for example).

There, that was for the technical part.

Now for a personal comment. I find it utterly disgusting and shocking that a blog host owner would give people an ultimatum to leave and disable the export function in the blogging software. Sanja tells me that they had the export function until a few days before the ultimatum.

Of course, a blog host can choose not to host certain people. But trying to lock people in by disabling export of their own data is simply evil. If you’re kicking people off your system, you damn well better make sure they can take their data with them.

Edit, 27.01, 12:00: I’m happy to learn that it seems the disabling of the export function was not related to the ultimatum, and that the blog381 people were not actually trying to actively lock people in. However, it remains that it’s pretty delicate in a conflictual situation to tell people to “submit or leave” when they don’t have a way to export their data on their own.

So, people, please. If you need a blog host, choose a serious one. WordPress.com for example. Or Blogger. Or Typepad. Putting your precious blog between the hands of an individual is risky (weblogs.com, anybody? and if you remember, people on weblogs.com at least had the guarantee they could export their data…)

How did this happen?

I got some details about the situation, but a word of warning about that, first. The source material to this Serbian blogosphere drama is all in… Serbian. I’m relying here on what my friend Sanja told me about the situation, and I do not doubt her good faith. I know, though, that stories do have multiple sides, and that there might be more to the background than what I’m telling you here — but whatever the background story, it cannot justify the behaviour of this blog host.

From what I gathered, what brought about this crisis is a quarrel between two bloggers: Tatjana aka Venus aka Lang (Update: Tatjana is not happy that I’m linking to her and has redirected visitors to this site elsewhere; to see her blog, copy-paste the link http://www.laluve.com/ in your browser), the owner of the Serbian blogging platform blog381.com (not the Tatjana who organized BlogOpen!), and another pretty popular blogger. At some point, Tatjana decided to forbid the people using her platform from linking to this other blogger or harbouring his comments.

Here is the warning she posted on the community forums:

Vlasnik blogova

http://bruh.org/ludizmaj/,

http://www.blogoye.org/pecina/,

http://www.blogoye.org/Mudrosti/,

http://www.blogoye.org/sujeta/

(ima verovatno jos ali ne mogu da trazim)

je ovom blog sistemu naneo stetu laziranjem glasova oko izbora za najblogera (na kom je on bio ‘pobednik’), ‘miniranjem’ sledeceg izbora, sirenjem neistina, traceva, vrbovanjem novih blogera sa tri osam jedan sistema, a sve u cilju da se naskodi ovom sistemu a poveca sopstveni traffic i “ugled”.

Za one koji nisu dovoljno informisani i sve ostale koji su slusali ili nisu, samo jednu stranu price od gore pomenutog, necu dodatno iznositi nikakve detalje, niti vise imam nameru da se borim sa provincijalizmima pojedinih ljudi koji su bili ili jesu na neki nacin u komunikaciji sa blogom381 i njegovim korisnicima.

Slobodna volja svakog od nas da pise kako i gde hoce, ali oni koji se odluce da i dalje pisu ovde nece moci da imaju linkove ka ovim blogovima niti komentare vlasnika istih.

Ukoliko imate zelju,nameru ili potrebu da ostanete na ovom blog sitemu, obrisite linkove i komentare gore pomenutog blogera u roku od 24h.

Translation (Sanja was a bit tired, so forgive the wobbliness):

The owner of these blogs
http://bruh.org/ludizmaj/,
http://www.blogoye.org/pecina/,
http://www.blogoye.org/Mudrosti/,
http://www.blogoye.org/sujeta/

has caused damage to this blog system by faking votes for the election of “The best blogger” (where he was “the winner”), and was undermining the next election by spreading gossip, lies, and recruiting new 381 bloggers, with only one aim: to damage this community and increase his own blog traffic and “reputation”.

For those who are not informed well enough, and all others who were listening or didn’t, only one side of the story of the person mentioned above, I will not give any additional details, nor do I have the intention to fight with provincialism of some people who were or in some way are connected to blog381 communication and their users.

It is the free will of each of us to write how and where we want to, but those who decide to keep writing here, will not be able to have links to these blogs or comments by their owner.

Those of you who have the wish, intention or need to stay on this blog system, should delete links and comments of the blogger (mentioned above) within 24 hours.

Sanja learnt about this because the owner of the blogging platform left a comment on one of her posts (not the most recent) to let her know about it. Given that the “other blogger” in question is a friend of Sanja’s, she wasn’t going to comply.

Other bloggers have also seen their blogs deleted, or at least de-activated (actually, before the 24-hour limit was up). A dozen or so, says Sanja.

If you want to chime in on the “political” side of this story (particularly if you’re involved in this story or a direct witness), you’re welcome to use my comments. However, I ask (as always) that everybody remain civil and refrain from personal attacks (commonsense blogging etiquette, y’know).

Update: It seems that since Sanja’s blog was deactivated, the whole blogging platform has been shut down, with a message that people can e-mail the administrator to get an export of their blog. This message was not there during the ultimatum period.

In a comment to this post, Tatjana aka Lang asked me to remove the link to her blog, http://www.laluve.com/ , which I had placed upon her name. As I have refused to remove it (linking to the people involved in this story is perfectly relevant, and on the web, you can link to who you want, anyway), she has set up a redirection which sends visitors from this site straight off to CNN. So, I’ve left the link in, of course, but provided you with a handy copy-paste if you want to go and visit her all the same.