A din­ner has been planned on Feb 7th, 2007 for South Florida blog­gers,
design­ers, devel­op­ers, techies and geeks, in the com­pany of Shel Israel, David Parmet, Jere­miah Owyang and other We Media con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants. If you’re inter­ested in join­ing, you can sign up at Scrap­blog.

Tech­no­rati Tags: weme­dia scrap­blog geekdinner

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Hot out of the oven: Bar­camp Miami cook­ies … they’re delish!

Tech­no­rati Tags: bar­camp, bar­camp­mi­ami

post clue­train,
orig­i­nally uploaded by alexde­car­valho.

Signed by Hugh!

Unfor­tu­nately I missed the event but a friend came back with this signed t-shirt. Love it. Thanks, Hugh!

And no, I won’t sell it on eBay.

Update from Andrew, who together with Andreas and Tor­ben kindly got this t-shirt signed for me: “I’m a big Hugh fan too — but had never met him before. Seems like a
great guy (we had a beer with him and Ross May­field on the last day of
the conference)”.

Tech­no­rati Tags: clue­train, hugh­train, pinko leweb3, gap­ingvoid

Wow … it’s been a long four months since I last posted here! My move from Paris to Miami ear­lier this year so occu­pied my mind that I refrained from blog­ging. Although some may post more in peri­ods of change, the tran­si­tion from one coun­try to another, the admin­istrivia involved, recon­nect­ing with old friends and meet­ing new peo­ple had me more involved in meat­space than before.

Paris rocked, espe­cially the first five years, but some­how with time, the city felt less and less like home. After watch­ing some of my Parisian friends move out of the city, and most of my expat friends move out of the coun­try, my turn came up. This car­toon from Hugh pretty much sums it up: just sub­sti­tute “Paris” for “New York”. Like frogs that won’t jump out of water that’s being heated to a boil, Parisians live in pretty stress­ful con­di­tions, includ­ing noise and air pol­lu­tion, poor ser­vice, high prices, cramped quar­ters, traf­fic, clouds and driz­zle, mul­ti­ple taxes, polit­i­cal grid­lock and an under­per­form­ing econ­omy. Don’t get me wrong, Paris is cer­tainly not the worst place to live in and i’ll miss the city of lights for my friends, for its cul­ture and for the great con­ver­sa­tions. And Paris is a move­able feast.

Despite my four month hia­tus, I haven’t been com­pletely idle  and  RSS sub­scribers have received my daily del.icio.us links all along, which are spliced into the feed­burner feed and which get auto­mat­i­cally posted to Stone­soup. I’ve also posted pho­tos to Flickr and have evan­ge­lized, setup and con­tributed to inter­nal com­pany blogs. Read.io took some time, and now AgeStage. But hardly a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of post­ing here and to France­Brazil. And there’s really no excuse, is there, with the excel­lent, free tools that make blog­ging easy and quick, like Qumana, Per­for­manc­ing and Portable Fire­fox

The South Florida blog­ging scene seems very laid back, as you might expect with the mix of great weather, beach­ing and boat­ing … and per­haps a more con­ser­v­a­tive, “South­ern” lifestyle. Rel­a­tive to Paris, there seem to be fewer local blogs and no events to speak of, other than the first dork­bot — palm beach gath­er­ing on May 13th.

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Thomas Cramp­ton mod­er­ated an inter­est­ing ses­sion on blogs and pol­i­tics this after­noon at Les Blogs 2.0, in Paris. The panel fea­tured the embat­tled Christophe Gre­bert, who appeared on Karl Zero’s  TV news-show “Le Vrai Jour­nal” this week­end. His trou­bles for run­ning the blog are not over and he faces a new court appear­ance in Feb­ru­ary 2006: he’s a coura­geous lad in need of support.

les­blogs

Tue 18/10/2005 15:12 Forum on the sus­tain­abil­ity of Brazil’s eco­nomic growth

Quick sum­mary of a day-long forum on the polit­i­cal, fis­cal and mon­e­tary poli­cies, choices and issues in sus­tain­ing eco­nomic growth in Brazil:

- Growth has been strong but has not matched ‘Asian Tigers’ levels;

- Despite social advances, much remains to be done to reduce inequal­i­ties and major reform is needed in the pen­sions sys­tem, which is skewed in favor of the riches classes;

- The numer­ous reg­u­la­tory agen­cies need to pro­fes­sion­al­ize, gain their inde­pen­dence and coor­di­nate their poli­cies better;

-  And the country’s indus­trial and ser­vice sec­tors find them­selves ham­pered in trade nego­ti­a­tions by Brazil’s great suc­cess and power in agribusiness.

How­ever, the out­look is pos­i­tive and in par­tic­u­lar, the econ­omy has hardly flinched in face of cur­rent polit­i­cal prob­lems, mainly because of the sound poli­cies in place.

(moblogged from 6680)

Recently I orga­nized the Brazil­ian del­e­ga­tion’s par­tic­i­pa­tion at the 6th World Forum on e-Democracy, an event held by the French “high-tech Mayor” Andre San­tini, at Issy-Les-Moulineaux, near Paris.

Dur­ing the event, Monique Ciprut of Les Echos quoted me regard­ing the role of blogs in Brazil (pdf ver­sion note: copy­right Les Echos). We spoke about the impor­tance of par­tic­i­pa­tory jour­nal­ism in a democ­racy and how blog­gers in Brazil were con­tribut­ing to open up the debate. In par­tic­u­lar, she picked up my ref­er­ence to the pop­u­lar blog by the right-wing politi­cian Cesar Maia, who has been openly crit­i­cal of the Lula admin­is­tra­tion. How­ever, the blog has been ‘too” pop­u­lar and was recently dis­con­tin­ued (on 30/9/2005) because it took too much of Maia’s “men­tal time,” even though he had three assis­tants, each less than 25 years old. I expressed reser­va­tions about how open the con­ver­sa­tion can be in coun­tries were inter­net pen­e­tra­tion was rel­a­tively low, were there were high lev­els of illit­er­acy, and where access to com­put­ers and the inter­net were reserved to the mid­dle class and above. I believe the gov­ern­ment has an impor­tant role in pro­vid­ing con­di­tions for greater inter­net access, in pro­vid­ing lower-priced com­put­ers and in financ­ing local munic­i­pal­i­ties to sup­port them in e-government initiatives. 

The Brazil­ian del­e­ga­tion, pic­tured left included Min­is­ter Car­los Vel­loso, Pres­i­dent of Brazil’s Supe­rior Elec­toral Tri­bunal and in charge of the country’s elec­tions, Ana Cristina Hof­mann, Pres­i­dent of Petropolis-Tecnopolis and co-chair of the W2i (Wire­less Inter­net Insti­tute) Dig­i­tal Cities Con­ven­tion in Europe, held at the begin­ning of Novem­ber 2005 in Bil­bao, and Vagner Diniz, Pres­i­dent of Insti­tuto Conip and active pro­po­nent of mobile gov­ern­ment (m-gov) in Brazil.

Spe­cial thanks to my part­ner on this project, Philippe Luce, Founder of Agora-Consultants. Thanks also to Yann Mauchamp, France Coun­try Man­ager, OpenBC, who first saw the Les Echos arti­cle. Update: Thanks also to Jus­sara Nunes, Brazil­ian blog­ger in France, who lent us an impor­tant hand. We were glad to have you with us!

For more on the sig­nif­i­cance of the par­tic­i­pa­tory, read-write web (Web 2.0), see Al Gore’s speech at the We Media Con­fer­ence a cou­ple of days ago in New York.

“We
must ensure that the Inter­net remains open and acces­si­ble to all
cit­i­zens with­out any lim­i­ta­tion on the abil­ity of indi­vid­u­als to choose
the con­tent they wish regard­less of the Inter­net ser­vice provider they
use to con­nect to the World­wide Web.”

Tech­no­rati Tags: blogs, democ­racy, brazil, brasil, e-governement, e-democracy, wire­less

I’ve been riv­eted by
the images of dev­as­ta­tion on CNN and as time passes and the human
suf­fer­ing increases, it becomes even more clear there was no dis­as­ter
recov­ery plan­ning in place.The recov­ery will take months, so it’s never too late to give to those in need.

Here’s how you can help:

Amer­i­can Red Cross

Vic­tims of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina are attempt­ing to recover from the mas­sive
storm that is still mak­ing its way across the Mid-Atlantic States.
Amer­i­can Red Cross vol­un­teers have been deployed to the hard­est hit
areas of Katrina’s destruc­tion, sup­ply­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands vic­tims
left home­less with crit­i­cal neces­si­ties. By mak­ing a finan­cial gift to
Hur­ri­cane 2005 Relief, the Red Cross can pro­vide shel­ter, food,
coun­sel­ing and other assis­tance to those in need.

Hur­ri­cane­Help — Find sur­vivors of Hur­ri­cane Katrina

This is a ser­vice to help con­nect Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina vic­tims with their
friends and fam­ily. Please respect those affected by this tragedy and
only sub­mit accu­rate, rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. This is not an offi­cial
infor­ma­tion site.

Social Source Software’s Kat­rina Peo­pleFinder Project in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Omidyar.net

Refugees can search 20 web sites for lost rel­a­tives and still miss their entry on the 21st web site. There is a need to com­bine all the refugee data from big data­bases like Red Cross, large post­ing forums like Craigslist and many other sources on the web. The Kat­rina Peo­pleFinder Project seeks to cre­ate a sin­gle repos­i­tory com­bin­ing as many sources of refugee data as pos­si­ble from all over the web with­out inter­rupt­ing exist­ing momentum.

We need help for both reg­u­lar peo­ple and soft­ware engi­neers. Every­body is crit­i­cal to build­ing a cen­tral repos­i­tory of ALL the refugee records we can find on the web. The Social Source Foun­da­tion, Civic­Space Labs and Salesforce.com Foun­da­tion are coor­di­nat­ing hun­dreds of peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing Craigslist and Earthlink.

Poignant tes­ti­mony by pub­lic offi­cials and others:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin — raw and uncensored

Joan Touzet, orig­i­nally from New Orleans, has posted the full uncen­sored audio,
which is raw in lan­guage and emo­tion. Nagin dis­cusses the cur­rent
vio­lence and chaos in the city, and the lack of effec­tive action by
FEMA and the fed­eral gov­er­ment; Nagin accuses the Gov­er­nor and FEMA of
think­ing too small.

Read Chris Waigl’s tran­script here

This video on Crooks & Liars is a must-see:

The tear-filled eyes of Jef­fer­son Parish Pres­i­dent Aaron
Brous­sard as he was inter­viewed by Tim Russert on today’s Meet the
Press.

Pub­lic pho­tos on Flickr tagged with Kat­rina (over 4,000)

Joi Ito talks about The under­priv­i­leged vic­tims of Kat­rina

I won­der about the alle­ga­tions of treat­ing the under­priv­i­leged vic­tims
as more “expend­able”. I real­ize this is quite a harsh alle­ga­tion, but
some­thing that I won­der about none the less.

The
armed forces recruits mostly from the under­priv­i­leged class, and it is
they who fight the wars. It is time to give back.

 

Learn more about the impact of Katrina:

New Orleans LA post-Katrina Intel Dis­sem­i­na­tion Wiki!

This wiki was setup to fac­tor the tons of ran­dom bits of infor­ma­tion flow­ing out of New Orleans in totally dis­or­ga­nized chunks, and being repeated around the inter­net in var­i­ous forms. Blogs are not up to the task of dis­till­ing this info in a use­ful way, so we’ve setup this ad-hoc project at nola-intel.org to try and keep track of all of this.

Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Many esti­mates pre­dict that Kat­rina was the costli­est storm in his­tory
to strike the United States. In terms of fatal­i­ties it was the sec­ond
dead­liest named storm to hit the US, and may be declared the dead­liest
after more casu­al­ties are dis­cov­ered. Kat­rina also caused the first
total dev­as­ta­tion of a major Amer­i­can city since the 1906 San Fran­cisco earth­quake and sub­se­quent fires.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Kat­rina

There are no spoil­ers in this review.

Emmanuel Vivier from Cread­rive / Culture-Buzz asked whether I’d like to review a movie and a cou­ple of days later I received the collector’s edi­tion DVD of Con­stan­tine — the movie:

Based on the DC Comics/Vertigo Hell­blazer graphic nov­els and writ­ten by
Kevin Brod­bin and Frank Cap­pello, Con­stan­tine tells the story of John
Con­stan­tine (Keanu Reeves [see note]), a man who has lit­er­ally been to hell and
back. When he teams up with skep­ti­cal police­woman Angela Dod­son (Rachel
Weisz) to solve the mys­te­ri­ous sui­cide of her twin sis­ter, their
inves­ti­ga­tion takes them through the world of demons and angels that
exists just beneath the land­scape of con­tem­po­rary Los Ange­les. Caught
in a cat­a­strophic series of oth­er­worldly events, the two become
inex­tri­ca­bly involved and seek to find their own peace at what­ever cost.

Did I like it?

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